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The Constitution IS the Crisis | Antonius Aquinas

Posted by M. C. on February 12, 2020

Once read, any notion of the “founding fathers” as disinterested statesmen who sublimated their own interests and that of their constituents to that of their country will be disavowed.  Moreover, The New Republic:1784-1791 is the most important in the series since the grave crises that the nation now faces can be traced to those fateful days in Philadelphia when a powerful central state was created.

I vouch for the first 4 volumes. The best history you never learned in school.

https://antoniusaquinas.com/2020/02/10/the-constitution-is-the-crisis/

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A Review of Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty, Vol. 5The posthumous release of Murray Rothbard’s fifth volume of his early American history series, Conceived in Liberty, is a cause of celebration not only for those interested in the country’s constitutional period, but also for the present day as the nation is faced with acute social, economic, and political crises.  The fifth volume, The New Republic: 1784-1791, stands with Boston T. Party’s 1997 release, Hologram of Liberty, as a grand rebuttal of the cherished notion held by most contemporary scholars, pundits on the Right, and, surprisingly, many libertarians who believe that the US Constitution is some great bulwark in defense of individual liberty and a promoter of economic success.ConceivedInLiberty4in1 Volumes 1-4

Rothbard’s narrative highlights the crucial years after the American Revolution focusing on the events and personalities that led to the calling for, drafting, and eventual promulgation of the Constitution in 1789.  Not only does he describe the key factors that led to the creation of the American nation-state, but he gives an insightful account of the machinations which took place in Philadelphia and a trenchant analysis of the document itself which has become, in the eyes of most conservatives, on a par with Holy Writ.

What Might Have Been

While Rothbard writes in a lively and engaging manner, the eventual outcome and triumph of the nationalist forces leaves the reader with a certain sadness.  Despite the fears expressed by the Antifederalists that the new government was too powerful and would lead to tyranny, through coercion, threats, lies, bribery, and arm twisting by the politically astute Federalists, the Constitution came into being.  Yet, what if it had been the other way around and the forces against it had prevailed?

It is safe to assume that America would have been a far more prosperous and less war-like place.  The common held notion that the Constitution was needed to keep peace among the contending states is countered by Rothbard, who points out a number of instances where states settled their differences, most notably Maryland and Virginia as they came to an agreement on the navigation of the Chesapeake Bay.  [129-30]

Without a powerful central state to extract resources and manpower, overseas intervention by the country would have been difficult to undertake.  Thus, the US’s disastrous participation in the two world wars would have been avoided.  Furthermore, it would have been extremely unlikely for a Confederation Congress to impose an income tax as the federal government successfully did through a constitutional amendment in 1913.

Nor would the horrific misnamed “Civil War” ever take place with its immense loss of life and the destruction of the once flourishing Southern civilization.  The triumph of the Federal government ended forever “states rights” in the US and, no doubt, inspired centralizing tendencies throughout the world, most notably in Germany which became unified under Prussian domination.

In a failed attempt in 1786 to enact an impost tax under the Confederation, Abraham Yates, a New York lawyer and prominent Antifederalist, spoke of decentralization as the key to liberty as Rothbard aptly summarizes:

Yates also warned that true republicanism can only be preserved in small states, and

keenly pointed out that in the successful Republics of Switzerland and the

Netherlands the local provinces retained full control over their finances.  A taxing

power in Congress would demolish state sovereignty and reduce the states, where

the people could keep watch on their representatives, to mere adjuncts of

congressional power, and liberty would be gone.  [64]

Antifederalists, such as Yates, had a far greater understanding of how liberty and individual rights would be protected than their statist opponents such as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.  The Antifederalists looked to Europe as a model, which, for most of its history, was made up of decentralized political configurations.  The Federalists, on the other hand, got much of their inspiration from the Roman Republic and later Empire.  There is little question that an America, with the political attributes of a multi-state Europe, would be far less menacing to both its own inhabitants and to the rest of the world than what it has become under the current Federal Leviathan if the Constitution never passed.

Speculation aside, historical reality meant that America would be fundamentally different than it would have been had the Articles of Confederation survived, as Rothbard points out:

The enactment of the Constitution in 1788 drastically changed the course of

American history from its natural decentralized and libertarian direction to an

omnipresent leviathan that fulfilled all of the Antifederalists’ fears.  [312]

Limited Government Myth

One of the great myths surrounding the American Constitution – which continues within conservative circles to this very day – is that the document limits government power.  After reading Rothbard, such a notion can only be considered a fairy tale!

The supposed “defects” of the Articles of Confederation were adroitly used by the wily nationalists as a cover to hide their real motives.  Simply put – the Articles had to be scrapped and a new national government, far more powerful than what had existed under the Articles, had to be created as Rothbard asserts: “The nationalists who went into the convention agreed on certain broad objectives, crucial for a new government, all designed to remodel the United States into a country with the British political structure.”  [145]

In passing the Constitution, the nationalist forces gained almost all they had set out to accomplish – a powerful central state and with it a strong chief executive office, and the destruction of the states as sovereign entities.  The supposed “checks and balances,” so much beloved by Constitution enthusiasts, has proven worthless in checking the central state’s largesse.  Checks and balances exist within the central government and is not offset by any prevailing power, be it the states or citizenry.

There was no reform of the system as it stood, but a new state was erected on the decentralized foundation of the Confederation.  Why the idea of the founding fathers as some limited government proponents is a mystery.

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CIA secretly owned world’s top encryption supplier, read enemy and ally messages for decades

Posted by M. C. on February 11, 2020

A little bigger than the FIB and Best Buy’s Geek Squad.

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/11/cia-secretly-owned-worlds-to.html

Xeni Jardin

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. That company was secretly run by the CIA, which had the ability to read all those communications for decades.

Greg Miller at the Washington Post:

The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.

The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

The decades-long arrangement, among the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War, is laid bare in a classified, comprehensive CIA history of the operation obtained by The Washington Post and ZDF, a German public broadcaster, in a joint reporting project.

