Jul 172023
 
 July 17, 2023  Posted by at 9:21 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,


Andy Warhol Reigning Queens 1985

 

NATO Plan to Bulk Up Presence on Eastern Flank Faces ‘Serious Problems’ (Sp.)
US, NATO Weapons Stockpiles at ‘Dangerously Low’ Levels: Top General (ET)
‘They’re Running Out of Ammo’: Putin on US Sending Cluster Bombs to Kiev (Sp.)
The Incredible Shrinking NATO (Dmitry Orlov)
Ukraine Behind New Crimean Bridge Attack – Media (RT)
Real War To Defeat, Fake Propaganda To Victory – Nato Is In Two Minds (Helmer)
The Wagner Mutiny (Jacques Baud)
Cracks in NATO’s Ukraine Project (Hahn)
Failed Proxy War With Russia Shows US Can’t ‘Pick on Someone Its Own Size’ (Sp.)
Why Dennis Kucinich Should Now Threaten His Candidate RFK Jr. (Zuesse)
Hunter Biden Threatens Trump With ‘Legal Trouble’ (RT)
Almost Half of Millennials Want Jail Time for “Misgendering” (Turley)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joe Biden at 29

 

 

 

 

Kerry
https://twitter.com/i/status/1680479725624369153

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Until now, we were pointing out that Ukraine was running out of troops, weapons and ammo. Now, it’s all of NATO. 3 articles.

“These are numbers that, unless they announce an all-out mobilization, cannot be provided.”

NATO Plan to Bulk Up Presence on Eastern Flank Faces ‘Serious Problems’ (Sp.)

NATO’s plan to beef up its military presence in Eastern Europe will face “serious” problems because almost no country can muster troops in significant numbers, with Spain no exception, military analyst Juan A. Aguilar told Sputnik. Spain would be able to send only a meagre number of soldiers to reinforce the NATO flank in Slovakia and Romania, he added. In fact, the media impact of the announcement recently made by the country’s President is far greater than the actual size of the forces to be sent on the ground, remarked the director of the strategic research portal Geoestrategia.es. Pedro Sanchez had revealed during the recent NATO summit in Vilnius that Spain will deploy 700 troops in Slovakia and reinforce its presence in Romania by 250 military personnel.

“As a committed member, Spain is going to announce the deployment of Spanish forces in Slovakia to reinforce the eastern front and we are going to reinforce our presence in Romania with a greater number of troops,” Sanchez said, adding that his country would “continue to contribute to the alliance’s effort to achieve the just and lasting peace.” Although the details have not yet been officially specified, Juan A. Aguilar weighed in on the announcement, saying: “I don’t think that more than 300 soldiers can be deployed in three annual rotations, about 1,000 in total, a battalion… There are no more, unless they withdraw from other areas,” said the military analyst. He recalled that although Spain has on paper “some 150,000 troops”, far from all of them are available to be posted to Eastern Europe.

“Out of the 150,000 we have to subtract those integrated into Common Corps, Headquarters, Logistics, the Navy and the Air Force… Then, those of the special units (NBC, UME, Anti-aircraft) and, of course, the garrison troops deployed in the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla”, Aguilar explained. “What’s left?” queried the military analyst, and speculated: “Three light brigades and three armored-mechanized brigades, not at full strength, numbering about 18,000 soldiers. You have to leave a garrison for the country’s capital… There are troops deployed in Lebanon, Iraq, Mali, Turkey, the Baltic countries… And there are at least three rotations a year”.

NATO has been bulking up its military footprint along the alliance’s eastern flank, in countries that share a land border with Ukraine, where Russia is conducting its special military operation. NATO’s multinational battlegroups are currently stationed in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. US President Joe Biden on Thursday approved an executive order authorizing 3,000 US military reserve personnel to augment Operation Atlantic Resolve, which provides rotational deployment of combat-credible forces to Europe as part of the United States’ commitment to NATO. Following decisions made at the NATO summit in Vilnius, allies that have been sending tens of billions of dollars in weapons to the regime in Kiev vowed to maintain up to 300,000 troops in a “state of high readiness”, as part of the NATO Response Force.

However, this comes as many of the afore-mentioned bloc members are worried about their own insufficient ammunition stocks, drained by the US-spearheaded Western proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Major European NATO powers like Germany, Italy and the UK have all conceded that after splurging on Ukraine, their own military had been “hollowed out” by arms shipments. Moscow has warned repeatedly about the consequences of these actions for regional and global security, only serving to fan the flames of the Ukraine conflagration. As for military manpower along the eastern NATO flank, Juan A. Aguilar told Sputnik: “NATO wants to deploy 300,000 men in Eastern Europe. The US would put up 100,000, but the rest of the countries have to provide a total of 200,000. If they make four rotations a year, 800,000 troops are needed. These are numbers that, unless they announce an all-out mobilization, cannot be provided.

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“So we don’t have nearly what we had at the heart of the Cold War..”

US, NATO Weapons Stockpiles at ‘Dangerously Low’ Levels: Top General (ET)

The weapons stockpiles of the United States and its NATO allies are becoming “dangerously low,” with no “short-term” solutions, according to a top U.S. Air Force commander. Gen. James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa, made the remarks at the Chief of the Air Staff’s Global Air & Space Chiefs’ Conference in London, Breaking Defense reported. The air force general urged NATO allies to think seriously about their stockpiles. “I think it’s very important that we kind of take stock of where we are in our weapons state across the 32 nations of NATO, and we’re getting way down compared to where we were,” Gen. Hecker said, while speaking on a panel with the air chiefs of the UK and Sweden at the conference, the outlet reported.

“And it’s probably not going to get better—well, it’s not in the short term—but we’ve got to make sure in the long term we have the industrial base that can increase what we have,” he said at the July 12–13 event, urging all NATO nations to start making deeper investments. The United States is at “roughly half the number of fighter squadrons” it had compared to when it engaged in Operation Desert Storm, a U.S.-led operation that started in January 1991 as part of a response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, according to the general. He noted that there has been a similar decrease in fighter squadrons for the UK. “So we don’t have nearly what we had at the heart of the Cold War,” he said.

“Now you add that we’re giving a lot of munitions away to the Ukrainians, which I think is exactly what we need to do, but now we’re getting dangerously low and sometimes, in some cases. even too low, that we don’t have enough,” Gen. Hecker said. “And we need to get industry on board to help us out so we can get this going.” The United States has provided Ukraine with more than $41.3 billion in security assistance as of July 7, since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, according to the U.S. State Department. That total encompasses more than $15 billion in weapons and equipment delivered to Ukraine from U.S. military stocks since the Russian invasion.

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“Until now, we have not used them… we did not need to, despite also previously experiencing a shortage of ammunition..”

‘They’re Running Out of Ammo’: Putin on US Sending Cluster Bombs to Kiev (Sp.)

The Biden administration unveiled a new military assistance package for Ukraine on July 7, which included cluster bombs. The lethal weapons are banned by the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which has been ratified by 123 countries, excluding the US and Ukraine, and several other nations. The US decided to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine because the Western-fueled proxy war against Russia is running low on ammo, President Vladimir Putin told local media. “They [the United States] are doing this not because of ‘the good life’, but because they are running low on ammunition in general,” the head of state said, answering a question from a Russian journalist. The Russian leader recalled that Washington previously referred to the use of cluster bombs as a “crime.”

“As for cluster munitions, the US administration itself provided an assessment of these munitions with comments by its staff some time ago, when the use of cluster munitions was called a crime by the US administration itself. This is how I think it should be regarded,” he said. Moscow reserves the right to respond accordingly in case of cluster munitions use against the country, emphasized the Russian president. “Of course, if they are used against us, we reserve the right to mirror actions,” Putin said in the interview for Russian television. He underscored that Russia, which has various kinds of cluster munitions, has not yet needed to resort to using the lethal weapons. “Russia has in its possession a sufficient stockpile of various types of cluster munitions. Until now, we have not used them… we did not need to, despite also previously experiencing a shortage of ammunition,” Putin noted.

