The Automatic Earth

Damien Hirst Spiritual Day Blossom 2018

DeSantis Twitter Space
https://twitter.com/i/status/1661542033884958723

P.e.n.i.s.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1660828620506509312

Pulp Fiction meets Nighthawks

Whistleblower
https://twitter.com/i/status/1661552527265918980

In 1996 RFK jr suffered a neurological injury which baffled doctors. Years later when he was in litigation over a particular flu vaccine he discovered that his condition, spasmodic dysphonia, was listed as one of the top side effects.

“But his promises to his new master are very different: not peace, but war.”

• Zelensky A ‘Servant Of The People’ – But Not The Ukrainian People (Kornilov)

Every May, Vladimir Zelensky makes a show of proving that he remains what Ukrainians elected him to be: a servant of the people. This is part of the comedian-turned-politician’s myth, borrowed from the eponymous TV show he fronted prior to seeking high office. On the anniversary of his inauguration, every May 20, he gives a showpiece performance in the form of a report on the past year of his rule. He plays the role of the “servant,” informing his “masters” – the voters of Ukraine. Just two years ago, and it seems like ages now, Zelensky chose the Antonov aircraft hangar and a huge, unfinished Mriya cargo plane without wings (a Soviet project that independent Ukraine had spent 30 years talking about getting moving again) – as his backdrop. He went on to paint Ukrainians a beautiful picture of their country’s future, in which the Mriya (which means ‘dream’ in the local language) would finally take to the skies.

Less than a year later, soldiers under Zelensky’s command bombed both the hangar where he held the press conference and the plane, which never managed to take off. Everything seemed possible in Zelensky’s world, but he did forget one thing. Two years ago, when he was talking about turning Ukraine into a new Eden, he forgot the main promise that prompted Ukrainians to vote for him: his pledge to bring peace. Now, it’s even funny to remember the words the “servant of the people” uttered in his inaugural speech on May 20, 2019: “Our first priority is a ceasefire [in Kiev’s war with the Donbass]… I would not hesitate to lose my position for the sake of peace.” Over the intervening years, Zelensky has remained true to his tradition and, on the anniversary of his inauguration, he has continued to report as a true servant. But as time has passed he has acquired new masters – the US leadership.

This is a very significant change and confirms that, for Zelensky, Ukraine and its people have long been nothing more than a prop for his bloody adventures and their future well-being certainly is not part of the plan. His visit to Japan for the G7 summit was yet another venue in which to beg for weapons. Ukrainian diplomats take great offense when elements of the Western press liken Zelensky’s foreign trips to a traveling circus, but that is the reality. The whole point of his many trips is to raise yet more funds, and promises, to keep the war going – and thus to keep Ukrainians dying. As retired Italian general Marco Bertolini rightly pointed out the other day, if Western arms supplies to Ukraine had stopped, “the war would have ended a year ago and would not have cost hundreds of thousands of lives.”

The worst part is that everyone understands this very well. The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, says practically the same thing. However, even with the full knowledge that supplying Kiev with new lethal weapons means using Ukrainians as cannon fodder, the West keeps pumping in supplies. Of course, those same Ukrainians were promised Zelensky as a “servant” two years ago before he found himself some new masters. In Hiroshima, Zelensky fawned over his current bosses as best he could. He pathetically likened his request for F-16 jets to seeking “wings for freedom.”

[..] To sweeten the bitter pill of the humiliating defeat in Donbass, the Ukrainian president is trying to label the West’s promises to provide Kiev with F-16 fighter jets as a victory. What this will look like in practice is anyone’s guess, and no one knows how close it will bring the world to a potential catastrophe. Of course, Hiroshima is probably the best place to assess the consequences and understand how they could affect the entire planet. Especially the Ukrainian people, whom Zelensky promised to serve faithfully four years ago. But his promises to his new master are very different: not peace, but war.

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“..the guilty people will receive their punishment – as a minimum, they’ll be hanged on the Red Square.”

“So if they had at the start of it 500 tanks – now they have 5,000. If there were 20,000 men who were able to fight – now there are 400,000. So how exactly did we demilitarise it?”

• Putin Has Led Russia To Failure With His Invasion – Prigozhin (DM)

Vladimir Putin has led Russia to abject failure with his invasion of Ukraine, the head of the Russian Wagner mercenary group has said in an astonishing outburst. Far from demilitarising Ukraine – Russia’s key war aim – Putin’s botched strategy has seen Kyiv amass ‘one of the world’s strongest armies’ through massive Western supplies, Yevgeny Prigozhin said. The Wagner chief was once considered a close ally and confidant of Russia’s tyrant and had been nicknamed Putin’s ‘chef’. But in the latest of his increasingly frequent outbursts, Prigozhin has given a devastating critique of his war strategy. He then warned of impending ‘revolution’ in Russia unless changes were made by the Kremlin leadership.