Read more:

‘The intelligence coup of the century’

[washingtonpost.com, Greg Miller Feb. 11, 2020, via techmeme, image modified from a photograph by theglobalpanorama CC BY-SA 2.0 ]

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Pentagon proposes slashing funding for Stars and Stripes – Task & Purpose

Posted by M. C. on February 11, 2020

Lederer said in a Stars and Stripes story that the Pentagon plans to cut $7 million from the newspaper’s budget, or about 35% of its annual expenses.

That is just a handful of big bombs. May S & S got too close to the truth too many times for it’s own good.

Nip it!

https://taskandpurpose.com/pentagon-cuts-stars-stripes-funding

by Jeff Schogol

The Defense Department plans to cut funding for Stars and Stripes, the editorially independent newspaper for U.S. troops and their families overseas.

“We essentially decided that — kind of coming into the modern age — that newspapers are probably not the best way that we communicate any longer,” the Pentagon’s acting comptroller Elaine McCusker said during a briefing Monday about the Defense Department’s budget request.

The decision to cut funding for Stars and Stripes came as a result of a Defense Department wide review that looked at trimming costs, said McCusker, who could not say exactly how much the Pentagon wants to cut the newspaper’s subsidy by.

(Disclosure: This reporter worked for Stars and Stripes from August 2005 until December 2011).

Stars and Stripes publisher Max Lederer said he was notified on Monday that the Defense Department plans to eliminate all appropriated funding for the newspaper starting in fiscal 2021.

“Consequently, I have just begun to evaluate the impact to operations,” Lederer told Task & Purpose. “The loss of funding to support the Stripes mission around the world will definitely reduce the ability of the Stripes staff to gather, produce, and deliver the content needed and desired by the military community. The men and women who sacrifice every day for the safety of our nation deserve the objective and balanced unique content produced by Stars and Stripes.”

Lederer said in a Stars and Stripes story that the Pentagon plans to cut $7 million from the newspaper’s budget, or about 35% of its annual expenses.

Stars and Stripes is often the only source of information to deployed service members, especially since the Defense Department has begun preventing troops from taking their cell phones with them when they go downrage.

The newspaper first published during the Civil War and it has served troops continuously since World War II. It is available both in print and online.

Past defense secretaries have tried to phase out Stars and Stripes but the newspaper has traditionally enjoyed strong support in Congress.

Wall Street reporter Gordon Lubold first reported on Sunday that the Defense Department plans to cut Stars and Stripes’ funding as part of an effort to transfer $5 billon to higher priority projects.

“There were no previous discussions with the organization before today’s announcement,” Stars and Stripes editor Terry Leonard told Task & Purpose. “We have not had time to do an assessment. But it seems likely it will have a large impact on our ability to provide the fair, balanced and often unique content about and for our military audience that our readers have a right to expect.”

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The Lessons of Richard II – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on February 11, 2020

How could they, the medievals, have been so blind as not to see what was in front of their noses, and which we now see at a glance?

We complain of the mediocrity, or even sub-mediocrity, of our leaders and their bureaucratic hangers-on, but we do not see that our system does much, perhaps everything, to guarantee the rise of such people to the top.

The “revolution of rising expectations” was a phrase used to describe the change in what people expected of life after the Second World War. We now need a counterrevolution, for when expectation is dissociated from possibility, it results in the most disagreeable and dangerous of all attitudes: resentment.

https://www.takimag.com/article/the-lessons-of-richard-ii/

Theodore Dalrymple

For reasons best known to myself, last week I read a short book about Richard II, the English king who came to the throne at age 10 and was deposed 22 years later, in 1399, and murdered the following year.

It seems that Shakespeare got him more or less right, at least if the chronicles of the time got him right. Richard II was a young man of very poor judgment and a strong sense of entitlement (a common and disastrous combination), though he was not evilly intentioned in the manner of later dictators. He showered his court favorites with gifts and honors, at the expense, of course, of the rest of the population, then—as now—the taxpayers. Shakespeare memorably described the beneficiaries of Richard’s extorted largesse as the caterpillars of the commonwealth. Is there any commonwealth, any political system, any polity, without them?

It is part of Shakespeare’s unique genius that when we hear or read Richard’s great speeches during and after his deposition by his cousin who was crowned Henry IV, we not only sympathize with him, though he has never been presented to us as anything but a very flawed man and ruler, but empathize with him to the extent that we actually, in some sense, become him: Richard II, though a king, is us.

The book about him suggested that there was much criticism of Richard at the time, but that it never got to the root of the problem, which was the very nature of the medieval political system. His critics thought only that he failed as an individual, not that corruption and misrule were inherent in the very feudal system of which he was at the summit. This was a system in which the only remedy for incompetence or worse was overthrow, usually accompanied by murder.

“What, then, will our long-distant critics say of us?”

Richard’s critics, according to the author, were blinded by their assumptions about what a political system must be like, which explains the shallowness of superficiality of their complaints against Richard. We, with the advantage of more than six centuries of distance, can see things more clearly and at greater depth than the contemporaries with Richard, who could not think other than medievally.

No doubt this is so, and allows us to enjoy a certain and pleasant sense of superiority. How could they, the medievals, have been so blind as not to see what was in front of their noses, and which we now see at a glance? Of course, there took place in Richard’s reign the famous Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, but first it was not really a revolt by peasants, and second it had no real demands to make other than that the rulers should become personally honest and selfless, which is something the world has rarely, if ever, seen, and the likelihood of which has scarcely grown in the interval.

When condemning, or pitying, Richard’s critics for the superficiality of their grievances against him, we do not stop to imagine what people of 600 years hence (if the extinction of the human race surreptitiously or subconsciously desired or contemplated with pleasure by the more extreme environmentalists, who prefer penguins to their parents, does not take place) will say of us and our blindnesses; for surely it cannot be that, for the first time in history, we see things plainly, clearly, and as they are, without any distorting lens of preconception?

What, then, will our long-distant critics say of us, what things beneath our noses will they see that we do not see? Or do we suppose that we have reached such a state of enlightenment that they will see things exactly as we see them and that, therefore, our political philosophy and system will be their political philosophy and system?

