Organizing Notes

Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....

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Location: Brunswick, ME, United States

The collapsing US military & economic empire is making Washington & NATO even more dangerous. US could not beat the Taliban but thinks it can take on China-Russia-Iran...a sign of psychopathology for sure. We must all do more to help stop this western corporate arrogance that puts the future generations lives in despair. @BruceKGagnon

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Poland Is Gradually Getting Tired Of Ukrainian Problems

 

 Military Cemetery in Olsztyn, Poland

 

SouthFront

With the approaching winter, the gradual depletion of supplies of military equipment and ammunition from Europe to Ukraine, as well as heavy losses of the AFU [Armed Forces Ukraine] in the Donetsk region, dissatisfaction with the Polish government’s actions is growing among Poles.

From the very beginning of the conflict, Poland has taken a position of full-fledged support for Kiev. One of the results of this was the adoption by the Ukrainian parliament in July 2022 of the law on special guarantees for Poles. Many media saw this gesture as preparation for Poland’s gradual takeover of Ukraine’s border regions; however, there was no further development of this process. 

Using extremely aggressive anti-Russian rhetoric, Warsaw sent several thousand Polish military personnel to participate in the combat operations, acting under the guise of volunteers and members of the Ukrainian International Legion. According to Michal Dworczyk, head of the Chancellery of the Polish Prime Minister, Ukraine has received more than $1.5 billion worth of military equipment, and total aid from Poland has exceeded $3.7 billion.

Nevertheless, the so-called refugee fatigue associated with the need to help millions of Ukrainians who have fled their homes is increasingly being discussed in Poland. For example, in Lodz, locals are increasingly paying attention to the rude behavior of Ukrainians, not understanding why they need help in the future. According to the Polish portal Wyborcza.pl, a large number of refugees intend to stay in Poland permanently, preferring cities such as Katowice, Bydgoszcz and Białystok. Poles fear that with the onset of winter more Ukrainians will flood into Poland, fleeing from the shortage of heating and water in their apartments.

At the same time, last month articles about the deaths of Poles who took part in military operations in Ukraine have become more frequent in the Polish media. According to Niezalezny Dziennik Polityczny, the cemetery in the town of Olsztyn already contains over 1,200 new graves, supposedly belonging to volunteers who died fighting the Russian military. It is noteworthy that the 16th Polish mechanized infantry division is based in this city, and the remains of the dead were cremated and buried in American-style standardized tombstones.

Nevertheless, there are regular military drills of NATO countries on the Polish territory, the last of which took place in early November with the participation of more than 2,000 soldiers and 300 pieces of machinery, and the scenario of the exercises was designed for possible confrontation with the Russian army. Currently, the Polish government is making serious efforts to agitate citizens to join the national armed forces. However, this often does not find a response among ordinary Poles, who fear that their lives would be endangered if a full-scale war with Russia breaks out in Europe.

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

My daily media list



I often get asked where I get my news information so I thought I'd share some of my faves with you.

Take a look and have at it. Videos and news sources.

I occasionally click on corporate media but usually only to get a look at the distorted view they are pushing on a particular issue.

Bruce

 

Monday, November 28, 2022

Former German politician: NATO must be shut down

 


 

German Statesman Slams EU Leaders' Spinelessness, Demands NATO's Dismemberment, Closure of US Bases

 

Sputnik

Germany has found itself reaping the consequences of the crisis in Ukraine, facing skyrocketing energy and food costs, recession and the danger of permanent deindustrialization as Washington and Brussels continue to call for more and more sanctions against Russian energy to try to “punish” Moscow for its military operation in Ukraine.

The United States and its allies have spent the entire period since 2014 preparing for a confrontation with Russia in Ukraine, Oskar Lafontaine, a veteran German statesman with over forty years of political experience under his belt, has said.

“Of course, I also mean the conflict in Ukraine, which began with the Maidan putsch in Kiev in 2014. Since then, the US and its Western vassals have been arming Ukraine and systematically preparing it for confrontation with Russia. Ukraine thus became a de facto, if not de jure, member of NATO. This backstory has been studiously ignored by Western politicians and the mainstream media,” Lafontaine told Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten in an interview published Sunday.

“For more than 100 years, it has been the declared aim of US policy to prevent German business and technology from merging with Russian raw materials at all cost. It is perfectly clear that, if you take this history into account, we are dealing with a US proxy war against Russia which has been prepared for a long time,” Lafontaine said.

Crop of Spineless Leaders

Lafontaine, who has worked under Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schroder, and served as president of the Bundesrat, minister president of Saarland, minister of finance, and leader of Die Linke and the SPD, blasted the current crop of German and European leaders for going along with policies which have brought Berlin to the brink of disaster.

“It is unforgivable that the SPD in particular betrayed the legacy of Willy Brandt and his policy of détente, and did not even seriously insist on compliance with the Minsk Agreements,” the politician said, referring to the 2015 peace agreements meant to restore peace to the Donbass.

Lafontaine slammed the German government over its limp-wristed response to the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, which he characterized as a “declaration of war on Germany.” It was “pathetic and cowardly” of the federal government to try to “sweep incident under the carpet,” despite evidence that “the USA either carried out the attack directly or greenlit it,” the politician said.

“It was a hostile act against the Federal Republic, and not only against us, and once again makes clear that we must free ourselves from American tutelage,” Lafontaine stressed. The politician pressed his country’s leaders to force the removal of all US military bases and nuclear weapons from German soil, and called for the creation of a European security architecture with France, separate from NATO, which he called an “obsolete” alliance that acts as a “tool to enforce the US’s claim to remain the sole power in the world.”

 


Lafontaine admitted that freeing Germany from Washington’s grip wouldn’t be easy, but stressed that he can’t see “any alternative” to such a radical step. “If we and other European countries continue to remain under US tutelage, they will push us over a cliff to protect their own interests,” he said.

“To use a hackneyed expression: We are experiencing the birth pangs of the transitional phase from a unipolar to a multipolar world order. And the question arises whether we will have a place of our own in this new world order, or be drawn into Washington’s conflicts with Moscow and Beijing as American vassals,” the politician emphasized.


