Tag: perpetual war

Futurist John Petersen: Cyclical economic analysis model predicts a potential GLOBAL CIVIL WAR starting this year

John Petersen, futurist and founder of The Arlington Institute, recently joined the “Health Ranger Report” with Mike Adams to talk about predictions and forecasts that could shape the next few years of global governance.

At the core of the discussion was a startling prediction by Martin Armstrong, known for his cyclical economic analysis model, Socrates. Armstrong forecasts that a global civil war could begin as early as 2025, driven by widespread dissatisfaction with government institutions.

According to Petersen, Armstrong’s prediction is based on a broad-based, planet-wide uprising of the people against government institutions. This shift in public opinion is characterized by a deep sense of betrayal from the governed, stemming from the perception that those in power have misused their authority and resources. This sentiment has already manifested in multiple examples around the world, including political upheavals in Germany, Canada, France and the United States. (Related: Historian warns four out of five major predictors for CIVIL WAR in the United States have already happened.)

The root of this discontent lies in the erosion of public trust. Events such as the handling of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, economic mismanagement and perceived betrayal of public trust have eroded faith in government institutions. This erosion is exacerbated by emerging technologies and the increasing transparency that exposes previously hidden secrets and unethical behaviors by governments and corporations.

“It all hinges on betrayal, that there’s this notion that builds itself up into the populace that says, ‘The government, you guys, we trusted you. We gave you our money, gave everything and you betrayed us.’ And that’s the broad base,” Petersen said.

Petersen and Adams envision a transition scenario that pivots on the role of emerging technologies and the decentralization of knowledge. This is where projects like the Arlington Institute’s TransitionNet come into play. Transition Net aims to create a global collaboration platform designed to harness the collective intelligence of millions of contributors in building a new, emergent model of governance and societal structure.

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Chinese Navy Reveals a Naval Artificial Intelligence “Dreadnaught” Moment

There have been “Revolutions in Military Affairs” (RMAs) over the ages.  RMAs are pivot points when something changes warfare dramatically.  In the naval arena, one of the most memorable RMAs was the introduction of the HMS Dreadnaught in 1906.

It was said, “Dreadnought made every other exist­ing battleship obsolete, and her name became generic for similar fast, modern vessels. All battleships laid down before her were pejoratively labeled “pre-dreadnought.”

The Chinese Navy (PLAN) has revealed a new vessel that may represent the modern, naval “Dreadnaught” moment.  The “Killer Whale” (or Orca), autonomous surface combat vessel has recently been shown in China, cruising on the river from its Guangzhou Shipyard.

This vessel is the largest military purpose USV built to date.  It is little coincidence that Guangzhou was the location of the shipyard.

Guangzhou is the Silicon Valley region of China, and the Orca is not just an autonomous warship, but a floating combat data center.

This vessel reflects significant data collection, data analysis, and AI-enabled autonomous actioning.

AI and Autonomy are trending topics, but the Orca is far ahead of any other AI-enabled, autonomous vessel publicly known to date.

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Israel, US, UK Launch New Airstrikes On Yemen Amid Efforts To ‘Hunt’ Houthi Leaders

On Friday Israel has launched new major strikes on Yemen, amid ongoing vows to ‘hunt’ down Houthi leaders and kill them.

A new Israeli military (IDF) statement said fighter jets struck “on the western coast and inland Yemen” in response to the day prior Houthis having launched three drones at Israel. It also follows a Pentagon-ordered air raid on Yemen earlier this week. The fresh strikes further targeted the port city of Hodeida, Ras Isa Port, Sanaa, as well as North Western Amran province – and reportedly had participation from the US and UK.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday that the latest air assault means Houthis will continue to pay a price for attacking Israel. 

He said that twenty Israeli Air Force jets participated in the new strikes against the Houthis, which followed on the heels of another new US-led coalition assault.

Times of Israel has noted that “The Houthis confirmed the strikes and said they occurred while people were rallying in Sanaa in support of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Last month Netanyahu called out Iran for its support to the Houthis, warning that “whoever sponsors the Houthi terror in Hodeida or Sana’a will pay the full price.” 

Washington has for years documented Tehran’s support to the group, which has included advanced missiles and drone technology. This has allowed the threat out of Yemen to grow significantly.

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Getting Russia Right 

Thirty years ago, March 1994, E. Wayne Merry, a career Foreign Service officer, filed a dissent cable that remained firmly under wraps until last month, when the estimable National Security Archive at George Washington University published it on its website. Many are now comparing Merry’s cable to George F. Kennan’s Long Telegram in its scope and prescience. Merry tells me he finds such comparisons embarrassing—but they are, in my view, both unavoidable and well earned.

