After my original posting, a lot of people suggested I ask Stephanie Seneff to sponsor me. In fact, if I had a dime for everyone who suggested Stephanie, I could retire 🙂
Stephanie and I are good friends (we talk all the time). She would do it if she were an MIT faculty member. But she isn’t.
I can tell you one thing though: it was absolutely stunning to me that she was the only person at MIT people suggested I ask. That in itself is remarkable.
The entire MIT faculty is wrong on this issue
There are over 1,000 faculty members at MIT and not a single one thinks the vaccines might be unsafe? Nobody?!?!?
OK, I can live with that. Apparently, they’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid at MIT.
But what is totally unacceptable is that they refuse to even consider the possibility that they could be wrong.
What ever happened to open-minded scientists?
I know that there are a few faculty members who believe I should be able to speak at MIT, but they are afraid of retribution from their peers. So they avoid the controversy by doing nothing. They won’t even let me publicly reveal who they are.
What’s even worse than that is that there are serious cases of vaccine injury at MIT that are not being reported
More on those stories later. They’ve been covered up.
MIT should be speaking out for what the science says, not actively suppressing scientific discourse.
MIT should be a leader in science. They should be saying the science does not support the use of the vaccine, the vaccine mandates, and mask mandates. That’s what a great science institution should do: look at the data and tell the truth.
MIT does the opposite. They refuse to even look at the data. They simply go along with the narrative and suppress anyone who questions whether the government is telling us the truth.
Summary
MIT is a heartless institution that will not face the possibility they are wrong. They just don’t want to talk about it.
They will not even acknowledge the vaccine injuries within their own community.
MIT used to be a great institution. Those days are gone.
Europe is staring at a complete collapse of its economy if they sanction Russia’s energy sector and shut down her ability to do business with their banks. The question no one is asking is, “Did they provoke this fight on purpose to do exactly this?” From where I’m sitting, it looks to me like their insistence on zero diplomatic concessions to Russia led directly to this outcome. So, the answer to my question is ‘Yes, it was deliberate.’
The EU has unveiled its first tranche of economic sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. EU leadership looks even more angry about this outcome than US leadership does. Here’s the article covering this tangled mess by Sputnik News.
We know that the EU is very dependent on Russian energy and the existing sanctions have hampered EU-Russian trade for years now. Europe is incredibly vulnerable here to any form of supply/demand shocks as their financial system teeters on the edge of the abyss.
There is no solidarity between the US and the EU on these matters, as I’ve pointed out in post after post here. So, the question now is, if Europe is targeting Russian energy exports and the ability of EU banks to do business to buy Russian gas and other export commodities why would they pick this fight?
The answer must be that this is exactly what they wanted in the first place.
In the US we call this ‘suicide by cop,’ which is exactly how I framed it when asked by Sputnik for my thoughts on the subject this morning. I was asked on Monday before Putin’s intervention in Ukraine, to answer the following questions. Events moved beyond them, obviously, but I publish them here anyway because they are still of some value. {current editorial comments in brackets}
According to recent research, US liquefied natural gas export capacity will be the world’s largest by the end of 2022. Could it be that part of the whole game around Ukraine was about the US petroleum sector benefitting from the current standoff in Ukraine?
Of course. That is a sub-plot in this very complicated story. There are many factors that went into this standoff over Ukraine, which Russia is now accelerating towards an end-game state {boy howdy was that an understatement 12 hours later}. LNG exports from the US is certainly one of them, but I think the bigger issues concern the future of NATO, the security architecture of Europe and who controls it.
I see this as much as a fight between the US/UK and the EU over security as much as it is about the US’s long-standing antipathy to Russian energy exports. These issues are, of course, all intertwined.
Is the current political battle over Ukraine just a pretext for the US to earn money via the energy sector, increasing supplies?
No, it isn’t. It’s much deeper and nuanced than that. There are future weapons contracts for US and UK military contractors at stake here, as well as France’s desires to become a major player in European arms sales.
Russia, I believe, is being used as a bogeyman to advance internal European and ‘Anglo’ political agendas having more to do with shifts in foreign policy focus than just the ‘follow the money’ angle here. ‘Following the energy and arms money’ is an important consideration but I think they are now downstream of a much different security landscape in Europe by 2030.
The European Union is looking for ways to assert its independence from Washington D.C. Downing St. is pushing everyone into conflict for its own selfish and historical reasons, clinging to outdated political theories about controlling the ‘World Island’ and driving a wedge between Russia and China, which is achieving the exact opposite result.
How likely is it that the US might now try to establish control over transit routes going through Ukraine? Will the “Russian invasion” narrative be used as a pretext for doing so?