The US-pledged cluster munitions have already been delivered to the Kiev regime, the Pentagon confirmed on Thursday. Lt Gen Douglas Sims, Joint Staff J3 director of operations, said that the bombs “have indeed been delivered to Ukraine at this point.” The Armed Forces of Ukraine, according to the Russian military, have previously resorted to the use of the controversial cluster munitions for shelling Donbass, in particular Donetsk. According to Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, this indicates that the goal of the Ukrainian military is to kill a maximum number of civilians. Cluster bombs are extremely deadly containing dozens or hundreds of explosive submunitions, or bomblets, and are designed to maximize damage to enemy forces across an area of up to several hundred square meters.

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“The sight of Western armor ablaze does not make good advertising. Consequently, the US defense contractors must be very eager to stop this steady stream of negative advertising for their products to stop right this second..”

The Incredible Shrinking NATO (Dmitry Orlov)

NATO is a captive buyers’ club for US-made weapons. That is what vaunted NATO standards, with which the Ukraine must comply before it is deemed worthy to be invited to join NATO, are all about: to comply with these standards, your weapons have to be mostly US-made. That is also the reason for all of the various wars of choice, from Serbia to Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya and Syria: these were demonstration projects for US weapons, with the additional goal of using up the weapons and the munitions so that the Pentagon and the rest of NATO would have to reorder them. The geopolitical rationales for these military conflicts are mere rationalizations. For instance, between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos during 580,000 bombing sorties—equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years.

What was the geopolitical rationale? Nobody can even remember if there ever was one. But those bombs were about to expire and needed to be used up and reordered to keep the money flowing. In response to such strange inducements, US-made weapons tend to be overly complex (so that their makers can charge more for the useless extra features) and rather fragile (never tested against a peer adversary like Russia or China, or even against Iran), developed slowly (to clean up on R&D funding), built slowly (because what’s the rush?) and very high-maintenance (so that US defense contractors can get even richer delivering spare parts and service). These weapons were supposed to be tested every so gently by giving hell to backward tribesmen armed with old Kalashnikovs and RPGs.

Ukraine is a different story altogether. There, the Ukrainians, with their mismatched hand-me-down Western armor, are being asked to penetrate three lines of hardened Russian defenses. After about a month of effort and staggering losses of men and equipment, they haven’t yet been able to reach the first defensive line. The sight of Western armor ablaze does not make good advertising. Consequently, the US defense contractors must be very eager to stop this steady stream of negative advertising for their products to stop right this second — before their reputations end up completely ruined; hence the unseemly haste with which the entire Ukrainian project is being orphaned.

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Russia is angry now.

Ukraine Behind New Crimean Bridge Attack – Media (RT)

The Crimean Bridge was damaged in a joint “special operation”conducted by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) and naval forces, media outlets reported on Monday. The Russian authorities have yet to announce the reason behind the incident. According to a source for RBK Ukraina, the key infrastructure linking the peninsula with mainland Russia was attacked by an unspecified number of sea surface drones. “It was difficult to reach the bridge, but finally the task was accomplished,” he said. Ukrainian officials have cheered the incident but have yet to confirm their direct involvement in the reported attack.

Andrey Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, described the Crimean Bridge as a “redundant construction,” but refused to elaborate. Traffic on the bridge was stopped in the early hours of Monday, with Crimean Governor Sergey Aksyonov citing an unspecified “emergency.” Later, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said that a married couple from his region was killed in the incident and their daughter was injured. Russia’s Ministry of Transport said the road surface of one of the tracks was damaged, while the bridge’s supports remain intact.


Ukraine has attempted to target the strategic link in the past, according to Moscow. Last week, the Russian Defense Ministry said that Kiev attempted to strike the bridge with a missile, but failed to penetrate the air defenses. In October last year, the bridge was damaged in a deadly truck bombing, which Moscow said was orchestrated by Ukrainian intelligence services. At the time, Russia responded by intensifying missile strikes on Ukraine’s military and energy infrastructure.

Bridge

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“..despite the losses, the Ukrainians have so far taken just five of the 60 miles they hope to cover to reach the sea in the south and split the Russian forces in two.”

Real War To Defeat, Fake Propaganda To Victory – Nato Is In Two Minds (Helmer)

What is new now is that the Ukraine, the US and NATO are losing their war against Russia on the battlefield, and risk losing all the deterrence which NATO has been designing, building, buying, and deploying since 1949. With or without desperation measures, Swiss colonel Jacques Baud tells War of the Worlds, Russia has already won the war. “Colonel Douglas Macgregor hasn’t this courage,” a US NATO veteran comments, referring to the Trump Administration appointee now broadcasting against the Biden Administration. Russian military bloggers and the Defense Ministry in Moscow are reporting that the so-called mosquito tactic of numerous small Ukrainian attacks on the Russian lines, run simultaneously, are resulting in Russian feints followed by artillery counter-fire; ending in heavy Ukrainian losses followed by retreat without territorial gains.

“It is within the realm of possibility that Ukrainian forces have seen losses at this level,” the New York Times quotes a British security analyst, adding that “ a significant level of lost weapons was generally a hallmark of wars of attrition, like the one in Ukraine.” The newspaper adds the claim: “In the first two weeks of Ukraine’s gruelling counteroffensive, as much as 20 percent of the weaponry it sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed, according to American and European officials. The toll includes some of the formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers — the Ukrainians were counting on to beat back the Russians. The startling rate of losses dropped to about 10 percent in the ensuing weeks, the officials said, preserving more of the troops and machines needed for the major offensive push that the Ukrainians say is still to come.

Some of the improvement came because Ukraine changed tactics, focusing more on wearing down the Russian forces with artillery and long-range missiles than charging into enemy minefields and fire. But that good news obscures some grim realities. The losses have also slowed because the counteroffensive itself has slowed — and even halted in places — as Ukrainian soldiers struggle against Russia’s formidable defences. And despite the losses, the Ukrainians have so far taken just five of the 60 miles they hope to cover to reach the sea in the south and split the Russian forces in two.”

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“This crisis demonstrates the inability of Westerners to think and act according to facts, rather than expectations. The Ukrainian people are beginning to understand this.”

The Wagner Mutiny (Jacques Baud)

Clearly, Putin did everything he could to prevent the mutineers from reaching Moscow, where any clashes could have fed into Western propaganda. Playing with Lukashenko’s mediation, Putin reacted with a mixture of firmness (adoption of anti-terrorist measures, trenches on access roads to Moscow, placing territorial units on alert) and magnanimity (offering a way out via Belarus) to calm things down. It should be noted that, despite his tough talk about “treason,” and contrary to the claims of Western propagandists, the indictment of the mutineers does not refer to article 275 of the penal code (treason), but to article 279 (armed rebellion), which is less serious, as explained by John Helmer in an excellent podcast.

That said, Vladimir Putin’s statement on June 27 that Russian forces had “prevented a civil war” seems to have unnecessarily over-dramatized the situation. He probably wanted to give importance to the role of the armed forces in this crisis, but at the same time, he also suggested a greater fragility than the events had shown. As to the idea that the intelligence services had foreseen this mutiny, it is most probably false. In fact, Westerners are watching Russia’s domestic situation for the slightest hint of regime change, which is the ultimate goal of our support for Ukraine. This is why, as early as May, with the first Prigozhin videos, Western services raised the possibility of a coup in Moscow. But, in terms of intelligence methodology, these are not “predictions,” but simply working hypotheses and scenarios.

For an intelligence service, predicting an event implies having indicators and concrete indications on which to draw conclusions. However, neither the Ukrainians, nor the Americans, nor the French had the slightest indication, but only the hope that such a mutiny might take place. As a member of Ukrainian military intelligence told the French channel France 24. In reality, everyone was surprised, and no international actor has been able to exploit in Ukraine or elsewhere what could have been the beginning of a power crisis in Russia. This also shows that Western understanding of the conflict is based exclusively on hypotheses, which are themselves often based on Ukrainian wishful thinking, but very rarely on facts. This is why we are pushing Ukraine towards defeat.

