Tag: perpetual war

Are North and South Korea escalating toward war?

A series of escalatory events on the Korean peninsula have intensified tensions between the two Koreas in recent weeks.

On October 13, Seoul and Pyongyang exchanged harsh verbal threats of military action over alleged drone incursions from South Korea into the northern capital. According to North Korea’s claim, the South Korean drone scattered anti-regime propaganda leaflets across Pyongyang.

Exactly who was behind the drone infiltrations remains unclear, but analysts have speculated that the South Korean military or South Korea-based anti-North activists could be involved.

The incident prompted Pyongyang to order its border troops to prepare for military retaliation if South Korean drones were to infiltrate again, threatening a “horrible disaster.” In turn, Seoul also put its frontline military on high alert, with a defense ministry statement that “if North Korea inflicts any harm on the safety of South Koreans, that day will be the end of the North Korean regime.”

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Biden’s ‘leadership’ is blowing the lid off two wars

President Joe Biden has called America “the world power,” and has referred to his “leadership in the world.” If Biden does indeed see himself as a, or the, world leader, then he has been disappointing in his job and has mismanaged it.

The world today stands on the brink of larger wars, even potentially world wars, on two fronts simultaneously. That is, perhaps, a more precarious position than the world has found itself in in over half a century, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and perhaps longer. Then, the danger came from a single front: today, there is danger on two or even three.

The Biden administration seemingly subscribes to a foreign policy doctrine of nurturing wars while attempting to manage them so that they remain confined to America’s foreign policy interests and do not spill over into wider wars. But such fine calibrations are not easily done. War is sloppy and unpredictable. Though a nation’s plans may be well understood by its planners, calibration of what might push the enemy too far and cause a wider war depends equally on your enemy’s plans, calibrations, passions and red lines: all of which are harder to profile or understand.

What is more, the contemporary culture of the U.S. foreign policy establishment seems dedicated precisely to excluding the kind of knowledge and empathy that allows one to understand an adversary’s mind, and instead to fostering ill-informed and hate-filled prejudice.

Calibrating how far you can push militarily or politically without tipping the balance of containment and triggering full-scale war is dangerously worse than tricky. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah badly miscalculated how far the calibrated strikes and responses with Israel could go before a controlled conflict became a larger war. The price of miscalculation was his life and a war in Lebanon.

Successive U.S. and European governments, and the NATO Secretariat, calculated that they could, through a series of steps, expand NATO into the former Soviet space without triggering a military response from Russia. The result of this miscalculation has been a war that has been disastrous for Ukraine and severely damaging for Western interests and that risks ending in either Western humiliation or direct war between Russia and the West.

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Journalists Find No Evidence of Israeli Claim That Hezbollah Money Stash Is Under Beirut Hospital

Journalists were given unrestricted access to the Sahel General Hospital in Beirut’s southern suburbs after the Israeli military claimed a Hezbollah money and gold stash was hidden in a bunker underneath the building.

A BBC journalist reporting from the hospital’s basement levels said the staff opened any doors and cabinets the reporters wanted to open. Journalists were also able to explore anywhere in the building on their own, and no evidence of a Hezbollah money stash was found.

Israel first made the claim in a video on Monday night, prompting the hospital to evacuate patients over fears they would be bombed. “We were here at the hospital working, treating patients, and then the video came out,” Dr. Omar Mneimne, who works at the hospital, told The National. “Obviously, we [have been] living in terror for the past 24 hours.”

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Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts

A former senior Israeli government official now working as Meta’s Israel policy chief personally pushed for the censorship of Instagram accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine — a group that has played a leading role in organizing campus protests against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

Internal policy discussions reviewed by The Intercept show Jordana Cutler, Meta’s Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief, used the company’s content escalation channels to flag for review at least four SJP posts, as well as other content expressing stances contrary to Israel’s foreign policy. When flagging SJP posts, Cutler repeatedly invoked Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which bars users from freely discussing a secret list of thousands of blacklisted entities. The Dangerous Organizations policy restricts “glorification” of those on the blacklist, but is supposed to allow for “social and political discourse” and “commentary.” 

It’s unclear if Cutler’s attempts to use Meta’s internal censorship system were successful; the company declined to say what ultimately happened to posts that Cutler flagged. It’s not Cutler’s decision whether flagged content is ultimately censored; another team is responsible for moderation decisions. But experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed alarm over a senior employee tasked with representing the interests of any government advocating for restricting user content that runs contrary to those interests.

“It screams bias,” said Marwa Fatafta a policy adviser with the digital rights organization Access Now, which consults with Meta on content moderation issues. “It doesn’t really require that much intelligence to conclude what this person is up to.”

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US authorizes CIA mercenaries to run biometric concentration camps in Gaza Strip

The Biden administration has approved the deployment of 1,000 CIA-trained private mercenaries as part of a joint U.S.-Israeli plan to turn Gaza’s apocalyptic rubblescape into a high-tech dystopia.

Starting with Al-Atatra, a village in the northwestern Gaza Strip, the plan calls to build what the Israeli daily Ynet calls “humanitarian bubbles” – turning the remains of villages and neighborhoods into tiny concentration camps cut off from their environs and surrounded and controlled by mercenaries.

This comes as Israel carries out daily massacres and ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, enacting the proposal known as The Generals’ Plan, originally crafted by former national security chief Giora Eiland to turn Gaza into “a place where no human being can exist.”

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Have We Ever Seen A Time When 4 Major Global Wars Are All Percolating Simultaneously?