Recalling his decades of experience in politics, Lafontaine lamented in decades past, German leaders, “at least in some conflicts, had German interests in mind, and did not throw them overboard in anticipatory obedience” to Washington. “You need to have a backbone when you are the head of a country. The image of Chancellor Scholz standing like a schoolboy next to President Biden when he announced that nothing would come of Nord Stream 2 was humiliating.”

Ukraine Disaster

Asked whether he believed Washington has achieved its aims in Ukraine, Lafontaine said that the answer was both “yes and no,” with the principle successes being the ruined relations between Russia and the European Union, and the “sidelining” of Berlin and Brussels “as the US’s potential geostrategic and economic rivals, for the time being.”

“They are setting the policies of EU states even more than before the Ukraine conflict (thanks also to compliant politicians in Berlin and Brussels). They can also sell their dirty fracking-derived gas, and the US defense industry is doing great business,” the politician said. 

“On the other hand, they have not succeeded in ‘ruining Russia’, as [German Foreign Minister Annalena] Baerbock put it…overthrowing [Vladimir] Putin and installing a puppet government in Moscow to get better access to Russian raw materials, as was the case in [Boris] Yeltsin’s time,” Lafontaine said.

“And I have the impression that Washington has now realized that they are biting on granite here. Despite massive arms deliveries to Ukraine and the dispatch of numerous ‘military advisors’, Russia, which is a nuclear power, cannot be defeated militarily. In addition, Western sanctions are proving to be a boomerang: they hurt Western states more than Russia and will cause deindustrialization, unemployment and poverty. Working people in Europe are paying the price for the world power ambitions of a mad elite in Washington and the cowardice of European leaders,” Lafontaine concluded.

Who runs the gangs in Haiti?

 

 

 

Wongel Zelalem reports on a former kidnapper exposing who is behind the gangs in Haiti.

Ritter on the Ukraine missile that hit Poland

 


 

As usual Scott Ritter's experience in missile technologies enables him to have the definitive response to the recent 'accidental' Ukrainian missile launch that hit inside Poland.

False flag.....likely done in order to officially draw NATO into the war. Fortunately didn't work out that way. Can we expect another such false flag event?

Ritter says, 'The world is tired of western hegemony'.

And, could we add, the world is tired of Washington's endless lies.

Why are American citizens so reluctant to speak out against the corporate media and our embarrassing bi-partisan government's war aimed at Russia, China, Iran and others?

How come so many keep swallowing the BS?

How come those who do stand up and tell the truth about Ukraine, often get ostracized even by their 'liberal/progressive friends'?

What ever happened to political courage? Remember that song that ends with 'and home of the brave'....

I understand that we are not supposed to talk about 'the division' in public. 

I'd call it complicity rather than division.

Bruce

Sunday, November 27, 2022

Sunday song

 


 



Saturday, November 26, 2022

Irish MEP calls out her own country on 'neutrality'


 

 

Clare Daly is a member of the EU parliament representing Ireland. 

She sounded out about Irish hypocrisy when it comes to declaring 'neutrality' but then joining the west in support of the US-UK-NATO war on Russia - using Ukraine as the hammer.  

Friday, November 25, 2022

To Decolonize Our Minds, Start With Words

 


 

Where is the clear image of a decolonized society we are to emulate? There isn’t one. Yet if we are to free ourselves, we need practical steps.

 

by Steven Newcomb (Peace & Planet News)

At least since historian Oswald Spengler published his prophetic The Decline of the West (1918), Western “civilization” has been portrayed as in a severe state of crisis and decline. For more than two centuries, the imperial enterprise of the United States has colonized the territories and resources of the original nations of this continent while pretending to have a “providentially assigned” or “God-given” destiny. This is the evidence of white Christian nationalism in U.S. law, based on the Bible and Christianity. Christendom was supposedly mandated to consume and eliminate heathendom.

As a Shawnee-Lenape writer, I prefer to think about such matters from an Original Nations’ perspective. Our Native ancestors were standing at the ocean shoreline, centuries ago, looking out at the first invading ships from Christendom coming toward them. Now imagine us as present-day Native people standing next to them with 500 years of hindsight.

This is a technique to begin decolonizing our minds. One step of that process involves taking a closer look at the way the English language colonizes our thinking. What is colonization? What is civilization?

Liberation is a word that appears to speak about something positive yet provides no clear image of the kind of society that will replace institutionalized oppression. 

In his book Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011), Naill Ferguson referred to that context as the West’s “ascendancy,” a term Webster’s defines as domination. Samuel Morison, in his Oxford History of the American People (1962), defined colonization as “a form of conquest in which a nation takes over a distant territory, thrusts in its own people, and controls or eliminates the native inhabitants.” Morison said that “modern colonization” has resulted in “world dominion.” Again, the theme of domination. The massive wealth accumulated by Western civilization is the result of patterns of genocide, expropriation of resources, and colonization, all maintained under the rubric of “globalization” and the “global economy.”

These days it is common to find discussions of decolonization. Cambridge University, for example, recently announced that it will work to decolonize its English literature curriculum. The theme of decolonization gained global attention during the activism against the Dakota Access pipeline in the Great Sioux Nation treaty lands and the Tar Sands in the far northern region of Great Turtle Island, to name just two examples.

It makes sense, in principle, that decolonization can be achieved by reversing patterns of domination. Yet where is the clear image of a decolonized society we are to emulate? There isn’t one. Yet if we are to free ourselves, we need practical steps.

When we talk about decolonization we are making an effort to think and articulate the results of colonization we want to dismantle without saying what should replace a colonized existence. Liberation is a word that appears to speak about something positive yet provides no clear image of the kind of society that will replace institutionalized oppression.

 



Here’s one possibility: providing a territorial sanctuary for Original Nations to enable them to build models of ecological, cultural, and spiritual sustainability free from the imposition of U.S. domination.

