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The Institutionalization of the New Cold War

The 31 countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are taking their victory laps over the latest expansion of the political-military alliance.  The boastful communique for last week’s NATO summit in Lithuania had more than 60 references to nuclear weapons, and promised modernization for NATO’s nuclear powers: the United States, Britain, and France.  There is increased likelihood for the pre-positioning of advanced military weaponry, particularly artillery and air defense systems.  The Baltic Sea will become Lake NATO.

When the NATO countries halt their celebration, it will be time to plan for the next Cold War, which will be far worse than the Cold War that dominated the 1950s and 1960s.  Cold War 2.0 will be more expensive than its predecessor, and far more difficult to bring to a close. The excessive military spending will complicate far more urgent tasks dealing with the climate crisis and the next pandemic, which will eventually occur.  Finally, arms control and disarmament, which was the primary process for pursuing an end to the earlier Cold War, will be more difficult to orchestrate.

The first Cold War was relatively easy for the United States to manage.  The twelve founding members of NATO were compatible in terms of policies and processes; and the perception of the threat was shared.  In Cold War 2.0, the United States will not be as dominant; the alliance will be divided between the western and eastern members of the alliance; and the perception of the threat will vary due to domestic politics and geographic proximity to Russia.  The current difficulties and debates over Ukraine membership; future relations with Russia; and appropriate levels of defense spending are already creating tensions within the alliance.

U.S. supporters of NATO expansion have provided a series of fatuous arguments to defend their position.  The New York Times has trumpeted that “Ukraine has become a testing ground for state-of-the art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that…could shape warfare for generations to come.”  The military-industrial complex couldn’t have written this justification more succinctly.  Right-wing ideologues, such as the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen, boast that “lessons learned on the Ukrainian battlefield could be used to help Taiwan,” which ignores the differences between an amphibious assault in Taiwan vs. the war of attrition in Ukraine.

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Tough on crime Republican busted for having fraudulent license plate on sports car

New York City Council member Vickie Paladino has been outspoken against unregistered vehicles, the need for bicycle license plates and other city requirements, making her knows as a stickler for “law and order.” But according to a report from StreetsBlog NYC, a luxury sports car parked in the Republican’s driveway bears an Arizona temporary license plate that the Arizona Department of Transportation has deemed a fraud.

“The 90-day paper tag — the kind that drivers get when buying a car — lists the same plate number as a real temporary tag that was issued in September 2022, according to Arizona DOT spokesman Bill Lamoreaux. But that real tag expired in December, meaning the one in Paladino’s driveway, which lists an August expiration date, is ‘fraudulent,’ Lamoreaux said,” StreetsBlog reported.

“Paladino said the car belongs to her son, Thomas Paladino Jr., but did not otherwise respond to a request to comment.”

Paladino Jr. denied knowledge of the fraudulent tag.

“I don’t know anything about a fraudulent temporary license plate,” he told StreetsBlog. “I have more than one car, all of which are properly licensed.”

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Feds fight Nxivm sex cult leader Keith Raniere’s bid at new trial on claims FBI planted child porn on his computer

Federal prosecutors slammed convicted Nxivm sex cult leader Keith Raniere’s bid for a new trial — denouncing his claim that he has “newly discovered evidence” that proves the FBI planted evidence on his computer.

In a response filed Friday in Brooklyn federal court, prosecutors wrote that Raniere’s third attempt at securing a new trial — like his first two — was “entirely without merit,” adding that the motion should be denied as “untimely, unfounded, legally unsupported, and contrary to the evidence adduced at trial.”

When the 62-year-old sicko — who is serving a 120-year sex trafficking sentence — filed for a new trial in May 2022, he claimed he had unearthed evidence showing the government “manufactured child pornography and planted it on a computer hard drive to tie it to him,” according to court papers.

Raniere’s lawyers also said the feds “falsified, fabricated, and manipulated all the key evidence it used” to convict him of child exploitation and child porn.

Prosecutors, in the Friday filing, detailed the evidence the FBI found in Raniere’s Halfmoon, NY, residence — including nude photos of his first sex slave, Camila, who was around 15 years-old at the time.

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Environmentalists ‘Ignore the Winter’ While ‘Hyping Up’ Summers to Maintain Climate Narrative, Expert Claims

The ongoing narrative presenting the current hot temperatures across the world as something alarming is ludicrous, according to Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of the national nonprofit advocacy group Power the Future, who insists that environmental activists are hyping up heat events.

Earlier this month, Christopher Hewitt, director of climate services at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), said the world is in “unchartered territory” as the organization reported “record-breaking temperatures.” However, in a July 19 interview with Joshua Philipp on EpochTV’s “Crossroads,” Mr. Turner called such claims “laughable.”

Mr. Turner’s organization advocates in Washington for American energy jobs. He pointed out that very long ago, when the Sahara desert was an ocean, the world’s average temperature was about 30 degrees hotter than it currently is.

“There were no humans that caused that. It was just the natural earth cycle,” he said. “So the environmentalists are all up in arms that we’re 1.2 to 1.8 degrees Celsius warmer than we were 150 years ago. And that’s really kind of a negligible number when you look at the billions of years that the Earth has been around.”

The Earth saw its “coolest June in the last 30-some-odd years,” according to Mr. Turner. However, this fact “barely made the news cycle because it wasn’t a fun, sexy story. So they just kind of ignored it.”