In an astonishing attack on military leaders, he said Russia would restore the death penalty and the guilty – he named defence ministry Sergei Shoigu and chief of the defence staff Valery Gerasimov as responsible for the war crisis – would be ‘hanged on Red Square’. Prigozhin blamed both Shoigu and Gerasimov for losing more men in Bakhmut than in the entire ten-year Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1979-89, which eventually led to the collapse of the USSR. ‘So the de-nazification of Ukraine, which we announced – we made Ukraine a nation, known to everyone around the globe,’ he said, mocking Putin’s warped purpose for going to war. ‘They are like Greeks at their peak, or Romans.’ He told interviewer Konstantin Dolgov – a prominent pro-war blogger: ‘We legitimised Ukraine, it became a country which is known to everyone.

‘As for de-militarisation… [this is] a painful issue indeed. ‘So if they had at the start of it 500 tanks – now they have 5,000. If there were 20,000 men who were able to fight – now there are 400,000. So how exactly did we demilitarise it? ‘Quite the opposite! We militarised it up to the brim. ‘I think Ukrainians today are one of the world’s strongest armies. They have high levels of organisation, training, military intelligence. ‘They have various ammunition and moreover, they are able to switch between any system – Soviet, Nato, anything at all – with the same success. They take their losses philosophically. ‘All they do is to achieve the supreme goal, just like us during the Great Patriotic War [Second World War].’ Prigozhin’s armed force of convicts and volunteers – named Wagner private military company – has claimed to have taken Bakhmut but at a devastating toll.

He admitted that in Bakhmut his force had lost 10,000 prisoners freed to fight for Putin, and the same number of volunteers. Many experts estimate the Wagner losses to be higher. Prigozhin then claimed Ukraine had lost 50,000 with 70,000 wounded. ‘During the [special military operation] I pulled out 50,000 inmates from jails,’ he said. Twenty per cent of them died.’ Adding to the latest of his outbursts, Prigozhin said he saw Shoigu and Gerasimov as guilty, not least for failing to supply Wagner with ammunition and weapons. ‘Without a doubt the death penalty will be brought back, because we are in a state of war,’ he said. And the guilty people will receive their punishment – as a minimum, they’ll be hanged on the Red Square.’

He lambasted the comfortable elites in Russia who continued to live normally while cannon fodder troops at the front lost their lives in huge numbers. Their sons must be forced to the war, he said. He singled out the defence minister Sergei Shoigu, whose daughter and son -in-law flaunt their wealth on social media. While last year it emerged the foreign minister Sergey Lavrov’s stepdaughter owns a £4 million luxury apartment in Kensington, London. Mr Prigozhin said: ‘Everything might end as in 1917, with a revolution, when first the soldiers rise up and then their loved ones.

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From a different source:

1. 6.5 thousand foreign mercenaries of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were destroyed.
2. 10 thousand units of military equipment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were destroyed.
3. 35 thousand units of weapons of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were taken as trophies.
4. More than 50 aircraft and helicopters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were destroyed.
5. 55,000 soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were killed.
6. 85 thousand soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were wounded.
7. Such a large percentage of the dead was due to the fact that the Armed Forces of Ukraine were almost surrounded and did not have time to take out the wounded.
8. PMC Wagner has also losses, but several times less.
9. 10 brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were completely destroyed and deprived of combat capability.
10. 21 brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were defeated and withdrawn to the rear for reorganization.
11. All these brigades were preparing for the offensive but instead of an offensive, they were defeated in Bakhmut.

• Wagner Chief Reveals Losses In Fight For Artyomovsk (RT)

The head of Russia’s Wagner Group, Evgeny Prigozhin, has revealed that the private military company lost around 20,000 servicemen during the liberation of the strategic Donbass city of Artyomovsk, also known as Bakhmut, from Ukrainian forces. In an interview published by Wagner’s press service on Tuesday, Prigozhin said that during the long-running battle he had boosted the company’s ranks with 50,000 inmates from Russian prisons, who were offered the chance to fight instead of completing their sentences. “Around 20% of them have died,”Prigozhin said. “The casualties among them were the same as among those who enlisted by contract with us.” This suggests that Wagner’s losses in Artyomovsk, which is a key settlement in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), amounted to some 10,000 former prisoners and 10,000 military professionals.