It is very likely that there was no Western involvement in Yevgeny Prigogin’s decision. The USA made every effort to demonstrate its distance from the Prigozhin mutiny. Westerners, on the other hand, saw it as the realization of their “dream” and clearly stirred up the situation in the hope that it would lead to internal conflict. Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky tweeted that he might spend his vacation in Crimea. Besides a childish behavior, it shows that he has understood absolutely nothing about the dynamics of events in Russia. In the end, this situation was nothing more than that of a company director trying to save his business and doing so impulsively and thoughtlessly, with potentially dramatic consequences for combatants on both sides in Ukraine. This crisis demonstrates the inability of Westerners to think and act according to facts, rather than expectations. The Ukrainian people are beginning to understand this.

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“They take territory at great loss of life and equipment only to relinquish the same territory a few days layer with more losses.”

Cracks in NATO’s Ukraine Project (Hahn)

Western and Ukrainian expectations and claims regarding the potential of the counteroffensive are exposing the hideously phantasmagorical expectations of most in Washington, Brussels, and Kiev. After six weeks of Ukraine’s highly costly counteroffensive, instead of territorial gains Kiev’s forces are being routed, experiencing enormous casualties, losses of territory on the Oskol river, an operational encirclement of Avdiivka, and successful Russian advances on the Kupyansk-Liman front lines. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed on July 11th that the Ukrainians have suffered 26,000 casualties and lost 3,000 units of equipment, including 1,244 tanks and fighting vehicles as well as APCs, artillery pieces, and mortars, since June 4th when the counteroffensive began.[2]

To put this into the perspective of Ukrainian weapons requests and NATO capacity and willingness (or unwillingness) to meet them, in December 2022 last year Zalyuzhniy told The Economist that he needed “300 tanks, 600-700 IFVs, 500 Howitzers.” In such case, he thought it “completely realistic to get to the lines of February 23rd.” But the Ukrainians never received anything like this, and the West nevertheless pressed Zelenskiy to underataken the ill-considered idea of a broad counter-offensive against the revived Russian army. The Ukrainians have lost more equipment in just six weeks of the counteroffensive than Zalyuzhniy had requested; this without even reaching the first line of the Russian forces’ three well dug-in defense lines in the south and making even less progress in the east. Ukrainian forces have not been able to take and hold even one small settlement along the entire line of contact extending from Kherson to Kharkov. They take territory at great loss of life and equipment only to relinquish the same territory a few days layer with more losses. Not surprisingly, cracks are appearing in the Ukrainian ranks.[3]

On this background it is hardly surprising that tensions between Kiev and its Western patrons are running high, with each side blaming the other for the military farce. Both Zalyuzhniy and Zelenskiy are at odds with the West for its failure to provide sufficient military equipment for a counteroffensive the West itself has demanded as a kind of test as to whether Kiev deserves continuing military aid. In turn, Zelenskiy made his disenchantment with NATO and the West known both before and during the summit. In a June 30th Washington Post interview, Zalyuzhniy seemed to be airing both his opposition to the conduct of the counteroffensive without sufficient fire power (recall the pre-offensive pressure from Kiev for the provision of F-16s) as well as Kiev’s grievances regarding insufficient arms, thus setting up the West as scapegoat for the counteroffensive’s failure.

[..] Years of successfully pulling the wool over people’s eyes and Western fawning over him since February 2022 led Zelenskiy to overestimate the power of his personality and his communication skills. There was never any chance that the NATO summit in Vilnius would offer Ukraine membership, a membership action plan (MAP), or a shortcut to membership no matter how charismatic Zelenskiy imagines himself to be. These hopes were as delusional as were the repeated Ukrainian decisions not to forego NATO membership before and after Maidan, before and after Minsk, before and after Putin’s proposals on a new European security architecture and his massing of troops on Ukraine’s borders, before and after his February 2022 invasion, and before and after the March 2022 agreement to end the war by Kiev renouncing the goal of NATO membership and returning to the Minsk format.

What kind of policy is it that demands Ukraine’s movement towards NATO membership, backs a coup to achieve it, and then arms the intensely anti-Russian Maidan regime while not offering Kiev NATO membership in the face of decades of protestations from the military and nuclear power next door that it views such actions as a grave threat to its national security? But it is worse than that.

The Washington/Brussels consensus tells us that Putin is a hungry, imperial dictator determined at all costs to conquer ‘all of Ukraine’ and reestablish the former USSR, meaning taking all the Baltic and Transcaucasus countries as well. If we are to be guided by the concensus’s analysis, then we are left with the unavoidable conclusion that Washington and Brussels pushed Ukraine into the claws of the aggressive, angry bear they themselves riled and aggravated. No matter. United together, ‘we will not waver’: Ukraine will fight ‘as long as it takes’ to defeat the bear on behalf of the United States and its subservient allies.

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“How much does the USA spend on military hardware? How much has the United States sent to Ukraine? How many billions and billions of dollars? How many other countries have thrown billions and billions of dollars into this? And they’re gonna run out of ammunition? What? What?!”

Failed Proxy War With Russia Shows US Can’t ‘Pick on Someone Its Own Size’ (Sp.)

In a string of statements last week justifying cluster bombs’ deployment, White House, Pentagon and State Department officials characterized it as a stopgap measure that should allow US defense industry to ramp up its “depleted” stocks of 155 mm shells. Secretary of State Antony Blinken even suggested that Ukraine would be “defenseless” if Washington did not urgently send the weapons. “The stockpiles around the world and in Ukraine of the unitary munitions, not the cluster munitions, were running out, about to be depleted. And so, the hard but necessary choice to give them the cluster munitions amounted to this: if we didn’t do it, we don’t do it, then they will run out of ammunition. If they run out of ammunition, then they will be defenseless,” Blinken said.

“I don’t understand how a cluster bomb is a ‘defensive’ weapon,” veteran US-based journalist and political analyst Caleb Maupin told Sputnik. “This is something you drop from a plane or you deploy and it goes across a widespread area and explodes, or it remains undetonated and then someone walks by and gets blown up. So the idea that they would be ‘defenseless’ without the cluster bombs, that doesn’t add up [if you] look at what a cluster bomb is.” Maupin also questioned how it was that the US and its NATO allies, which outspend Russia militarily multiple times over, and have sent more weapons to Ukraine than Moscow spends on defense in a year, could be “running out” of ammunition.

“How much does the USA spend on military hardware? How much has the United States sent to Ukraine? How many billions and billions of dollars? How many other countries have thrown billions and billions of dollars into this? And they’re gonna run out of ammunition? What? What?! And you look at Russia, and you look at Belarus, the countries that are on the other side in Ukraine, they don’t seem to have this problem. They’re not running out of ammunition. They’re not running out of military hardware and weapons,” Maupin said.

“The United States has spent so much more money on this and so many billions of dollars have been piled into Ukraine. What’s going on here? What in the world is going on here? You almost wonder if this military-industrial complex thing where weaponry has been turned into a mechanism for stabilizing the economy, we dump lots of money into military expenditures – you wonder if a lot of these weapons are produced with the thought that they might never be used. They’re simply a moneymaking cash cow for certain Pentagon contractors. And with that being the situation, you have to wonder why we are going through them so quickly and what’s really going on here,” he added.

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The numbers are interesting. They don’t seem to confirm what RFK claims.