The transit routes through Ukraine in the minds of the Russian leadership fully depreciated assets that they unfortunately still continue to subsidize. Putin mentioned the cost to subsidizing a hostile regime in Kiev during his speech announcing the recognition of the Donbass, $250 billion over 30 years.
If the US wants control over those transit routes, that’s fine. Russia will happily shut off the gas through them, since it costs Gazprom money to ship gas through them at this point. Putin has ordered Gazprom to keep those pipelines filled as a fig leaf to Europe who has continually bitten his hand.
I expect he won’t care to re-up the transit contract with Ukraine when it expires in December 2024.
So, if DC wants this, Putin will oblige and then stop transit all together, citing conflicts with Ukraine.
To what extent can the US indeed provide energy security for Europe by supplying resources?
The total US LNG output according to the EIA for 2022 is 11.5 bcf per day, which is 115 bcm per year, or roughly the capacities of Nordstream 1 and 2 combined.
Is there 55 bcm of spare capacity (the size of NS2) in the US system to feed a new market in Europe? No, not with demand rising at more than 6% annually and accelerating as the world comes out of COVID-19 lockdowns.
The demand for European LNG is so high that US and Russian suppliers both have massive market opportunities there. So, this isn’t about the money, in the end. With most of Europe ending its COVID-19 restrictions in a desperate attempt to stave off political unrest, demand is only going to rise further.
Moreover, US LNG is far more expensive than Russian piped gas. This is simply a fact. And with the Biden administration working with Davos to lean on banks to retard investment into new oil and gas projects, long-term supply of energy to Europe from the US is limited anyway.
US exports will go to where the bid is the highest and with Europe’s terrible future prospects, massive debt overhang and lack of economic dynamism they will not be capable of outbidding other global customers for gas. That’s been the reason for the insane prices in Europe this winter, competition for limited gas supplies driving prices up, despite rising global capacity.
Can Europe survive without Russian energy supplies, if they were to be disrupted now due to the standoff and sanctions?
While anyone with an ounce of decency deeply regrets and opposes the use of such massive military force as we have seen recently in Ukraine, if there is one lesson to be learned from this entire miserable chapter (and by “chapter” I mean the entirety of post-Cold War US foreign policy) it is this: There are consequences that come with the belief that the key to peace and prosperity is to remake the world in your own image through the use of overt and covert, violent and non-violent means.
As of this writing, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is hunkered down in his bunker somewhere in Kiev, as the sound of the encroaching war gets closer and closer. A grim scene, to be sure.
All the US and EU kisses and roses leading up to this end have turned to dust and barbed wire, as a no-doubt deeply bitter Zelensky has nothing left but to cry out in anger:
Zelensky earlier: “Who is ready to fight with us? I do not see anyone. Who is ready to give Ukraine a guarantee of NATO membership? Everyone is afraid.” — ASB News / MILITARY〽️ (@ASBMilitary) February 25, 2022
The chips are down, as much of the US-equipped and backed Ukrainian military appears to have turned and ran as Russian forces approached. That is not to say that there has not been death and destruction on both sides. The battle for Kherson was brutal, with plenty of Russian losses. But nevertheless, as of this writing, it has fallen to Russian control.
Kiev in the main may well fall within the next 12-24 hours. Russian troops are already in the city. And Zelensky is in his bunker with fewer and fewer to take his calls. The cavalry he believed was promised him will not be coming to rescue him. Ukraine will be de-militarized and Ukraine will be neutral. Once held up as a great ally of Washington and Brussels, Zelensky is alone.
It brings to mind that great quote I often recycle from RPI academic advisor John Laughland, written as the early US-backed color revolutions rampaged through the former Soviet world in the early 2000s:
It is better to be an enemy of the Americans than their friend. If you are their enemy, they might try to buy you; but if you are their friend they will definitely sell you.
Zelensky has now learned the bitter truth, which previously favored foreign leaders also learned. Most of their lessons have been evenharder than Zelensky’s (at least to this point).
The bitter truth is that Washington’s foreign policy establishment never actually considered Zelensky – or his predecessor Poroshenko – to be allies or partners of the United States. Overflowing with a toxic mix of ignorance, arrogance, and extreme cynicism, Washington’s elites have always viewed Ukraine as a tool to “regime-change” a Russia that, after its post-Yeltsin recovery, would no longer take its direction from them.
The false gods of American exceptionalism are jealous ones indeed.
The American foreign policy establishment wanted a perpetual “Yanks to the Rescue” Russia, whereby US “consultants” and spooks would ensure that the most obsequious candidate would continue to win and rule. A string of Russian presidents who would, à laShevardnadze and a whole string of other post-Soviet leaders, run the country like a family business: lots of biznis deals for family members…and maybe 10 percent for the “big guy.”