Around 20% of Wagner’s forces had also received injuries that would require at least three months to recover from, Prigozhin stated. However, he insisted that the Ukrainian military had suffered far greater losses in what he previously called “the Bakhmut meat-grinder.” “We’ve destroyed 50,000 troops of the Ukrainian armed forces [in Artyomovsk],” the Wagner chief claimed, adding that another 50,000 to 70,000 had been seriously wounded. Prigozhin announced on Saturday that the operation to take control of Artyomovsk, which had been spearheaded by Wagner, had ended and that the city had been “fully captured.” The battle for the major logistics hub had been fought for 224 days, he added.

The Russian Defense Ministry confirmed later the same day that the city had been taken, with President Vladimir Putin congratulating Wagner servicemen and regular Russian military troops on their success. Ukraine, which previously claimed that Artyomovsk would be defended at any cost and would become a turning point in the conflict with Moscow, has thus far refused to admit the loss of the city. On Sunday, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said that the settlement “is only in our hearts”when asked by US counterpart Joe Biden at the G7 summit in Japan if Kiev still controlled Artyomovsk. A few hours later, Zelensky changed his stance and denied that the settlement was“occupied by Russia.”

Bakhmut

A sequence showing how a Private Military Contractor consisting of 60,000 men totally destroyed a #NATO trained, supplied and led force almost 4 times its size in #Bakhmut

This is what’s secretly worrying #NATO commanders, this is why “fortress #Bakhmut” is suddenly irrelevant pic.twitter.com/iZOycuKPVt

— Chay Bowes (@BowesChay) May 24, 2023

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“..Moscow is only considering the option of “completing the special military operation..”

• Russia Opposes ‘Freezing’ Ukraine Conflict – Kremlin (RT)

Russia is “in solidarity” with the West on the view that the conflict in Ukraine cannot be frozen, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with Russia’s TASS news agency on Wednesday. Asked whether Russia was considering putting the fighting on hold, Peskov stated that Moscow is only considering the option of “completing the special military operation,” which means securing Russia’s interests and achieving its goals either through military, or other available means. The spokesperson said it’s premature to talk about a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine conflict, as there are no prerequisites for such an outcome yet. “It is unlikely that we can talk about real negotiations with any of the representatives of the current Kiev authorities, because there [in Ukraine] any negotiations with the Russian Federation are simply prohibited now,” Peskov explained.

Earlier, the German chancellor stated that any peace talks on the situation in Ukraine cannot aim to freeze the conflict. “Russia must withdraw its troops,” Olaf Scholz insisted on the sidelines of the G7 summit on Sunday. Meanwhile, the US is reportedly seeking to stretch out the conflict for years or even decades. According to the Politico news website, Joe Biden’s administration has been considering freezing the fighting instead of pushing for Ukraine’s victory, with the goal of achieving a situation similar to that between North and South Korea. “A Korea-style stoppage is certainly something that’s been discussed by experts and analysts in and out of government,” a source told the outlet. “It’s plausible, because neither side would need to recognize any new borders, and the only thing that would have to be agreed is to stop shooting along a set line.”

The benefit of such a scenario for the US would be that it would cost less for Western nations to support Ukraine, draw less public attention, and reduce the pressure to assist Kiev. Additionally, it would allow Ukraine to continue switching its military to NATO standards, in the hope of joining the military alliance. Russia, meanwhile, has repeatedly criticized NATO’s expansion into Europe and its attempts to build a presence in Ukraine without the country’s formal accession. Moscow has cited such moves as one of the key reasons for launching its military offensive in February 2022.

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“Mearsheimer expects that Russia, which already has incorporated four Ukrainian oblast plus Crimea, will take another four oblast from Ukraine.”

• Mearsheimers Latest Talk On The War In Ukraine (MoA)

Yesterday the well known international relations scholar John Mearsheimer gave a talk (video, 1:33h) about the war in Ukraine to the Committee for the Republic. Mearsheimer made two major points: Ukraine can not win this war because the kill ratio in this war is in its disfavor. Mearheimer estimates that two Ukrainians die for one Russian soldier but says that many of his friends think that the ratio is more like 3:1 or 4:1. The reason for this is the WWI-style static war in which artillery is the most deadly weapon. Russia has an immense artillery advantage. During an offensive the attacker will often have more casualties than the defender. But in this war the Ukraine side has been (counter-)attacked most of the time while the Russians defended.

