whitehouse | Yes, I fully coincide with what you have proposed, President Biden.
And I could summarize everything we’ve been saying in five basic items
of cooperation.
Number one, since the energy crisis started, Mexico has used 72
percent of its crude and fuel oil exports to United States refineries —
800,000 barrels a day.
Therefore, we decided that while we’re waiting for prices of gasoline
to go down in the United States — and I hope that Congress approves or
passes your proposal, Mr. President —
PRESIDENT BIDEN: It has gone down for 30 days in a row. (Laughs.)
PRESIDENT LÓPEZ OBRADOR: (As interpreted.) — of lowering — lowering prices, yes. That’s it.
In the meantime, while we’re waiting for prices to go down, we have
decided that it was necessary for us to allow Americans who live close
to the borderline so that they could go and get their gasoline on the
Mexican side at lower prices.
And right now, a lot of the drivers — a lot of the Americans — are
going to Mexico, to the Mexican border, to get their gasoline.
However, we could increase our inventories immediately. We are
committed to guaranteeing twice as much supply of fuel. That would be
considerable support.
Right now, a gallon of regular costs $4.78 average on this side of the border. And in our territory, $3.12.
Let me clarify something, and I also want to take advantage of this
opportunity to thank you, Mr. President. Most of this gasoline, we are
producing it in the Pemex refinery that you allowed us to buy in Deer
Park, Texas.
Two, we are putting at the disposal — or sending at the disposal of
your administration over 1,000 kilometers of gas pipelines throughout
the southern border with Mexico to transport gas from Texas to New
Mexico, Arizona, and California for a volume that can generate up to 750
megawatts of electric energy and supply about 3 million people.
Three, even though the USMCA has made progress for the elimination of
tariffs, there are still some others that could be immediately
suspended. And we could do the same with some regulations, regulatory
measures, and tedious procedures or red tape in terms of trade related
to foodstuffs and other products so that we can lower prices for
consumers in both our countries, always being very careful in the
protection of health and the environment.
Four, starting a private-public investment plan between our two
countries to produce all those goods that will be strengthening our
markets so that we can avoid having importations from other regions or
continents.
In our country, we shall continue producing oil throughout the energy
transition. With the U.S. investors, we are going to be establishing
gas-liquefying plants, fertilizer plants, and we shall continue
promoting the creation of solar energy parks in the state of Sonora and
other border states as well.
And we’re going to accomplish this with the support of thermal
electric plants and also through transmission lines to produce energy in
the domestic market, as well as for exports, to neighboring states in
the American union, as for instance, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and
California.
It’s also important to mention that, two months ago, we took the
sovereign decision of nationalizing lithium in Mexico. This is a
fundamental mineral, a fundamental input to advance in our purpose not
to depend on fossil fuels. And this will be available for the
technological modernization of the automotive industry among our great
countries — the countries of the USMCA.
Five, orderly migration flow and allowing arrival in the United
States of workers, technicians, and professionals of different
disciplines. I’m talking about Mexicans and Central Americans with
temporary work visas to ensure not paralyzing the economy because of the
lack of labor force.
The purpose of this plan would be to support and to have the right
labor force that will be demanded by the plan you proposed and that was
passed by Congress of using $1 trillion for the construction of
infrastructure works.
And it’s also indispensable that I say this in a very sincere fashion
in the most respectful manner: It is indispensable for us to regularize
and give certainty to migrants that have for years lived and worked in a
very honest manner, and who are also contributing to the development of
this great nation.
I know that your adversaries — the conservatives — are going to be
screaming all over the place, even to Heaven. They’re going to be
yelling at Heaven. But without a daring, a bold program of development
and wellbeing, it will not be possible to solve problems. It will not
be possible to get the people’s support.
In the face of this crisis, the way out is not through conservatism.
The way out is through transformation. We have to be bold in our
actions. Transform not maintain the status quo.
On our part, we’re acting in good faith, with all transparency,
because there shouldn’t be selfishness between countries, peoples that
are neighbors and friends. On the other hand, integration does not
signify hegemony or subjugation.
And, President Biden, we trust you because you respect our
sovereignty. We are willing to continue working with you for the
benefit of our peoples. Count with our support — count on our support
and solidarity always.
Long live the United States. Viva México lindo y querido. Long live Mexico — dear Mexico, loved and beautiful Mexico. Viva México.
mexiconewsdaily | Back in the late 1980s and leading up to the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the PYMES (small and medium size companies) did
not understand the effects of the opening of the Mexican economy to
foreign investment.
My two Mexican partners and I attended a conference where the speaker
kept repeating, “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.” We
followed the advice and survived, but many in the middle class did not
and soon found themselves facing bankruptcy.
Today Mexico is facing the same problem and those most affected are
the 47% (AMLO’s latest figures) of those living below the poverty line
and are paying no attention. The key word is corn. To summarize: The
four largest exporting countries of corn are the United States,
Argentina, Brazil, and Ukraine. The second largest importer of corn in
the world is Mexico, where the product is the most important food staple
for the making of tortillas.
They are also not aware that parts of the Midwest of the United
States where corn is harvested have been suffering from drought, nor are
they aware that President Biden insists that the growers of corn turn
this into ethanol as a substitute in light of growing gasoline prices.
The poor may be aware that there is a war going on between Russia and
Ukraine but have no idea that globally this has affected the supply of
corn in the world.
Those Mexicans living below the poverty line, what the sociologist
Oscar Lewis called “The Culture Of Poverty” based on two books titled The Children of Sanchez and Five Families, are
totally unaware of these global realities that will inevitably have a
serious effect on their well-being. The word partial famine comes to
mind.
What does this have to do with the expat community? It behooves every
one of us to talk to those Mexicans who work for us and explain these
realities by advising them to save as much money as possible for the
upcoming crisis. As an example, my gardener and handyman has many
part-time jobs so he can invest in building a home for his wife and
three-year-old daughter.
I told him, “Stop investing your money in a new home for the time
being and concentrate on feeding your family. Hope for the best, but
prepare for the worst.”
I hope he listens, but I have my doubts. It’s the effort that counts.
Beldon Butterfield is a writer and former publisher and media representative. He is retired and lives in San Miguel de Allende.
amidwesterndoctor |One of the greatest challenges for individuals with advanced
knowledge in a subject is the gradual realization of just how little
they know (conversely, as shown by the Dunning–Kruger effect,
the less individuals know, the more they overestimate their knowledge
and competence). Being able to proceed forward despite not knowing if
you were on the correct path requires a great deal of courage,
especially when most of your peers oppose what you are doing. That said,
virtually every person who has been highly successful and changed the
world for the better had this type of courage.