The Western mindset continues to be a primary source of domination, and a little-noticed paradox makes replacing a colonized mentality easier said than done: The English language I am using to write this article has been designed to reinforce and maintain the domination I want to end. We cannot end colonizing patterns by continuing to think and act in ways that maintain those patterns.

The languages of Original Indigenous Nations are repositories of vitally important cultural and spiritual models based on an attitude of deep reverence and respect for Mother Earth—for water, and for the ecosystems of the planet. Yet we all live under the “plenary power” of the United States. The verb “civilization” is defined by Webster’s as “the forcing of a cultural pattern on a population to which it is foreign.”

We ought to translate traditional cultural and spiritual concepts from our Original Nation languages into English. Those meanings and teachings contain thousands of years of ancestral, cultural, and spiritual imagery that the Western mindset does not naturally contain. My Oglala friend and mentor Birgil Kills once told me, for example, that an Oglala Lakota metaphor for marriage is the two wings of a bird. When they move together in unison the bird is able to fly beautifully. Other examples include “Mother Earth,” “the love of the land,” “All Our Relations,” “the land takes care of us when we take care of the land.” Some of the Seven Laws of the Oceti Sakowin as, Wacante Oganake, “to help, to share, to give, to be generous,” Wowaunsila, “pity, compassion,” and Wowauonihan, “to respect, to honor.”

Admittedly, such simple ideas can’t amount to much when the traditional territory of every Original Nation and the land of every Indian reservation on Great Turtle Island is legally and politically defined as “U.S. soil” and controlled by the United States based on the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and Domination.

All this civilization and dominion have brought Mother Earth to a period that scientists are calling the Sixth Extinction, the brink of ecological collapse. What kinds of negative impacts are going to result from radiation being released daily from the devastated nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan? The acidification of the oceans continues unabated. The massive decline of the global insect population is a powerful indicator that the planet is not right. Western systems make it fairly impossible for us to build economic models premised on reverence and an abiding respect for all life.

Clearly, we must not stay within the mental and behavioral limits of the system we say we want to replace.

~ Steven Newcomb (Shawnee, Lenape) is a legal scholar and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the doctrine of Christian discovery. In 2008 Fulcrum published his book Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery.  

Thursday, November 24, 2022

The great illusion - a prayer for thanksgiving

 

Chiricahua Apache Prisoners of War at Ft. Marion in St. Augustine, Florida


Thanksgiving,
one of America's
greatest illusions,
the original sin
 
Dress up the genocide
real nice,
turkey, feathers,
pumpkin pie,
peace pipe,
native people
and the killer
christian colonists
seemingly
as friends.
 
But the truth
was otherwise.
 
The new,
soon to be empire,
rivaling Europe,
envisioned itself as
king of the global hill.
 
Washington 
had to sell
its image
as something
great and different,
from all the other
marauders
and plunderers.
 
But eventually
the turkeys come home
to roost
and the world learns
that the noble sounding
American experiment
is just a nightmare
 
Give a prayer 
of thanks today
that the veil
has been lifted
and that all 
can now see the truth,
if willing 
to open their eyes
and hearts.
 
The shining city on the hill,
streets paved in gold,
is nothing more
than a sad
illusion.
 
Just a
figment
in the pirates
imagination.
 
Bruce  

Who really writes the movie scripts?

 


 

If you've seen Top Gun or Transformers, you may have wondered: Does all of that military machinery on screen come with strings attached? Does the military actually get a crack at the script? 

With the release of a vast new trove of internal government documents, the answers have come into sharp focus: the US military has exercised editorial control over thousands of films and television programs. 

Propelled into a field trip across America, media professor Roger Stahl engages an array of other researchers, bewildered veterans, PR insiders, and industry producers willing to talk. In unsettling detail, he discovers how the military and CIA have pushed official narratives while systematically scrubbing scripts of war crimes, corruption, racism, sexual assault, coups, assassinations, and torture. 

From The Longest Day to Lone Survivor, Iron Man to Iron Chef, and James Bond to Jack Ryan, the deliberate creation of this other "cinematic universe" is one of the great PR coups of our time. As these activities gain new public scrutiny, new questions arise: How have they managed to fly under the radar for so long? And where do we go from here?  

Distributed by the Media Education Foundation mediaed.org


“This powerful documentary hits us with overwhelming evidence that every film made with DOD or CIA cooperation is a picture made with major input from that agency, including pervasive censorship and rewriting. It forced me to wonder: How many hours of my lifetime have I spent staring at movie screens and TV screens unknowingly absorbing DOD and CIA propaganda? Is this part of a military-industrial-entertainment complex? Theaters of War is a terrific teaching experience. It should also inspire a host of follow-up articles and a dissertation or two.”
— H. Bruce Franklin | American cultural historian and author of Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Dismantling General Dynamics with the Mapping Project

 


 

This month's Global Network video highlights the organization and website, The Mapping Project  

 
http://mapliberation.org/
 
The Mapping Project is a website full of resourceful information on the links between oppressive institutions, essentially "connecting the dots" of US Imperialism and local institutions in the Massachusetts area. The organization is made up of "multi-generational collective of activists and organizers" who wanted to:
 

"develop a deeper understanding of local institutional support for the colonization of Palestine and harms that we see as linked, such as policing, US imperialism, and displacement/ethnic cleansing. Our work is grounded in the realization that oppressors share tactics and institutions – and that our liberation struggles are connected. We wanted to visualize these connections in order to see where our struggles intersect and to strategically grow our local organizing capacities."
 

Sometimes the peace/antiwar movement gets too focused on the big guns, i.e. top 5 largest weapons corporations, and we forget that our local institutions are supporting the oppression of US imperialism. Our local universities, banks, police departments and other local institutions are sharing tactics and operations amongst themselves.
 
The Mapping Project reminds us that we need to build campaigns which focus on breaking these links to US imperialism, one by one. Each broken thread makes US imperialism weaker.