The Ukraine also has a much smaller population than Russia. The current ratio is about 5 Russians for 1 Ukrainian. With a much smaller population and much higher casualties the Ukraine will run out of able bodies way before Russia does. Mearsheimer expects that Russia, which already has incorporated four Ukrainian oblast plus Crimea, will take another four oblast from Ukraine. (I predicted this on February 24 2022, the day the war began. Those eight oblast plus Crimea are historically Russian land inhabited by Russian people. During the last thirty years they have consistently voted for pro-Russian candidates while the people in west Ukraine consistently opted for anti-Russian candidates.) Ukraine will end up as a dysfunctional (and poor) rump state.

Mearsheimer says that there will be no peace agreement in Ukraine. The war is seen by both sides as existential. Ukraine insists of regaining territory it sees as part of the country. Ukraine wants security guarantees from the ‘west’ which Russia opposes. The problem of hyper-nationalism (fascism) on the Ukrainian side also makes peace impossible. Then there is the problem that Russia, after having been lied to over the Minsk agreements, has zero trust in any ‘western’ word.

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“Storm Shadow allows the Ukrainian military to strike deep into Russian-annexed parts of Ukraine – and potentially at Russian cities too..”

• British Warmongering Is Driving Europe Towards Catastrophe In Ukraine (Cook)

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky made an unexpected trip to Britain last week on a whistle-stop tour of European capitals, pleading for more powerful and longer-range weapons to use in his war against Russia. What was hard to ignore once again was the extent to which the UK is playing an outsize role in Ukraine. Last year, shortly after the start of the war, the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson, hurried to Kyiv – presumably on Washington’s instructions – apparently to warn Zelensky off fledgling peace talks with Moscow. At around the same time, the Biden administration made clear it favoured an escalation in fighting, not an end to it, as an opportunity to “weaken” Russia, a geo-strategic rival along with China. Since then, the UK has been at the forefront of European efforts to entrench the conflict, helping to lobby for the supply of weapons, training and military intelligence to Ukrainian forces.

British tanks and thousands of tank shells – including, controversially, some made from depleted uranium – are being shipped out. Last week, the UK added hundreds of long-range attack drones to the inventory. And an unspecified number of £2m-a-blast Storm Shadow cruise missiles, with a range of nearly 300km, have started arriving. Last week Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, said the missiles were already in use, adding that Kyiv alone was deciding on the targets. Storm Shadow allows the Ukrainian military to strike deep into Russian-annexed parts of Ukraine – and potentially at Russian cities too. A recent leak revealed that the Pentagon had learnt through electronic eavesdropping of Zelensky’s eagerness for longer-range missiles so that his forces were “capable of reaching Russian troop deployments in Russia”.

Britain now pays little more than lip service to the West’s claim that its role is only to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian aggression. The supply of increasingly offensive weapons has turned Ukraine into what amounts to a proxy battleground on which the Cold War can be revived. During Zelensky’s visit to the UK last week, Johnson’s successor, Rishi Sunak, effectively acted as an arms broker for Ukraine, joining with the Netherlands in what was grandly dubbed an “international coalition” to pressure the Biden administration and other European states to supply Kiev with F-16 fighter jets. Washington appeared not to need much cajoling. Three days later, Biden dramatically changed tack at a G7 summit in Japan. He effectively gave a green light for US allies to supply Ukraine not only with US-made F-16s but similar fourth-generation fighter jets, including Britain’s Eurofighter Typhoon and France’s Mirage 2000.

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“NATO’s reckless expansion reflects the same intentions that undergirded the Hitlerian doctrine of ‘Drang nach Osten’..”

• NATO’s Eastward Expansion Shares Intent With Hitlerian Policies – Lavrov (TASS)

Behind NATO’s latest expansion push lie the same underlying intentions as the policies of Hitler, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at an international meeting of high-level officials responsible for security issues in Moscow on Wednesday. “In essence, NATO’s reckless expansion reflects the same intentions that undergirded the Hitlerian doctrine of ‘Drang nach Osten’ (German for ‘Drive to the East,’ which was the Nazi slogan justifying the conquest of Central and Eastern European lands – TASS),” Lavrov said. According to Russia’s top diplomat, the United States has purposefully set about destroying the architecture of European security, “while focusing in particular on engendering threats that are unacceptable to Russia.”