Americans are victims (willing or not) of a mass media system as propagandistic as any that existed during Soviet Communism. The “party line” is established and it is unwaveringly followed whether the favored flavor is Fox or MSNBC. When it became obvious that Yeltsin’s one-time understudy, Vladimir Putin, wasn’t going to play that way, the party line came down that he must be demonized.
Not carefully studied and where appropriate opposed (on the basis of actual US interests), but rather Putin had to be demonized and, ultimately, “regime-changed.”
Discourse in the US is so infantile that just writing this objective truth will no doubt land this author in the “Putin’s puppet” purgatory. Not for the first time.
Most Americans will not have heard – and those who have likely do not care – that twice when the Ukrainian people elected a president who was in favor of maintaining good relations with its Russian neighbor the US intervened and overthrew the government. First time in the 2004-5 “Orange Revolution” and then the fateful 2014 “Maidan” revolt, which was explicitly and overtly supported by senior US government officials on the ground in Kiev including Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland and the late neocon warmonger Sen. John McCain.
In the meantime tens of millions of dollars flow from the US taxpayer to favored think tanks, civic organizations, and media outlets via the National Endowment for Democracy (sic) and numerous US-funded related organizations. The goal is the same: manipulate Ukraine so that it remains on Washington’s preferred path (toward conflict with Russia).
It is fashionable – particularly over the past two days – for even antiwar and “restraint”-promoting scribblers and jaw-boners to fall into tune with the warmongers’ songbook of “Russian aggression” as the sole cause of recent bloodshed and destruction.
While anyone with an ounce of decency deeply regrets and opposes the use of such massive military force as we have seen recently in Ukraine, if there is one lesson to be learned from this entire miserable chapter (and by “chapter” I mean the entirety of post-Cold War US foreign policy) it is this: There are consequences that come with the belief that the key to peace and prosperity is to remake the world in your own image through the use of overt and covert, violent and non-violent means. That lesson should have been learned with the fall of Soviet communism itself, but the “victors” were too full of hubris to pause for a moment of humility.
Wishing reality was one thing and accepting that it is another are two very different things. The distinction must be made or the mass mental illness of “American exceptionalism” can never be cured. Otherwise the consequences next time the tectonic plates shift may be far closer to home.
Whether America and the EU like it or not, the era of ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” is well and truly over. Its end is not to be mourned but to be celebrated. The only pro-America foreign policy is non-intervention in the affairs of others.
Ukrainian President Zelensky is unlikely to survive his turn being America’s cat’s paw to wrong-foot Russia. While he sits in his bunker contemplating his fate, he may well be visited by the ghosts of Saddam and Gaddafi and all those who preceded him in this position. God help him.
Needless to say, Washington continues to create its “own reality” almost weekly, and this one’s a doozy. There manifestly would be no war in the Ukraine today save for Washington’s machinations back in February 2014, but that bit of crucial history is now deader than a doornail.
In light of the grotesquely one-sided Ukrainian war news on the MSM, it can be well and truly said that America circa February 2022 has become the land where history died.
From the sophomoric coverage of CNN and NBC, for instance, you would think that Ukraine’s borders have been universally agreed upon by one and all for eons; that the government in Kiev has done absolutely nothing to provoke Russian suspicion and anger; and that Uncle Sam, NATO and the European Union have flitted around the neighborhoods on Russia’s borders merely cheer-leading for democracy and selflessly passing out economic aid and cookies to the long-suffering Ukrainian peoples.
Well, no. Today’s hot war eruption in Ukraine would absolutely not be happening save for the violent coup of February 2014 that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected pro-Russian President; and which coup was funded, organized and choreographed by Washington-based neocons, busybodies and arms merchants who otherwise had no reason for even existing in the post-Soviet world.
Moreover, by reviewing the voting patterns of the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election we can see exactly how Washington’s blunderbuss intervention in support of the Maidan putsch put the kibosh on stable governance in Kiev and friendly relations with Ukraine’s historic neighbor and suzerain, Russia. That’s because while the 2010 election reflected the stark divisions of the Ukrainian electorate (see map below) it still produced a government that was reasonably acceptable to most of the electorate, and one which proceeded to work toward new arrangements with both Ukraine’s EU neighbors to the west and Russia to the east.
In the end, that tolerable governing balance was abruptly and unilaterally canceled by Washington’s writ, especially when it then almost instantly embraced and recognized an ad hoc, anti-Russian government which came from the extreme right side of the political/ethnic spectrum.