Will there still be elections every few years, in which some fluctuating proportion of the population will choose among various mediocrities who will promise them six impossible things before breakfast, and will be elected on the basis of some combination of better slogan, better appearance, better presentation, more beguiling glibness? And while the color of the caterpillars of the commonwealth may change a little, caterpillars of the commonwealth there will still be. Whether it is better that there should be a few big, fat caterpillars, or a numerous plague of smaller caterpillars, is a question without a definitive answer; we veer between one answer and its opposite.

We complain of the mediocrity, or even sub-mediocrity, of our leaders and their bureaucratic hangers-on, but we do not see that our system does much, perhaps everything, to guarantee the rise of such people to the top. Power, or at least its simulacrum, is the consolation prize of those who want to be outstanding but lack the talent for anything except manipulation, plotting, dissimulation, and betrayal. Such types are encouraged in a polity that describes itself as both democratic and meritocratic.

One can criticize a political system, of course, without having anything better to propose. Indeed, one can criticize a system that one believes to be the best possible in the circumstances. Does it follow, then, that such criticism is pointless or futile?

Not in the slightest. The point of such criticism is not to suggest something better, but to keep one realistic. A system may be the best possible without being perfect in the sense of having no inherent drawbacks at all. This in turn suggests that perfection is not of this world, the appreciation of which is necessary to control or limit two related and very deleterious psychological tendencies, the first to utopian thinking and the second to extravagant self-pity; for if you give way to the first you are very likely to give way to the second. An exhibitionist despair is the other side of the coin of unrealistic optimism.

The “revolution of rising expectations” was a phrase used to describe the change in what people expected of life after the Second World War. We now need a counterrevolution, for when expectation is dissociated from possibility, it results in the most disagreeable and dangerous of all attitudes: resentment.

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Biological Weapons: A Useful and Timely Factual Overview – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on February 11, 2020

A US Army operating manual from 1956 stated explicitly that biological and chemical warfare were an integral operating portion of US military strategy, were not restricted in any way, and that Congress had given the military “First Strike” authority on their use.

Then we had “Operation Drop Kick” (12), designed to test various ways of dispersing infected insects over large geographical areas, the tests carried out over various parts of the continental US, including most of the East Coast. We had “Project SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense). Then, as late as 2000, we had “Project Bacchus” designed to determine the feasibility of constructing an anthrax production facility in a foreign country while remaining undetected.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/02/no_author/biological-weapons-a-useful-and-timely-factual-overview/

By Larry Romanoff

The US government and its many agencies and educational and health institutions, have for many decades conducted intensive research into biological warfare, in many cases strongly focused on race-specific pathogens.

In a report to the US Congress, the Department of Defense revealed that its program of creating artificial biological agents included modifying non-fatal viruses to make them lethal, and genetic engineering to alter the immunology of biological agents to make treatment and vaccinations impossible. The military report admitted that at the time it operated about 130 bio-weapons research facilities, dozens at US universities and others at many international sites outside the purview of the US Congress and the jurisdiction of the courts.

This knowledge hasn’t been a secret for a long time. In a classified 1948 report by the Pentagon’s Committee on Biological Warfare, the main selling point was that:

 “A gun or a bomb leaves no doubt that a deliberate attack has occurred. But if … an epidemic slashes across a crowded city, there is no way of knowing whether anyone attacked, much less who”, adding hopefully that “A significant portion of the human population within selected target areas may be killed or incapacitated” with only very small amounts of a pathogen. (1) (2)

A US Army operating manual from 1956 stated explicitly that biological and chemical warfare were an integral operating portion of US military strategy, were not restricted in any way, and that Congress had given the military “First Strike” authority on their use. In 1959, an attempt by Congress to remove this first-strike authority was defeated by the White House and bio-chemical weapons expenditures increased from $75 million to almost $350 million. That was an enormous amount of money in the early 1960s. (3)

US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (image on the right) executed 150 top-secret bio-weapons programs in the 1960s, performing bio-weapons experiments and field tests on an unwitting public, sometimes in foreign countries but most often against American citizens. McNamara ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff  “to consider all possible applications” of these agents against enemy nations in a coherent plan for a total “biological and chemical deterrent capability”, the plan to include cost estimates and an “appraisal of international political consequences”. (4) (5)

In the year 2000, The Project for the New American Century (6) (7) produced a report titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, which contained a radical and belligerent Right-Wing policy ambition for America. Their report called itself a “blueprint for maintaining global US preeminence … and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.” The authors, their genocidal mentality obvious, stated:

“Advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare … to a politically useful tool.”

Bio-Weapons Research Institutions

The US Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland is the military’s main facility for research on biological warfare. It comprises 80,000 m². By the mid-1980s, this bio-weapons section of Fort Detrick was receiving nearly $100 million per year, and this was only one of many sections.

When Japan invaded China, one of Dr. Ishii’s (unit 731) grand successes was to develop methods of mass-producing fleas and ticks infected with the plague and other lethal pathogens for distribution among civilian populations – which is how the Americans learned to weaponise insects – to breed and disseminate ticks infested with Lyme Disease from their secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory in New York State. This was also the source of the US programs of breeding and disseminating mosquitoes and fleas infected with cholera and Yellow Fever in China and North Korea, to say nothing of the domestic mosquito programs the US inflicted on its own people.

Founded on Ishii’s human research, the US military developed an entomological (insect) warfare facility, and initially prepared plans to attack Russia and the Soviet States with entomological bio-weapons. The facility was designed to produce 100 million yellow fever-infected mosquitoes per month, its output tested on unwitting American civilians by dropping infected mosquitoes and other insects over large portions of the US. As is so typical for the US military, these projects beginning in the 1950s and 1960s were given juvenile appellations like “Project Big Buzz” and “Project Big Itch” and “Operation Mayday” (8) (9) (10), but were tests of the feasibility of producing billions of insects, infecting them with lethal pathogens, then loading them into munitions and dispersing them over Russia from aircraft or even missiles.