“It is enough just to mention the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty more than 20 years ago, as well as from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and from the Open Skies Treaty,” he maintained. Lavrov accused Washington and its allies of marginalizing the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), a body that he said no longer played any role in European security. The Russian foreign minister criticized the NATO countries’ “provocative” course toward relentlessly expanding the alliance eastward, which he said has been done in spite of the top-level Western pledges made to the then-leadership of the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand “one inch.” Also, this policy “contravenes [Western countries’] commitments made at the highest level to refrain from bolstering their own security at the expense of the security of other [nations],” he lamented.

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“I am confident that, together, we will achieve the formation of a more equitable, multipolar world..”

• Neocolonial Model Of World To Become Thing Of The Past – Putin (TASS)

Russia, together with other countries, will assuredly achieve a fair world order, whereas the model under which certain countries develop at the expense of others will become a thing of the past, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, greeting the participants in the 11th International Meeting of High-Level Officials Responsible for Security Issues. “I am confident that, together, we will achieve the formation of a more equitable, multipolar world, while the ideology of exceptionalism as well as the neocolonial system, which has undergirded the exploitation of the resources of the entire world, will inevitably recede into the past,” he noted. Putin assured the foreign security officials that Russia was ready to engage in the closest level of interaction with all interested countries in efforts to counteract common threats and tackle the challenges that humankind is facing today.

“We highly appreciate the fact that Russia has numerous allies and partners across diverse regions and continents. We sincerely cherish our historically strong, friendly, and genuinely trust-based ties with Asian, African and Latin American countries, and we will continue to do all we can to strengthen them,” he assured his audience. Separately, Putin talked about the significance of the conference for the global situation, noting that, over the years, regular interactions between security officials aimed at sharing their expertise and assessments have proven their utility and relevance, and have been instrumental in resolving key issues of regional and global security as well as strategic stability. The Russian president also noted that the conference’s agenda is very intensive and substantive. Above all, the meeting’s participants will discuss the current global situation and the prospects for its further development, as well as analyze the most pressing contemporary threats.

“Among them are international terrorism, extremism, illegal arms and drug trafficking, transnational crime and illegal migration. And, of course, issues pertaining to food and information security,” the Russian leader elaborated. Putin hoped that the meeting would be constructive and produce useful results, while helping to determine new methods and areas for practical cooperation “for the benefit of countries and peoples, and in the interest of peace and stability on the planet.” The meeting is being held in the Moscow Region on May 23-25. Russia’s delegation is headed by Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev.

EFF

South Africa’s EFF leader @Julius_S_Malema says he would arm Moscow because ‘Russia is in a war with imperialism’

‘I will go beyond the friendship with Russia. In the war I will align with Russia and I will even supply the weapons’, he says of Putin’s war on Ukraine pic.twitter.com/YC23xCJljh

— BBC HARDtalk (@BBCHARDtalk) May 24, 2023

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Ukraine denies.

• Ukraine’s Top General Gravely Wounded In Russian Strike (RT)

General Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, who had disappeared from the public eye in recent weeks, was seriously wounded some weeks ago in a Russian strike near the city of Kherson, a security source told RIA Novosti. Zaluzhny suffered a head trauma and numerous shrapnel wounds in early May, in a missile attack on a Ukrainian command post not far from the village of Posad-Pokrovskoe, the agency reported on Wednesday. The general had undergone a craniotomy at a military hospital in Kiev after the strike, the source claimed. The prognosis by the doctors is that the 49-year-old is going to live but won’t be able to execute his duties as commander anymore, he added. Zaluzhny’s condition is further complicated by the fact that he has an underlying condition namely diabetes, the agency also reported.

Speculations about Zaluzhny’s whereabouts emerged after he refrained from participating in a high-profile NATO meeting on May 10. The chairman of the bloc’s military committee, Rob Bauer, said that Kiev told Brussels that the Ukrainian commander couldn’t attend in person nor via a video-link due to a “complex operational situation” on the ground in the conflict with Moscow. The general hasn’t been seen in public since then, even though footage that has emerged online in recent days that suggested he was fine, turned out to have been made before his disappearance. On Saturday, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Anna Malyar claimed Zaluzhny was in good health and remained in charge of the armed forces. “The commander-in-chief is in his place. He’s doing his job. We just talked,” she wrote on Telegram.

Malyar suggested that rumors of Zaluzhny’s possible injury or death were being spread by Russia in an attempt to demoralize the Ukrainian forces during the battle for the strategic city of Artyomovsk, which the Ukrainians call Bakhmut. Moscow announced the “full capture” of Artyomovsk on Saturday, but Kiev has thus far been reluctant to acknowledge the loss of its key stronghold in Donbass. Zaluzhny has been popular with the Western media and portrayed as a key figure in Ukraine’s resistance to Russia. Throughout the conflict, the so-called ‘Iron General’ has given lengthy interviews to outlets like The Economist and Time, which listed him among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022.