The effect was to send Kiev on a path toward massive economic and military aid from the US/EU and NATO membership that was bound to produce the adverse Russian reaction that Ambassador George Kennan had warned about two decades earlier.
As to the aid matter, Ukraine received only minor assistance from the west prior to 2014, but upwards of $15 billion since then. That included nearly $3 billion of military aid from the US, $6 billion of development and economic aid from Western donors, $3 billion of subsidized Ex-Im Bank funding from the US and $3 billion of other humanitarian aid. The effect was to turn Ukraine into a ward of Washington — a new post-coup fact on the ground that was blatantly obvious to Moscow.
As to the adverse shock effect of the Maidan coup on Ukrainian governance and external policy, the map below tells you all you need to know. The dark blue parts of the map to the far east (Donbas) indicate an 80% or better vote for Viktor Janukovych in the 2010 election. By contrast, the dark red areas in the west voted 80% or more for the Ukrainian nationalist, Yulie Tymoshenko. That is to say, the skew in the Ukrainian electorate was so extreme as to make America’s current red state/blue state divide seem hardly noteworthy by comparison.
As it happened, the sum of the pro-Janukovych skews from the east and south (Donbas and Crimea) added up to 12.48 million votes and 48.95% of the total, while the sum of the extreme red skews in the center and west (the old eastern Galicia) amounted to 11.59 million votes and 45.47% of the total.
Stated differently, it is hard to imagine an electorate more sharply divided on a regional/ethnic/language basis, but one which still produced a decisive enough victory margin (3.6 percentage points) for Janukovych — so as to be accepted by all parties. That became especially clear when Tymoshenko, who was the incumbent prime minister, withdrew her election challenge a few weeks after the run-off in February 2010.
At that point, of course, Russia had no beef with the Kiev government at all because essentially Janukovych’s “Regions Party” was based on the pro-Russian parts (blue areas) of the Ukrainian electorate.
During the next several years the economic basket case which was Ukraine attempted to improve its circumstances by running a bake-off of sorts between the European Union and Russia with respect to aid and trade deals.
And well its leaders might have: Ukraine had become a cesspool of financial corruption in which a handful of oligarchs had robbed the country blind. Its 2013 real GDP consequently fell to $600 billion (2017 $) — a 33% shrinkage from its 1990 level.
The US government has a long history of fun and interesting advice when it comes to imminent death…Now, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has issued updated guidance to its “Nuclear Explosion” readiness public awareness website, which includes tips to avoid Covid!
“A nuclear explosion may occur with or without a few minutes warning,” reads the page, which was updated on Friday. “Fallout is most dangerous in the first few hours after the detonation when it is giving off the highest levels of radiation. It takes time for fallout to arrive back to ground level, often more than 15 minutes for areas outside of the immediate blast damage zones.FEMA recommends the following steps to prevent ‘significant radiation exposure,’ which include “Try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household,” and “If possible, wear a mask if you’re sheltering with people who are not part of your household.”
In case of a nuclear explosion, FEMA warns to try to keep 6 ft social distance and wear a mask for covid. You can’t make this up pic.twitter.com/LfxFX1dZoS
What’s more, “If you are experiencing a medical emergency, call 9-1-1 and let the operator know if you have, or think you might have, Covid-19. If you can, put on a mask before help arrives.””Many people already feel fear and anxiety about the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). The threat of nuclear explosion can add additional stress.”
Bright FLASH can cause temporary blindness for less than a minute.BLAST WAVE can cause death, injury, and damage to structures several miles out from the blast.RADIATION can damage cells of the body. Large exposures can cause radiation sickness.FIRE AND HEAT can cause death, burn injuries, and damage to structures several miles out.
ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE (EMP) can damage electrical power equipment and electronics several miles out from the detonation and cause temporary disruptions further out.
FALLOUT is radioactive, visible dirt and debris raining down from several miles up that can cause sickness to those who are outside.
FEMA also says you have 10 minutes after the shock wave passes to find the “nearest, best shelter location” if you’re outdoors when a nuke goes off, as radiation levels are the highest immediately after the fallout arrives.But whatever you do, remember to wear your mask and practice social distancing while you hopefully avoid a painful cancerous death.
The media and the war machine (or do I repeat myself?) want us to take sides in the two-day old deadly clashes in Ukraine. To those of us with long histories in military conflicts in which the US foreign policy establishment, media, and military have an interest, the terms are always framed as white hats and black hats – and you had better choose a side!
“Are you on the side of FREEDOM or are you a puppet of [insert Hitler proxy here]?”
You must take a side. (In fact you must choose the side the US elites want you to choose).