From a US Army report from March of 1981, one writer noted that “you can marvel at how much (or how little) it would have cost to launch a yellow fever-infected mosquito attack on a city – with a handy “Cost per Death” chart included!.” The Dugway Sheep incident is worth attention as well. (11)

Then we had “Operation Drop Kick” (12), designed to test various ways of dispersing infected insects over large geographical areas, the tests carried out over various parts of the continental US, including most of the East Coast. We had “Project SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense). Then, as late as 2000, we had “Project Bacchus” designed to determine the feasibility of constructing an anthrax production facility in a foreign country while remaining undetected. There were other of these programs of course, all with foolish names and all designed to assess the dissemination of infected insects and other lethal pathogens into civilian populations. They were kept very secret since they were illegal in domestic law and contravened international law and many weapons treaties that other nations signed with the US in good faith.

Selected Articles: War against Iran or North Korea?

In addition to Fort Detrick, the US military has a bio-weapons ordnance plant at Vigo, Indiana, which was a massive production facility that specialised in biological pathogens, and capable of producing 275,000 bombs containing Botulinum or one million anthrax bombs per month. The fermenter tanks at Vigo contained 250,000 gallons, or about one million liters, making it, according to reports, by far the largest bacterial mass-production facility in the world.

This was not a recent development; Vigo was fully operational during the Second World War, essentially a bio-anthrax factory, one of its first orders being from Winston Churchill in 1944 for 500,000 anthrax bombs, and which Churchill stated should be considered only the “first installment”. Vigo was eventually turned over to Pfizer for “antibiotics manufacture” and was replaced in the mid-1950s by a new state of the art facility at the Pine Bluff Arsenal. (13) (14) (15)

The Daily News published an article on 24 September 2005, in which it detailed US Army plans for bulk purchases of anthrax, relating a series of contracts that had been discovered by Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project, which emanated from the military’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. These notices asked various companies to tender for the production of bulk quantities of anthrax, as well as to produce “significant volumes” of other biological agents. One contract specified that the tendering company “must have the ability and be willing to grow (anthrax) in 1,500-litre quantities”, and “must also be able to produce 3,000-litre batches” of unspecified other biological agents. (16) (17)

When a nation’s military is producing lethal biological pathogens in quantities of millions of liters, it is time to stop pretending we are not engaged in biological warfare. It is of no comfort that the military might claim these to be “harmless” strains of pathogens, since (1) any facility capable of producing benign pathogens can easily produce lethal varieties and (2) there is no such thing as ‘harmless’ anthrax.

There is no material difference between a defensive and an offensive biowarfare program, and even fools cannot claim “self-defense” when producing millions of liters of anthrax. Even the US Government Accountability Office, in its 1994 report on these programs, stated that US military’s Biological Defense Program contained “scores of divisions, departments, research groups, bio-intelligence and more, by no means all related to “‘defense’ in any sense”, and were by nature belligerent and offensive military programs. We are nevertheless assured that the US “has never used biological weapons”, by the same people who were simultaneously tendering contracts for the production of anthrax and other “pathogens” in multiple batches of 3,000 liters. Dissembling propaganda is impossible to avoid in America, even in official military medical textbooks.

There were other sites and facilities besides Fort Detrick that were constructed by the US military solely for the development of bio-weapons, including the Horn Island Testing Station in Mississippi which was meant to be the primary bio-weapons testing site, and the Plum Island Germ Laboratory in New York State from which the military spread Lyme Disease among half the area population.

One portion of the Plum Island facility was designed exclusively to develop and test lethal animal pathogens that could destroy an enemy nation’s food supply – as the US attempted to do in North Korea. Deadly strains of foot-and-mouth disease were one result of this research, which the Americans later shared with their fellow psychopaths at Porton Down in the UK – who put it to good use. An additional portion was the development, testing and production of bombs containing what was called a “vegetable killer acid”, and which could destroy cereals, grains, and most cultivated vegetable crops. I have a strong suspicion that many of the recent bird flu and swine flu epidemics originated from pathogens created at Plum Island.

The textbook titled, Medical Aspects of Biological Warfare (2007), published by the US military’s Surgeon-General, admits to the establishment of “a large-scale production facility in Pine Bluff, Arkansas”, with the new plant featuring “advanced laboratory … measures enabling large-scale fermentation, concentration, storage, and weaponisation of microorganisms”.

And it does also admit that by 1951, the US had produced its first biological weapons, anti-crop bombs, and “antipersonnel” munitions, having “weaponised and stockpiled” all these. It adds that the CIA had independently “developed weapons using toxins including cobra venom and saxitoxin for covert operations”, but that unfortunately “all records regarding their development and deployment were destroyed in 1972” when the information became public. (18)

And the US military has tried to weaponise venereal diseases, leading to travesties like the Guatemala Syphilis project, where they infected thousands then left them to die. The official narrative, while admitting the criminality, stubbornly adheres to the tale of a charitable purpose of testing medications – for thousands who were specifically denied the medicines that would have saved their lives. (19)

The US military appears desperate not only to find biological ways to kill nations of people, but is equally interested in methods of destroying their food supply. Accordingly, it also confessed to another several dozen (at least) occasions where devastating crop and plant disease agents had been released, in experiments to test methods of destroying the entire food plant life of an enemy nation. In 2012, Japanese media revealed that the United States government had tested specific, DNA-engineered crop-killing bioweapons in Okinawa and Taiwan during the 1960s and early 1970s, and that the US military tested some of these within the continental US as well. They were also applied in Vietnam. The purpose of Agent Orange was never as a defoliant as claimed, but developed instead to destroy Vietnam’s entire rice crops and to sufficiently contaminate the soil to prevent re-growth.

This text is Part I of  a 3 Part article.

Part II The Geopolitics of Biological Weapons

Part III  Genetically Modified Seeds: Conceived as a Weapon*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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Robert S. McNamara dies at 93; architect of the Vietnam ...

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Executive Order – Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on February 11, 2020

The Fountainhead turned inside out?

“Modern” is often outmoded before it is even done.