Odds & Ends

 


  • Iranian warnings about domestic unrest should be taken seriously. If the turmoil in Iran continues, regional consequences could be grave.  For the United States, pursuing a conventional war against the Islamic Republic is a non-starter. If the US were to launch an invasion, as it did in the Iraq war, not only would it face difficulties capturing territory and suffer many defeats, Iran’s regional allies, along with its arsenal of ballistic missiles, could devastate Washington’s allies and military facilities throughout the Middle East. Such a war would be, in a sense, akin to a doomsday situation. Therefore, the only options that the US and its allies have to effect regime change in Tehran are through proxies and economic sanctions. See the entire article here
  • Researchers in the United States have developed a new method for controlling the brain circuits associated with complex animal behaviours, using genetic engineering to create a magnetised protein that activates specific groups of nerve cells from a distance.

Understanding how the brain generates behaviour is one of the ultimate goals of neuroscience – and one of its most difficult questions. In recent years, researchers have developed a number of methods that enable them to remotely control specified groups of neurons and to probe the workings of neuronal circuits.

The most powerful of these is a method called optogenetics, which enables researchers to switch populations of related neurons on or off on a millisecond-by-millisecond timescale with pulses of laser light. Another recently developed method, called chemogenetics, uses engineered proteins that are activated by designer drugs and can be targeted to specific cell types.  See the whole story here 

  • Leading the charge in a new generation of lunar exploration has been the China National Space Administration (CNSA), which has dispatched several probes to the moon from its Chang’e series. They have explored the far side of the moon and sent back the first lunar soil samples in 40 years.

The Chinese space program is working on a new type of nuclear power plant to be used to power a permanent base on the moon, which China hopes to build before the decade is out, the head of China’s lunar exploration effort told Chinese media on Tuesday.  See more here 

  • Russian energy giant, Gazprom, said on Tuesday that Ukraine was diverting natural gas supplies transiting to Moldova, and the company has threatened to curtail deliveries through a key pipeline in response.

“The volume of gas supplied by Gazprom to the ‘Sudzha’ gas measuring station (GMS) for transit to Moldova via Ukraine exceeds the physical volume transmitted at the border of Ukraine with Moldova,” Gazprom’s statement read.

Moldova paid for some November gas supplies on Monday, according to Gazprom, which said that Kiev had kept 52.52 million cubic meters of gas meant for Moldova on its territory.  Find the whole story here

  • Over the past days, Ukraine has targeted the area around the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, and the IAEA experts at the facility have confirmed there is widespread damage across the site.

"The Kiev regime continued provocations in order to create a threat of a man-made disaster at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant. On November 21, artillery of the Ukrainian armed forces fired 8 large-caliber shells at the industrial zone of the nuclear power plant," the Russian defense ministry said in a statement. From RT  

  • Pentagon Hiding Cost Of Ukrainian War - watch the short video here 
  • More videos surfaced of Ukraine Nazi troops killing Russian POW's who were unarmed and lying face down on the ground. See it here

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

U.S. moving factories out of China

 


So, the process that everyone was so much afraid of is beginning. The United States is preparing for a serious confrontation with China. But what kind of confrontation can we talk about when your factories are located on enemy territory? It was expected that the Americans, preparing to fight China, would begin to transfer their factories from there to other countries. 

So the company Foxconn, the manufacturer of Apple devices, decided to invest $300 million in a new plant in Vietnam with 30,000 jobs. Vietnam already produces iPads and AirPods. In total, Foxconn plans to invest $1.5 billion in expanding production in this country. 

In the meantime, Microsoft also began to produce most of the Xbox consoles in Vietnam. 

And this year, in India, Americans will start production of the latest iPhone 14.

Awaiting Liberation: A Report from the Front and a Warning



By Batiushka for the Saker blog


If you are expecting dramatic news and pictures from the Donbass, where Allied troops are slowly but inexorably advancing, destroying thousands of Nazis of all Western nationalities and dozens of their military vehicles and piles of their equipment every week, as they liberate towns and villages (all unreported by the Western media), sorry. This is a story from the home front. It is a human story. I hope it brings it all home to you.

It is about a small town south of Kiev. Two years ago, Ukrainian (though they are Russians, as far as they are concerned) members of my family, a couple with two grown-up children, bought a brand-new house there. I have been there and stayed there. Last year. I know it well and the road from there to central Kiev. I could take you there now.

First of all, it is snowing. Photos sent to me show it. The long Indian summer is well and truly over. And the Russians have decided to use the same tactics as the Americans used in Serbia: launch missiles at the energy infrastructure. Thank you, USA, for your example of how to wage war.

The Ukrainian currency, the hryvnia, has dropped by 30% against the dollar, pound and euro. Everything that is imported has increased in price by at least that much. Many things by 100%. Though that is similar to the situation in Western Europe, where I now live. On top of that what you used to get from Russia is now unobtainable because of ‘sanctions’.

Only, in the Ukraine, this is against the background of the bankrupt economy being propped up by the US/UK/EU to the tune of billions of dollars per month. How do you fancy living in a country with a drop in GDP of 40% this year? And there is no sign of any change in the future, at least not until the Kiev regime collapses, Zelensky leaves for Miami from the roof of the US embassy via helicopter (remember Saigon?), Nazis cling to the outside of US aircraft taking off from Borispol Airport (remember Kabul?), other fanatical nationalists leave for Poland (some already have), and Russia liberates the whole country, as now seems necessary and inevitable.

Property prices in central Kiev have fallen. Many are trying to move out, as there are mainly flats and also the explosions are mainly in Kiev. Of course, if you are in a high-rise block, you will never sell unless you are on a low floor. Nobody wants to get stuck in a lift or, almost as bad, if you have to take your groceries up to the fifteenth floor by the stairs every day.

You have to do everything yourself. There are few workmen left because they have been abducted, screaming and kicking, into the armed forces. If they are lucky, they will be able to surrender to their Russian brothers before they get turned into body dust or shot in the back by the hated Ukrainian secret police. The workmen who are left charge astronomical rates. My relatives are very glad that they finally completed everything just a few weeks before it all began in February.

Last Thursday X saw a bad accident on the road nearby: the traffic lights were not working because of a power cut. That is happening all over. The streets are in darkness, no lights.