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We still have to state the obvious?

• The War in Ukraine Was Provoked (Jeffrey Sachs)

George Orwell wrote in 1984 that “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the past. Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations. Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion. A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism.

In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective. The Biden team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement. Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. The New York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as “unprovoked” no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven guest op-eds. The first was the U.S. intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order).

The second was the U.S. role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The shooting war in Ukraine began with Yanukovych’s overthrow nine years ago, not in February 2022 as the U.S. government, NATO, and the G7 leaders would have us believe. Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three ways. First, it would expose how the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the U.S. more than $100 billion in outlays to date. Second, it would expose Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement. Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.

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“..the G7 is an effective aggregation of former empires that once dominated the world unchallenged, now held under the wings and servitude of the US.”

• The G7 Is An Outdated Tool Of The US Neo-Empire (Fomenko)

The summit of G7 nations took place in Hiroshima, Japan over the last weekend. Hiroshima is significant for a few reasons. First of all, it is known to the world as the location that the United States nuked, along with Nagasaki, at the end of World War II, which led to the surrender of the Empire of Japan and that country’s transformation into a US client state. Secondly, Japan is working to remilitarize itself in line with America’s dual containment effort against China and Russia. Thus, while Japan is chair of the G7 this year, the event was a rubber-stamping of US-centric geopolitical goals which took aim at both countries. However, what might be said about the G7 itself? Founded as a Cold War-era organization in 1975, and briefly incorporating the West’s aspirations for post-Soviet Russia, the group professes to represent the world’s “most advanced industrial countries,” but anyone could tell you this is an outdated category.

Countries such as China and India, with economies larger than most G7 members, are not part of the group. Rather, the character and agenda of the G7 is distinctly ideological, and its goal is to preserve a Western-dominated concept of the world at all costs. It should not go unnoticed that the G7 is an effective aggregation of former empires that once dominated the world unchallenged, now held under the wings and servitude of the US. Remarkably, all three Axis powers of World War II, defeated by the allies, are a part of this grouping. Although the respective fascist-oriented regimes of Germany, Italy and Japan were rightfully destroyed, these countries were all rebuilt as American client states following the war and their respective interests placed in the hands of Washington.

Similarly, the allied empires, which emerged victorious, including France, Britain and its imperial dominion, Canada, found that the war had severely depleted their national resources and strength to the point they could no longer continue as the global superpowers they had been. Consequently, they surrendered their leadership baton to the US and have ever since relied on following its lead to secure their interests around the world. In each instance, all of these countries held positions of privilege from their imperial eras. Having colonized most of the globe, and Japan having militarily occupied much of Asia, these countries had made themselves tremendously wealthy. Britain’s fabulous wealth, for one, is tailored directly to the exploitation of Africa and India. Colonial empires were strictly commercial in character, using ideology as a justifying force for aggression, upholding their economic interests by immense military power. This gave these countries privilege, which thus formed the distinction between the Global North and the Global South.

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Borrowed from Sun Tzu: “They are willing to burn down the world around them to get what they want.”

• Catastrophic Borrowing Kills Global Financial System – John Rubino

Analyst and financial writer John Rubino says this time, the so-called debt ceiling fight could end in a systemic failure. Rubino points out, “In a well-run society, the debt limit would be zero. Governments should not borrow money in the first place…” “The amount of money we are borrowing is catastrophic. Historians are going to look back at this era, and they are just going to wonder why we allowed it to happen and what were we thinking. We are destroying the global financial system by allowing governments to borrow this much money. The debt limit thing is being called a crisis, and if they let it go too far, it will be a crisis… …I think this game of chicken will end in the not-too-distant future, and if it doesn’t, they have an ulterior motive. They want to crash the economy because that achieves something for them…

…We can speculate about this. The party in power wants to crash the economy, and that is a very dark scenario… They are willing to burn down the world around them to get what they want. Look at Russia-gate and the contents of the Durham Report. The Democrats are willing to do stuff like that… I would not put it past the Democrats to plan and implement it if they think it benefits them.” The economy is already doing bad and getting ready to tumble. So, why not tank it with a debt ceiling impasse and blame it on the Republicans? Some speculate that is the Dem plan because the Obama/Biden economy is going down anyway. If the economy sinks low enough, how much money will the Fed print to bail it out. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is already warning there is going to be more bank consolidation.