Why Dennis Kucinich Should Now Threaten His Candidate RFK Jr. (Zuesse)

The former Congressman Dennis Kucinich is RFK Jr.’s campaign manager, which is a crucial advisor to any Presidential candidate; he now needs to lay down the law to his candidate and threaten to resign unless RFK Jr. will promise never again to be so sloppy in his wordings as to leave his many enemies on both the left and the right an opportunity to splash headlines against him that will take advantage of those sloppy wordings from him so as to accentuate still further the candidate’s existing propaganda-vulnerabilities. RFK Jr. has now done this twice — once in a way that will antagonize Palestinians and any progressive Jews who support them against Israel; and, now, this time, on July 12th, in an incident that the intensely pro-Israel Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post headlined about on July 15th, “RFK Jr. says COVID was ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews”. (A more honest headline would have been “RFK Jr. says COVID was ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews and Chinese,” but Murdoch knows that Democratic Party primaries candidates need votes mainly from Jews and from Blacks, not from Chinese; and, so, playing the ‘anti-Semite’ card against Kennedy would hit him where any Democratic Party Presidential candidate would be hurt the most.)

Kennedy said there that scientific studies had shown that because of certain details of the structure of the virus that causes the covid-19 disease, and because of certain genetic structures that are more commonly found in Jews and in Chinese and that are least commonly found generally among both Whites and Blacks, the ratios of Jews and of Chinese who have fallen victim to the covid-19 virus have been remarkably low, and the ratios of all Whites and of all Blacks who have fallen victim to it have been remarkably high. He apparently felt that more research needs to be done on this, especially if covid-19 was created as a bioweapon (and so maybe targeted against Whites and Blacks). If those allegations are truthful, then any rational person would agree with them, but RFK Jr.’s having worded his argument as carelessly as he did was a gratuitous invitation for his enemies to use his statements there as a weapon against him so as to prevent him from becoming the Party’s nominee instead of for Joe Biden to become that.

This was the second such incident. The first was pandering for the pro-Israeli or “zionist” Jewish vote on June 13th by telling Glenn Greenwald that “Israel is a democracy” (as-if an apartheid nation can even POSSIBLY be that), and he refused to answer Greenwald’s question of whether if he will become President he will act so as to stop U.S. taxpayers from continuing to donate $3.8 billion per year to Israel’s Government, $3.3 billion of that to be spent on buying weapons made by U.S. weapons-manufacturing corporations to be used against Palestinians and against Iran. He wouldn’t answer it.

[..] I myself am skeptical even of the truthfulness of what Kennedy said there about the covid-19 virus and its vaccines [..] look at Israel there: It has had 517,874 covid-19 cases per million inhabitants, and that is the 23rd-highest infection-rate among the 228 nations on the planet. Israel has had 1,348 covid-19 deaths per million population, and that’s the 85th-highest covid death-rate. So, since Israel has the world’s highest population-percentage who are Jews, why does that country have among the world’s highest infection-rates and even of death-rates from that virus? And how can this be the case if what RFK Jr. said on July 12th is actually true? Obviously, it can’t. On the other hand: China has had only 347 cases of covid-19 per million people, and that is the lowest of all nations (except for Western Sahara which has a total population of only 626,161 spread over its entire desert, and that’s too small a population over too large an area for it to be at all comparable to China.)

But look at what is the world’s second-lowest: Niger. And its population is 26,083,660. There is no reason to doubt its covid-19 statistics; moreover, some others among the best-performing covid-19 countries are also Black African nations.

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“..the Cocaine was for use by Hunter, & probably Crooked Joe, in order to give this total disaster of a President a little life and energy!”

Hunter Biden Threatens Trump With ‘Legal Trouble’ (RT)

Hunter Biden, son of US President Joe Biden, sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to former president Donald Trump on Thursday, warning that continuing to target the troubled 53-year-old on social media could result in “even more legal trouble” for the Republican presidential hopeful. Trump’s online comments – including his suggestions that one or both Bidens was responsible for the cocaine recently discovered in the White House – “could lead to [Hunter’s] or his family’s injury,”Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for the younger Biden, told ABC News on Friday. Lowell cited previous incidents, including the January 6 Capitol riot, the assault on then House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in October, and the arrest of a heavily-armed man near the Obama’s home last month, as being inspired by past Trump comments and warned Trump’s attorneys, “We are just one such social media message away from another incident.”

“You should make clear to Mr. Trump – if you have not done so already – that Mr. Trump’s words have caused harm in the past and threaten to do so again if he does not stop,” Lowell continued, urging the ex-president’s lawyers to impress upon their client “how his incitement can further hurt people and cause himself even more legal trouble.” Trump recently skewered Hunter with a series of posts on his Truth Social platform, arguing the cocaine discovered in a cubby in the White House’s West Wing earlier this month belonged to the younger Biden, whose struggles with crack addiction are well-documented. “THEY 100% KNOW WHO IT IS,”Trump wrote regarding the cocaine culprit on Monday, claiming, “If they don’t release information, it means they destroyed the tapes & the Cocaine was for use by Hunter, & probably Crooked Joe, in order to give this total disaster of a President a little life and energy!”

In an earlier post, he asked if “anyone really believe[d] that the COCAINE found in the West Wing of the White House, very close to the Oval Office, [was] for the use of anyone other than Hunter & Joe Biden.” Trump renewed his attacks after the younger Biden pleaded guilty last month to two misdemeanor tax charges following a years-long investigation, in a plea deal that is expected to keep him out of prison. The Republican 2024 frontrunner lamented that the prosecutor “gave out a traffic ticket instead of a death sentence.” The former president’s own legal troubles continue to pile up, as a Georgia grand jury considers charging him over alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. He has already been indicted both federally and by the state of New York and has pled not guilty to all charges.

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So much for protected free speech.

Almost Half of Millennials Want Jail Time for “Misgendering” (Turley)

A recent survey by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek, found that 44 percent of millennials (between ages 25-34) favor criminal charges for people who use the wrong pronouns for others or so-called “misgendering.” We have previously discussed how misgendering is now a crime in countries like Great Britain. Misgendering has been referred to as an “act of violence” at some U.S. universities. There has been a concern that we are seeing the rise of a generation of censors, who have been taught since a young age that speech is harmful and even violent. Yet, hate speech is protected in the United States. Given that fact, it is astonishing to claim that a pronoun violation could lead to incarceration. Only 31 percent of the millennials disagreed with the proposition. They are not alone. Recently, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who is a lawyer, said that “if you espouse hate … you’re not protected under the First Amendment.”


Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean declared the identical position: “Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.” Even some dictionaries now espouse this false premise, defining “hate speech” as “Speech not protected by the First Amendment, because it is intended to foster hatred against individuals or groups based on race, religion, gender, sexual preference, place of national origin, or other improper classification.” If hate speech is constitutionally protected, pronoun use or misuse is also protected as a criminal matter. (There is ongoing litigation of the protection in an employment setting for civil liability or disciplinary action). Yet, the most serious concern is the inclination of this generation to use criminal laws to police such questions. It reflects the erosion of free speech principles with younger generations. That crisis of faith could prove disastrous with free speech in a virtual free fall in Europe.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Media – It’s hot in Europe & people are going to stop going on holiday. Except here’s a map of July 1973 for Greece. It didn’t stop European holidays, they increased to +538 million tourists, predicted to increase by 9 million per year.

 

 


42°C in Novara, Northern Italy, back in 1952.

 

 

 

 

Pool

 

 

cat rooster
https://twitter.com/i/status/1680817457177542656

 

 

Puffer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1680609418071756801

 

 

WHEN I AM OLD
When I am old… I will wear soft gray sweatshirts… and a bandana over my silver hair… and I will spend my social security checks on my dogs. I will sit in my house on my well-worn chair and listen to my dogs breathing. I will sneak out in the middle of a warm summer night and take my dogs for a run, if my old bones will allow… When people come to call, I will smile and nod as I show them my dogs… and talk of them and about them…

the ones so beloved of the past and the ones so beloved of today… I will still work hard cleaning after them, mopping and feeding them and whispering their names in a soft loving way. I will wear the gleaming sweat on my throat, like a jewel, and I will be an embarrassment to all… especially my family… who have not yet found the peace in being free to have dogs as your best friends… These friends who always wait, at any hour, for your footfall… and eagerly jump to their feet out of a sound sleep, to greet you as if you are a God, with warm eyes full of adoring love and hope that you will always stay,

I’ll hug their big strong necks… I’ll kiss their dear sweet heads… and whisper in their very special company… I look in the mirror… and see I am getting old… this is the kind of person I am… and have always been. Loving dogs is easy, they are part of me. Please accept me for who I am. My dogs appreciate my presence in their lives… they love my presence in their lives… When I am old this will be important to me… you will understand when you are old, if you have dogs to love too.