Modernism doesn’t care about truth and beauty; it cares about power, especially the power to coerce.  Many people detect that dynamic, and that is one reason they loathe Modernist buildings. The main imperative of Modernism was to separate us from nature, since it was human nature that brought about all the horrors of the 20th century and so revolted the intellectual elites. The result of that was a denatured architecture of the machine and an animus against what it means to be human located in nature.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/executive-order/

In this pause between past and future Deep State seditions, and the full-blown advent of Corona Virus in every region of the world, we pause to consider Mr. Trump’s executive order requiring new federal buildings to be designed in the classical style. The directive has caused heads to explode in the cultural wing of Progressive Wokesterdom, since the worship of government power has replaced religion for them and federal buildings are their churches — the places from which encyclicals are hurled at the masses on such matters as who gets to think and say what, who gets to use which bathroom, and especially whose life and livelihood can be destroyed for being branded a heretic.

 

The religion of Progressivism (under various names) has been growing for over a century, based on the idea that the material abundance of techno-industrial societies should be centrally managed by national bureaucracies, finally leading to a nirvana of perfect fairness. The part that’s always left out is that this is accomplished by coercion, by pushing people around, telling them what to do and how to think, and by confiscating their property or docking their privileges if they seem to have too much of either. You can observe the operations of this doctrine in the current crop of Democratic Party aspirants to the White House.

The architecture that expressed all that is loosely called “Modernism” mostly because it was supposed to represent the distilled essence of everything that is up-to-date, and the idea of coercing an unfair world toward universal fairness has ruled the elite managerial class ever since Karl Marx lanced his boils of social grievance on the printed page. The First World War really sealed the deal for Modernism. The industrial-scale slaughter — well-depicted in the recent movie, 1917 — so horrified the elites that the architecture branch of elite-dom decided to shit-can all the offensive claptrap of history as expressed in buildings and replace them with bare boxes of one kind or another. A whole metaphysical theology was constructed to justify this attempt at a totalistic do-over for the human race. “Less is more…” et cetera.

Meanwhile, along came Stalin and Hitler who persisted in the dirty business of neoclassical architecture, and they screwed the pooch on that theme for all time, while the Second World War reaffirmed the urge to cleanse the world of all that filthy symbolism. By the 1950s, Modernism ruled the scene as the architecture of Decency and Democracy. It very quickly became the architecture that glorified corporate America, viz., the rows of glass box skyscrapers hoisted up along the grand avenues of midtown Manhattan, and then every other city center in America. Before long, as the old government buildings of yore grew obsolete, they too were replaced with confections of Modernism, and then the university libraries, and finally… everything.

The trouble with being up-to-date in architecture is that buildings last a long time and dates fade into history, and if you hate history you have created a problem. The world is a restless place. The main feature of this particular moment is that techno-industrial society has entered an epochal contraction presaging collapse due to over-investments in hyper-complexity. That hyper-complexity has come to be perfectly expressed in architecture lately in the torqued and tortured surfaces of gigantic buildings designed by computers, with very poor prospects for being maintained, or even being useful, as we reel into a new age of material scarcity and diminished expectations — especially the expectation for reaching that technocratically engineered nirvana of fairness.

Of course, the mandarin uber-class among the elite, especially the poohbahs in the architecture schools, can’t bear the thought that things are tending this way. Their theology of up-to-date-ness, of “the cutting edge,” is all about fashion. That things go out of fashion has given them the opportunity to create and cash-in on ever more new fashions, to keep up the pretense of perpetually surfing that cutting edge, from which they derive their status. And this incessant reach for status, and the power it confers, belies and betrays the whole business of representing the ultimate nirvana of fairness, revealing them to be the mendacious frauds they are.

The Trumpian reach backward toward classicism is certainly a quixotic move, even though one can make a case for it being a national style, at least in the early years of the USA when that mode of building was supposed to represent the democracy of ancient Greece and the dignity of the Roman republic — hence, Greco-Roman architecture. Some things to consider: We’re going to have to reduce the scale of the things we build. The cutting edge grandiosity of today is about to go out of style. National bureaucracies will shrink, if they don’t vanish altogether, and so will the buildings that house their operations.

We’re going to need buildings that don’t go out of style, so you can forget about the cutting edge, and classicism does have the virtue of timelessness — or at least it did, for a long time. These new buildings ought to have the capacity for adaptive re-use over generations, even centuries. They will probably have to be made out of non-exotic materials, namely, masonry and wood, since the scarcities we face will include a lot of modular fabricated materials ranging from plate glass to aluminum trusswork to steel I-beams, to sheetrock — all things requiring elaborate, complex mining and manufacturing chains.

A virtue of classicism is that it employs structural devices that allow buildings to stand up: arches, columns, colonnades. These are replicable in modules or bays along scales from small to large. These devices honestly express the tectonic sturdiness of a building within the realities of gravity. A hidden virtue of classicism is that it is based on the three-part representation of the human figure: the whole and all the parts within it exist in nested hierarchies of base-shaft-and-head. This is true of columns with capitols set on a base, of windows with their sills, sashes, and lintels, and the whole building from base to roof. Classical architecture follows proportioning systems universally found in nature, such as the Fibonacci series of ratios, which are seen in everything from the self-assembly of seashells to the growth of tree branches. Thus, classicism links us to nature and to our own humanity.

Classical ornaments — the swags, moldings, entablatures, cartouches, corbels, festoons, and what-have-you — are not mandatory, but, of course, they also provide a way of expressing our place in nature, which is a pathway to expressing truth and beauty.

Modernism doesn’t care about truth and beauty; it cares about power, especially the power to coerce.  Many people detect that dynamic, and that is one reason they loathe Modernist buildings. The main imperative of Modernism was to separate us from nature, since it was human nature that brought about all the horrors of the 20th century and so revolted the intellectual elites. The result of that was a denatured architecture of the machine and an animus against what it means to be human located in nature.

We’re probably not going back to anything like formal classicism because the contraction ahead will leave us in a world of salvage, of cobbling together whatever we can from the detritus left over. But sooner or later — surely well after Mr. Trump has decomposed into his constituent molecules — we will get back to an architecture that is based on our place in nature, so don’t set your hair on fire over this new executive order, no matter how much The New York Times wants you to.