In other words, more banks will be going under. Rubino says that is a huge worry and explains, “The dark part of this scenario is the government has to step in and bail out those little banks. Let’s say it’s a couple of trillion dollars . . . to them, it’s play money . . .but what if the markets look at that and say what happens if all the other sectors blow up and the government has to come up with $10 trillion or $15 trillion? What does that do to the dollar? Then you go from a banking crisis to a currency crisis, which is almost impossible to contain. I think it is completely possible that we go to that next stage.”

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“India, in thesis, from the beginning regarded Chabahar as a key plank of its “Diamond Necklace” strategy, counterpunching the Chinese “String of Pearls..”

• The Inside Story Of Russia-Iran-India Connectivity (Pepe Escobar)

The key New Silk Roads of emerging multipolarity are China’s ambitious, multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Russia-Iran-India International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC). They have evolved in parallel and may sometimes overlap. What is clear is the G7/G9 will go to the ends of the earth to undermine them. The recent $1.6 billion deal between Iran and Russia to build the 162-km long Rasht-Astara railway is an INSTC game-changer. Iran’s Minister of Roads and Urban Development Mehrdad Bazpash and Russia’s Minister of Transport Vialy Saveliev signed the deal in Tehran, in front of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and with Russian President Vladimir Putin attending on video conference. Call it the marriage of Iran’s “Look East” with Russia’s “pivot to the East.” Both are now official policies.

Rasht is close to the Caspian Sea. Astara is on the border with Azerbaijan. Connecting them will be part of a Russia-Iran-Azerbaijan deal on railway and cargo transportation – solidifying the INSTC as a key connectivity corridor between South Asia and Northern Europe. The multimodal INSTC advances via three main routes: the Western route links Russia-Azerbaijan-Iran-India; the Middle or Trans-Caspian route links Russia-Iran-India; and the Eastern one links Russia-Central Asia-Iran-India. The Eastern route features the immensely strategic port of Chabahar in southeast Iran, in the volatile Sistan-Balochistan province. That’s the only Iranian port with direct access to the Indian Ocean. In 2016, Iran, India, and an Afghanistan still under US occupation signed a tripartite deal in which Chabahar miraculously escaped unilateral US “maximum pressure” sanctions.

That was a stepping stone configuring Chabahar as the privileged gateway for Indian products to enter Afghanistan, and then further on down the road, toward Central Asia. Russia, Iran, and India signed a formal INSTC deal in May 2022, detailing a multimodal network – ship, rail, road – which proceeds via the previously mentioned three axes: Western, Middle or Trans-Caspian, and Eastern. The Russian port of Astrakhan, by the Caspian Sea, is crucial on all three. The Eastern route connects eastern and central Russia, through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, to the southern part of Iran as well as India and the Arab lands on the southern edge of the Persian Gulf. Dozens of trains are already plying the overland route from Russia to India via Turkmenistan and Iran.

The problem is that in the past few years, New Delhi, for several complex reasons, seemed to be asleep at the wheel. And that led Tehran to become much more interested in Russian and Chinese involvement to develop two strategic ports in the Chabahar Free Trade Industrial Zone: Shahid Beheshti and Shahid Zalantari. Chabahar is a tough nut to crack. Iran has invested heavily to turn it into an inescapable regional transit hub. India, in thesis, from the beginning regarded Chabahar as a key plank of its “Diamond Necklace” strategy, counterpunching the Chinese “String of Pearls,” which are ports linked by the BRI across the Indian Ocean.

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“While the FBI was manufacturing evidence of a non-existent Trump-Putin connection it was actively covering for Hillary – and it is continuing to do so.”

• The FBI Has Crossed The Rubicon (Faddis)

The recently released Durham report paints a graphic picture of an agency out of control. The FBI did not blunder into an investigation of Donald Trump, his campaign, and his associates. The FBI undertook to deliberately destroy Trump and those around him including General Flynn. The FBI took unto itself the power to decide who could be President. That fact has now been publicly exposed. The whole nation can see that the FBI acted in violation of law and every tradition we have had since the inception of the republic. The FBI has responded with remarkable clarity. It did nothing wrong. It does not care what Durham (or countless whistleblowers) say(s). It does not care what Congress thinks. It will do as it pleases.