In
some cases, we are just born with it, but in the majority cases, it
comes from living a life that cultivates courage. One of the most useful
words of wisdom I heard at a young age was “comfort makes you weak”
which is important because our technocratic society has tried to create
the illusion that if we always comply with it, it can guarantee our
safety and prevent all discomfort.
This is
fundamentally impossible (and often creates many medical issues), but
many traumatized and pampered members of society have become so
ingrained with this mythology they now lack the courage to venture
outside safe spaces created by the technocracy. Unfortunately, if you
lack the courage to oppose something you know is wrong, as history
repeatedly shows, that same evil will eventually show up at your
doorstep, and by the time it does it will have gained enough momentum
that you will no longer have the ability to oppose it.
The
strength that produces courage ultimately arises from our connection to
ourselves (particularly our physical body) and our connections to each
other. Hence, like many things in medicine where you cannot reduce a
problem to one single component, mass formation is also a complex
process that weaves into so many other aspects of our society that it
must also be dealt with holistically. Just remember:
Postscript: I have noticed that many groups will develop a
collective consciousness that often transcends the individual
participants (often leading them to rapidly adopt terrible behaviors
once they join the group holding that collective conscienceless) and can
often persist for generations. The best term I ever came across for
this, Egrigore, was something I came across on wikipedia.
I cannot fully endorse the idea because of where it originates from,
but over and over I have come across situations where it appears an
egrigore has taken over a group (particularly in Allopathic medicine,
which I believe carries fairly malignant Egrigores).
Reading
Desmet’s work has led me to suspect crowd psychology and the mass
formation concept provides another potential explanation for the
“Egrigore” concept I keep on running across. Put differently, this
means I believe in addition to Mass Formation applying to society as a
whole, it can also manifest within specific subgroups which have some
type of strong ritualistic link to each other especially when they also
have to suffer through a collective hardship.
forummag | “Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it,” James Carville, the
political strategist often credited with Clinton’s 1992 victory (and,
let’s be honest, not much else), whinged to Vox last year,
100 days into Joe Biden’s presidency. “It’s hard to talk to anybody
today—and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party—who doesn’t
say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.”
If someone makes up an identity grounded in nothing but subjective feeling and a state recognizes it as constituting a protected class, subjective reality becomes immune to challenge and the ultimate political contest becomes to control what feelings are recognized by the state
The statement is immediately self-contradictory, sure—it’s hard to
talk to anyone who doesn’t say this, but not out loud? But it’s already
setting the stage for a year of recriminations and preemptive
blame-shifting for what is widely expected to be a midterm bloodbath for
the ruling Democratic party. The political scientist Ruy
Teixera—co-author of a best-selling Bush-era book on how demographic
change would lead inexorably to permanent Democratic dominance—now
peddles a newsletter where he moans about “the Democratic Left’s adamant
refusal to base its political approach on the actually-existing
opinions and values of actually-existing American voters,” as if “the
Democratic Left” has been the determinant of what a government led by
Joe Biden—again, that Joe Biden, the one who is president—has managed to accomplish, or not accomplish, over the last year.
In lengthy Twitter threads and ugly Substack newsletters, consultants
and would-be consultants tell the gerontocratic and eternally
triangulating leadership of the Democratic Party that the real problem
is that the kids who work for them are too “woke.” Despite “everyone”
knowing it’s a problem, “wokeness” is a poorly defined concept. “Woke” was once
a Black slang term for being politically aware (specifically, being
aware—sometimes in a comically exaggerated way—of the myriad methods the
white establishment has of punishing politically active Black people).
It now serves, in the popular political discourse, the exact same
function as the term “PC” did for Marshall and From in 1993. “PC” stood
for “political correctness,” which, after the fall of the Soviet Union
and prior to 9/11, was, in the eyes of the white commentariat, the
single greatest threat faced by the United States. (A few years ago Moira Weigel
observed that the term “political correctness” hardly appeared in print
at all prior to 1990. As she notes, in 1992, a database of U.S.
magazine and newspaper articles turned up 2,800 references.) The point
of each term, as deployed by these men, is to euphemize a euphemism:
“special interests.”
“African Americans, women, white farmers, and, especially, organized
labor,” is how Geismer describes the New Democrat conception of “special
interests.” The big idea of the New Democrats was that denying all of
these annoying groups any material gains would please the White Suburban
Voter, who had emerged from all the social upheavals of 1960s and
beyond as the Main Character of American Politics. What is remarkable,
more than three decades later, is how little anyone has learned.
“WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ,” huffed
a recent tantalizing subhead in Politico’s “West Wing Playbook”
tipsheet. Was it some previously undisclosed intelligence operation? A
newly declassified Kennedy assassination document? No. It was a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Republican Senator Mitt Romney calling on the White House to “ditch its woke advisers.”
“White House chief of staff RON KLAIN may have taken this a bit
personally,” Playbook’s authors wrote. He “retweeted our own SAM STEIN, who quipped that White House deputy chief of staff BRUCE REED was the ‘embodiment of woke’ (Reed is objectively un-woke. In fact, the woke don’t like him).”
I do not mean this as a cheap gotcha point, but all of the capitalized
names in this dispatch are white men, and at no point do the keen
analysts behind Politico’s West Wing Playbook define what they think
the term “woke” means.” At a certain point, though, you have to ask:.
What does “wokeness” mean, to you, to Democratic centers of power and
(last and probably least) to Politico?
Back in George W. Bush’s second term, Jonathan Schwarz articulated
what he called the “Iron Law of Institutions.” It goes: “the people who
control institutions care first and foremost about their power within
the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus,
they would rather the institution ‘fail’ while they remain in power
within the institution than for the institution to ‘succeed’ if that
requires them to lose power within the institution.” Schwarz meant to
universalize it, but I think he nailed something very specific about how
the Democratic Party works, and I think Al From and Will Marshall ought
to agree.
The long-standing fight over who runs our nation’s left-of-center
party has featured multiple linguistic evolutions but otherwise remained
strikingly static. For my entire life, white moderates have been
complaining about how difficult the people on the side of multiracial
democracy are making it for them to win their idealized suburban voters.
peacediplomacy | The advocates of American primacy within the United States
foreign policy establishment historically rely on prevailing ideological
trends of the time to justify interventionism abroad. The new ‘woke’
face of American hegemony and projects of empire is designed to project
the U.S. as an international moral police rather than a conventional
great power—and the result is neo-imperialism with a moral face.
This is an iterative and systemic process with an internal
logic, not one controlled by a global cabal: when the older
rationalizations for primacy, hegemony, and interventionism appear
antiquated or are no longer persuasive, a new rationale that better
reflects the ruling class norms of the era is adopted as a substitute.
This is because the new schema is useful for the maintenance of the
existing system of power.
