Tag: perpetual war

China may be plotting moon takeover – NASA

China might be contemplating a “takeover” of the Moon as part of its military space program, NASA’s administrator Bill Nelson has told newspaper Bild.

In an interview published on Saturday, Nelson claimed that the United States is now involved in a new race to space, with China this time. He emphasized that in 2035 Beijing might finish construction of its own Moon station and start experiments a year later.

79-year-old Nelson claimed that we must be very concerned about China landing on the Moon and saying that it now belongs to the Peoples’ Republic and everyone else should stay out.

Claiming that China’s space program is a “military” space program, Nelson explained that the competition for the south pole of the moon is especially intense: potential water deposits there could be used in the future for rocket-fuel production.

When asked by Bild what military purposes could China be pursuing in space, Nelson claimed that Chinese astronauts are busy learning how to destroy other countries’ satellites.

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Biden Admin Gives $820 Million More in Military Aid to Ukraine, Including 2 Surface-to-Air Missile Systems

The Biden administration announced new security assistance to Ukraine on July 1 in a package worth about $820 million in total.

The assistance comprises an authorization of a Presidential Drawdown (PDA) of security assistance valued at up to $50 million, as well as $770 million in Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) funds. The PDA is the 14th drawdown of arms and equipment from the Pentagon’s inventories since August 2021.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, the United States has committed a total of about $6.92 billion in military aid to Ukraine to fight Russian forces. Prior to the invasion, since 2014, the United States had committed some $1.8 billion in weapons and military training to Ukraine, $700 million of which came from the Biden administration.

The latest $820 million aid package was broadly announced by President Joe Biden at a news conference on Thursday in Madrid, which was the third and final day of the NATO summit focused on the Russia-Ukraine war.

“We are going to support Ukraine as long as it takes,” Biden said, adding that the United States is giving Ukrainians “the capacity” so that “they can continue to resist the Russian aggression.”

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HOW THE PENTAGON USES A SECRETIVE PROGRAM TO WAGE PROXY WARS

SMALL TEAMS OF U.S. Special Operations forces are involved in a low-profile proxy war program on a far greater scale than previously known, according to exclusive documents and interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials.

While The Intercept and other outlets have previously reported on the Pentagon’s use of the secretive 127e authority in multiple African countries, a new document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act offers the first official confirmation that at least 14 127e programs were also active in the greater Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region as recently as 2020. In total, between 2017 and 2020, U.S. commandos conducted at least 23 separate 127e programs across the world.

Separately, Joseph Votel, a retired four-star Army general who headed both Special Operations Command and Central Command, which oversees U.S. military efforts in the Middle East, confirmed the existence of previously unrevealed 127e “counterterrorism” efforts in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.

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Mike Pompeo’s Revealing Hudson Institute Speech

Former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo gave a speech at the Hudson Institute last week that’s probably worth taking a look at just because of how much it reveals about the nature of the US empire and the corrupt institutions which influence its policies.

Pompeo is serving as a “Distinguished Fellow” at the Hudson Institute while he waits for the revolving door of the DC swamp to rotate him back into a federal government position. The Hudson Institute is a neoconservative think tank which has a high degree of overlap with the infamous Project for the New American Century and its lineup of Iraq war architects, and spends a lot of its time manufacturing Beltway support for hawkish agendas against Iran. It was founded in 1961 with the help of a cold warrior named Herman Kahn, whose enthusiastic support for the idea that the US can win a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was reportedly an inspiration for the movie Dr Strangelove.

A think tank is an institution where academics are paid by the worst people in the world to come up with explanations for why it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid, which are then pitched at key points of influence in the media and the government. “Think tank” is a good and accurate label for these institutions, because they are dedicated to controlling what people think, and because they are artificial enclosures for slimy creatures.

Pompeo’s speech is one long rimjob for the military-industrial complex which indirectly employs him. He repeatedly sings the praises of the weapons that are being poured into Ukraine, two of them by name: the Patriot missile built by Raytheon and the Javelin missile built jointly by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, both of whom happen to be major funders of the Hudson Institute. He repeatedly decries the “disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan,” and excoriates the Biden administration for failing to control the world’s fossil fuel resources aggressively enough in its efforts to “prostrate itself to radicals.”