Many work from home, or used to. That is difficult now, because at best you only have three to four hours of electricity before it goes off for at least the same amount of time. There is no light. And then even the best batteries in a computer mean that you lose power after an hour or two – that is, if you have the internet, which is not all the time.

And remember to charge up your phone as soon as the power comes back on. The power will not last and may go off all day. You have no way of knowing. And when the power goes off, the boiler also goes off. No heating, no hot water. The windows are taped across in Xs against possible missile blasts, which would cause the glass to shatter. My relatives saw a missile going over last May. It landed in Kiev. 


And sometimes the washing machine will stop half-way through the cycle. Power-cut. That is inconvenient. And always remember to carry a flashlight in your pocket or handbag and have at least one other one in the house. Many are using Swedish-made primus stoves to cook – if you can get one and the refills. Some Swedes are doing well out of this.

As for shopping, well, the opening hours change with the power cuts, though corner shops remain open, if dark. And of course, Kiev has gone back to a cash economy. The card machines will not work – no electricity. Hopefully, the bank cash dispensers will get restocked often enough. That is, if you have money in your account.

My relatives do not have a car. Many of the Ukrainians who are wealthy enough to have cars drove to the West last March/April/May with their recruitment age sons (bribes of up to $5,000 a time to the border guards, who left last), and now live in cramped quarters in the houses of Western people naïve enough and once prosperous enough to take them.

My relatives are very lucky because they can get on minibuses to take them to their house in the country. Just a wooden affair, but there are vegetables there, especially potatoes, and lots of firewood. They had a busy summer in the large vegetable garden. They prepared for the winter, picking, bottling and pickling. The only way of heating there is putting wood in the stove. No gas, but then you do not need any. And you can even live without electricity, as there is a stock of candles. The only thing – it gets really cold there in the winter, -20 or -30 outside, -10 inside, unless you heat constantly. So you stay inside as much as possible and prepare lots of dry firewood for years before.

All of this is a warning to Western Europe. I know you are being distracted by the World Cup soccer circus. Do not be. You too voted for US puppet-leaders like Zelensky? You too wanted to be Ukrainianised by the US? Then this is your future too. You have been warned. I have friends in Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova. They are already living like this. This is a virus that is creeping westwards towards you.

You are seeing your future – unless you can get rid of your pro-Nazi puppet-governments in time. Elect Russia-friendly governments. Make friends with your neighbours next door, in the east of Europe. (Never heard of ‘love your neighbour’?). Moscow is 1,600 kilometres from Berlin, around 2,500 kilometres from Rome, Paris and London. You know it makes sense. You could be nice and warm soon.

Monday, November 21, 2022

Kiev tried to pressure Georgia into opening ‘second front’ against Russia

 

Soldiers at the Vaziani Military Base in Tbilisi, Georgia.

RT

Ukraine attempted to push Georgia into joining the conflict against Moscow, Irakli Garibashvili claims
Kiev tried to pressure Russia’s neighbor into opening ‘second front’ 

Georgia could have been turned into a “shooting range” if opposition leaders had managed to take control of the country, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili claims. He said Kiev had tried to pressure Tbilisi into joining the conflict with Russia.

In an address to parliament on Friday, Garibashvili said that Ukrainian attempts to open a “second front” against Russia in Georgia were “not an interpretation, and not a legend,” but a “direct quote” from what was said at a press conference.

“These people [the Georgian opposition] are their [Ukrainian officials] allies. Imagine if these people had been at the helm of the Georgian government today,” Garibashvili said. “Does anybody have any doubt that a ‘second front’ would have been opened in Georgia, turning the country into a ‘shooting range?’”

Tbilisi has so far refrained from taking part in the Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its military operation in Ukraine, and Garibashvili stated in April that his country would not join the fighting, as it would run counter to Georgia’s national interests.

Shortly after Russia launched its military operation in late February, a number of officials in Kiev, including the secretary of the Ukrainian National Security Council, Aleksey Danilov, called on several countries, including Japan, Poland, Moldova, and Georgia, to open up a series of “second fronts” by attacking Russia and seizing such border regions as the Kuril Islands and Kaliningrad. No countries have so far taken Kiev up on the request.

Sunday, November 20, 2022

Crooked laundry operation

 


Sunday song

 


 


Saturday, November 19, 2022

Anti-war People's Forum in NYC

 


 NEGOTIATIONS- YES!     ESCALATION- NO! 

 

Saturday, November 19th, The People’s Forum (New York City).

The moment is now to inaugurate a new, multi-national, grassroots movement to advocate for the end to the current war in Ukraine. The stakes are too real and the dangers too great for the peoples of the word to remain on the sidelines. 

Anti-war forces in the United States and across the world may have different analyses of Russia, Ukraine, and this tragic war, but we can unite around one thing: there is no road to peace if US government policy remains to obstruct negotiations and send endless weapons into the war zone. 

We, people of conscience, are coming together to demand that there be a radical shift in the direction of US military and foreign policy. NATO expansion must end. Money must be spent on education, healthcare, and housing, not the war machine. 

We demand peace, not war. Join us! 

Speakers include: Jeremy Corbyn, UK Member of Parliament Jill Stein, Former Green Party Presidential Nominee Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental Institute for Social Research Brian Becker (particularly important speech), ANSWER Coalition Eugene Puryear, Breakthrough News Claudia de la Cruz, The People’s Forum Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK …and more! 

This event is co-sponsored by The People’s Forum and the ANSWER Coalition.

Japan's role as U.S. agent in Asia-Pacific

 


  
Rachel Clark lives in upstate New York and is a professional Japanese language interpreter, translator, as well as a peace activist and coordinator of many Veterans For Peace delegations and speaking tours to Japan.   

In this interview with Global Network coordinator Bruce Gagnon they discuss the following: 

  • The impacts on Okinawa and Jeju Island, South Korea of expanding US bases in the region.
  • What was the goal of the Obama administration's 'pivot' of US military forces into the Asia-Pacific.
  • What role does Japan play as the US agent in the region?
  • How has Article 9 of the Japanese constitution (that calls for a pacifist nation) been amended to serve US interests?
  • Why are NATO warships now porting in Japan? Is NATO expanding its 'mission' into the Asia-Pacific?
  • How does the corporate media narrative impact the people and nations of the region?