The rise of a ‘woke’ activist-driven, social justice-oriented
politics—particularly among the members of academia, media, and the
professional managerial class—has provided the latest ideological
justification for interventionism, and it has become readily adopted by
the U.S. foreign policy establishment. These groups now have an even
greater level of symbiotic relationship with state actors.
Professional selection and advancement under these conditions
require elite signaling of loyalty to ‘progressive’ universalism as the
trending state-sanctioned ideology, which further fuels the push towards
interventionism. This combination of factors encourages a new
institutional and elite consensus around trending shibboleths.
The emerging hegemonic posture and its moral imperialism are at
odds with a sober and realistic appraisal of U.S. interests on the world
stage, as they create untenable, maximalist, and utopian goals that
clash with the concrete realities on which U.S. grand strategy must be
based.
The liberal Atlanticist tendency to push moralism and social
engineering globally has immense potential to create backlash in
foreign, especially non-Western, societies that will come to identify
the West as a whole with niche, late-modern progressive ideals—thus
motivating new forms of anti-Westernism.
nakedcapitalism | The greatest challenge facing societies has always been how to
conduct trade and credit without letting merchants and creditors make
money by exploiting their customers and debtors. All antiquity
recognized that the drive to acquire money is addictive and indeed tends
to be exploitative and hence socially injurious. The moral values of
most societies opposed selfishness, above all in the form of avarice and
wealth addiction, which the Greeks called philarguria– love of
money, silver-mania. Individuals and families indulging in conspicuous
consumption tended to be ostracized, because it was recognized that
wealth often was obtained at the expense of others, especially the weak.
The Greek concept of hubrisinvolved egotistic behavior
causing injury to others. Avarice and greed were to be punished by the
justice goddess Nemesis, who had many Near Eastern antecedents, such as
Nanshe of Lagash in Sumer, protecting the weak against the powerful, the
debtor against the creditor.
That protection is what rulers were expected to provide in serving
the gods.That is why rulers were imbued with enough power to protect the
population from being reduced to debt dependency and clientage.
Chieftains, kings and temples were in charge of allocating credit and
crop-land to enable smallholders to serve in the army and provide corvée
labor. Rulers who behaved selfishly were liable to be unseated, or
their subjects might run away, or support rebel leaders or foreign
attackers promising to cancel debts and redistribute land more
equitably.
The most basic function of Near Eastern kingship was to proclaim “economic order,” misharumand andurarumclean
slate debt cancellations, echoed in Judaism’s Jubilee Year. There was
no “democracy” in the sense of citizens electing their leaders and
administrators, but “divine kingship” was obliged to achieve the
implicit economic aim of democracy: “protecting the weak from the
powerful.”
Royal power was backed by temples and ethical or religious systems.
The major religions that emerged in the mid-first millennium BC, those
of Buddha, Lao-Tzu and Zoroaster, held that personal drives should be
subordinate to the promotion of overall welfare and mutual aid.
What did notseem likely 2500 years ago was that a warlord
aristocracy would conquer the Western world. In creating what became the
Roman Empire, an oligarchy took control of the land and, in due course,
the political system. It abolished royal or civic authority, shifted
the fiscal burden onto the lower classes, and ran the population and
industry into debt.
This was done on a purely opportunistic basis. There was no attempt
to defend this ideologically. There was no hint of an archaic Milton
Friedman emerging to popularize a radical new moral order celebrating
avarice by claiming that greed is what drives economies forward, not
backward, convincing society to leave the distribution of land and money
to “the market” controlled by private corporations and money-lenders
instead of communalistic regulation by palace rulers and temples – or by
extension, today’s socialism. Palaces, temples and civic governments
were creditors. They were not forced to borrow to function, and so were
not subjected to the policy demands of a private creditor class.
But running the population, industry and even governments into debt
to an oligarchic elite is precisely what has occurred in the West, which
is now trying to impose the modern variant of this debt-based economic
regime – U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism – on the entire
world. That is what today’s New Cold War is all about.
By the traditional morality of early societies, the West – starting in classical Greece and Italy around the 8thcentury
BC – was barbarian. The West was indeed on the periphery of the ancient
world when Syrian and Phoenician traders brought the idea of
interest-bearing debt from the Near East to societies that had no royal
tradition of periodic debt cancellations. The absence of a strong palace
power and temple administration enabled creditor oligarchies to emerge
throughout the Mediterranean world.
Greece ended up being conquered first by oligarchic Sparta, then by
Macedonia and finally by Rome. It is the latter’s avaricious
pro-creditor legal system that has shaped subsequent Western
civilization. Today, a financialized system of oligarchic control whose
roots lead back to Rome is being supported and indeed imposed by U.S.
New Cold War diplomacy, military force and economic sanctions on
countries seeking to resist it.
dailymail | As distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx,
as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast
tacos here in San Antonio - is your strength,' she said, mispronouncing
the word 'bodega.'
'We are not tacos.
Our heritage as Latinos is shaped by a variety of diasporas, cultures
and food traditions, and should not be reduced to a stereotype,' the
National Association of Hispanic Journalists said in response.
The gaffe came as President Biden's popularity among Latino voters continues to plummet.
According to a recent Quinnipiac opinion poll found that Biden's approval rating among young Hispanic voters is around 26%.
San
Antonio is home to one of the largest Latino communities in the United
States, with a population of nearly 1.5 million people that is 65
percent Hispanic or Latino, according to U.S. Census data.
In April 2021, Biden made a similar gaffe
when she mispronounced the phrase: 'Si se puede' (Yes we can) to a group
of farmworkers in Delano, California.
During
the same speech on Monday, Biden also made reference to a recent visit
that she made to Uvalde, Texas in the wake of the May 2022 massacre at
Robb Elementary School.
She said: 'I
stood in front of those 21 crosses and touched the pictures of the
bright, beautiful faces that would never again laugh, or open birthday
presents, or tell their parents that they love them. And I knew that a
piece of Uvalde would always be a part of me.'
The
first lady also touted her husband's modest gun reform law saying that
the president 'will do everything he can to call on Congress to act,
including on measures to ban assault weapons and high capacity
magazines.'
Biden added: 'A ban on guns
that only belong on the battlefield. The right to make our own
decisions about our own bodies,' to rapturous applaus
technofog | The troubling thing is that most of the presidency is off-script.
How do you address inflation and families being priced-out of groceries when you struggle through a press conference?
How do you formulate a strategy about China or Russia when you rely on a cheat sheet for a 5-minute meeting?
Make
no mistake, Biden’s senility is one of the biggest stories in the
world. The media’s silence on this matter is telling. Never before has
the press tried to so hard to ignore so big a story (I venture this is
bigger than Hunter’s laptop), as they’re afraid of what a correct
assessment of Biden’s facilities might reveal. Ask whether
Dementia-in-Chief is a threat to national security or economic recovery.