We have reached a moment in history that none of us will forget.  We are literally standing on the precipice of the unthinkable, and most people don’t even realize it.  Of course horrific wars have a way of erupting when most people are not expecting them.  Hardly anyone expected a global war to erupt in 1914, but then tens of millions of precious souls died over the next four years.  Hardly anyone expected a global war to erupt in 1939, but then tens of millions of precious souls died over the next six years.  This time around, what is happening should be glaringly obvious to everyone.  Personally, I have been specifically warning about what is taking place right now for more than a decade.  If we do not change course, billions of precious souls could die during the nightmarish global wars that are rapidly approaching.

At this moment, most Americans have no idea that a war between the United States and China is coming.

Just a few days ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping boldly talked about “preparation for war” as he was dressed in military fatigues…

On Thursday Chinese Communist Dictator Xi Jinping commanded troops to strengthen their preparedness for war while visiting his People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force following last week’s drills of surrounding the sovereign country of Taiwan.

“Xi said the military should ‘comprehensively strengthen training and preparation for war, (and) ensure troops have solid combat capabilities,’ CCTV reported,” according to the AFP and reported on Barrons Saturday.

Why would China need to prepare for war?

Needless to say, nobody is planning to attack China.

The truth is that the only reason that China would need to prepare for war is if it was planning to invade Taiwan.

Because the moment that China invades Taiwan, the U.S. and China will be at war.

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Russian Forces Liberate Novosadovoye Settlement in Donetsk Region

The Zapad battlegroup also inflicted losses on three Ukrainian brigades in Novoyegorovka, Ternov, Torskoye and Krasny Liman and repelled a counterattack by the 14th mechanized brigade.

The Russian Zapad battlegroup has liberated another settlement in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reports.

“Units of the Zapad battlegroup, through active and decisive actions, have liberated the settlement of Novosadovoye in the Donetsk People’s Republic,” the MoD report stated.

The Zapad group also inflicted losses on personnel and equipment of three Ukrainian brigades in the areas of Novoyegorovka in the Kharkov region, Ternov, Torskoye and Krasny Liman in the DPR, and repelled a counterattack by an assault group of the 14th mechanized brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

“The enemy lost over 470 servicemen, three U.S.-made M113 armored personnel carriers, six vehicles, a Strela-10 anti-aircraft missile system, a 152mm D-20 howitzer, a 122mm Gvozdika self-propelled artillery unit, and a 122mm D-30 howitzer. Three field ammunition depots were destroyed,” the report added.

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About 51,000 Ukrainians Have Deserted Armed Forces This Year

The Ukrainian prosecutor’s office has opened 51,000 cases of desertion through the first nine months of 2024. The number of soldiers abandoning their posts is likely to double last year’s total. 

The Times of London reported data from the Ukrainian government showing that “51,000 criminal cases were initiated for desertion and abandonment of a military unit between January and September of this year.” El Pais previously noted that 45,000 Ukrainians were being prosecuted for desertion from the start of the year through August. Al-Jazeera says the number is at least 30,000 desertions. 

At the start of the year, Kiev was estimated to have between 500,000 and 800,000 active-duty soldiers and an additional 300,000 reservists. The Ukrainians have also sustained casualties fighting to defend from Russian advances and amid Kiev’s Kursk invasion. 

Kiev has struggled to fill its ranks with fresh soldiers, leading Ukraine to drop its conscription age from 27 to 25. As Kiev is still facing manpower shortages, American politicians are pushing Ukraine to drop draft age to 18. Ukraine has also resorted to allowing prisoners to leave jail if they join the military 

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The Ultimate Con of a Government “Rules-Based System”

The US puppet in Ukraine is feeling hot and sweaty.  Europe has lost interest, his UkroNats have lost patience, and Russia is plodding steadily to Kiev and Odessa.  The solution?  Zelensky wants “his” nukes back from Russia, and if he keeps this up, perhaps he will get them, pointy end first.

Meanwhile, the moral high ground always claimed by US government – whether in Ukraine or the Middle East or Taiwan or Central America or the flyover states – has collapsed like the I-40 in North Carolina.

The scam kings and consorts in Washington, DC have created a royal world of manners in which they live and function.  The presidency is Potemkin, and in our elections, as James Bovard explains, “voters merely have a cameo role to sanctify the nearly boundless power of officialdom.”

This world of manners is what we are all told is the “rule-based system” whereby the US serves as kindly globocop, who only occasionally takes a little kickback from the “protected” souls.  Like with the US soldiers in northern Syria, guarding Conoco oil extraction.  This is why when a US president ordered troops withdrawn from Syria, the permanent bureaucrats just patted him on the head. They always know better than the people.  They prefer a brain dead president, like Biden, and if not that, one with a head filled with a fluffy self righteousness and just a touch of fascism will do just fine.

As Americans, we have two problems.  First, we the people didn’t design these rules, didn’t agree to them, and frankly would never consent to them, if we knew how they worked.  That’s kind of a big problem.  Second, the power exerted by government “embeds” – the media kind, the business kind, the protective racket kind – is for lack of a better word, octopussified.  But unlike the James Bond thriller, the thieves and racketeers Mischka and Grischka operate out of DC.

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Freedom of Expression Under Attack Amid Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: UN Official

A newly released UN report raises the alarm about the risks of freedom of expression around the world as Israel carries out its effort to ethnically cleanse Gaza.

The report should come as no surprise to subscribers to The Trends Journal.

We have been reporting on the crackdown in the U.S. on college protesters and anyone who speaks out against the atrocities playing out in Gaza. There is only one position accepted in Washington and in the mainstream news, which could be summed up in the phrase: Israel has the right to defend itself.

But Israel’s rights have trumped individual freedoms across the world, Irene Khan, the UN’s special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, said in the report, which was, predictably, largely ignored in the media.

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