The US government never fights in the self-interest of the elites. It only fights (directly and by proxy) for the freedom and liberation of others. If you doubt that you are un-American, they scream.
The Iraqis would greet us as liberators, we were told. They will love our bombs. Likewise the Libyans once their leader is knife-raped to death. And then of course the Syrians once our al-Qaeda “moderate” head-choppers are put in charge. The rest of the world is so so grateful that the omniscient Washington foreign policy elites can choose their fate for them. Surely they are too foolish to decide for themselves!
Ironically, as the US government and its obedient media were hysterically telling us we must demand Russian blood for their attack on a Ukraine that had not attacked them first, the US government today bombed a Somalia that had not attacked it first. And let’s not even talk about the horrific Saudi genocide (with full US support) in Yemen.
This is not a WHATABOUT column, however. It’s just to point out how manipulated Americans are by the unholy partnership between government, Washington parasitical elites, and the media.
Perhaps the only thing worse are the third-tier flunkies who do their bidding in international organizations.
Today NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced that NATO countries were going to send more weapons to Ukraine. Brilliant! Bureaucrats, especially stupid ones, always double down then their policies are shown to be failures.
As one report quoted the failed Swedish politico/NATO chief: ‘We see rhetoric, the messages, which is strongly indicating that the aim is to remove the democratically-elected government in Kiev,’ he announced after a meeting with NATO leaders. What? NATO must send weapons to Ukraine because Russia is attempting to remove its democratically-elected government? How dare they! Don’t they know that’s OUR job?
Here’s the side we should be on in Ukraine and everywhere else: non-intervention in the affairs of others. Today’s Ukraine nightmare is the product of a US foreign policy that overthrew not one, but two elected Ukrainian governments because the people chose a president that Washington’s pampered elites didn’t like.
As I wrote in an article today, one thing we can take with us from Russia actually doing what it long said it would do if Ukraine was armed by hostile governments and pulled toward NATO membership is that:Whether America and the EU like it or not, the era of ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” is well and truly over. Its end is not to be mourned but to be celebrated. The only pro-America foreign policy is non-intervention in the affairs of others. Yes, this is a good thing and it should be celebrated. Don’t worry – it’s not un-patriotic to applaud an authenticly pro-America foreign policy! Now is the time to demand a change in how things are done. It does not weaken the US to decide to not meddle in the affairs of others. On the contrary, we are strengthened by shrugging off the burden of (very badly) running the rest of the globe.
Unless anyone believes we are stronger by burning one trillion dollars for the US military empire each and every year.
Let’s ask the truckers and the waiters and the welders of America how they like billions of their hard-earned dollars laundered to the ultra-rich Beltway elites through corrupt regimes abroad. Foreign aid is falsely perceived as a plate of rice and beans to a motherless child in a war-torn hellhole. The reality is that foreign aid is that which re-models all the bathrooms in million dollars mansions in McLean VA and its evil environs.
Gold plated Beltway toilets. The ignoble flotsam of the corrupt US empire.
Sincerely yours,
Daniel McAdams Executive Director Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
Biden is no JFK. It is clear Biden does not possess an iota of Jack Kennedy’s intelligence, courage, nerve, vigor, or idealism. He is a lifetime political grifter and partisan hack who parasitically attached himself to the DC establishment. That such a nonentity could even sniff the US Senate, much less become president, is an indictment of our system. But at the moment he is, or appears to be, the voice of reason against the John Boltons of the world.
Joe Biden’s perverse legacy, if that term even applies anymore, may well be determined in the coming weeks by his handling of events in Ukraine. He can improve it by showing restraint against the relentless neoconservative chorus. One wonders what the results of a pure popular vote on the question of going to war with Russia over Ukraine would be, versus a vote solely within the DC beltway.
Note: Biden was silent on the recent imposition of emergency martial law by the Trudeau government in Ottawa (a few hundred miles from Washington, DC), but has plenty to say about Kiev (4,881 distant miles). This is not coincidental. As journalist Glenn Greenwald puts it, we are required by Western propaganda to denounce actions by Vladimir Putin (such as freezing the bank assets of political opponent Alexei Navalny) while cheering the same actions taken by the Canadian government against money donated to truckers. Crackdowns in “democracies” are subject to a more enlightened standard:
[W]hen these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West’s official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.1
Much of today’s Western rhetoric about the former USSR employs this language of treason, accusing war skeptics of siding with Putin. American politicians and media often veer into outright Russophobia, sometimes with a not-subtle racial animus. This flows in large part from the 2016 election of Donald Trump, which somehow had to be the result of Russian interference and not Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings. It was remarkable to see so many politicians and pundits risk resurrecting a Cold War with a nuclear power simply to hurt Trump politically. But it worked: they got rid of Trump, and now the Cold War is back.