Friday, November 18, 2022

South Korea rolls back ambiguity on US-China rivalry

 

President Yoon Suk-yeol and first lady Kim Keon-hee of South Korea pose for a photo with President Joe Biden of the US on Nov. 12 following a gala banquet for leaders of ASEAN Plus Three nations hosted by Cambodia.

 

Here we go -- literal copy-and-paste of US policy

 

By Kiji Noh

South Korea’s Indo-Pacific strategy, which was unveiled by President Yoon Suk-yeol during his summit with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Phnom Penh last week, amounts to a public declaration that Korea will stand with the US in its hegemonic and strategic rivalry with China.

What Yoon has dubbed “Korea’s Indo-Pacific strategy” resembles the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy in more than name only. The US’ strategy is designed to surround and contain China.

In contrast, the Yoon administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy is noticeably tilted toward the US.

On November 13, Yoon said, “Key values such as regional freedom, human rights and the rule of law must be respected, and attempts to forcibly change the status quo must not be tolerated. The South China Sea needs to be a sea of peace and prosperity, a sea where the rules-based maritime order is protected. The freedoms of navigation and flight must be guaranteed according to the principles of international law, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and parties must refrain from behavior that would heighten tensions.”

With this overt reference to the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, Yoon was clearly demonstrating a critical attitude toward China. Emphasizing the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and opposing attempts to change the status quo by force are narratives that are used by the US and Japan when criticizing China.

See more on this story here

Terror blowback in Italy

 


 

 Italian police bust Azov-tied Nazi cell planning terror attacks 


The arrest of Italian neo-Nazis affiliated with the Ukrainian Azov Battalion highlights the terrifying potential for blowback from the Ukraine proxy war

Italian police announced a series of raids against the neo-Nazi Order of Hagal organization. Accused of stockpiling weapons and planning terror attacks, the group has established operational ties to the Ukrainian Azov Battalion.

Five members of an Italian neo-Nazi organization known as the “Order of Hagal” were arrested on November 15th while an additional member remains wanted by authorities. He happened to be in Ukraine, fighting Russian forces alongside the Azov Battalion, which has been formally integrated into the Ukrainian military.

The “Hagal” members are accused of plotting terrorist attacks on civilian and police targets. A sixth member of the Hagal group, now considered a fugitive, is in Ukraine and embedded with the Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi paramilitary group that has been incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard.

Members of the Order of Hagal reportedly maintained “direct and frequent” contacts over Telegram with not just the Azov Battalion, but also the neo-Nazi Ukrainian military formations Right Sector and Centuria, “probably in the view of possible recruitment into the ranks of these fighting groups,” according to Italian media.

The police investigation was launched in 2019 and has included extensive computer searches and wiretapping; tactics which have revealed members of the group’s intent on carrying out violent acts in Italy. 

But Ukraine is not the only country to have been visited by members of the Order of Hagal; “some members” also traveled to Israel to train in Krav Maga and the use of long and short weapons,” according to police officials. In fact, they were even given diplomas for completing the training.

See the rest of this GrayZone story here

Thursday, November 17, 2022

Robert Parry: A great journalist who tried to alert the public

 


By Mary Beth Sullivan (Social worker, Brunswick, Maine) 


I just finished a book called American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader which I highly recommend. 

I think it was in 1987 when I first heard Noam Chomsky speak. I was working in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time. A friend invited me to a foreign policy lecture Chomsky was giving at MIT, where he was a professor of linguistics. The lecture focused on US policy in El Salvador and Nicaragua. He shared information that turned upside down all that I had been reading and learning from the news I was consuming.

I was a huge fan of Ted Koppel and ABC's Nightline at the time, and I remember leaving the lecture thinking 'Damn! If I can't trust Ted Koppel, who can I trust? Now what do I do?' 

Chomsky had sown an internal discord that was discombobulating, and left me feeling unmoored for quite a long time. I was compelled to find alternative sources of information.

It wasn't until the US orchestrated a coup in Ukraine in 2014 that I discovered Robert Parry's on-line news source Consortium News, Although it is not my only news source, it is an important one as I strive to understand the chaos that has been unleashed in Ukraine. 

Parry's book brought me back into the history of our time, some of which I was wide awake for, some of which I only partially understood. It's an important chronicle. The time spent looking back informs the present day in sad and profound ways.  

I hope others will learn as much as I did! 


~ Here's a link to an article about the Parry book, which is excerpted below. 

A new compilation of Robert Parry’s writings, American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader, provides an illuminating history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries – a troubling recent past that Parry meticulously chronicles through in-depth research and compelling storytelling. The book, just published by iUniverse, documents how the deterioration of the U.S. media’s commitment to providing an honest accounting of current events has enabled corruption and wrongdoing at the highest levels of government.

Among the many hard-hitting stories that can be found in the reader:

  •     Mafia influence in state and local governments
  •     The full story of the Reagan administration’s illegal use of arms sales to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s
  •     How the U.S. government looked the other way as drug traffickers imported cocaine into the United States
  •     The government’s development of sophisticated propaganda techniques to influence American public opinion
  •     How the U.S. enabled and covered up war crimes, atrocities, and genocide in Central America
  •     The development of crippling – and morally questionable – economic sanctions as a go-to policy option in achieving geopolitical objectives
  •     The politicization of intelligence and abuses of power by the CIA
  •     What’s known and not known about the Reagan campaign’s interference with President Carter’s efforts to free U.S. hostages held in Iran in 1980
  •     How the U.S. supported an unconstitutional regime change in Ukraine in 2014, leading to eight years of civil war and today’s conflict with Russia
  •     The use of official lies and distortions by the government and media to sell endless military interventions to the American people

Latest excellent commentary on the war

 


 

Andrew Napolitano interviews Col. Douglas Macgregor about the following:

  • The truth about the wayward Ukrainian missile that hit inside Poland
  • Polish troops now fighting against Russia while wearing Ukrainian uniforms
  • Pentagon Chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley's tendency to lie while occasionally uttering a few truthful words
  • What do the Pentagon generals fear most?
  • Was the Russian withdrawal from Kherson a loss or a strategic move?
  • Where is the war going next?