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ClubOrlov: A Most Convenient Virus

Posted by M. C. on February 11, 2020

Given that this is the Pentagon, whose basic task involves killing people, not the World Health Organization, it seems likely that they also do something along the lines of developing effective biological weapons. A couple of years ago US operatives were caught collecting DNA samples from the Russian population and were promptly escorted out of the country.

It would be nice know things in relative terms.

Is this virus infecting/killing more people, invading more countries than any typical everyday virus?

https://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2020/02/a-most-convenient-virus.html

I prefer to write on things I know about, but once in a while an opportunity presents itself for me to comment on some aspect of widespread mistrust and confusion while resting on a solid foundation of my professional curiosity. This is the case of the 2019-nCoV novel coronavirus. A lot of the elements of the coronavirus story just don’t add up, and that’s what I want to explore. At the outset, I want to make it clear that I am no expert on these matters. Is 2019-nCoV a genetically engineered biological weapon or is it a naturally evolved strain of a virus that is endemic in China’s bat population? This we don’t know, but it is interesting to look at the plausibility of each of these scenarios and also to consider whether what we are observing could be a combination of a little of each.

As a biological weapon of mass destruction, 2019-nCoV isn’t particularly good. On the plus side, it is highly contagious and can be spread by infected individuals who are not showing any of the symptoms, such as fever and shortness of breath. On the minus side, the mortality rate is a mere 2.1% and is likely to trend down because this rate does not account for a potentially huge number of young, healthy people who contracted the virus but never developed any symptoms, were never tested for it, and will never know that they had survived it. For a virus to be potent as a bioweapon, its kill ratio needs to be optimized for killing the largest possible number of its victims, but doing so slowly enough so that the victims don’t die before they have a chance to spread the infection.

Another minus: the average age of those who succumb to it is around 65, making it rather ineffective in impairing the productive capacities of a nation, be they industrial or military, since many of those who die are past their peak productive years or retired. In fact, taking a rather cynical view, this virus could be rather helpful in reducing the burden of economically unproductive sick an elderly people who, in an aging Chinese population, and given the respect Chinese society traditionally gives to its elders, consume a growing share of the country’s resources.

On the plus side, those who succumb to it are predominantly Chinese, male and elderly, and this may be taken as an indication of some very clever targeting. In fact, the selectivity of this virus may be indicative of an effort to selectively take out members of the Chinese Communist party, in order to destabilize China politically, to effect regime change there and to impose US-style Freedom&Democracy® upon the hapless Chinese population. Given that the US no longer has the military might to take on China (and can’t even respond to Iranian rocket attacks on its military bases), and given that the US has pretty much lost the trade war against China, a biological weapon may be the only arrow left in its quiver.

Let’s keep in mind that the Pentagon has built quite a number of facilities around the world that research various pathogens. Given that this is the Pentagon, whose basic task involves killing people, not the World Health Organization, it seems likely that they also do something along the lines of developing effective biological weapons. A couple of years ago US operatives were caught collecting DNA samples from the Russian population and were promptly escorted out of the country.

The obvious supposition is that these samples were to be used to develop biological weapons to specifically target the Russian population. I suspect that the specialists charged with this task were most disappointed to discover that the vast majority of the Russian population consists of just your regular white people, pretty much the same the world over, and to target them is to target themselves. But that is not the case with the Chinese, whose genetic makeup is more distinctive. This is all clearly inconclusive, and it may very well be the case that the Pentagon’s biological weapons program is just another part of its giant money-burning machine, or the case may be that it actually does produce a biological weapon now and again, and that 2019-nCoV is the meager result it has so far managed to produce.

But then again, the way the epidemic started is not what you’d expect if an artificial strain were released at some place and time. In that case, you’d expect an instantaneous spike in infections, with symptoms showing up in a tight cluster right at the end of the incubation period. But instead what we saw was sporadic incidents of infection connected with a certain fish market in Wuhan gradually giving rise to an epidemic. This suggests that the source of the virus is a natural one, such as the bats which were sold at this market. However, the Chinese have been eating bats for thousands of years (bat soup is a delicacy), so why would this virus only emerge now?

The reason for the timing may simply be increased contact. The virus emerged right around the Chinese new year. According to the Chinese calendar, this is the year of the rat, and while the Chinese also eat rats, bats are preferred. Also, around two-thirds of all the pigs in China have recently been lost to swine flu, driving up prices of pork and also, incidentally, forcing China to start importing pigs from the US, which were previously subject to an embargo. This made the naturally abundant bats an attractive alternative to other sources of animal protein. Equally serendipitously, China’s chicken population is now being ravaged by avian flu, and this, as you might expect, will force China to start importing chickens from the US as well.

Of course, this is all highly inconclusive, but a view may be taken that all is fair in love and war—and trade war with the US especially. But what has set off a few alarms in my head was the reaction to the coronavirus epidemic, both in China and in the West, the US especially.

First, the Chinese government has treated the epidemic as an act of war, deploying all the means at its disposal, including the military, in order to contain its spread, building several large new hospitals, putting entire huge cities under quarantine and extending the national holidays. The response as been far beyond what this virus seems to warrant, with its low mortality rate. Without saying so, the Chinese government has treated this epidemic as an act of biological warfare—perhaps as a dry run for a more lethal epidemic that may come in the future. At any rate, the Chinese government is seeing to it that nobody can blame it for not taking the problem sufficiently seriously, or not doing enough about it.

Second, the Western media response has been an exemplary effort to produce a panic and to smear China, making what is happening there into a horror story. Not only did the mass media outlets do their best to stoke mass hysteria about all things Chinese, but various bloggers and independent “experts” pitched in to produce a panic. There seems to have been a policy-driven reorientation from Russophibia (where it has been high time for the US to silently admit defeat and move on) to Sinophobia (where the US is yet to have its ass handed to it on a plate). Those notionally independent commentators who are exploiting this opportunity to attack China are acting as useful idiots in this centrally choreographed media campaign.

Third, the White House has recently requested that experts look into the possibility that 2019-nCoV has been genetically engineered. It is often the case that the person who shouts “Catch the thief!” the loudest happens to be the thief himself. I suspect that the next move will be to declare that this virus is indeed an engineered biological weapon developed by… why, Russia, of course, and Mr. Putin personally.