At this writing, Putin has declared the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent and autonomous from Ukraine. Russian forces have entered Ukraine and launched missiles; deaths and injuries are reported. Those troops reportedly have control over the Chernobyl power plant. Ludwig von Mises’s birthplace, today called Lviv, is threatened.
In response, Biden today announced retaliatory sanctions against Russia and promised severe economic consequences for Putin’s actions. Military and aerospace technology will be blocked, while Russian banks will be shut off from international markets. US and EU officials also have considered the more severe option of removing the country from the SWIFT system of international payments, which would cut off foreign-currency purchases of oil, gas, and other Russian exports.
Still, Biden has shown restraint. Let’s hope he keeps to this commitment made earlier today:
“Our forces are not and will not be engaged in the conflict,” he said. “Our forces are not going to Europe to fight in Ukraine but defend [sic] our NATO allies and reassure those allies in the east.”
There will be plenty of voices in Biden’s ear demanding more, much more. The subcurrent to Biden’s election in 2020 was the return of neoconservatism with a vengeance. Many of the worst foreign policy hawks, from David Frum to Max Boot to Bill Kristol, have found their home in the Democratic Party. The GOP, for its part, is scrambling to outdo the Democrats in their bellicosity for Putin in a nauseatingly transparent effort to make Biden look weak for the upcoming midterm elections. Hence the sorry spectacle of former Trump national security advisor John Bolton—among the worst war promoters in modern history—solemnly lecturing us on MSNBC about Biden’s failure to have placed US troops in Ukraine weeks ago. Unless Putin’s foray is short lived, rest assured that Congress, the Pentagon, the spy agencies, Biden’s cabinet, and his own party leaders (mindful of polls) will call for US military strikes. Some will call for American troops to defend Ukraine on the ground.
President John F. Kennedy faced similar pressures in his brief years as president. Regardless of one’s views on Camelot, Kennedy was a New England liberal and idealist—not a neoconservative. He sincerely abhorred the possible use of nuclear weapons in a conflict with the Soviets. He communicated clandestinely with Nikita Khrushchev to avoid just such a conflict and managed to bring the US back from the brink of an ugly tank standoff in Berlin during 1961—stating, to the chagrin of the Cold Warriors, that the Berlin Wall was “a hell of a lot better than a war.”
Kennedy similarly resisted calls by the Pentagon, CIA, and Joint Chiefs for the US to back a puppet government in Laos. He was reasonably firm in his opposition to escalations in Vietnam, denying repeated Pentagon requests for thousands of ground troops. Time and again he imagined his reelection in 1964 would free him politically to remove America completely from Southeast Asia.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the pressure on Kennedy to use nuclear missiles against that tiny, impoverished country was intense. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, CIA deputy Richard Helms, the Joint Chiefs, and one particularly bloodthirsty general named Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay all pressed hard for action. They considered JFK’s Cuban blockade disastrously weak. One CIA operative called his failure to launch a nuclear strike “treasonous.” LeMay compared it to appeasement in Munich. And of course his own vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was never an ally when it counted. Kennedy’s only firm and trusted confidant throughout all of it was his own brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
Like Trump, JFK faced almost mutinous attacks and subterfuge from within: by his own cabinet, administrative agencies, military commanders, and especially the CIA.
Biden is no JFK. It is clear Biden does not possess an iota of Jack Kennedy’s intelligence, courage, nerve, vigor, or idealism. He is a lifetime political grifter and partisan hack who parasitically attached himself to the DC establishment. That such a nonentity could even sniff the US Senate, much less become president, is an indictment of our system. But at the moment he is, or appears to be, the voice of reason against the John Boltons of the world.
1. Glenn Greenwald, “The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West,” Glenn Greenwald, Feb. 21, 2022, https://greenwald.substack.com.
The US shouldn’t have poked the Russian Bear. Now it is fully awake: after Ukraine, the Russians are likely to do a clean sweep of foreign belligerents poking around the East Med and the Black Sea.
Russia also has stationed a few Mig-31Ks in Syria’s coastal region in Latakia equipped with hypersonic Khinzals – more than enough to sink any kind of US surface group, including aircraft carriers, in the East Med. The US has no air defense mechanism whatsoever with even a minimal chance of intercepting them.
This is what happens when a bunch of ragged hyenas, jackals and tiny rodents poke The Bear: a new geopolitical order is born at breathtaking speed.