These two guys are my favorite commentators these days on this US-NATO war on Russia. 

See more about Ukraine's military fiasco here

Nothing but lies

 
 

 
We've been taught
to believe
the media, 
the church,
Congress,
the Pentagon,
academia,
Wall Street,
Hollywood celebs,
and a hell of alot
more. 
 
The lies are endless
and become more
outrageous 
every damn day.

We all know it.

Why then do some
so-called 'peace activists'
still daily send emails 
loaded with mainstream media 
lies?
 
CNN, NPR, AP,
MSNBC, CBS, BBC,
DW, Daily Mail, FOX,
Washington Post,
NYT,
all peddling bullshit.
 
Composed of course
by the CIA,
with a bit of a flair,
added by Hollywood.
 
You want to change 
the world?
 
Stop ingesting
and sharing
this corporate 
media garbage. 
 
Bruce

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Polish President Duda: 'Ukrainian missile hit us'

 


Polish President Andrzej Duda says there is “no evidence” that the projectile was fired by Russia

 

A missile that allegedly killed two people in Poland on Tuesday was most likely launched by Ukrainian air defense forces, Polish president, Andrzej Duda, has announced.

Russia’s defense ministry previously said its analysis of photos from the site showed that the projectile was from a S-300 air defense system used by Kiev.

Most likely, a missile made by Russia in the 1970s has fallen on Polish territory. We have no evidence that it was launched by Russia,” Duda told reporters.

There is a high probability that it was a Ukrainian air defense missile,” he added.

Duda said it was an “unfortunate accident” rather than a deliberate attack on Polish soil. He suggested that the missile had struck Poland when Ukrainian forces were trying to intercept Russian attacks.

 

Like this British rag, most of the western media jumped the gun on this story blaming Russia. Do you think they will issue an apology to Moscow? Likely not. Why would any self-respecting 'peacenik' believe these western corporate media outlets? But sadly many of them swallow every BS line these rags print.

 

The Russian Defense Ministry confirmed that it fired a barrage of missiles at Ukrainian command centers and energy infrastructure sites on Tuesday, but said the targets were no closer than 35km (21.7 miles) from the Ukrainian-Polish border.

The ministry also said, according to photos published by the media, the missile that hit Polish territory was from an S-300 air defense system used by Ukraine.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Warsaw would not call for urgent consultations under Article 4 of the NATO Treaty, which are reserved for concerns over individual members’ territorial integrity and sovereignty.

~ Reprinted in part from RT

 

Update: Ukrainian soldiers play role of happy Kherson residents for foreign media - See SouthFront

STRATCOM Admiral Richard: 'Ukraine is a Warm Up for Fighting China'

 


 

 Why the Head of America’s Nuclear Forces Just Warned of an Imminent ‘Very Long’ War


MilitaryWatch Magazine.com


The head of the U.S. Strategic Command [STRATCOM] Admiral Charles A. Richard has warned that a great power war “is coming,” claiming that the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian War in which U.S. personnel and equipment have played a central role is a “warm up.” The Department of Defence published the admiral’s remarks that were made at the Naval Submarine League’s 2022 Annual Symposium & Industry Update’s Awards Luncheon, where he stressed: “This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” Richard said. “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested in a long time.” Richard highlighted China specifically as the adversary of the next conflict, stating:

“We have to do some rapid, fundamental change in the way we approach the defence of this nation… As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking. It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they (China) are putting capability in the field faster than we are. As those curves keep going, it isn’t going to matter how good our (operating plan) is or how good our commanders are, or how good our horses are — we're not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem.”

Admiral Richard’s statement comes as the future of funding for the Strategic Command’s key assets remains uncertain, with its sole ICBM class in service the Minuteman III being by far the oldest and most obsolete in the world and potentially being retired without replacement to avoid the expense of doing so. The American bomber fleet, too, is seeing its two newer models the B-1B and B-2 retired in the near future with the former having already begun to be decommissioned due to extremely low availability rates, while their successor the B-21 faces delays and is considered unlikely to be supplied in the numbers currently hoped for. 

China’s armed forces overtook the United States in spending on defence acquisitions in 2020, and the country is fast modernising its strategic forces with a much more diverse and sophisticated ICBM arsenal, a range of new bomber classes, and a H-20 program to rival the B-21 which may well enter service first and could potentially outperform it.

 



China’s upcoming ballistic missile submarines, using magnetic drives among other revolutionary technologies, are expected to be by far the stealthiest in the world. China has also beaten the U.S. by several years to actively field missiles with hypersonic glide vehicles, which can be integrated across its nuclear triad. Thus the Strategic Command chief’s warning may well have been intended to highlight issues the American strategic arsenal is facing, its importance in a potential new conflict with China, and as a result the need for more funding. Overstating the urgency of a need for funding and potential imminence of war remains a practice far from uncommon in the U.S. military leadership.

Regarding how a new Sino-U.S. great power war could break out, Admiral Richard stated that a war in the Taiwan Strait as the likely cause. Although the United States and all other UN member states recognise Taiwan as part of China, the Chinese Civil War which technically remains ongoing means that the island 130km off the Chinese mainland is under a separate but unrecognised Western aligned authority claiming to rule China - the Republic of China (RoC). Both the RoC government in Taipei and the People’s Republic of China based in Beijing claim to be the sole rulers of the Chinese nation. 

Although the former has no recognition at the United Nations and a status comparable to a non-state actor, it has continued to receive significant quantities of military equipment and support from the Western world to sustain its separation. The Taiwan Strait thus remains a major hotspot, although the balance of power in the area has continued to very quickly shift to favour the Chinese mainland as the capabilities of RoC forces and nearby American assets have fast become more limited by comparison.