Pompeo, easily ranked among the most fanatical imperialists on the entire planet, hilariously says that “China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a form of imperialism.” He decries a “genocide” in Xinjiang and repeatedly implies that China deliberately unleashed Covid-19 upon the world, calling it “the global pandemic induced by China.” He repeatedly claims that Vladimir Putin is trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union.

Along with praise for NATO and for the various anti-China alliances in the Indo-Pacific, Pompeo names “Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan” as “the three lighthouses for liberty” which those alliances must work to support militarily. You will notice that those three “lighthouses” just so happen to be the hottest points of geostrategic conflict with the top three opponents of the US empire: Russia, Iran, and China.

But there are a couple of things Pompeo says which have some real meat on them.

“By aiding Ukraine, we undermined the creation of a Russian-Chinese axis bent on exerting military and economic hegemony in Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East,” Pompeo says.

“We must prevent the formation of a Pan-Eurasian colossus incorporating Russia, but led by China,” he later adds. “To do that, we have to strengthen NATO, and we see that nothing hinders Finland and Sweden’s entry into that organization.”

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Empire To Expand NATO In Response To War Caused By NATO Expansion

Turkey’s President Erdoğan has officially withdrawn Ankara’s objection to the addition of Finland and Sweden to NATO membership, with the three countries signing a trilateral memorandum at a NATO summit in Madrid.

The removal of Erdoğan’s objection was reportedly obtained via significant natsec concessions from the other two nations largely geared toward facilitating Turkey’s ongoing conflict with regional Kurdish factions, and it removes the final obstacle to Finland and Sweden beginning the process of becoming NATO members. Finland’s addition will more than double the size of NATO’s direct border with Russia, a major national security concern for Moscow.

“Sweden and Finland moved rapidly to apply to NATO in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, reversing decades of security policy and opening the door to the alliance’s ninth expansion since 1949,” Axios reports.

So the western empire will be expanding NATO again in response to a war that was predominantly caused by NATO expansion. Brilliant.

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History’s Biggest “Butterfly Effect”-Event Occurred On This Day

The butterfly effect is the concept that small causes can have large effects. Initially, it was used with weather prediction but later the term became a metaphor used in and out of science.

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The name, coined by Edward Lorenz for the effect which had been known long before, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a tornado (exact time of formation, exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome. 

–  Wikipedia

On this day in history, June 28, 1914, the driver for Archduke Franz Ferdinand,  nephew of Emperor Franz Josef and heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire,  made a wrong turn onto Franzjosefstrasse in Sarajevo.

Just hours earlier, Franz Ferdinand narrowly escaped assassination as a bomb bounced off  his car as he and his wife,  Sophie,  traveled from the local train station to the city’s civic city.   Rather than making the wrong turn onto Franz Josef  Street, the car was supposed to travel on the river expressway allowing for a higher speed ensuring the Archduke’s safety.

Yet, somehow, the driver made a fatal mistake and tuned onto Franz Josef Street.

The 19-year-old anarchist and Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, who was part of a small group who had traveled to Sarajevo to kill the Archduke,  and a cohort of the earlier bomb thrower, was on his way home thinking the plot had failed.   He stopped for a sandwich on Franz Josef Street.

Seeing the driver of the Archduke’s car trying to back up onto the river expressway, Princi seized the opportunity and fired into the car, shooting Franz Ferdinand and Sophie at point-blank range,  killing both.

That small wrong turn,  a minor perturbation to the initial conditions, or deviation from the original plan,  set off the chain events that led to World War I.

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The Fantasy of Fanaticism

For a moment in time, it looked as if reality had managed to finally carve its way through the dense fog of propaganda-driven misinformation that had dominated Western media coverage of Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine.

In a stunning admission, Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former senior adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and Intelligence Services, noted that the optimism that existed in Ukraine following Russia’s decision to terminate “Phase One” of the SMO (a major military feint toward Kiev), and begin “Phase Two” (the liberation of the Donbass), was no longer warranted. “The strategies and tactics of the Russians are completely different right now,” Danylyuk noted. “They are being much more successful. They have more resources than us and they are not in a rush.”

“There’s much less space for optimism right now,” Danylyuk concluded.

In short, Russia was winning.