From a dramatic meeting of the Russian Security Council to a UN history lesson delivered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the subsequent birth of the Baby Twins – the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk – all the way to the breakaway republics’ appeal to Putin to intervene militarily to expel the NATO-backed Ukrainian bombing-and-shelling forces from Donbass, it was a seamless process, executed at warp speed.
The (nuclear) straw that (nearly) broke the Bear’s back – and forced it to pounce – was Comedian/Ukrainian President Volodymy Zelensky, back from the Russophobia-drenched Munich Security Conference where he was hailed like a Messiah, saying that the 1994 Budapest memorandum should be revised and Ukraine should be nuclear-rearmed.
That would be the equivalent of a nuclear Mexico south of the Hegemon.
Putin immediately turned Responsibility to Protect (R2P) upside down: an American construct invented to launch wars was retrofitted to stop a slow-motion genocide in Donbass.
First came the recognition of the Baby Twins – Putin’s most important foreign policy decision since inserting Russian jets into Syria’s airspace in 2015. That was the preamble for the next game-changer: a “special military operation…aimed at demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine,” as Putin defined it.
Up to the last minute, the Kremlin was trying to rely on diplomacy, explaining to Kiev the necessary imperatives to prevent heavy metal thunder: recognition of Crimea as Russian; abandoning any plans to join NATO; negotiating directly with the Baby Twins – an anathema for the Americans since 2015; finally, demilitarizing and declaring Ukraine as neutral.
Kiev’s handlers, predictably, would never accept the package – as they didn’t accept the Master Package that really matters, which is the Russian demand for “indivisible security.”
The sequence, then, became inevitable. In a flash, all Ukrainian military forces between the so-called line of contact and the original borders of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts were re-framed as an occupying army in Russian-allied territories that Moscow had just sworn to protect.
Get Out – Or Else
The Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense were not bluffing. Timed to the end of Putin’s speech announcing the operation, the Russians decapitated with precision missiles everything that mattered in terms of the Ukrainian military in just one hour: Air force, navy, airfields, bridges, command and control centers, the whole Turkish Bayraktar drone fleet.
And it was not only Russian raw power. It was the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) artillery that hit the Armed Forces of Ukraine headquarters in Donbass, which actually housed the entire Ukrainian military command. This means that the Ukrainian General Staff instantly lost control of all its troops.
This was Shock and Awe against Iraq, 19 years ago, in reverse: not for conquest, not as a prelude for an invasion and occupation. The political-military leadership in Kiev did not even have time to declare war. They froze. Demoralized troops started deserting. Total defeat – in one hour.
The water supply to Crimea was instantly re-established. Humanitarian corridors were set up for the deserters. Ukrainian forces remnants now include mostly surviving Azov batallion Nazis, mercenaries trained by the usual Blackwater/Academi suspects, and a bunch of Salafi-jihadis.
Predictably, western corporate media has already gone totally berserk, branding it as the much-awaited Russian ‘invasion.’ A reminder: when Israel routinely bombs Syria and when the House of One Saudi routinely bombs Yemeni civilians, there is never any peep in NATO’s media.
As it stands, realpolitik spells out a possible endgame, as voiced by Donetsk’s head, Denis Pushilin: “The special operation in Donbass will soon be over and all the cities will be liberated.”
We could soon witness the birth of an independent Novorossiya – east of the Dnieper, south along Sea of Azov/Black Sea, the way it was when attached to Ukraine by Lenin in 1922. But now it would be totally aligned with Russia, and providing a land bridge to Transnistria.
Ukraine, of course, would lose any access to the Black Sea. History loves playing tricks: what was a ‘gift’ to Ukraine in 1922 may become a parting gift a hundred years later.
It’s creative destruction time
It will be fascinating to watch what Prof. Sergey Karaganov masterfully described, in detail, as the new Putin doctrine of constructive destruction, and how it will interconnect with West Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean and further on down the Global South road.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the ceremonial NATO Sultan, denounced the recognition of the Baby Twins as “unacceptable.” No wonder: that shift smashed all his elaborate plans to pose as privileged mediator between Moscow and Kiev during Putin’s upcoming visit to Ankara. The Kremlin – as well as the Foreign Ministry – don’t waste time talking to NATO minions.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, for his part, had a recent, very productive entente with Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad. Russia, this past weekend, has staged a spectacular strategic missile display, hypersonic and otherwise, featuring Khinzal, Zircon, Kalibr, Yars ICBMs, Iskander and Sineva – irony of ironies, in synch with the Russophobia-fest in Munich. In parallel, Russian Navy ships of the Pacific, Northern and Black Sea fleets performed a series of submarine search drills in the Mediterranean.