Also revealing is the media’s attempts to explain-away or
otherwise repackage Biden’s mental and physical deficiencies. Peter
Baker, writing for The New York Times, says Biden’s “age has increasingly become an uncomfortable issue for him, his team and his party.” Of course, Biden’s age isn’t the issue per se - it’s Biden’s mind. “Age” is just The New York Times’ way of being polite, of serving the Biden Administration.
To make matters worse, there was the unbelievable “uniform” reporting of Biden’s competence by those interviewed by Baker:
In
interviews, some sanctioned by the White House and some not, more than a
dozen current and former senior officials and advisers uniformly
reported that Mr. Biden remained intellectually engaged, asking smart
questions at meetings, grilling aides on points of dispute, calling them
late at night, picking out that weak point on Page 14 of a memo and
rewriting speeches like his abortion remarks on Friday right up until the last minute.
Those
comments by Biden’s closest advisors and Democrat officials are
certainly contrasted by how they treat Biden, and Baker unfortunately
makes no effort to push-back on that point. As Baker concedes: “He stays
out of public view at night and has taken part in fewer than half as
many news conferences or interviews as recent predecessors.”
“Out of public view at night.” Could it be because Biden struggles with sundowning, which causes confusion, aggression, anxiety, and depression? Baker doesn’t ask.
But
- if you have any concerns about Biden’s health or acuity - don’t
worry. The New York Times has found experts that “put Mr. Biden in a
category of ‘super-agers’ who remain unusually fit as they advance in years.”
Sadly, Baker doesn’t challenge that conclusion either. And what an easy challenge it would have been.
There’s
the old cliché that journalists must speak truth to power. As Chomsky
once observed, speaking truth to power is pointless because the powerful
already know the truth. Better to speak truth to the powerless. As to
Biden’s age-related failures - dare I say dementia - the press has
chosen to avoid speaking the truth to the power and the powerless.
How
much it matters is another story. This is likely a one-term president
and the public is seeing Biden’s real-time deterioration for themselves.
But - if the press is willing to cover-up Biden’s dementia - then what other stories are they euthanizing?
CNN | Debra
Messing was fed up. The former "Will & Grace" star was among dozens
of celebrity Democratic supporters and activists who joined a call with
White House aides last Monday to discuss the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
The
mood was fatalistic, according to three people on the call, which was
also co-organized by the advocacy group Build Back Better Together.
Messing
said she'd gotten Joe Biden elected and wanted to know why she was
being asked to do anything at all, yelling that there didn't even seem a
point to voting. Others wondered why the call was happening.
That
afternoon, participants received a follow-up email with a list of basic
talking points and suggestions of Biden speech clips to share on
TikTok.
The call, three days after the decision eliminating federal abortion rights, encapsulates the overwhelming sense of frustration among Democrats
with Biden. It offers a new window into what many in the President's
party describe as a mismanagement permeating the White House.
Top Democrats complain the President isn't acting with -- or perhaps is even capable of -- the urgency the moment demands.
"Rudderless, aimless and hopeless" is how one member of Congress described the White House.
Two
dozen leading Democratic politicians and operatives, as well as several
within the West Wing, tell CNN they feel this goes deeper than
questions of ideology and posture. Instead, they say, it gets to
questions of basic management.
More than a week after the abortion decision, top Biden aides are still wrangling over releasing new actions in response, despite the draft decision leaking six weeks earlier.
White
House counsel Dana Remus had assured senior aides the Supreme Court
wouldn't rule on abortion that day. A White House press aide assigned to
the issue was walking to get coffee when the alert hit. Several
Democratic leaders privately mocked how the President stood in the foyer
of the White House, squinting through his remarks from a teleprompter
as demonstrators poured into the streets, making only vague promises of action because he and aides hadn't decided on more.
Then,
Biden's July 1 meeting with governors to talk about their efforts to
protect abortion rights was planned so last minute that none of those
who attended came in person, and several of those invited declined to
rearrange their schedules to appear virtually.
Multiple
Democratic politicians who have reached out to work with Biden --
whether it's on specific bills, brainstorming or outreach -- often don't
hear anything back at all. Potential appointees have languished for
months waiting to hear if they'll get jobs, or when they'll be done with
vetting. Invitations to events are scarce, thank you calls barely
happen. Even some aides within the White House wonder why Biden didn't
fire anyone, from the West Wing or at the Food and Drug Administration,
to demonstrate some accountability or at least anger over the baby formula debacle.
Inside the White House,
aides are exhausted from feeling forever on red alert, batting at a
swarm of crises that keeps growing -- enough for White House press
secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to make an offhand joke about the constant
"eleventh hour" decision-making in the building when under fire at a
recent daily briefing.
NYTimes | “I
do feel it’s inappropriate to seek that office after you’re 80 or in
your 80s,” said David Gergen, a top adviser to four presidents. “I have
just turned 80 and I have found over the last two or three years I think
it would have been unwise for me to try to run any organization. You’re
not quite as sharp as you once were.”
Everyone
ages differently, of course, and some experts put Mr. Biden in a
category of “super-agers” who remain unusually fit as they advance in
years.
“Right now, there’s no evidence
that the age of Biden should matter one ounce,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a
longevity specialist at the University of Illinois Chicago who studied
the candidates’ ages in 2020. “If people don’t like his policies, they
don’t like what he says, that’s fine, they can vote for someone else.
But it’s got nothing to do with how old he is.”
Still,
Professor Olshansky said it was legitimate to wonder if that would
remain so at 86. “That’s the right question to be asking,” he said. “You
can’t sugarcoat aging. Things go wrong as we get older and the risks
rise the older we get.”
The White
House rejected the idea that Mr. Biden was anything other than a
seven-day commander in chief. “President Biden works every day and
because chief executives can perform their duties from anywhere in the
world, it has long been common for them to spend weekends away from the
White House,” Andrew Bates, a deputy press secretary, said after this
article was published online.
The president’s medical report
in November indicated he had atrial fibrillation but that it was stable
and asymptomatic. Mr. Biden’s “ambulatory gait is perceptibly stiffer
and less fluid than it was a year or so ago,” the report said, and
gastroesophageal reflux causes him to cough and clear his throat,
symptoms that “certainly seem to be more frequent and more pronounced.”
But overall, Dr. Kevin C. O’Connor, the president’s physician, pronounced him “a healthy, vigorous 78-year-old male who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”
Questions about Mr. Biden’s fitness have nonetheless taken a toll on his public standing. In a June survey
by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and the Harris Poll,
64 percent of voters believed he was showing that he is too old to be
president, including 60 percent of respondents 65 or older.
Mr.
