Tag: perpetual war

Shocking Investigation Finds Widespread Uranium Contamination in US Water Supply

A new investigation looks into the extent to which U.S. water supplies are contaminated with uranium.

Maybe it’s the good kind of uranium that turns you into Spider-Man or the Incredible Hulk and not the bad kind of uranium that turns you into Thyroid Cancer Man – one of the lesser-known Marvel superheroes.

ProPublica has come out with an investigation entitled “The Cold War Legacy Lurking in U.S. Groundwater.” After World War II, the Cold War started between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. because the rich needed to stop the damn Communists from pushing their furry hats on everyone! There was a feverish need to build loads of nuclear weapons. To do that, the U.S. needed uranium, and its ruling class didn’t care how they got it.

More than 50 uranium mines popped up across the Western U.S. But they didn’t just turn our weapons radioactive. They also “dumped radioactive and toxic waste into rivers like the Cheyenne in South Dakota and the Animas in Colorado. … Some of the more than 250 million tons of toxic and radioactive detritus… scattered into nearby communities, some spilled into streams and some leaked into aquifers.”

Luckily for the U.S. government at the time, most of the people having their lives destroyed by radioactive detritus were either Native Americans, poor, or both. And as we know well, none of those groups matter to the ruling class – not then and not now. They don’t care about anybody who doesn’t have enough money to have, at minimum, one backup tax haven for when their first tax haven floods due to climate change.

Providing clean water is the most basic responsibility of a government. The U.S. government – the richest in the world – can’t do that, which puts this country at the level of a failed state.

And this is nothing new. The U.S. government – which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America – has a long history of polluting its own people’s drinking water.

Of course, everyone knows about the lead-tainted water of Flint, Michigan. But did you know that in 2016, excessive lead levels were found in almost 2,000 water systems across all 50 states?

This year, shocking levels of lead were found in Chicago’s tap water. But of course, it goes far beyond lead.

Also this year, as reported by ABC News, “A lawsuit alleged the Navy ‘harbored toxic secrets’ after jet fuel leaked from a storage facility in Red Hill, Hawaii operated by the Navy, contaminating locals’ drinking water and sickening hundreds of families.”

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New House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul Is a Standard Old-School Interventionist

For those who hoped the new Republican-led and Trump-approved House of Representatives under Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) might promote some of the better aspects of MAGA-ism, such as a foreign policy that recognized the mistakes of the past three decades, and charter a less bellicose and controlling path for the U.S. abroad, the ascension of Rep. Michael McCaul (R–Texas) to chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee should be unpleasant cold water.

While the Trumpian strain in the GOP is supposed to favor a radical rethink of the U.S. mission to find and combat foreign adversaries with every sort of intervention, involvement, and pressure even if short of direct troop deployment, McCaul retains an older sense of an abiding American mission to shape the world to our desires and “interests.”

McCaul:

• is an enthusiastic supporter of U.S. military aid to Ukraine and helping ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian leaders face war crimes tribunals;

• is fighting to raise the political costs of ending foreign interventions by an attack investigation on President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal (which was following through on Trump’s intentions) and insists the U.S. must even now “hold the Taliban accountable for their appalling actions”;

• wants to make sure the U.S. is optimally aggressive in supporting Taiwan against China, including “strategic, long-term security assistance well in advance of conflict in order to effectively deter, and, when necessary, to respond to, acts of aggression”;

• wants more U.S. pressure on Nicaragua;

• is angry that Biden “has backed away from the goal of North Korea’s complete denuclearization [and] failed to make the security commitments to the Indo-Pacific that its own National Defense Strategy demands”;

• demands “immediate action to combat and deter the proliferation of Iran’s conventional and non-conventional weapons, including through the use of sanctions and enforcement of U.S. export controls”;

• legislates to ensure the U.S. keeps an eye on foreign lands’ “freedom of expression…with respect to electronic information”;

• and had been a loud voice in opposition to former President Donald Trump’s plans to lessen U.S. presence in Syria.