Author Unknown (DM)

 

 

 

 

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Home Forums Debt Rattle July 17 2023

Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 60 total)
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  • #139224

    Andy Warhol Reigning Queens 1985   • NATO Plan to Bulk Up Presence on Eastern Flank Faces ‘Serious Problems’ (Sp.) • US, NATO Weapons Stockpiles
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle July 17 2023]

    #139225
    Alexander Carpenter
    Participant

    https://joannenova.com.au/2023/07/models-wrong-again-looks-like-climate-change-is-making-rainfall-less-intense-globally/

    Also note the extensive comments providing valuable-overview perspective (much like here at TAE).

    What’s it gonna take to shut up the retard neurotics, hidden-agenda ideologues, and presstitutes?

    #139226
    Dr. D
    Participant

    A: to take away their money. They, and other people, are only “If you’re so smart why ain’t you rich?” or the reverse, “If you’re rich, you can only be smart. The richer you are, the smarter.” There are no criminals in their world.

    So as long as the Laptop class is comfortable, and has a house (now each worth $1M) they are collectively rich as many billionaires and therefore the smartest people in America. QED. Remove their 401k and they are instantly stupid and no one will follow them.

    I don’t know why that is, I just report it.

    #139227
    WES
    Participant

    So Spain is having a heat wave! Big deal. It has these every summer! Perfect beach weather!

    Back in the late 1970s I was working in a Rio Tinto gold/copper mine about an hours drive west of Seville. A mine, previously mined by the Romans!

    Yes, it was very hot about 47 degrees C. The handrails on the blast hole drill I was working on were so hot your hands would burn if you weren’t wearing gloves! We put our hand tools in a bucket of water so we could hold and use them. But it was a dry heat with little or no wind.

    I joked it was so hot you could fry an egg on a car hood! So we did! It took a while but the egg did finally turn white!

    But I have worked in much hotter places like Morroco or the state of Nevada where temperate got above 100 degrees Fahrenheit daily. Again it was a dry heat, much easier to take than in a high humidity place like the Congo during it’s rainy season.

    So much for climate change! Back then they called it global cooling!

    #139228
    Dr. D
    Participant

    “US Virgin Islands Demands $190 Million From JPMorgan Over Jeffrey Epstein Relationship”

    Baffled by this. What legal logic exists that they get money for not knowing about, and arresting, a well-known, high-profile pedophile living and committing crimes on their territory?

    Better not let Chicago find out about this: they already don’t do their job; if they can ALSO get $190 million every time they don’t arrest a criminal, there’ll be no end to it.

    “Russia, Iran Coordinating To Expel US Troops From Syria, Pentagon Says”

    I would think so. If you allow nations to just invade and occupy their neighbors, well, that’s a war crime, right?

    “Hersh Exposes The Real ‘Quid Pro Quo’ That Changed Erdogan’s Mind About Sweden”

    $11 Billion direct payoff by Biden to Erdogan in order to have any wins at all at NATO meeting. Like that $6B to Prigozhin. And some F16s. A day later Erdogan says, “Sweden: Just kidding, we need to be in the EU first.”

    Like Prigozhin, the media slavishly melt down in ecstasy over it, claiming Turkey completely and permanently switched sides, Russia is over, BRIICS are dead, etc. Have you ever seen Turkey? Have you ever read anything before?

    So when Biden double-crosses Erdogan on the $11 Billion, Erdogan can twice as double-cross Biden over it…but maybe after $1-3 billion loans were already written. …Which they then default on. Since neither NATO, nor the IMF, are likely to exist soon.

    John Kerry. Headline: “Kerry Doesn’t Believe in Marriage” Why is that? It’s universal to the point of beggary that if you own something, your wife owns it too. All property in a marriage is joint property. If they fell into arrears on the payments for that plane, they would have attached assets of John Kerry and even Federal paychecks to John Kerry.

    IsraeLab, Chart: Who we are and what we do:

    We are a group of doctors and researchers who are actively following up on the vaccine campaign in Israel and monitoring the healthcare system for possible safety signals. Our findings are based strictly upon official sources of information:

    Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Israeli Ministry Of Health, HMO’s (Kuppot Holim), and hospitals
    Weekly epidemiological reports published on IMOH’s web site
    Additional reliable sources which could be verified and published
    We declare that we have no conflict of interests
    We are not looking for financial support

    “Spain would be able to send only a meagre number of soldiers to reinforce the NATO flank in Slovakia and Romania,”

    Um, why? Why would they have a “flank” and why would it need to be “reinforced”? Are Slovakia and Romania at war? Also they CAN send them – Spain has 47 million people – they WON’T send them.

    America, 10x their size, can barely send 3,000 men, or the size of an Easter Day parade in Nashville.

    ““Until now, we have not used [cluster bombs]… we did not need to, despite also previously experiencing a shortage of ammunition..”

    They are the wrong munition for the purpose. They are almost certainly going to HAMPER Ukraine’s war effort because of it, just like all the patchwork equipment and incompatible trainings worldwide. Ukraine is now ATTACKING. They need thermobaric bombs and mine sweepers. What they absolutely DON’T need is to drop cluster bombs with a +5% dud rate on the trenches they are about to charge into.

    ““I don’t understand how a cluster bomb is a ‘defensive’ weapon,” … that doesn’t add up [if you] look at what a cluster bomb is.”

    Crimean bridge: I think it’s those pesky Bolivians again. But Ukraine put out a postage stamp for them.

    “The toll includes some of the formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers — the Ukrainians were counting on to beat back the Russians.”

    They have indeed adopted typical Western thinking: the answer to all problems is to buy something. It’s all about THINGS, material world, “tiny pebbles” theory. Money. You just get an Excalibur, a magic Iron Suit, Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, or that latest Oracle Software, and you don’t need to do any work! No need for 20 years of tireless training, sharpening steel on steel in a Kurosawa movie, no need for win, lose, draw, and no time needed either! All those phones will now answer themselves!

    How do we know it’s always and only OBJECTS, magical objects like a possessed sword that make the world, and never, never people? This is the same as the whole Western view on guns: Guns get up, hop out of the drawer, and run around shooting people. Totally without any human criminals involved! They’re magic! Magical thinking!

    And thus it is with Bradley Fighting Vehicles: No Crews Required! No crews trained, no soldiers attached, no time expended at all! Zero. You just order them from Amazon for deliver the next day and they fight the battles for you.

    This is merely an extension of their seething hatred and raw contempt for all human life and efforts. Such that they can’t even rest their eyes on the mere existence of humans, or even their existence within the overall Matrix and machine, Agent Smith.

    As they say, this “demonstrates the inability of Westerners to think and act according to facts, rather than expectations. The Ukrainian people are beginning to understand this.”

    “It is very likely that there was no Western involvement in Yevgeny Prigogin’s decision. The USA made every effort to demonstrate its distance from the Prigozhin mutiny.”

    You are kidding, right? We spent all week with every major talking head and guest doing the #Opposite of “distancing”. There was a classic one of Twitter Blue Checks, “Patriot Wagners, making life safe for democracy” then 1 hour later, after the deal, “Wagner is a terrorist group and should be arrested worldwide” again. The Twitter account doesn’t even notice. Hypocrisy and Illogic are as swimming in water.