Biden’s public appearances have fueled that perception. His speeches
can be flat and listless. He sometimes loses his train of thought, has
trouble summoning names or appears momentarily confused. More than once,
he has promoted Vice President Kamala Harris, calling her “President
Harris.” Mr. Biden, who overcame a childhood stutter, stumbles over
words like “kleptocracy.” He has said Iranian when he meant Ukrainian
and several times called Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia,
“John,” confusing him with the late Republican senator of that name from
Virginia.
Republicans and
conservative media gleefully highlight such moments, posting viral
videos, sometimes exaggerated or distorted to make Mr. Biden look even
worse. But the White House has had to walk back some of his ad-libbed
comments, such as when he vowed a military response if China attacks Taiwan or declared that President Vladimir V. Putin “cannot remain in power” in Russia.
Mr. Biden was famously prone to gaffes
even as a younger man, and aides point to his marathon meetings with
families of mass shooting victims or his working the rope line during a
trip to Cleveland this past week as evidence of stamina.
Globalresearch | Hunger must be sustained to exploit manual labor, contends George Kent, a professor at the University of Hawaii’s political science department. who authored the November 2021 UN the document.
“We sometimes talk about hunger in the
world as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished,
viewing it as comparable with the plague or aids. But that naïve view
prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains hunger.
Hunger has great positive value to many people,” Kent notes. “Indeed, it
is fundamental to the working of the world’s economy. Hungry people are
the most productive people, especially where there is need for manual
labour.”
Without “the threat of hunger,” essential
low-paying jobs would become vacant, a labor shortage would emerge and
the global economy would cease to exist, Kent continues.
“We in developed countries sometimes see
poor people by the roadside holding up signs saying ‘Will Work For
Food.” Actually, most people work for food. It is mainly because people
need food to survive that they work so hard either in producing food for
themselves in subsistence-level production, or by selling their
services to others in exchange for money. How many of us would sell our
services if it were not for the threat of hunger?
“More importantly, how many of us would
sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger?
When we sell ourselves cheaply, we enrich others, those who own
factories, the machines and the lands, and ultimately own the people who
work for them. For those who depend on the availability of cheap
labour, hunger is the foundation of wealth.”
According to the U.N., assumptions attributing poverty and low-paying
jobs to hunger are “nonsense” because people deprived of nourishment
have stronger incentive to work.
“Who would have established massive
biofuel production operations in Brazil if they did not know there were
thousands of hungry people desperate enough to take the awful jobs they
would offer?” Kent asserts. “Who would build any sort of factory if they
did not know that many people would be available to take the jobs at
low-pay rates?
“Much of the hunger literature talks
about how it is important to assure that people are well fed so that
they can be more productive. That is nonsense. No one works harder than
hungry people. Yes, people who are well nourished have
greater capacity for productive physical activity, but well-nourished
people are far less willing to do that work.”
“Slaves to hunger” are “assets” to “people at the high end,” Kent concludes:
The non-governmental organization Free
the Slaves defines slaves as people who are not allowed to walk away
from their jobs. It estimates that there are about 27 million slaves in
the world, including those who are literally locked into workrooms and
held as bonded labourers in South Asia. However, they do not include
people who might be described as slaves to hunger, that is, those who
are free to walk away from their jobs but have nothing better to go to.
Maybe most people who work are slaves to hunger?
For those of us at the high end
of the social ladder, ending hunger globally would be a disaster. If
there were no hunger in the in the world, who would plow the
fields? Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the
rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to produce
our own food and clean our toilets. No wonder people at the high end are
not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset.
The decades-oldop-ed was removed from the United Nation’s website on Wednesday hours it went viral.
The United Nation’s Chronicle subsequently issued a statement claiming the article is “satire.”
A 2020 report published by The Rockefeller Foundation that outlines a
globalist plan to transform the food system is underway began
circulating across the internet on Monday.
The report also calls for “numerous changes to policies, practices
and norms” to modify the U.S. food supply, including data collection and
online surveillance to track people’s the dietary habits.
michaelshellenberger |Sri Lanka has fallen. Protesters breached the official
residences of Sri Lanka's Prime Minister and President, who have fled to
undisclosed locations out of fear of death. The proximate reason is
that the nation is bankrupt, suffering its worst financial crisis in decades.
Millions are struggling to purchase food, medicine and fuel. Energy
shortages and inflation were major factors behind the crisis. Inflation
in June in Sri Lanka was over 50%. Food prices rose by 80%. And a half-million people fell into poverty over the last year.
But
the underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders
fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic
agriculture and “ESG,” which refers to investments made following
supposedly higher Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria. Sri
Lanka has a near-perfect ESG score (98) which is higher than Sweden (96) or the United States (51), notes a commentator.
To be sure, there were other factors behind Sri Lanka’s fall. COVID-19 lockdowns and a 2019 bombing hurt tourism, a $3 billion to 5 billion-per-year industry. Sri Lanka’s leaders insisted on paying China back
for various “Belt and Road” infrastructure projects when other nations
refused to do so. And higher oil prices meant transportation prices rose 128% since May.
But
the biggest and main problem causing Sri Lanka’s fall was its ban on
chemical fertilizers in April 2021. Over 90% of Sri Lanka’s farmers had
used chemical fertilizers and, after the ban, 85% experienced crop losses. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent
in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice
despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier.
The price of carrots and tomatoes rose
five-fold. Tea, the nation’s main export, also suffered, thereby
undermining the nation’s foreign currency and ability to purchase
products from abroad.
While there are 2 million farmers in Sri Lanka, 70% of the nation’s 22 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on farming. “We are furious!” said one rice farmer in May. “Angry! Not just me - but all the farmers who cultivated here are angry.”
expose-news | Dr. Nathan Wolfe was a founding citizen of Ghislaine Maxwell’s
TerraMar Project; a member of the Edge Foundation; a self-proclaimed
“virus hunter” whose area of research is zoonotic diseases with a
special focus on bats; with links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and
EcoHealth Alliance; who previously bungled epidemic responses while
selling pandemic insurance; whose company Metabiota which is funded by
Rosemont Seneca, Google, The Skoll Foundation, among others, was awarded
a sub-contract with the US Military’s DTRA program for work in
Ukrainian biolabs.
A few days before the end of March
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marija Zakharova published a
timeline of US-Ukraine bioresearch headed “BioBiden.” Of the 23
timeline points she listed, Nathan Wolfe or organisations associated
with him – Metabiota and Global Viral – were explicitly mentioned in 8
of them:
2007 – US DoD employee Nathan Wolfe founded Global Viral
Forecasting Institute (subsequently – Global Viral), a biomedical
company. The mission stated in the charter is non-commercial study of
transborder infections, including in China.
2014 – Metabiota, a
private commercial organisation specialising in the study of pandemic
risks is detached from Global Viral. Neil Callahan and John DeLoche,
employees of Hunter Biden’s company Rosemont Seneca Partners are
appointed to the board of Metabiota. Global Viral and Metabiota begin to
get funding from the US Department of Defence.