Taking all of this into account, the scenario that seems most plausible to me was that this virus was genetically engineered in one of the Pentagon’s biological weapons laboratories and introduced into China via infected wild bats, having picked the technology and manufacturing mecca of Wuhan as a target. The ultimate goal, one might surmise, is to induce US corporations to repatriate production to the US mainland in order to “make America great again.”

But my suspicion is that this isn’t going to work. The Chinese government will succeed in stopping the epidemic, in the process demonstrating that it cares about its people and is effective in protecting them. Already the infection rate, plotted on a log scale, is starting to slope down from a straight line, meaning that the epidemic is losing steam. And then, working alongside many other countries, China will move on with the main task of eradicating the other parasite—which is the United States, a country that get something for nothing simply by printing dollars.

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Citizens United Revisited – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on February 11, 2020

In a free society, individuals, groups, organizations, corporations, and unions would be free say or publish anything at any time about any political candidate. They would also be free to spend any amount of money in whatever way they choose for or against any candidate they choose.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/02/laurence-m-vance/citizens-united-revisited/

By

It has been ten years since the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. This being a presidential election year, it might be a good idea to revisit this case.

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002—the McCain-Feingold Act—prevented corporations or labor unions funding “electioneering communications” that refer to a candidate for federal office within 60 days of a general election and within 30 days of a primary election.

In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which was decided by the Supreme Court on January 21, 2010, by a 5-4 vote, the Court reversed the ruling of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that upheld the provisions of BCRA prohibiting unions and corporations from broadcasting the abovementioned “electioneering communications.” Unions and corporations no longer have to create political action committees (PACs) to spend money on “electioneering communications.”

President Obama famously condemned the Citizens United decision during his 2010 State of the Union Address:

Last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, and worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that’s why I’m urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong.

To this day, Democrats and progressives have never gotten over it. On the tenth anniversary of the decision, Elizabeth Warren maintained: “We need a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.” Hillary Clinton opined: “Ten years ago today, the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United unleashed hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate and special-interest money into U.S. elections. The next president should propose a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision.” And then there is Bernie Sanders: “Today marks 10 years since the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which allows corporations to spend unlimited money on elections. We are going to overturn that decision and get corporate money out of politics.”

Although the BCRA was presumably about campaign financing, it was clearly designed to permit the government to limit who could speak and when they could speak. Clearly, then, Citizens United was a victory for free speech.

The First Amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.And as the majority opinion of the Supreme Court states: “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

The problem with Citizens United is that it didn’t go far enough. Unions, charitable organizations, religious organizations, and corporations still cannot use funds from their treasuries to make contributions directly to political candidates or for independent expenditures that advocate the election or defeat of a candidate in federal elections. There are still limits on campaign contributions.

In a free society, individuals, groups, organizations, corporations, and unions would be free say or publish anything at any time about any political candidate. They would also be free to spend any amount of money in whatever way they choose for or against any candidate they choose. There would be no speech restrictions, public financing of elections, spending limits, donation limits, disclosure requirements, distinctions between hard and soft money, or campaign-finance restrictions.

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Lying Schiff’s Star Witness Alexander Vindman Tied to Ukrainian Arms Dealers, Ukrainian Oil and Gas and the Atlantic Council

Posted by M. C. on February 10, 2020

Vindman also admitted during testimony that he tampered with and tried but failed to alter the transcript of President Trump’s call to the Ukrainian President.

He may be a US citizen but he is also Ukrainian.

Kim Philby was a British citizen. That doesn’t mean that was where his loyalties lay.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/10/lying-schiffs-star-witness-alexander-vindman-tied-to-ukrainian-arms-dealers-ukrainian-oil-and-gas-and-the-atlantic-council/

Joe Hoft by Joe Hoft

We just keep getting more and more pieces to the corrupt puzzle involving the Democrats, the Deep State, foreign actors and the media.  Here’s some more about Alexander Vindman, Lying Adam Schiff’s start witness two days ago.

We reported yesterday that Yesterday Colonel Alexander Vindman was a witness in Adam Schiff’s basement chamber of secrets.  During questioning on Tuesday Colonel Vindman admitted he shared the read-outs of President Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Zelenzky with several other secret operatives.

When Rep. Jim Jordan asked him who he shared the readouts with — Rep. Adam Schiff SHUT DOWN the questioning!

FOX News investigative reporter Catherine Herridge reported that Colonel Vindman may have violated the federal leaking statute 18 USC 798 when he leaked the president’s classified call to several other operatives.

Vindman also admitted during testimony that he tampered with and tried but failed to alter the transcript of President Trump’s call to the Ukrainian President.

Yesterday we tied Vindman to Obama’s former Russian Ambassador Michael McFaul who spoke out in support of Vindman.  The fact that Vindman is connected to McFaul is alarming. McFaul was one of the first to attack President Trump’s attorney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for investigating Ukrainian corruption involved in the Russia collusion scam. During his work, Rudy identified the crimes committed by the Bidens in their pay-for-play scam in the Ukraine.

McFaul is no stranger to controversy or corruption. It goes without saying he was Obama’s Ambassador to Russia, for example.

McFaul has a storied past. D. Manny wrote at Politics Central that McFaul was one of the first individuals to discuss the never verified Russian hack of the DNC –

 

There is a 06/14/2016 article on Politico written by Daniel Strauss entitled, “Russian Government Hackers Broke into DNC Servers, Stole Trump Oppo; The Hackers had Access to the Information for Approximately One Year.” In that article, Strauss includes a comment attributed to Michael McFaul:

Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, called the hack “meddling in our personal affairs.”

“I am sure they intended to do this without being caught,” he told POLITICO. “They wanted to obtain the information without it being detected. That’s a kind of target that would make sense — in terms of them wanting to know things about what is going on here. Whether they were doing it to try to try to [sic] manipulate our political process, I’d have to think about that.”

He added: “Russia has tremendous capabilities, both the Russian government and their proxies and people somewhat affiliated with the government. We always underestimate their capabilities.”