One big difference of course is that people in positions of influence listened (at first, anyway) to Kennan, but dismissed Merry—and with predictably disastrous results for the U.S.-Russia relationship. The Harvard-inspired economic policies that fell under the rubric of “shock therapy” (which sought to turn what had been a planned, socialist economy for the preceding 70 years into a free market system on Anglo-American lines overnight) contributed to the largest demographic and economic collapse of a modern industrialized country ever recorded in peacetime. Russian economists and scholars compared the economic and social consequences of the American-imposed austerity program on Russia to that which might have been expected from a “medium level nuclear attack.”

Merry, who served as chief political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow 1990–1994, saw what so many within the Washington political establishment chose not to see, that the imposition of the set of foreign economic doctrines on Russia was destroying the lives of ordinary  people—as well as transforming U.S.–Russia relations for the worse. 

The story of Washington’s malfeasance toward Russia in the 1990s is not new. The Nobel winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted the folly of Washington’s meddling in the post-Soviet space in The Russia Question (1994); the Soviet dissident Andrei Sinyavsky castigated Russia’s Westernizers in The Russian Intelligentsia (1997); here at home, famed Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen railed against the incompetence of Clinton administration and the myopia of both the scholarly community and the media in Failed Crusade (2000).

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What Is the Russo–Ukrainian War About?

Peace was once the objective of American statesmen. Today, however, virtually everyone in Washington seems to favor war. So it is with the Russo–Ukrainian conflict. Donald Trump’s desire to end the fighting has caused barely suppressed horror. 

Unfortunately, if, as rumored, he hopes to achieve peace by threatening Russia with a massive increase in aid to Kiev, his effort is bound to fail. More support won’t remedy Ukraine’s greatest weakness: manpower. More money would, however, betray his supporters who believed they were voting for America First, not Kiev über alles.

The case for peace is clear. The U.S. risks its proxy war against Russia going hot, while pushing the latter into ever closer relationships with China, Iran, and North Korea. Moreover, Washington is heading toward insolvency, spending nearly trillion dollars annually to finance its rapidly escalating debt. All the while, Ukraine is being destroyed.

How does the Washington “Blob” justify Uncle Sam’s latest endless war? With a series of unconvincing and inconsistent arguments. 

Allowing Russia to prevail will undermine the “rules-based international order.” That order is a pious fraud, promoted by states that concocted rules for their benefit and break them when convenient. Indeed, the first Trump administration was infamous for using human rights as a weapon against adversaries while coddling more repressive friends. American policymakers should ask whether the order can survive the West’s multiple violations.

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The EU’s Need For Cheap Ukrainian Labor Imperils Ukraine’s Post-War Reconstruction

Forthcoming developments might lead to Germany and/or Poland, where over two million of them collectively reside, either encouraging their return or incentivizing them to stay.

Zelensky has finally begun to think about his country’s post-war reconstruction plans as suggested by what he said late last week with regard to the need for Ukrainian refugees to return once the conflict ends. The challenge though is that he also accused unnamed EU countries of exploiting his citizens as cheap labor, and if they allow them to remain there, then Ukraine will struggle to rebuild. Here are his exact words, which will then be analyzed in the larger context of this conflict’s rapidly evolving dynamics:

“Let’s be honest: There are many Ukrainians abroad. In some countries, they have been seen as a cheap labor force. And now, they realize Ukrainians are often more skilled than their own citizens. I say: ‘Look, give me a bit more air defense, and I’ll tell everyone to come back immediately. And they reply, ‘No, let those who work here stay, but the rest should return.”

For starters, the immediate context concerns the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ desertion rate, which the Associated Press estimated to be more than 100,000 since February 2022. Zelensky also acknowledged this problem late last week but downplayed it at the same time. Nevertheless, it’s clear that his generals must urgently replenish these losses as well as those from the battlefield, ergo the latest report from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) about how they might soon drop the draft age to 18.

These immediate military imperatives can be exploited by the EU as the humanitarian pretext for not deporting Ukrainian refugees in order to keep them in the bloc so that they can either remain as cheap labor or soon become it. Accordingly, it’s unlikely that any of them will make any serious moves to repatriate them so long as the conflict continues, but it’s also possible that it might end later this year. That’s because Trump campaigned on doing so and Zelensky just suggested that he thinks it’s possible.

Speculation about the timeframe and terms aside, the latter of which could include some of the two dozen compromises that were recently proposed at the end of this analysis here, the end of the conflict could then instantly lead to more grassroots pressure upon EU governments to encourage those refugees to return. The two countries where this might soon become a pressing issue are Germany and Poland, which have around 1.2 million and 988,000 Ukrainian refugees respectively.