2014 – Metabiota
shows interest in Ukraine and invites Hunter Biden to “assert Ukraine’s
cultural & economic independence from Russia”.
2014 – Metabiota and Burisma Holdings begin cooperation on an unnamed “science project in Ukraine”.
2014
– Metabiota, Global Viral and Black & Veatch Special Projects begin
full-fledged cooperation within the US DoD programmes.
2014-2016 – Implementation of Metabiota and US DoD contracts, including a $300,000 project in Ukraine.
2016 – former US Assistant Secretary for Defence Andrew Weber is appointed head of Metabiota’s global partnerships department.
2016
– EcoHealth Alliance, a Global Viral founder Nathan Wolfe’s structure,
is engaged in the study of bat-transmitted coronaviruses at the research
centre in a Wuhan laboratory, China.
Considering the accusation is US
political elites’ involvement in the military biological activity in
Ukraine, it perhaps indicates Moscow has identified Nathan Wolfe as a
person of interest in what Zakharova termed “this truly diabolical
plan.”
“If an alien
visited Earth, they would take some note of humans, but probably spend
most of their time trying to understand the dominant form of life on our
planet –microorganisms like bacteria and viruses.”
Nathan Wolfe, Business Continuity and The Pandemic Threat Robert A Clark (2016)
From 1999 to 2006 Wolfe conducted
research as a postdoctoral student and then as an assistant professor at
Johns Hopkins University. There he worked with American epidemiologist
Donald Burke, who suspected that the practice of hunting bushmeat in
Africa had exposed a source of HIV. Based in Cameroon, Wolfe studied the
local hunters and their hunting practices. In 2004 he and his
colleagues found that 1% of bushmeat hunters were infected with the
simian foamy virus – a virus that is closely related to HIV and carried
by nonhuman primates.
In 2006 he joined the department of
epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began
pursuing ways to monitor, predict, and prevent animal-to-human transfer
of viruses and conducted projects in Africa and Southeast Asia. In
China, he collaborated with scientists to investigate wet markets (food
markets that sell live animals) as a source of zoonoses (diseases from
wild animals).
U.N. | We sometimes talk about hunger in the world as if it were a scourge
that all of us want to see abolished, viewing it as comparable with the
plague or aids. But that naïve view prevents us from coming to grips
with what causes and sustains hunger. Hunger has great positive value to
many people. Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world's
economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where
there is a need for manual labour.
We in developed countries sometimes see poor people by the roadside
holding up signs saying "Will Work for Food". Actually, most people work
for food. It is mainly because people need food to survive that they
work so hard either in producing food for themselves in
subsistence-level production, or by selling their services to others in
exchange for money. How many of us would sell our services if it were
not for the threat of hunger? More importantly, how many of us would
sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger?
When we sell our services cheaply, we enrich others, those who own the
factories, the machines and the lands, and ultimately own the people who
work for them. For those who depend on the availability of cheap
labour, hunger is the foundation of their wealth.
The conventional thinking is that hunger is caused by low-paying
jobs. For example, an article reports on "Brazil's ethanol slaves:
200,000 migrant sugar cutters who prop up renewable energy boom".1
While it is true that hunger is caused by low-paying jobs, we need to
understand that hunger at the same time causes low-paying jobs to be
created. Who would have established massive biofuel production
operations in Brazil if they did not know there were thousands of hungry
people desperate enough to take the awful jobs they would offer? Who
would build any sort of factory if they did not know that many people
would be available to take the jobs at low-pay rates?
Much of the hunger literature talks about how it is important to
assure that people are well fed so that they can be more productive.
That is nonsense. No one works harder than hungry people. Yes, people
who are well nourished have greater capacity for productive physical
activity, but well-nourished people are far less willing to do that
work.
The non-governmental organization Free the Slaves defines slaves as
people who are not allowed to walk away from their jobs. It estimates
that there are about 27 million slaves in the world,2
including those who are literally locked into workrooms and held as
bonded labourers in South Asia. However, they do not include people who
might be described as slaves to hunger, that is, those who are free to
walk away from their jobs but have nothing better to go to. Maybe most
people who work are slaves to hunger?
For those of us at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger
globally would be a disaster. If there were no hunger in the world, who
would plow the fields? Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work
in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to
produce our own food and clean our own toilets. No wonder people at the
high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us,
hunger is not a problem, but an asset.
lefteast | Amid the geopolitical and humanitarian crisis generated by the war in
Ukraine, another crisis is unfolding globally which is also heavily
affected by the war. Global food supply problems
could cause food shortages and famine in several low-income countries
in North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Global food prices,
increasing since the early 2000s, had already reached new peaks in the
last years. Owing to the important role of Ukraine and Russia in the
global food system (they are both among the largest grain exporters in
the world, and Russia has a significant role in the fertilizer industry
as well), they are expected to further accelerate to highest-ever
levels. The war also reveals how important local food systems
are in providing nutrition in Ukraine: people fleeing the cities are
depending at the moment on food produced by small family farms. The
solidarity of Romanian farmers providing Ukrainian family farms with
seeds also shows the power of alternative ways of thinking outside the
logic of the global food system.
The growing food crisis points to characteristics of the global food
system that has emerged in relationship to the capitalist economy. The
global food system’s dependence on fossil fuels, commercial seeds, and
chemicals (fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides), and its devastating
societal effects in certain parts of the world make the system
unsustainable. Rural societies in general, but more specifically small
producers and rural communities in peripheral and semi-peripheral
regions, are affected by the global food system in a way that is
inherently unjust. The marginalization of small producers and peasant
communities who lack the capacity to successfully integrate into the
global food system (but are also unable to remove themselves from it ),
and inequalities in access to land and natural resources caused by land
concentration or land grabbing are significant consequences of the
global food system. The global division of labor means that while
peripheral and semi-peripheral regions more frequently specialize in the
more labor-intensive and less profitable activities in the global
commodity chain, core countries are generally involved with more capital
and technology-intensive production and more profitable activities,
reproducing global inequalities in the accumulation of capital.
Liberalization of the land market in semi-peripheries and peripheries,
rather than aiding small or medium farms, has tended to benefit mostly
the local elite (a minority of the rural society) or multinational
corporations based in core countries. In semi-peripheral Hungary, the
food-processing industry and supermarkets, which realize a great amount
of profit from the food commodity chain are also to a significant extent
operated by foreign capital.
The global food system has negative effects on society and more
broadly a damaging impact on the environment. It is a main culprit in
the loss of biodiversity and a major driver of climate change. Negative
environmental effects like the emergence of herbicide-resistant
superweeds, the loss of pollinators, and the increasingly prevalent
droughts hit back at the global food system. Requiring costly
interventions in agroecosystems such as new pesticides, artificial
pollination, and irrigation, they contribute to higher food prices.