While McCaul thankfully isn’t making open calls to immediately send in the troops to solve all the world’s problems, he is a largely pre-Trump Republican when it comes to foreign policy, eagerly demanding to keep U.S. money, arms, and pressure at play in as many foreign fields as he can survey.

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Unprovoked!

In an interview with the Useful Idiots podcast not too long ago, Noam Chomsky repeated his argument that the only reason we hear the word “unprovoked” every time anyone mentions Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the mainstream news media is because it absolutely was provoked, and they know it.

“Right now, if you’re a respectable writer and you want to write in the main journals, you talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you have to call it ‘the unprovoked’ Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Chomsky said.

“It’s a very interesting phrase; it was never used before. You look back, you look at Iraq, which was totally unprovoked, nobody ever called it ‘the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.’ In fact, I don’t know if the term was ever used — if it was it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.”

“Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked,” Chomsky said. “That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked. Top U.S. diplomats have been talking about this for 30 years, even the head of the C.I.A.”

Chomsky is of course correct here. The imperial media and their brainwashed automatons have spent many months mindlessly bleating the word “unprovoked” in relation to this war, but one question none of them ever have a straight answer for is this: if the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, how come so many Western experts spent years warning that the actions of Western governments would provoke an invasion of Ukraine?

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Death From Above: Drones Are Changing the Landscape of War

On the third floor of an abandoned factory in Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, 39-year-old “Rem” struggles to light a cigarette while holding the remote control of his Chinese-made drone. He swears. Several feet behind him, clad in a bulletproof vest and helmet, a soldier known as “Duke” is surveying a map of the eastern approach to the city on his tablet. A dozen Russian positions have been marked with red crosses, bearing such evocative names as “mattress,” “putin,” and “machine gun.”

The ping of a notification coming from Duke’s phone finally breaks the silence. “Fire,” says Duke in Ukrainian, staring intently at the screen of his tablet. A loud bang rattles the walls and windows, followed by a whizzing sound rapidly rising above the building, getting fainter, and then stopping. A couple of seconds later, the live feed from the drone’s camera shows the shell landing right on a Russian position. “That’s perfect,” exclaims Rem, also in Ukrainian. “Exactly where we needed it.” The two men rejoice. Thanks to their store-bought DJI Matrice drone, the accurate fire from a Polish-made Krab self-propelled howitzer has silenced a Russian automatic grenade launcher.

Both from the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro, Rem and Duke have been serving in the Skala intelligence battalion since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Created and led by Iurii Skala, a veteran of the Donbas war, this battalion is made up of mostly inexperienced volunteers like Rem, who was a car dealer prior to the invasion. 

For three weeks, he and Duke have been surveying enemy movements and directing artillery fire from their position, somewhere in the center of Bakhmut. This small salt-mining town of roughly 70,000 inhabitants has been devastated by months of shelling and gruesome trench warfare that has prompted comparisons to the First World War and the battles of Verdun or Passchendaele. But even as exhausted soldiers shoot at the enemy from mud-filled trenches and men perish by the dozens every day from unending artillery fire, the ever-growing use of drones has revolutionized the nature of the fighting in Bakhmut — and in Ukraine at large.

In the basement of a residential building located a few blocks from their position, a portly officer is bent over a table, listening intently to a walkie-talkie. Facing him is a flat screen television that transmits live footage from a drone circling above the city. The air is thick with anticipation. When word of a successful strike finally comes through, the officer triumphantly throws his fist in the air before slumping back in his chair. “Now we can move easily,” he says, grinning. Guided by one of the Skala battalion’s drones, artillery fire has silenced a Russian position.

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A Secret War in the Making: Americans Should Not Die to Defend Taiwan

The United States might be a democracy in form, but most policies are developed without even a semblance of public participation. For instance, policymakers overwhelmingly believe that the US should go to war with the People’s Republic of China if it attacks Taiwan. President Biden has five times declared that he would back Taiwan militarily. Yet Congress has not voted.