The Assistant Director of the FBI for Counterintelligence, Suzanne Turner, just testified before Congress. Asked about the Durham report, the one that said her agency had run amok and tried to stage what amounted to a coup, she responded by saying she had not bothered to read the report nor had she been briefed on it. When pressed further she offered to take questions back to the FBI and see if she could get someone else to answer them. Contempt dripped from her every word and every mannerism. The concerns of the people’s elected representatives were clearly of no interest whatsoever to her.

The House Oversight Committee is investigating the possibility that the current President of the United States took money from foreign interests, including Communist China, in exchange for policy decisions. In other words, the House is pursuing evidence that suggests pretty strongly that Joe Biden works for Beijing. As part of that investigation, the House has demanded from the FBI copies of reports that apparently show the FBI knew about this some time ago. The FBI has refused to provide the documents. Meanwhile, there are continuing reports that whistleblowers from within the federal workforce who provide information about the Bidens are being retaliated against and sidelined. In some cases, they have had their security clearances taken away and been suspended without pay. That’s what happens to FBI agents who think Congress is still in charge.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) has blasted the FBI for impeding the investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings, calling the federal agency “very patronizing.” He has also said that the FBI does not “respect anyone.” All of that is crystal clear. The days when the FBI would scurry to take action and avoid Congressional disfavor are long gone. The Bureau is above all that now. Meanwhile, the FBI has announced that it destroyed all of the evidence it gathered into the actions of Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and the mountains of foreign money that flowed to the Clintons when Hillary was Secretary of State. This comes after revelations that the FBI shut down four separate investigations into the Clinton campaign in the runup to the 2016 election. While the FBI was manufacturing evidence of a non-existent Trump-Putin connection it was actively covering for Hillary – and it is continuing to do so.

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They want a monopoly on opinion. Because The Science. Same as with Covid.

• US, EU Politicians Demand Withdrawal Of COP28 Chief (Cradle)

Over 100 members of the US Congress and European Parliament signed a letter calling for Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber to be removed as the head of the upcoming COP28 climate conference, Reuters reported on 24 May. COP28 will be hosted by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in December and will center around efforts to mobilize $100 billion of public and private climate finance for developing economies. Jaber, who heads the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and serves as the UAE’s climate envoy, was designated in January to lead the talks. In the public letter, lawmakers, including US Democratic senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, voiced “profound concern” that oil companies would be able to “exert undue influence” on the climate negotiations.

Addressing US President Joe Biden, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and the UN, the letter stated, “We urge you to … engage in diplomatic efforts to secure the withdrawal of the president-designate of COP28.” On the European side, the signatories hailed mostly from green political parties, which have exercised increasing influence over the continent’s energy policies, perhaps most prominently in Germany. Germany’s Green Party has been losing support as its energy policies move forward, increasing energy costs and threatening Germany’s energy intensive industrial economy. Energy costs have risen in part due to efforts to shut down both the coal and nuclear energy industries, while supporting sanctions against Russia due to the Ukraine war which have blocked imports of cheap Russian natural gas.

An effort to mandate the installation of expensive heat pumps in homes in the place of gas and oil heating systems as well as a proposal to ban combustion-engine cars as of 2035, have also been unpopular. Meanwhile, Sultan al-Jaber called for a major boost to public and private finance for the climate change project in Africa. At the African Development Bank 2023 Annual Meetings in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, Jaber said that Africa has “huge potential for low-carbon growth and sustainable development.” “But one critical challenge stands in its way – and that is the lack of available, accessible, affordable finance. And this lack of finance is putting the world’s climate goals and Africa’s sustainable development at risk,” he said, according to UAE news agency Wam. “Cop28 is exploring additional mechanisms to supercharge the flow of private finance to Africa.”

@JunkScience

The real reason 'climate scientists' are fleeing Twitter:

No global warming in almost 9 years despite 500 billion tons of emissions. https://t.co/Hewysl0Z8I

The hoax is up. pic.twitter.com/lQQZgFVuie

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) May 24, 2023

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Luxembourg based P. Adams Schwertransporte, who specialize in the transport of heavy items, revealed striking photos of how it transported a 67-meter-long blade for a wind turbine

Filefish
https://twitter.com/i/status/1661281159244926977

The Inca tern is a uniquely plumaged bird that breeds on the coasts of Peru and Chile. It can be identified by its dark grey body, white moustache on both sides of its head, and red-orange beak and feet

Macropinna

Macropinna microstoma is a deep-sea fish with a transparent head and tubular eyes

[full video, @MBARI_News: https://t.co/Tx8pMng9km]pic.twitter.com/We7Vh8TKZq

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 24, 2023

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