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Big money crimes

   


Did you ever wonder what happened to all those billions of tax dollars sent to Ukraine? Did you ever wonder why anyone was trusting the elites in Washington as they gave 'the most corrupt country in Europe' all that money? 
 
Today it turns out that these were the appropriate questions. 
 
Over $40 million$ of the tens of billions of dollars going to Ukraine were actually laundered back to the US to corrupt Democrats and their agents by using FTX cryptocurrency as the vehicle of exchange.
 
Now the money is gone and FTX is bankrupt.
 
We can only hope that Congress will have the guts to investigate and prosecute those involved in these illegal money laundering schemes.
 
FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried was the second biggest donor to the Democrats this past election cycle - just after George Soros. 

He screwed many of his investors.
 
 

 

France: Who is really our enemy?

 


 

 You are under contrôle: French elites privately fear the US and new research explains why Intelligence services worry about American economic warfare more than terrorism or the prospect of confrontation with Russia or China 

 

By Felix Livshitz (RT)

New research published by France’s Ecole de Guerre Economique has revealed some extraordinary findings about who and what the French intelligence services fear most when it comes to threats to the country’s economy.

The findings are based on extensive research and interviews with French intelligence experts, including representatives of spy agencies, and so reflect the positions and thinking of specialists in the under-researched field of economic warfare. Their collective view is very clear - 97 percent consider the US to be the foreign power that “most threatens” the “economic interests” of Paris.

Who is your true enemy?

The research was conducted to answer the question, “what will become of France in an increasingly exacerbated context of economic war?”. This query has become increasingly urgent for the EU as Western sanctions on Moscow’s exports, in particular energy, have had a catastrophic effect on European countries, but have not had the predicted effect Russia. Nor have they hurt the US, the country pushing most aggressively for these measures.

Yet, the question is not being asked in other EU capitals. It is precisely the continent-wide failure, or unwillingness at least, to consider the “negative repercussions on the daily lives” of European citizens that inspired the Ecole de Guerre Economique report.

As the report’s lead author Christian Harbulot explains, ever since the end of World War II, France has “lived in a state of the unspoken,” as have other European countries.

At the conclusion of that conflict, “manifest fear” among French elites of the Communist Party taking power in France “strongly incited a part of the political class to place our security in the hands of the US, in particular by calling for the establishment of permanent military bases in France.”

“It goes without saying that everything has its price. The compensation for this aid from across the Atlantic was to make us enter into a state of global dependence - monetary, financial, technological - with regard to the US,” Harbulot says. And aside from 1958 - 1965 when General Charles de Gaulle attempted to increase the autonomy of Paris from Washington and NATO, French leaders have “fallen into line.”

This acceptance means aside from rare public scandals such as the sale of French assets to US companies, or Australia canceling its purchase of French-made submarines in favor of a controversial deal with the US and UK (AUKUS), there is little recognition - let alone discussion - in the mainstream as to how Washington exerts a significant degree of control over France’s economy, and therefore politics.

As a result, politicians and the public alike struggle to identify “who their enemy” truly is. “In spheres of power” across Europe, Harbulot says, “it is customary to keep this kind of problem silent,” and economic warfare remains an “underground confrontation which precedes, accompanies and then takes over from classic military conflicts.”

This in turn means any debate about “hostility or harmfulness” in Europe’s relations with Washington misses the underlying point that “the US seeks to ensure its supremacy over the world, without displaying itself as a traditional empire.”

The EU might have a trade surplus of 150 billion euros with the US, but the latter would never willingly allow this economic advantage to translate to “strategic autonomy” from it. And this gain is achieved against the constant backdrop of - and more than offset by - “strong geopolitical and military pressure” from the US at all times.

 


 

I spy with my Five Eyes

Harbulot believes the “state of the unspoken” to be even more pronounced in Germany, as Berlin “seeks to establish a new form of supremacy within Europe” based on its dependency on the US.

As France “is not in a phase of power building but rather in a search to preserve its power” - a “very different” state of affairs - this should mean the French can more easily recognize and admit to toxic dependency on Washington, and see it as a problem that must be resolved.

It is certainly hard to imagine such an illuminating and honest report being produced by a Berlin-based academic institute, despite the country being the most badly affected by anti-Russian sanctions. Some analysts have spoken of a possible deindustrialization of Germany, as its inability to power energy-intensive economic sectors has destroyed its 30-year-long trade surplus - maybe forever.

But aside from France’s “dependency” on Washington being different to that of Germany, Paris has other reasons for cultivating a “culture of economic combat,” and keeping very close track of the “foreign interests” that are harming the country’s economy and companies.

A US National Security Agency spying order sent to other members of the Five Eyes global spying network - Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK - released by WikiLeaks, shows that since at least 2002 Washington has issued its English-speaking allies annual “information need” requests, seeking any and all information they can dig up on the economic activities of French companies, the economic and trade policies of France’s government, and the views of Paris on the yearly G8 and G20 summits.

Whatever is unearthed is shared with key US economic decision-makers and departments, including the Federal Reserve and Treasury, as well as intelligence agencies, such as the CIA. Another classified WikiLeaks release shows that the latter – between November 2011 and July 2012 – employed spies from across the Five Eyes (OREA) to infiltrate and monitor the campaigns of parties and candidates in France’s presidential election.

 



Washington was particularly worried about a Socialist Party victory, and so sought information on a variety of topics, “to prepare key US policymakers for the post-election French political landscape and the potential impact on US-France relations.” Of particular interest was “the presidential candidates' views on the French economy, what current economic policies…they see as not working, and what policies…they promote to help boost France's economic growth prospects[.]”

The CIA was also very interested in the “views and characterization” of the US on the part of presidential candidates, and any efforts by them and the parties they represented to “reach out to leaders of other countries,” including some of the states that form the Five Eyes network itself.

Naturally, those members would be unaware that their friends in Washington, and other Five Eyes capitals, would be spying on them while they spied on France.

It was clearly not for nothing that veteran US grand strategist and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once remarked, “to be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.”