Those predicting conflict believe the hour is late, but some imagine that a tough stance would preclude war. America’s president merely needs to wave his pinky finger, or state his demands, and Chinese Communist Party officials would run screaming back to the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai, never to be heard from again. General Secretary Xi Jinping is, however, made of sterner stuff, buttressed by the People’s Liberation Army, which is rapidly expanding to prevent Washington from treating the Asia-Pacific as coastal American waters.

Even so, many Blob members assume that if Beijing were foolish enough to fight, it would (of course) be defeated. Not so. Any war over Taiwan would be won on the seas, and the PRC is much closer and can more easily reinforce its forces. Breaking a naval blockade would be difficult and would invite full-scale conflict. Beijing now possesses a larger (based on numbers, not tonnage) navy than America. And China is able to concentrate its forces in the Asia-Pacific. Reported the Congressional Research Service: “China’s navy is a formidable military force within China’s near-seas region, and it is conducting a growing number of operations in the broader waters of the Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and waters around Europe.”

Geography is a major problem: Taiwan is barely 100 miles off China’s shore, roughly the same distance as Cuba from America. The PRC could rely on two score mainland military bases and enjoy air superiority over the island. Beijing’s strategy would be anti-access/area denial, using submarines and missiles, especially, to keep the US Navy afar.

Washington would have to rely on allied bases, most notably Japan (Okinawa), the Philippines, and South Korea. However, none of America’s friends want to end up as targets of Chinese missiles. The Republic of Korea, confronting a dangerous North Korea, is least-likely to back the US in a war against the PRC. The Philippines is a semi-failed state; a former defense secretary once opined that his nation had “a navy that can’t go out to sea and an air force that cannot fly.”

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Ukraine Arms Trafficking: The Waltz of Bloody Clowns

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Through an unprecedented outpouring of solidarity (especially with regard to the management of the health crisis), Europe has sent massive arms to Ukraine. Weapons that will undoubtedly end up killing Pierre, Jacques, Anne, even you or me.

This is the boomerang effect already seen through the ridiculous imposition of “sanctions trains”: before releasing 100 million euros to equip the Ukrainian armed forces, it is hard to believe that French President Emmanuel Macron did not understand the risk that its weapons will be used to equip entities that do not care about France’s interests in protecting its own population. (1)

Since last March, the NATO and G7 countries have been massively feeding President Zelensky and his clique with weapons of all kinds. (2)

The hunger of Kiev’s bloody clown is never satisfied, however.

In doing so, many of these weapons also end up in the hands of various terrorist groups around the world, including in Africa, fueling political instability there. (3)

The director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, indicated that Ukraine spends “the staggering amount of six billion dollars each month” on the war, this sum being provided to Zelensky by his Western ‘partners.’ (4)

These are hundreds of thousands of pistols, assault rifles, submachine guns and grenades, and hundreds of millions of cartridges of various calibers exported to Ukraine over the past eight months. Even NATO-supported Kosovo Albanians have not benefited from such largess.

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Drone advances in Ukraine could bring dawn of killer robots

Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare.

The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers.

That would mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun. Ukraine already has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven. But there are no confirmed instances of a nation putting into combat robots that have killed entirely on their own.

Experts say it may be only a matter of time before either Russia or Ukraine, or both, deploy them.

“Many states are developing this technology,” said Zachary Kallenborn, a George Mason University weapons innovation analyst. ”Clearly, it’s not all that difficult.”

The sense of inevitability extends to activists, who have tried for years to ban killer drones but now believe they must settle for trying to restrict the weapons’ offensive use.

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China could claim the moon as its own territory and BAN US astronauts from touching down, NASA boss warns – as the two countries battle in new space race to land on the lunar surface again

A chief at NASA is raising red flags over China’s ambitions to get to the moon. 

In a new interview, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson says he and others within the scientific agency are growing increasingly concerned over what the country plans to do when they make it to the moon. 

Nelson believes China could attempt to corner the market on resource-rich locations on the moon’s surface and try to block out the U.S. and other countries looking to make it to the lunar object.

‘There is potentially mischief China can do on the moon,’ said one other official monitoring the ‘space race.’ 