First, such an odd choice from whom to seek a comment. What qualifications or expertise render McFaul an authority on matters such as Russian hacking? A search of Michael McFaul’s history shows he served as US ambassador to Russia two years prior to the Politco article, and what’s more, he previously made the news because Obama assigned McFaul to be an ambassador without having any prior diplomatic skills, to a major country like Russia too.

Manny goes on to state that soon after McFaul was appointed Ambassador in Russia he was visited by a number of Communist leaders from Russia at the US Embassy.

Perhaps the most shocking observation of McFaul is related to his invitation in front of Congress at a Foreign Affairs Committee. Pictures of the event are telling, not necessarily because of McFaul, but rather because of the individual he has sitting directly behind him, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

McFaul’s Congressional hearing occurred eight days after the now famous Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump Jr. This meeting resulted in Donald Jr. being interrogated for hours by Congress over his meeting with Veselnitskaya.

What is more shocking is that Veselnitskaya met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, before and after her meeting with Donald Jr. Fusion is the firm behind the phony Trump-Russia dossier that was never confirmed and very possibly all made up but nevertheless was used by Obama’s Deep State to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on President Trump.

Vindman is also connected to Glenn Simpson. Vindman was in Eurasia, specializing in Russian affairs, at the same region as Glenn Simpson, who was also specializing in Russian affairs was there, as well as Christopher Steele, who was also specializing in Russian affairs at the time. Trey Gowdy uncovered this in Simpson’s testimony in front of Congress –

Today we have more on Vindman, Shifty Schiff’s star witness ==>>

Yorktown Solutions is a lobbying firm that represents some questionable Ukrainian arms companies and the Ukrainian Oil and Gas industry, interested in undermining the Nordstream 2 Project. (Kiev Post)

Daniel Vajdich is listed as the registered agent for the lobbying firm Yorktown Solutions. He just so happens to be a member of the Atlantic Council. The same Atlantic Council Burisma donated heavily to and welcomed Volker, now a Senior Advisor, after he resigned. (Which opens a whole other can of worms regarding his meeting with Burisma board members at the Atlantic Council Event.)

Yorktown Solutions lists Alexander Vindman in its FARA filing –

On what appears to be their first day of U.S. operations, Vindman received his first email from Yorktown, he then met with them in March, and is listed as corresponding with Yorktown Solutions through email every few weeks since. Important to note, March of 2019 is also when Lutsenko began making allegations against Biden per WAPO’s timeline.

In addition, Chairman of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine Stanislav Shevchuk met with the Special Advisor to the President of the USA, Head of the Russian and Eurasian Section of the US National Security Council Fiona Hill, Head of the Eastern Europe and Russia Division of the US National Security Council Alexander Vindman, former US Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Director of the Eurasian Center at the Atlantic Council of the United States John Herbst, partner of Baker McKenzie law firm Thomas Firestone during which a number of urgent issues were raised, in particular, the protection of the Constitution as part of the stability of the legal system and guarantee the effective functioning of democratic institutions.

What the hell were Hill, Vindman and Firestone doing together in Novermber 2018?   No doubt wasting more tax payer dollars working to overturn the 2016 election and the US Constitution.  This whole Schiff Sham is a disgrace.  Let’s hope and pray for justice.

Happy Halloween from the Schiff Sham and its basement chamber of secrets!

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World War III’s Newest Battlefield – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on February 10, 2020

Russia’s military budget is 1-20% of the US.

We build F-35s that don’t work and Ford class carriers that can’t launch aircraft. Iraq and Afghanistan have fought US to stanstill

Russia builds weapons that take out carriers and aircraft instead of building them.

Who would win?

https://original.antiwar.com/Michael_Klare/2020/02/09/world-war-iiis-newest-battlefield/

by and

In early March, an estimated 7,500 American combat troops will travel to Norway to join thousands of soldiers from other NATO countries in a massive mock battle with imagined invading forces from Russia. In this futuristic simulated engagement – it goes by the name of Exercise Cold Response 2020 – allied forces will “conduct multinational joint exercises with a high-intensity combat scenario in demanding winter conditions,” or so claims the Norwegian military anyway. At first glance, this may look like any other NATO training exercise, but think again. There’s nothing ordinary about Cold Response 2020. As a start, it’s being staged above the Arctic Circle, far from any previous traditional NATO battlefield, and it raises to a new level the possibility of a great-power conflict that might end in a nuclear exchange and mutual annihilation. Welcome, in other words, to World War III’s newest battlefield.

For the soldiers participating in the exercise, the potentially thermonuclear dimensions of Cold Response 2020 may not be obvious. At its start, Marines from the United States and the United Kingdom will practice massive amphibious landings along Norway’s coastline, much as they do in similar exercises elsewhere in the world. Once ashore, however, the scenario becomes ever more distinctive. After collecting tanks and other heavy weaponry “prepositioned” in caves in Norway’s interior, the Marines will proceed toward the country’s far-northern Finnmark region to help Norwegian forces stave off Russian forces supposedly pouring across the border. From then on, the two sides will engage in – to use current Pentagon terminology – high-intensity combat operations under Arctic conditions (a type of warfare not seen on such a scale since World War II).

And that’s just the beginning. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Finnmark region of Norway and adjacent Russian territory have become one of the most likely battlegrounds for the first use of nuclear weapons in any future NATO-Russian conflict. Because Moscow has concentrated a significant part of its nuclear retaliatory capability on the Kola Peninsula, a remote stretch of land abutting northern Norway – any U.S.-NATO success in actual combat with Russian forces near that territory would endanger a significant part of Russia’s nuclear arsenal and so might precipitate the early use of such munitions. Even a simulated victory – the predictable result of Cold Response 2020 – will undoubtedly set Russia’s nuclear controllers on edge.

To appreciate just how risky any NATO-Russian clash in Norway’s far north would be, consider the region’s geography and the strategic factors that have led Russia to concentrate so much military power there. And all of this, by the way, will be playing out in the context of another existential danger: climate change. The melting of the Arctic ice cap and the accelerated exploitation of Arctic resources are lending this area ever greater strategic significance.

Energy Extraction in the Far North Read the rest of this entry »

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