Danylyuk’s conclusions were not derived from some esoteric analysis drawn from Sun Tzu or Clausewitz, but rather basic military math. In a war that had become increasingly dominated by the role of artillery, Russia simply was able to bring to bear on the battlefield more firepower than Ukraine.

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G7 Commits To “Indefinite” Military & Financial Support To Ukraine

Just as the G7 was underway for its first day of meetings on Sunday in the five-star hotel Schloss Elmau in the Bavarian Alps of Germany, Russia’s military pounded Kiev with a series of missile attacks, which President Joe Biden – who is attending in person – condemned as “more of their barbarism.”

Biden was asked by reporters whether he views the relatively rare Russian strikes on Ukraine’s capital as deliberately timed due to the summit, which he didn’t answer. Ukrainian officials say one person died and six were injured as a result of the attack.

“We have to stay together, because Putin has been counting on, from the beginning, that somehow NATO and the G-7 would splinter, but we haven’t and we’re not going to,” Biden said in remarks during a pre-summit meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

As The Guardian previews of what’s expected to be tackled between now and Tuesday, “A price cap on Russian oil, deferral of climate change commitments, a potential famine in Africa and the further supply of weapons to Ukraine are to crowd into a meeting of G7 world leaders over the next three days held against the backdrop of the biggest geopolitical crisis since 1945.” Further, CNN’s audience has been told “Putin will be watching if they fail.”

Going into the summit, the UK’s Boris Johnson urged a united front on Ukraine amid what he called a growing war “fatigue” among the Western populace. The G7 countries which include Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and United States have Ukraine and global economic fallout from the war as top of the agenda.

“Now is not the time to give up on Ukraine, they need the support and resolve of the G7 more than ever,” Johnson stated on Twitter. “The UK will continue to back Ukraine every step of the way because we know that their security is our security, and their freedom is our freedom.”

And Biden stated: “Together, the G7 will announce that we will ban the import of Russian gold, a major export that rakes in tens of billions of dollars for Russia,” he announced on Twitter.

But it was EU chief Ursula von der Leyen who pledged indefinite G7 and European support to Ukraine:

“We will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes. The negative global impact of Russia’s war will be front and center of our exchanges at the G7.”

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Western Officials Admit Ukraine Is Crawling With CIA Personnel

In an article titled “Commando Network Coordinates Flow of Weapons in Ukraine, Officials Say,” anonymous western officials inform us of the following through their stenographers at The New York Times:

As Russian troops press ahead with a grinding campaign to seize eastern Ukraine, the nation’s ability to resist the onslaught depends more than ever on help from the United States and its allies — including a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training, according to U.S. and European officials.

Much of this work happens outside Ukraine, at bases in Germany, France and Britain, for example. But even as the Biden administration has declared it will not deploy American troops to Ukraine, some C.I.A. personnel have continued to operate in the country secretly, mostly in the capital, Kyiv, directing much of the massive amounts of intelligence the United States is sharing with Ukrainian forces, according to current and former officials.

At the same time, a few dozen commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine.

The revelation that the CIA and US special forces are conducting military operations in Ukraine does indeed make a lie of the Biden administration’s insistence at the start of the war that there would be no American boots on the ground in Ukraine, and the admission that NATO powers are so involved in operations against a nuclear superpower means we are closer to seeing a nuclear exchange than anyone should be comfortable with.

This news should surprise no one who knows anything about the usual behavior of the US intelligence cartel, but interestingly it contradicts something we were told by the same New York Times not three weeks ago.

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$150-million movie halted over Ukrainian ‘bad-guys’

The release of Guy Ritchie’s £125-million ($150-million) spy comedy Operation Fortune has been delayed a second time in order to remove the villains’ Ukrainian nationalities, the Daily Mail reported on Wednesday. Initially set to be released last January, the film is now scheduled for release later this year.

The offending characters are a group of Ukrainian gangsters who have purchased a deadly weapon, which the film’s heroes have to retrieve to foil their evil scheme. Sources told the Mail the gangsters’ characters have been edited so that they are no longer Ukrainian.

While there are “many bad guys in the film” and “the antagonists come from all over the world,” a source close to the production told the Mail that “out of sensitivity to the ongoing war in Ukraine it was decided some of these should no longer be identified as Ukrainian.”

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