The concerns come less than one month after three Chinese astronauts returned from a six month trip in which they helped to build and open a new space station. 

In an interview with Politico, Nelson said he and others are concerned the Communist nation will attempt to claim territory over the moon upon their arrival.

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Thomas Massie: $100B for Ukraine Could Have Given an Extra $200M to Every Congressional District in U.S.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is blasting Republicans, Democrats, and President Joe Biden for their approving more than $100 billion in American taxpayer money for Ukraine this year.

As part of a year-end $1.7 trillion spending package, 18 Senate Republicans and nine House Republicans voted with Democrats to throw another $45 billion in taxpayer money at Ukraine — bringing the total amount of taxpayer money sent to Ukraine, authorized by Congress, to more than $110 billion.

Massie, in a Twitter post on Wednesday, noted that the more than $100 billion approved for Ukraine this year could have, instead, been spent on every United States congressional district.

“$100 billion to Ukraine. Let’s put that in perspective. That’s more than $200 million this year from each Congressional district,” Massie wrote. “What could your congressman have done for your district with $200 million? How long will the kids in your district be paying interest on this debt?”

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Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok’s Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

Accusations of Chinese tyranny are often based on demands from Beijing that Google and Facebook comply with their censorship orders as a condition for remaining in China. Reports over the years suggested that these firms typically comply: Google was building a censored search engine suited to Chinese demands; The New York Times has claimed Facebook developed a censorship app as its entrance requirement to the Chinese market, and Vox accused Apple of succumbing to Chinese censorship demands by banning an app from its store that had been used by protesters in Hong Kong demanding liberation from control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

But now the tables appeared to be turning when it comes to U.S. censorship demands and TikTok. Threats to ban or severely limit the Chinese-owned-and-controlled platform from the U.S. have been hovering over TikTok’s head through both the Trump and Biden years. The most common justification offered for the threat is that TikTok’s presence in the U.S. empowers China to propagandize Americans, a concern that escalated along with the platform’s massive explosion among Americans. Since early 2021, TikTok has been the most-downloaded app both worldwide and in the U.S. In August, Pew Research conducted a “survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17” and found that “TikTok has rocketed in popularity since its North American debut several years ago and now is a top social media platform for teens among the platforms covered in this survey.”

Concerns over China’s ability to manipulate U.S. public opinion were based on claims that China was banning content on TikTok that was contrary to Beijing’s interests. Western media outlets were specifically alleging that the Chinese government itself was censoring TikTok to ban any content that the CCP regarded as threatening to its national security and internal order. “TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong,” warned The Guardian in late 2019.

Rather than ban TikTok from the U.S., the U.S. Security State is now doing exactly that which China does to U.S. tech companies: namely, requiring that, as a condition to maintaining access to the American market, TikTok must now censor content that undermines what these agencies view as American national security interests. TikTok, desperate not to lose access to hundreds of millions of Americans, has been making a series of significant concessions to appease the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, the agencies most opposed to deals to allow TikTok to stay in the U.S.

Among those concessions is that TikTok is now outsourcing what the U.S. Government calls “content moderation” — a pleasant-sounding euphemism for political censorship — to groups controlled by the U.S. Government:

TikTok has already unveiled several measures aimed at appeasing the U.S. government, including an agreement for Oracle Corp to store the data of the app’s users in the United States and a United States Data Security (USDS) division to oversee data protection and content moderation decisions. It has spent $1.5 billion on hiring and reorganization costs to build up that unit, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Perhaps one might view as reasonable U.S. concerns that China can weaponize TikTok to propagandize Americans and destabilize the U.S. through its power to censor the platform. Note, however, that this is precisely the same concern that countries like China, Iran and Russia all invoke to justify censorship compliance as a condition for U.S. internet companies to remain active in their country. Those countries fear that American tech companies — whose close partnership with U.S. security agencies has long been well-documented — will be used to propagandize and destabilize their populations and countries exactly the way that the U.S. Security State is apparently concerned that China can do to the U.S. via TikTok.

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