    “Zalyuzhniy told The Economist that he needed “300 tanks, 600-700 IFVs, 500 Howitzers.” In such case, he thought it “completely realistic”

    As said at the time, this is more equipment than is owned in all of NATO. He’s not wrong that this was what was needed to at least field the Russians not be a total embarrassment, and have the mild possibility of “winning”. (Remember: Russia can still turn all Ukraine and indeed all Europe into glass in 15 minutes) However, I point out that AGAIN their seething hatred of humans leads him to neglect that TRAINING 300 tank crews, 500 Howitzer crews is NOT realistic. That would take 18 months? 24 months? Since the depth of training is usually to have at least one guy around who’s done it before, 2-5 years? Plus 100,000 rounds of training ammunition? 20K rounds a year for 5 years?

    And Russia STILL has 5x that number of tanks, and with a Zero mile supply chain. Plus gasoline, which Europe doesn’t have.

    “You almost wonder if this military-industrial complex thing where weaponry has been turned into a mechanism for stabilizing the economy,”

    As Keynes said, “It would be exactly the same, exactly as productive and useful, if we just dug holes and filled them in again.” Or if we broke windows then repaired them again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Bastiat

    “but RFK Jr.’s having worded his argument as carelessly as he did”

    He did not word it carelessly. It’s just that the media and this writer are LYING. They make s—t up. And it’s not hard, you can listen to his statement yourself, and I did listen to it only yesterday. So it’s the new “Very fine people” hoax, where specifically saying “We condemn Nazis entirely” IN THE SAME PARAGRAPH, IN THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS RECORD, is not a rebuttal and was never said, but saying “Peaceful protesters on both sides” Actually means “I support all the bad people on only ONE side.”

    This guy has to get with the program: if the media is just going to get up and LIE about you, every morning, making up everything you said, Biden never took Burisma money, the laptop isn’t real, then none of what he says matters. I don’t know how people are +20 years behind the reality on this. Haven’t they clocked off and died of old age already? Progress is one funeral at a time? How old do you have to be to NOT have this be daily reality for all your life? CNN Green Screens, pretending to put on gas masks safe in the studio in Gulf War ONE.

    However, I agree with the writer on the statistics. It may indeed have been MEANT to be such a weapon, but if so, its efficacy on that point was ~1% Clearly every other feature overwhelmed the underlying theory about it, Vitamin D probably being a big one, but anti-malarial drugs being key as well.

    He should also know all the death stats are false, as the thought China had 300 people dead of Covid is laughable on its face. That alone would tell you the disease doesn’t actually exist. And Israel did what we did: mark ALL deaths as Covid deaths, including traffic accidents. So their stats basically don’t exist.

    Again, how old are you that you grew up with data that was within-the-ballpark not complete fabrications and lies? Must have been nice.

    “• Hunter Biden Threatens Trump With ‘Legal Trouble’ (RT)

    That is pretty far out. This is why we always err to maximum forbearance and tolerance of all speech. So even a Private Citizen, with no office or power at all, is not allowed to have OPINIONS? That’s about the maximum in the other direction. If I have opinions, will Hunter sue me too? (A: Yes. Yes they will.)

    What is the statement? “A known and admitted life-long coke user might be using coke.” That’s it. Not exactly a revelation, is it? Or inflammatory. Yet here we are.

    “• Almost Half of Millennials Want Jail Time for “Misgendering” (Turley)
    A recent survey by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek, “

    What did we JUST SAY? Last sentence? About statistics and data being all entirely fabricated and false? And this is according to the editors of the NEJM and Lancet, about MEDICINE, a field hard to hide crap in, and that was almost TEN YEARS AGO, they said, “(as all research now comes from pharma corporations) everything printed in our journals is false, we ought to put in a warning.”

    Biden approval is probably 8%. We have several sources. However, the same Newsweek claims surveys that it’s a very-average +40%. Draw your own conclusions.

    #139229
    Dimitri
    Participant

    Living in Athens I can confirm that, yes, the past few days were hot. But nothing extraordinary. This is typical Greek summer. We had worse heatwaves in the past. So I don’t understand the hysteria. “Experts” on tv were calling for lockdowns. Greek authorities implemented restrictions on access to the city’s parks. This new fear mongering campaign is really mind boggling. Since yesterday the meltemi started blowing again so things are cooling down. But the clown experts want to convince us that we are experiencing something unprecedented. No. Again, this is typical Greek summer.

    #139230
    Oroboros
    Participant

    The Deep Dipshit State® trying an open fake on Duh’mericans

    .

    .

    #139231
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Biden’s Granddaughter Relieved To Have Been Disowned After Seeing Biden Eat Baby

    .

    https://babylonbee.com/news/bidens-granddaughter-relieved-to-have-been-disowned-after-seeing-biden-eat-baby

    #139232
    WES
    Participant

    Zerosum:

    Just curious. How tall are the domestic blueberry bushes in your British Columbia area? How many blueberries would a typical bush have?

    In northern Quebec/Labrador the blueberry bushes were only 2″ to 4″ tall. Blueberries only grew on the southward facing slopes of hills. Further they tended to hide themselves on the leeward side of slopes protection from the prevailing cold winds. A good bush might yield 2 to 4 tiny blueberries. It was hard on your knees and back too as you were always bending over or kneeling down. I have no ideal how the scrawny black bears every got fat, for winter, eating these sparse and tiny blueberries!

    I once tried growing domestic blueberry bushes in my backyard at home, just north of Toronto but the blueberry bushes never prospered and all died out slowly. These domestic blueberry bushes ranged from a foot to 2 feet tall. They never produced very many blueberries. The soil just wasn’t acid enough despite my efforts to make the soil acid and sandy.

    #139233
    Oroboros
    Participant

    The Amish are the healthiest people in the Western world.

    .

    NO vaxx, NO masks, NO GMO, NO TV,

    NO autism, NO myocarditis, no SIDS, no SADS, no ADHD

    What a Coincidence!

    Duh’mericans will NEVER connect the dots

    Pass the GMO junk food, I’m missing the Kardashians on TV

    .

    #139234
    oxymoron
    Participant

    I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again – the ecological species assemblies are part of the climate.
    Are olives and carobs and cypress etc. heat loving? Well why yes Oxymoron they are.
    Can you grow Eucalyptus forests (which can only continue if exposed to the extreme heat and dryness that will cause forest fires) in Canada? Why no, sir continue…
    If Pistachio trees won’t set nuts with excess humidity in the air well surely the planet is warming so much you can grow them commercially in Melbourne, London, Sydney, Dallas!

    Ah again no.

    Weather changes and the climate may but people need to get a little perspective – this in NOT runaway climate change. I know from my own orchard.

    Look at nature not numbers and you will find whatever little truths this world is capable of revealing.

    #139235
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Creating a World of Distrust

    .

    Creating a World of Distrust

    Experts lie at the center of it.

    “I just saw a meme with two heads speaking to one another.

    One head is visibly angry and is saying something like, “look at this!!!” holding up a cell phone.

    The other head says, “oh yeah, let me tell you what I think of that.”

    The angry head says, “shut up idiot!! You are not an expert! ”

    #139236
    oxymoron
    Participant

    RFK Jr and Germ are right Asians and Ashkenazis Rule. One spike to rule them all and in the ace-2 bind them

    https://popularrationalism.substack.com/p/genetic-variation-across-human-populations

    #139237
    Oroboros
    Participant

    • NATO Plan to Bulk Up Presence on Eastern Flank Faces ‘Serious Problems’

    The German economy WAS the core of Eurotardistan®

    Now that it has no cheap energy and is being visibly de-industrialized, it’s like a twinky snowflake shaking it’s limp wrist at the God of Industrial Production and stammering in a whiny Germanic nasal tone about how unfair it is that God gave Russia 12 time zones of cheap energy and resources.

    The Russian industrial base is going to bang Eurotardistan like a cheap gong

    Hurrah!

    A tiny, tiny example in eternal time and space where the bad guys get their ass handed to them in a timely manner


    JUSTICE DELAYED IS JUSTICE DENIED

    Top Russian Talk Show Host Soloviev Says Russia Should Nuke Europe – Calls For WW3

    No Joke, Putin is barely holding back his own Hawks

    As Above, So Below

    .