The concept of food sovereignty was developed and propagated by the
international peasant movement La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way).
Originally rooted in autonomous peasant organizations in Latin America,
the movement later became global, and now has members from Africa, Asia,
North America, and Europe. La Via Campesina centers its work around
claims of social justice, the right of peasants to produce food, and
more equal access to lands and other resources (like water or seed). It
also focuses on the localization of food systems and emphasizes the
right to control one’s food and the right to access healthy, culturally
appropriate food instead of producing for and consuming the products of
the profit-focused global food system. Food sovereignty not only
concentrates on the health of people, but the health of the environment
as well, it argues for ecologically sound and sustainable agriculture.
In its thematic issue on food sovereignty
(#29), the Hungarian critical journal Fordulat addresses how the
operation of the global food system affects rural society and ecosystems
in Hungary and discusses the struggles and strategies of small
producers, including those of women who work in agriculture. The first
part of the issue contains five original articles and a translation,
tied together by the concept of food sovereignty and what it entails. It
gathers theoretical and empirical works that show how the history of
struggles of rural societies for more fair distribution of land and
natural resources and environmental degradation have developed in tandem
with capitalism, focusing specifically on transformations in Hungary’s
agriculture. It shows how the dialectical relationship between nature,
society, and the capitalist system to a large extent shapes rural life
in this semi-peripheral context today. The second part of the issue
presents three book reviews that reintroduce anthropological works
discussing local conditions, practices, and the changing meanings of
food and farming as well as resistance and struggle, amid the capitalist
and socialist transformations of the food systems in peripheral and
semi-peripheral places. While these books were written several decades
ago, they still hold relevance for understanding struggles in these
rural areas today.
John Helmer has an excellent article on the MH 17 "trial" in Holland and the
Dutch farmers' revolt. He traces the latter to the failure of Dutch
agribusiness plans to colonise ukraine and export its production,
employing cheap Ukrainian labour.
And, of course, being given the land cheaply.
"...Dutch analysts accuse Rutte of a Ukrainian
boomerang: the calculation was for Dutch agroindustries to invest in
Ukrainian farmland and crops with cheap labour and weak environmental
controls, with the dividends to flow back to The Netherlands
in cash. The Russian special military operation has killed that plan; instead, the Dutch died in MH17
and Ukrainian migrants are now moving into the country to take up state
money and drive the farmers off their land..."
The real beneficiaries of the Russian special military operation are going to be the people of Ukraine
whose government is intent on selling the nation's birthright for a few
billion delivered to offshore accounts. ...here's the link:
thesaker.is | The Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation
continues analysing the military-biological activity of the USA and its
allies in Ukraine and other regions of the world in view of new
information received at the liberated territories
and at the branch offices of the Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)
that form a unified information network.
We have previously stated that the Ukrainian
project of the Pentagon do not meet the pertinent healthcare problems of
Ukraine, while their implementation has not led to any improvement of
the sanitary-epidemiological situation.
The special military operation has led to forming the final report on DTRA activity dated from 2005 to 2016.
The document contains the data on evaluation of
healthcare, veterinary and biosecurity system efficiency prepared by a
group of U.S. experts in 2016.
This report is a concept document designed for
further planification of military-biological activity of the Pentagon in
Ukraine that contains conclusions on implementation of the programme
guidelines.
Despite the more than 10-year-long period of
cooperation in the alleged '...reduction of biological threats...', the
experts have stated:
'...There is no legislation on the control of
highly dangerous pathogens in the country, there are significant
deficiencies in biosafety... The current state of resources makes it
impossible for laboratories to respond effectively to public
health emergencies...'
The document emphasises that '...over the past five
years, Ukraine has shown no progress in implementing international
health regulations of the World Health Organisation'.
The report pays particular attention to
non-compliance with biosafety requirements when working and storing
microbial collections.
It has been stated '...that most facilities are
characterised by numerous gross violations, such as unlocked fencing
systems, unlatching windows, broken or inactive pathogen restriction
systems, lack of alarm systems...' The results of
the review conclude that there is no system for protecting dangerous
pathogens in Ukraine.
At the same time, the activities of the Defence
Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) have been assessed positively: the
organisation has managed to bring the national collection of
microorganisms to the United States, to organise biological assessment
work and to implement projects to study particularly dangerous and
economically significant infections that could cause a worsening
(changing) epidemic situation.
The report makes the case for continuing this work on behalf of the Pentagon that has cost more than $250 million since 2005.
The document is annexed with ambiguous comments
about the sponsors and implementers of the Biological Threat Reduction
Programme in Ukraine that have nothing to do with biosecurity issues. In
particular, the Soros Foundation is mentioned
with the notation '...contributed to the development of an open and
democratic society...'
It confirms again that the official activities of
the Pentagon in Ukraine are just a front for illegal military and
biological research.
We have repeatedly mentioned the role of U.S.
Democratic Party representatives in funding bioweapons activities in
Ukraine and the intermediary organisations that have been used for this
purpose.
I would like to refer to one of the key Pentagon contractors receiving money from Hunter Biden's investment fund, Metabiota.
The available data suggests that the company is
merely a front for internationally dubious purposes and is used by the
U.S. political elite to carry out opaque financial activities in various
parts of the world.
There is a specific example: Metabiota was involved
in the response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. The activities of
the company's employees have raised questions from the World Health
Organisation (WHO) in terms of their compliance
with biosafety requirements.
This is the report of the international panel of
experts from the Haemorrhagic Fever Consortium who were involved in the
fight against Ebola virus disease in Sierra Leone in 2015.
According to the document, Metabiota staff had
failed to comply with handling procedures and concealed the involvement
of Pentagon staff who were using the company as a front. The main
purpose of these activities was to isolate highly virulent
variants of the virus from sick and dead people, as well as to export
its strains to the USA.
In view of the apparent failure of Metabiota's
activities to meet the goals of controlling the spread of the disease,
the World Health Organisation's Ebola coordinator, Philippe Barbosa,
recommended to recall the staff of the company saying
he was extremely concerned about the potential risks of such
collaboration to WHO's reputation.
The U.S. military contractor's heightened interest
in the Ebola virus is not a coincidence: the disease is one of the most
pathogenic to humans. During the outbreak that began in 2014, 28,000
people were contaminated, over 11,000 of them
died, the mortality rate was around 40%.
The special military operation has led to receiving
documents that reveals the plans of Metabiota and the Ukrainian
Scientific-Technological Centre to study the Ebola virus in Ukraine.
This is the request for U.S. funding to diagnose
highly dangerous pathogens in Ukraine, including Ebola virus. This kind
of requests are part of U.S. strategy to redeploy high-risk work with
dangerous pathogens to third countries.