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Liberal Suburbs Have Their Own Border Wall

The New York City suburb of Scarsdale, located in Westchester County, New York, is one of the country’s wealthiest communities, and its residents are reliably liberal. In 2020, three-quarters of Scarsdale voters cast ballots for Joe Biden over Donald Trump. One can safely presume that few Scarsdale residents are ardent backers of Trump’s wall on the Mexican border. But many of them support a less visible kind of wall, erected by zoning regulations that ban multifamily housing and keep non-wealthy people, many of them people of color, out of their community.

Across the country, a lot of good white liberals, people who purchase copies of White Fragility and decry the U.S. Supreme Court for ending affirmative action, sleep every night in exclusive suburbs that socially engineer economic (and thereby racial) segregation by government edict. The huge inequalities between upscale municipalities and their poorer neighbors didn’t just happen; they are in large measure the product of laws that are hard to square with the inclusive In This House, We Believe signs on lawns in many highly educated, deep-blue suburbs.

In a new report for The Century Foundation, I contrast Scarsdale with another Westchester County suburb, Port Chester, which is just eight miles away but has remarkably different demographics. Scarsdale’s median household income, in excess of $250,000, is nearly three times that of Port Chester, as is the portion of residents with a college degree. And whereas three-quarters of Port Chester’s elementary students qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school, zero percent of Scarsdale’s students do. In Scarsdale, 87 percent of residents are non-Hispanic white or Asian American, whereas 69 percent of Port Chester residents are Black or Hispanic.

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The Distorted Story of Florida’s African American History Curriculum

“‘Do not, for the love of God, tell kids that slavery was beneficial’”

Um, what? According to the Florida Phoenix, Ron DeSantis’s Board of Education wants to teach that slavery was good! I saw this insanity posted on Facebook by an acquaintance, who called it proof that Ron DeSantis was a “racist fascist.” It was just the first in a stream of articles, posts, and tweets grabbing my attention that claimed Florida plans to horribly distort black history.

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And the headlines were lies.

It didn’t stop with the media. This blatant falsehood was passed along by political leaders like Vice President Kamala Harris, who tweeted this to her 14 million followers…

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Zelensky Blames Failing Counteroffensive On Lack Of Munitions From West, Delayed Training

Despite the row at this month’s NATO summit in Vilnius caused by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s angry tweet, for which he was accused by Western powers (especially the US and UK) of showing ‘ingratitude’, the Ukrainian leader is once again lashing out at his backers. This time, he’s blaming the failing counteroffensive on lack of munitions and delayed training from the West.

“We did have plans to start it in spring. But we didn’t, because, frankly, we had not enough munitions and armaments and not enough brigades properly trained in these weapons,” Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria via a translator in an interview which aired Sunday.

He also complained about training programs set up for Ukrainians to operate advanced systems, which are being sponsored and hosted in European countries under NATO guidance. Kiev has long pressed for a more expedited timeline on receiving US F-16 jets as well, but training has been “delayed” for this as well, set to begin next month.

“Still, more” – he continued of the problem – “that the training missions were held outside Ukraine. But, still, we started. And this is important.” Zelensky said these factors have been key to the stalled counteroffensive, especially that Ukraine’s forces are blowing through munitions at a very high pace to keep up with superior Russian fire.

“And because we started it a bit later on, it can be said, and it will be shared truth understood by all the experts that it provided Russia with time to mine all our lands and build several lines of defense. And, definitely, they had even more time than they needed,” he explained.

“Because of that, they built more of those lines. And, really, they had a lot of mines in our fields. Because of that, a slower pace of our counteroffensive actions,” Zelensky added. “We didn’t want to lose our people, our personnel. And our servicemen didn’t want to lose equipment because of that.”

Very early in the counteroffensive in June, he had acknowledged a “slower than expected” advance. And in recent days and weeks, US mainstream media has increasingly featured pessimistic headlines for the first time in the conflict, suggesting the counter offensive is doomed, especially the longer it drags on without delivering a significant punch to Russian front lines.

Zelensky continued in his remarks to CNN, “Yes, I do understand that it’s always better to see victory come sooner. This is what we also want. But the question is the price … of this victory. So, let us not throw people under tanks literally. Let us plan our counteroffensive as our analysts, our intelligence suggests. And some of our residential areas have been liberated already. So, I do believe in our victory.”

The consistent messaging from Kiev forces has been that Western aid is always insufficient – no matter the tens of billions poured in…

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Declassified CIA Files Form Bizarre Link Between JFK Assassination and UFOs

“You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to think it’s suspicious.”

Newly declassified U.S. government files from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are leading some to form a bizarre link between the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and flying saucers. The extraordinary connection comes after President Joe Biden recently cleared formerly top-secret documents to “provide a fuller understanding” of JFK’s murder.

The assassination has been pored over for decades, but one document has revealed the previously redacted name of a CIA official, Reuben Efron, who intercepted Lee Harvey Oswald’s mail in the months before the tragic shooting on Nov. 22, 1963.

However, Efron is named in another file, dated Oct. 15, 1955, which details a bizarre sighting of “flying saucers” while on a train trip through the Soviet Union. The official CIA document says the “reported sighting of unusual aircraft in USSR” was made by “three reliable US observers.”

The excerpt from a cable received from the U.S. Air Force reveals these individuals as Efron, Senator Richard Russell, and a Lt. Col. E. U. Hathaway. Senator Russell would later sit on the Warren Commission, which was tasked with investigating the JFK assassination.

The description of the incident in the “Trancaucasus Region” details “two mound and circular unconventional aircraft resembling flying discs or flying saucers were seen taking off almost vertically one minute apart.”

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