    #139238
    tboc
    Participant

    bears repeating

    ““This crisis demonstrates the inability of Westerners to think and act according to facts, rather than expectations……..”

    bares a reality few western persons will dare accept – there is mystery. The Big Bang hypothesis first codified by Georges Lemaître is four years short of a century. The famous hypothesis has more patches than an inner tube in a bald tire on a poor kids bicycle. Although they are unaware of the fact, most western minds who have reached my station in life still believe in a cosmological constant engendering a steady state. How about this, how to understand time dilation in this verse expanding at the speed of light. Wanna see the deer in the head lights stare? Ask someone my age, 72, about gravitational lensing in relation to the path of a photon. Just for grins ask what discovery is credited to Penzias and Wilson and in what year.
    Well, i don’t know but it is probably a threat to our national security.

    “…..the inability of Westerners to think and act according to facts…..” or hypothesis

    #139239
    Dora
    Participant
    #139240
    Dora
    Participant

    Dore and Campbell.

    #139241
    zerosum
    Participant

    UKRAINE PROXY WAR MERCENARIES (Guns for hire)

    Challenges (take from Peter to Pay Paul)

    people not willing to volunteer to join the war effort
    depleted weapons stockpiles
    expired ammunition
    three rotations a year
    already deployed elsewhere
    billions of dollars for …
    weapons and ammunition, repairs and maintenance, paychecks, infrastructures for training, billeting, food, supplies, transport, contractors
    production and supply line infrastructures
    supplies of fuel, gas, oil
    ———-
    Off topic, for WES
    You are awakening my old memories.
    In my youth, I left footprints in Abitibi, NW Ontario, Lower north Shore, Gagnon and Sept Iles.

    https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/agriservice-bc/production-guides/berries/blueberries
    ———-
    Biting the hand that feeds you
    https://sputnikglobe.com/20230717/russia-suspends-participation-in-grain-deal—kremlin-1111932906.html
    Russia Suspends Participation in Grain Deal
    ———

    The Grain Deal Is Coming To An End | The Battle Of Staromaiorske. Military Summary For 2023.07.16

    Military Summary
    ———–

    #139242
    zerosum
    Participant

    Ukrainians Attacked The Crimean Bridge | End Of The Grain Deal. Military Summary For 2023.07.17

    Military Summary

    #139243
    John Day
    Participant

    TAE comments were hot late last night, and TAE Summary input appreciated.
    Here’s this for your efforts, fellow-travelers.
    Midnight Confessions : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nZnqtDdsws

    #139244
    jb-hb
    Participant

    NATO Plan to Bulk Up Presence on Eastern Flank Faces ‘Serious Problems’ (Sp.)

    As soon as I read “NATO’s Eastern Flank” I stopped reading.

    If East is NATO’s flank, then NATO’s enemy is either the country-less Arctic or the Mediterranean ocean.

    I’m not reading a damn word about war or military affairs in general from someone who thinks East is NATO’s flank.

    #139245
    morongobill
    Participant

    The last thing that needs to be done is to censor Bobby. We don’t need any more scripted politicians.

    #139246

    gravitational lensing

    #139247

    Well, I’ll be.

    #139248
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    All solutions are derived from amassing mountains of wild ass guesses, and then trying one’s best to sort through the mess to find the best one.

    This is as true for nations and even whole civilizations as it is for individuals.

    We must guess at our answers because we absolutely have to have answers, and yet we are also unable to know ANYTHING for absolute certain. That capability is strictly reserved for the Divine Intelligence that created the World. The rest of us have to take our best guess, and the ways and means of doing that are as numerous and various as the number and variety of the people who engage in doing it.

    For this reason it is VERY important ( I would say VITALLY ESSENTIALLY important) that the entire spectrum of human thought and opinion be allowed to throw their own best guess into the hat so that the sorting-out process will include ALL of the guesses (good and bad alike).

    Throw ’em all into your hat and then sort ’em out to come up with the right one. (which means the answer which ACTUALLY best serves your REAL best interests.)

    The “sorting” process will conclude with a “solution” or answer that is somewhere in the vicinity of the average or mean of All of the answers added up to a total and then divided by the number of guessers.

    Think of it as a scatter chart or a lottery based on guessing the number of jelly beans in the jar.

    It’s almost (perhaps ACTUALLY!) miraculous how well that method works . . . but only if EVERYBODY is allowed to place their bet. If one side or the other is prevented from contributing to the calculation then there are TWO things you can know about how the answer will turn out:

    The FIRST thing you can know for sure is that the chances of the prejudiced answer being the BEST answer are virtually nonexistent (approaching very closely to zero), and that fact is made true by reason of the SECOND thing that you know about prejudged answers. And the second thing that you know about an answer based on only one side of the spectrum is that it will be dramatically SKEWED in favor of the side who got to vote, and against the best interests of all those who were censored, shut up, disenfranchised and not allowed to have any of their own say about the conditions of their own lives.

    From this it should be pretty clear that a person or group who don’t possess and also allow the right to free speech have got pretty nearly no chance at all of coming up with right answers to anything. That is VERY not good. In fact it is FATAL. It’s like the line from the movie where the voice says “If you build it they will come.” Except in this case the voice is saying “If you censor you will fall” (which is a nicey-nice way of saying: if you take away the rights of others you will lose those rights yourself, maybe even including your right to life itself if taken that far.)

    That’s a hard thing accept, but nevertheless it is still a fact that sometimes it seems not possible to accomplish such a sensibly noble freedom as Freedom at the same time that one is immediately needing to silence, imprison or kill some clear and present mortal danger in order to keep oneself and loved ones alive.

    In other words, sometimes you will experience the actual need to take away the rights of others in order to preserve the right of having Rights.

    I hope I don’t have to remind everyone that being in such a situation and having such a drastic “solution” are thin ice, Bro! The thinnest of thin. You better make DAMN sure you get it right, because if it turns out that you were wrong then you are well and truly screwed. I’ll clarify that point like this: If you take away the rights of another when you don’t absolutely HAVE to (in other words because it was a legitimate last ditch act of self-defense) then it’s you who is the bad guy in that matter and therefore you SHALL experience the consequence. I’m not saying you “should” experience those consequences. I’m saying that you “shall”, because that’s the way the first principles of Cause & Effect work.

    I’m not necessarily making a moral or intellectual judgment about whether the perpetrator of the action is right or wrong. I’m reporting on the observable FACT that the ultimate consequence of unjustly violating the RIGHTS of others, when it is not REALLY necessary, is that the perpetrator will have their right to those rights removed by others. It’s the inexorable complex mechanisms of Cause & Effect playing out as they must, that’s all.

    Sometimes, in order to simply stay alive, it becomes apparently necessary to remove some or ALL of the “rights” of another individual. We call this the Right of Self Defense. It’s triplet brothers with the freedoms of speech and movement. I’ve heard them referred to elsewhere as “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” In any case, they are rather important. In point of fact, the physical universe itself could not exist without them (but that’s probably a little more philosophically deep than is necessary for this little essay.)

    Here is the straightforward fact of it. If we do not grant these rights to ALL, then these rights will not exist for ANY, and at that very moment (in the extremely unlikely event that it ever happened) the world will have thereby ended. The game stops when the divine intelligence who made it (and whose show this is) determines that there are no rights, and not one femtosecond sooner or later than that.

    So in the meantime, let’s continue with this freedom of speech thing. Why not?

    #139249
    anticlimactic
    Participant

    TRANS

    I have a friend who is a transvestite. Although he is now over 70 he still has no idea why dressing as a woman has such an impact on him. He never went to work ‘dressed up’ and has kept it secret from his kids.

    At weekends he often goes to gatherings of like-minded people. He is not interested in ‘normal’ male conversation and hoped they would be interesting but for the most part they are normal blokes dressed as women. The vast majority are tranvestites with a small number of transexuals. He says the transexuals he has talked to ‘have problems’.