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Israel must prepare for potential war with Turkey, Nagel Committee warns

Israel must prepare for a direct confrontation with Turkey, according to the Nagel Committee’s latest report on the defense budget and security strategy.

The committee, established by the government, warns that Turkey’s ambitions to restore its Ottoman-era influence could lead to heightened tensions with Israel, possibly escalating into conflict.

The report highlights the risk of Syrian factions aligning with Turkey, creating a new and potent threat to Israel’s security.

“The threat from Syria could evolve into something even more dangerous than the Iranian threat,” the report states, warning that Turkish-backed forces might act as proxies, fueling regional instability.

The committee’s assessment comes amid Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly assertive policies in the region, which some analysts view as antagonistic to Israel’s interests.

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Current year US military is hilarious

So, the US lit off a Minuteman-3 recently. This system, with origins in the 1950s, is the land-based part of the US nuclear deterrence triad. The test didn’t go well; it blew up right after launch, probably from rotten capacitors. The google machine tells me this isn’t an isolated incident; the last time we tried lighting one off, the same thing happened. We do have a sea based ballistic missile deterrent in the Trident-2. The US hasn’t had any problems with them yet. The British have, and they draw from a shared pool with the US. The other arm of the triad is the B-2 and B-52; the B-2 can’t fly when it’s raining, and the latter dates from 1952. There are plenty of nuclear tipped cruise missiles; fortunately most of those were designed in the 70s and 80s when America still mostly had its shit together.

Unfortunately none of the American cruise missiles are particularly long range or stealthy (there was a stealthy one, retired),  all are subsonic, and they have shorter ranges than the Russian gizmos, which also come in supersonic and hypersonic varieties. Rooskies also have newer generations of ballistic missiles, and are really good at shooting down cruise missiles, so there’s that. Supposedly they also have nuclear tidal wave torpedoes capable of wiping out US coastal areas in radioactive sea water, SLAM hypersonic nuclear  ramjet cruise missiles and who knows what else. Pretty obvious who wins a nuclear war scenario: it won’t be the US. I mean, nobody wins a nuclear war, but the days of US supremacy or even basic competence with maintaining nuclear forces are long over.

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The IDF Will Plan For Total Defeat Of Hamas In Gaza If Hostages are Not Released By Trump Inauguration

Israel’s Defense Minister Yisrael Katz instructed the IDF to bring him a plan for the complete defeat of Hamas in Gaza as soon as possible:

“I have instructed the IDF to present me with a plan for the total obliteration of Hamas in Gaza, should they fail to release the hostages by the time President Trump assumes office.”

The Defense Minister emphasized that it is unacceptable to be dragged into a war of attrition against Hamas in Gaza, while the hostages remain in the tunnels, putting their lives at risk and suffering severely.

Katz asked the IDF to indicate what points might make it difficult to implement the plan, including humanitarian issues and other issues, and to leave it to the political echelon to make the necessary decisions.

On another note, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump declared there will be ‘Hell to pay’ if the hostages are not released by the time he assumes office in 10 days.

What does that mean? U.S. involvement in the conflict?

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Media Downplay Israeli Violations of Hezbollah Ceasefire

Israel and Hezbollah signed a ceasefire agreement at the end of November that required both sides to refrain from attacks on each other. The terms also included a mutual pullback from southern Lebanon after 60 days.

Despite the deal, Israel has subsequently launched repeated strikes on Lebanon against targets it claimed were Hezbollah, killing hundreds of Lebanese civilians. The violations began immediately, with Israel attacking journalists and vehicles mere hours after the deal was signed.

Within a week of signing the deal, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) reported that Israel had violated the ceasefire around 100 times, killing 15 people. Shortly after these initial strikes, Hezbollah launched two strikes into the disputed border zone that it called an “initial defensive and warning response” to Israel against continued ceasefire violations. These strikes did not kill or injure any Israelis. Despite this, Israel responded by continuing its ceasefire violations, killing more and more, bringing the post-ceasefire death toll to more than 30.

Despite the overwhelming number of Israeli attacks in the post-ceasefire period, news audiences have heard that a “tense ceasefire holds” (AP, 12/1/24). Media repeatedly reported on these violations as both sides “trading” or “exchanging” fire (New York Times, 12/2/24; AP, 12/3/24; NBC, 12/3/24; Semafor, 12/4/24; Financial Times, 12/3/24; Wall Street Journal, 12/3/24). While technically accurate, such reporting frames both sides as equally culpable in violating the ceasefire, allowing media to avoid acknowledging that Israel that Israel is by far the primary and more consistent violator.

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