The research was to be carried out at the Mechnikov
Anti-Plague Institute in Odessa. As the disease is not endemic and has
never been recorded in Ukraine indeed, there is a legitimate question
about the need for such research and its true
purpose.
We have already noted that Ukraine and other
post-Soviet states have become a testing ground for biological weapons
not only for the USA, but also for its NATO allies; on the first place,
Germany. Various projects have been carried out
on behalf of the Joint Medical Service of the German Armed Forces.
Bundeswehr professionals paid particular attention
to the Congo-Crimean fever pathogen. A large-scale screening of the
susceptibility of the local population to this infection was carried out
and included summarising demographic, epidemiological
and clinical data. This kind of approaches allows to identify new
regional virus genotypes and to select strains that cause latent
clinical forms.
The study of natural foci of Crimean-Congo fever
was carried out under the pretext of improving the Ukrainian
epidemiological surveillance system, with the participation of the
Institute of Veterinary Medicine in Kiev and the Mechnikov
Anti-Plague Institute in Odessa.
Bundeswehr's interest in Crimean-Congo fever stems
from the fact that mortality can be as high as 30% and its outbreaks
create a need for lengthy and costly treatment, preventive and special
handling measures.
This is a quote from Bundeswehr's instructions:
'...pay particular attention to fatal cases of infection with
Crimean-Congo fever as it allows the virus strains with maximum
pathogenicity and virulence for humans to be extracted from the
dead individuals...'
Apart from Germany, microbiologists from the USA
have shown a keen interest in tick-borne infections; research in this
area has been funded by DTRA through the UP-1 and UP-8 projects.
A separate project on ixodid ticks that are vectors
of a number of highly dangerous infections (tularemia, West Nile fever,
Congo-Crimean fever) has been implemented by the University of Texas.
Ticks used to be collected in the south-eastern
regions of Ukraine, where natural foci of infections characteristic of
the territory of the Russian Federation are located. At the same time,
the period of implementing this work coincided
with a rapid increase in the incidence of tick-borne borreliosis among
the Ukrainian population, as well as the increase in the number of ticks
in various regions of Russia bordering Ukraine.
This issue is being studied by competent Russian
professionals in coordination with professionals from the Ministry of
Defence of Russia.
We have previously pointed out the significance of
the results of the military-biological projects codenamed UP for the
Pentagon.
Note the report prepared for the U.S. Defence
Department by Black & Veatch and Metabiota. According to the
document, Veterinary Projects codenamed 'TAP' were implemented
simultaneously with the UP projects in Ukraine.
Their main guideline lies in economically
significant quarantine infections capable of damaging the agriculture of
several countries and entire regions, such as glanders, African swine
fever (ASF), classical swine fever, highly pathogenic
avian influenza and Newcastle disease.
African swine fever with two projects dedicated to this pathogen represented particular interest to U.S. military biologists.
The TAP-3 project was aimed to study the spread of
ASF pathogen through wild animals. The migration routes of wild boar
through Ukraine had been examining within its framework. The TAP-6
project scaled this process up to Eastern European
countries.
The study of vector populations of dangerous
zoonotic infections was carried out by staff of the Institute of New
Pathogens of the University of Florida (Gainesville) in Volyn, Rovno,
Zhitomir and Chernigov regions of Ukraine, as well as
in the areas bordering Belarus and Russia.
Note the worsening situation of African swine fever
in Eastern European countries: According to the International Office of
Epizootics, since 2014, outbreaks have been recorded in Latvia (4,021
cases), Estonia (3,814) and Lithuania (4,201).
In Poland, more than 13,000 cases of ASF have been detected, and
agricultural losses from the disease have exceeded 2.4 billion euro.
We have already emphasised the use of biological
weapons in Cuba in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, I would like to focus on
U.S. military-biological activities during the Korean War.
In March 2022, the U.S. Army Strategic Studies
Institute published a report on the U.S. chemical and biological weapons
programme during the Korean War. This report was aimed to create a
possible line of defence against allegations of illegal
activities carried out by U.S. biolaboratories in Ukraine.
The document attempts to refute the testimony of 38
U.S. military pilots who have admitted using biological weapons in
China and Korea.
According to the document, while preparing for the
Korean campaign, '...the U.S. Air Force secured additional funds to
purchase large quantities of chemical and biological munitions, obtained
a testing range for them in Canada and carried
out an extensive conceptual work on their use...'
At that time, the Americans considered brucellosis
pathogens and economically important infections, including wheat stem
rust, as priority biological agents. 2,500 munitions of this type the
U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command planned
to use, including '...to attack Soviet grain crops...'
Analysis of the data mentioned in the report shows
that the U.S. command uses the results of the research received from the
Japanese military-biological programme and a certain 'continuity' of
the works previously carried out by the Detachment
731 led by Shiro Ishii.
This is the record of the closed session of CIA,
State Department and the Pentagon representatives dated July 7, 1953.
The document clearly shows that the Americans are focusing on techniques
to manipulate public opinion and launch an aggressive
counter-attack within their strategies aimed to defend from
allegations.
The report states that the officials are reluctant
to actual investigations of chemical and biological incidents due to
fears of revealing the activities carried out by the U.S. Eighth Army.
Thus, the comparative analysis of U.S. activities
during the Korean War and currently in Ukraine demonstrates the
persistence of the U.S. policy of building up its own military and
biological capabilities in circumvention of international
agreements.
In conclusion, I would like to present real data on
the health condition of the voluntarily surrendered Ukrainian
servicemen. This diapositive presents the data on presence of antibodies
to contagious disease agents without mentioning personal
data of these servicemen.
The results are as follows: 33% of the examined
servicemen had had hepatitis A, over 4% had renal syndrome fever and 20%
had West Nile fever. The figures are significantly higher than the
statistical average. In view of active research
of these diseases held by the Pentagon within the Ukrainian projects,
there is reason to believe that servicemen of the Armed Forces of
Ukraine (AFU) were involved as volunteers in experiments to assess the
tolerance of dangerous infectious diseases.
The lack of therapeutic effect of antibacterial
medication has been reported during in-patient treatment of AFU
servicemen in medical facilities. High concentrations of antibiotics,
including sulphonyl amides and fluoroquinolones, have
been detected in their blood.
This fact may indicate preventive use of
antibiotics and preparation of personnel for operating in conditions of
biological contamination, such as cholera agent, that indirectly proves
the information of the Russian Defence Ministry that
Ukrainian special units were planning to use biological agents.
The data will be included in the U.S. military-biological dossier and we will continue to examine it and keep you informed.
Citizenship, Criticism, and Communism
-
In the 1940s and ’50s, Americans engaged in an intense debate over the
content of school textbooks, particularly social studies texts. Fears of
communism a...
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