    The point is that they are NOT ‘trans activists’, so who is?

    It seems to me that most ‘trans activists’ are not themselves trans but feel the need to promote the idea of changing sex. I would expect for the most part ‘trans’ will be male and cross-dressing would be enough, very few would consider a ‘sex-change’.

    There seems to be two levels of ‘sex change’. One just involves breasts – women lose them and men gain them, but their reproductive organs are unchanged. The other type of ‘sex change’ involves genital changes to better mimic the other sex. In both cases it involves taking hormones for life. These operations are so drastic that it should be the last resort but often it seems to be the first resort with little regard being given to the quality of life for the victims.

    I object to the misuse of ‘hate speech’ for just disagreeing with some aspects of trans. To me ‘hate speech’ is the Nazis in 1930s Germany – people who TRULY hate.

    I object to the word ‘transphobic’ as it means fear of trans people, but more often they look ludicrous and do not cause ‘fear’.

    What is odd is how much this tiny minority is catered to by governments and others, usually at the expense of many majority groups.

    It DOES make sense if this whole trans thing is a WEF style ploy to intimidate the majority and take away their freedoms.

    Many people are now afraid to express their opinions of woke/trans issues. The Bud Light fiasco gave the public a way of showing their anonymous disapproval – simply don’t buy the product!

    If 44 percent of millennials (between ages 25-34) favour criminal charges for people who use the wrong pronouns [but believe shop-lifters should be let free] it is abnormal and shows the level of brainwashing that has been achieved. This is just the forerunner of things to come.

    #139250
    John Day
    Participant

    @Aleexander Carpenter: Rainfall is not increased over 20 years; maybe a bit decreased in “intensity”. With global heating, it should increase.
    Not factored in is the vast application of aluminum oxide aerosols, “chemtrails”, which generally decrease rainfall. It’s not a “thing” to this analysis, but it has been happening for over 20 years. I pointed a sky full of chemtrails spreading out to haze (over Austin, Tx.) to a Vietnam-special-forces vet friend a couple of evenings ago. It was very easy to see, with older dense chemtrails already spread out, intermediate chemtrails, and some fresh.

    #139251
    phoenixvoice
    Participant

    Misgendering has been referred to as an “act of violence” at some U.S. universities.

    As someone who knows what it is like to be triggered to re-experience past trauma, and how it can powerfully affect current behavior and mental well-being, I understand the urge to protect vulnerable people — victims — from those who would bully them.

    But…

    The path through healing sufficiently from trauma lies through the triggers, not by crafting a life that avoids them.

    I don’t care what very important people say…

    Verbal abuse, though psychically painful, is not violence.
    Emotional abuse, though psychically painful, is not violence.

    Yes, people who have experienced verbal and emotional abuse need to escape the abuse and find safe space in order to become grounded and start healing — but they do not need to perpetually live inside a safe bubble. To do so is to not truly live.

    So, “misgendering” is not usually a form of bullying, not usually a form of abuse. It is often simply a reflection of physical reality or ignorance on the part of the speaker of someone’s pronoun preference. Since we cannot be certain what is going on in the mind of another, it is often impossible to ascertain in any given moment whether the “misgendering” was intended as emotional/verbal abuse or was simply normal conversation. Calling attention to physical reality — i.e. biological sex characteristics — through pronoun use is a form of speaking objective truth.

    My thoughts on misgendering: stop expecting the world to create a safe bubble for you! If you feel vulnerable, go find a community where you feel welcome and safe, and spend enough time there to tank up on all of those feel-good emotions. Choose how much time you want to interact with the rest of the world. When you interact with society at large, don’t expect it to cater to your personal emotional vulnerabilities. That is what your “safe space” community is for.

    #139252
    John Day
    Participant

    @Phoenixvoice: I read this as “meandering”, heh, heh, heh…

    Misgendering has been referred to as an “act of violence” at some U.S. universities.”

    #139253
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    @JohnDa

    I read this as “meandering”, heh, heh, heh…”

    Alas, even the great among us occasionally fall prey to the pun, but I gotta admit that it’s hard to resist scratching when that bug bites

    #139254
    Figmund Sreud
    Participant

    Alastair Crooke:

    “With the invention of the West came the invention of Western history – an elevated and exclusive lineage that provided an historical justification for the Western domination.”

    A Bonfire of the Vanities

    F.S.

    #139255
    Noirette
    Participant

    J. Dore and Dr. Campbell communicatin’, up top. See also:

    Peter McCullough is talking to Alex Jones. (link is to rumble)

    https://tinyurl.com/5ab2r9vp

    #139256
    Noirette
    Participant

    from Balkanist magazine, June 2023, echoing back to Serbia as relevant to UKR.

    excerpt, Marek Mikus:

    What I call the post-2000 hegemonic project in Serbia was essentially an agenda of neoliberalization and transnationalization carried out by the elites that came to power after the so-called October Revolution that ended the rule of Slobodan Milošević in October 2000. The agenda was formulated in opposition to Milošević’s nationalist project in the 1990s, which set Serbia on a path of direct confrontation with the West, culminating in the NATO bombing of the country in 1999.

    Due to economic mismanagement, the looting of public assets, but also Western sanctions, the economy was in a deplorable condition by the end of the decade and support for sacking Milošević and bringing Serbia in line with the rest of transitional Eastern Europe was growing. Eventually, with the significant involvement of foreign actors, a political and social coalition was assembled that essentially toppled the Milošević regime and opened the door for the post-2000 hegemonic project. The 2000s were a time of rapid, frequently criminal sell-offs of public assets and a host of standard neoliberal reforms, including external liberalization and erosion of the welfare state. The process of integration into the European Union (still incomplete and with no prospects of being finalized any time soon) provided the main institutional and ideological framework for this restructuring.

    — Some of the interview is about the Pride Parade, which takes place all over Europe just now (yest. in CH.)

    Slow Entropy in Serbia: An Interview with Marek Mikuš

    #139257
    thomasjkenney
    Participant

    @anticlimactic re: hormones ‘n’ stuff

    The ‘complete makeover’ folks have permanently lost the ability to feel tickly down there. Sex is over for them. Not having that pop-off valve will kill many.

    #139258
    zerosum
    Participant

    https://askeptic.substack.com/p/russia-ukraine-reports-2023-07-17
    Russia-Ukraine Reports – 2023-07-17
    Ukraine, with NATO help, hits Crimea Bridge. There will be an additional update today.

    #139259

    Let’s hope when it comes to Big Pharma,
    There’s going to be swifter Big Karma.

    The panel above shows gravitational lensing. It’s from Astronomy Picture of the Day.

    Background radiation, early 60s. I started college majoring in astrophysics. I ended up in art history when I hit the linear algebra brick wall.

    #139260
    jb-hb
    Participant

    If “triggering” me is violence and you are obligated to accommodate my potential triggering, then the more screwed up I am, the more I rule over you. At the point of maximum-screwed-up-ness, I can demand maximum accommodation – your complete obedience.

    Your complete obeisance, since I may require that I be celebrated, for affirmation-purposes. Either you overtly “normalize” me or I am NOT normal, in which case, I am oppressed and triggered. So you need to overtly celebrate me. To make it fair.

    Basically, by being screwed up, by being able to be triggered, I become that cowboy wearing the black hat who comes into the bar, finds the poor hard-working farmer, and yells “DANCE RUMMY DANCE” while shooting my sixgun at his feet while he hops around. Whenever I feel like that’s what I need.

    #139261
    thomasjkenney
    Participant

    I just had a very odd thought: Is it possible to tunnel under the Kerch Strait? I’ll probably dig for the answer, but maybe others would like my odd thought also.

    #139262

    GeertvDB interview with D Bigtree.

    Listening to it now.

    #139263

    Wrong video- sorry, it’s the 2021 one.
    “Last week he (GvdB) issued a warning…” (Kunstler this Monday)

    I think JK may be referring to this one.

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