The Putin doctrine privileges the asymmetrical – and that applies to the near abroad and beyond. Putin’s body language, in his last two crucial interventions, spell out nearly maximum exasperation. As in realizing, not auspiciously, but rather in resignation, that the only language Beltway Neo-conservatives and ‘humanitarian imperialists’ understand is heavy metal thunder. They are definitely deaf, dumb and blind to history, geography and diplomacy.
So, one can always game the Russian military – for instance, imposing a no-fly zone in Syria to conduct a series of visits by Mr. Khinzal not only to the Turk-protected shady jihadist umbrella in Idlib but also the jihadists protected by the Americans in Al-Tanf base, near the Syria-Jordan border. After all, these specimens are all NATO proxies.
The US government barks non-stop about “territorial sovereignty.” So let’s game the Kremlin asking the White House for a road map on getting out of Syria: after all the Americans are illegally occupying a section of Syrian territory and adding extra disaster to the Syrian economy by stealing their oil.
NATO’s stultifying leader, Jens Stoltenberg, has announced the alliance is dusting off its “defense plans.” That may include little more than hiding behind their expensive Brussels desks. They are as inconsequential in the Black Sea as in the East Med – as the US remains quite vulnerable in Syria.
There are now four Russian TU-22M3 strategic bombers in Russia’s Hmeimim base in Syria, each capable of carrying three S-32 anti-ship missiles that fly at supersonic Mach 4.3 with a range of 1,000 km. No Aegis system is able to handle them.
Russia also has stationed a few Mig-31Ks in Syria’s coastal region in Latakia equipped with hypersonic Khinzals – more than enough to sink any kind of US surface group, including aircraft carriers, in the East Med. The US has no air defense mechanism whatsoever with even a minimal chance of intercepting them.
So the rules have changed. Drastically. The Hegemon is naked. The new deal starts with turning the post-Cold War set-up in Eastern Europe completely upside down. The East Med will be next. The Bear is back, hear him roar.
In the awakening underway here and now, Americans will see how so many of the ills and derangements of recent years are products of our own Deep State aligned with a perfidious party of the Left and other global actors. We have harmed ourselves terribly and can’t seem to stop — and we must stop it, beginning with calling off the Covid-19 “vaccine” crusade. That will come any day, I predict, and then the people who brought all of this grief on are going to have to answer for it.
Good luck with “answer for it” part.
by James Howard Kunstler
The Ukraine blow-up is more a humiliation for “Joe Biden” and his faction than for the US per se, for the truth is that we have scant interest in that corner of the world and what goes on there is none of our business, and never was….
It is fair to say that the “Joe Biden” government dearly wanted a Russian invasion of Ukraine in order to divert attention from the “Joe Biden” government’s war on its own people in the United States. The table was nicely laid for it over many years, including, by the way, Mr. Trump’s vaunted gift of weaponry to Ukraine, which enabled and emboldened the Kiev regime to harass the Russian-speaking population of Donbas without relent. And the situation was aggravated by the deliberate negotiation-unworthiness (Russian term) of “Joe Biden” and Company, who refused to discuss the chief issue between the US and Russia, namely, the dishonest effort, in violation of written agreements dating from 1990, to enlist Ukraine in NATO, and thereby to place missiles on Russia’s border. The US disallowed something very similar in 1962, when the old USSR tried to put missiles in Cuba.
You are also seeing payback for the Maidan color revolution of 2014, engineered by John Kerry’s State Department and John Brennan’s CIA. We have been managing Ukraine backstage since then and, alas for that poor country, quite deceitfully. If you bother to read the recent statements of both “Joe Biden” and Mr. Putin, you will see exactly why and how the situation developed. You will also see an appalling difference in the quality of public utterance — as, say, the difference between Zippy the Pinhead and a Metternich.
I’ll get back to all that presently, but first let’s be clear about what “Joe Biden” & Co. seek to divert public attention from: the complete implosion of all the narratives that support the “Joe Biden” regime — and the campaign against Western Civ more generally by the sinister likes of Klaus Schwab and his global gang of Great Re-setters, including Bill Gates, George Soros, and many actors in America’s own Deep State.
The Covid-19 story is blowing up, and in a very ugly way for the American people. The news is finally wriggling free of our combined news media / social media censorship machine and that news is as follows: Covid-19 was a trip laid on the world to get rid of the irascible Mr. Trump and usher-in a system of digital social controls. The mRNA “vaccines” were all patented and ready to go before the virus even took off. The mRNA “vaccines” turned out to be ineffective and arguably more damaging than the Covid-19 virus. That last bit of news is now coming out in reports from the life insurance and funeral industries, which are showing an alarming increase in all-causes death, especially in people under 60 years of age.
MCViewPoint 