Google buries websites of Trump, RFK Jr, Republican challengers
RT | August 26, 2023
Google is suppressing the 2024 campaign websites of all serious challengers to Democratic incumbent President Joe Biden, a report from the Media Research Center claimed on Thursday.
Searching the web for ‘presidential campaign websites’ using Google returned results that did not include a single Republican candidate on the first page the day before the first Republican primary debate of the 2024 season, according to the MRC.
Not even former US President Donald Trump, who is polling neck-and-neck with Biden, appeared in the first few pages of results, the media watchdog observed.
Nor did Democratic challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the chief threat to Biden’s candidacy from within his own party, appear in the results at all, even though a recent poll had him at nearly 20% in a matchup against Biden.
Indeed, the only non-Biden Democrat to feature on the first page was lifestyle guru Marianne Williamson, who has never polled above the low single digits.
However, the websites of prominent Democrats who are not running for president in 2024, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, were more prominently featured at 29th, 12th, and 9th place in the results, respectively.
“Google has erased every threat to Joe Biden,” MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider said on Thursday, recalling how Google had “pulled out all the stops to put Hillary Clinton in the White House” and “has continued to interfere in our elections ever since.”
As of Saturday, the phenomenon appeared to have actually worsened. While Biden’s site was the fourth listed on the search engine and Williamson’s the fifth, Sanders remained at 12th, while Clinton had actually moved up to 13th.
Former Vice President Mike Pence’s site was the highest-ranked Republican in a search run on Saturday morning – though even his page was listed several places behind an Atlantic article informing the casual browser that 1996 Republican candidate and now-deceased former Senator Bob Dole’s campaign website “is still online.”
Kennedy has been widely disparaged by the media establishment and online factcheckers for his work on vaccine safety. He sued Google earlier this month for violating his First Amendment rights, arguing its subsidiary YouTube had blocked his content on orders from the Biden administration.
Trump also sued Google in 2021 for infringing on his free speech after he was deplatformed from YouTube along with most other mainstream social media platforms following the January 6 Capitol riot.
Over a dozen government agencies were found to be issuing content-based censorship orders to social media platforms last year in Missouri v. Biden, leading a judge to issue a restraining order forbidding the administration from contacting the platforms.
Biden administration sought control over TikTok
RT | August 26, 2023
The Biden administration sought to gain control over nearly every aspect of the inner workings of social media behemoth TikTok as part of negotiations allowing its continued operation in the US, according to a draft agreement obtained by Forbes last week.
The agreement, which runs to nearly 100 pages, would reportedly give the White House a level of control over the Chinese-owned platform even greater than that which it was found last year to be exercising over US-based competitors like Facebook and Twitter, allowing government officials to not only monitor and influence the conversation on the platform but also to interfere in the day-to-day operations of TikTok in the US.
Government agencies like the Department of Justice and Department of Defense would have full authority to examine TikTok’s servers, equipment, records, facilities, and other properties, according to the draft. They could also block changes to the app’s US terms of service, privacy policy, and moderation policies and veto the hiring of any individual involved in data security for the US.
The agreement would also force TikTok and its parent company ByteDance to submit to outside audits, assessments, code inspections, and cybersecurity checks by supposedly independent entities chosen by the US government. The company would be required to foot the bill for these intrusions.
The platform’s US staff could even have been required to exclude ByteDance’s executives from security-related decisions, instead deferring to an executive security committee whose actions would also be concealed from ByteDance. This committee’s primary responsibility would be maintaining US national security first and TikTok’s profitability second.
The draft seen by Forbes, dated last summer, is the product of months of exchanges between ByteDance and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which oversees foreign involvement in business deals that could potentially impact national security and has been investigating ByteDance for four years.
TikTok has repeatedly been threatened with a blanket ban or forced sale of its US assets to an American competitor as both President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump claimed the platform is used by Beijing for information warfare.
CFIUS renewed the call for a ban or sale in March after the DOJ launched an investigation into ByteDance employees using TikTok to spy on American journalists. A spokesperson for ByteDance confirmed the surveillance but attributed it to rogue employees who have since been fired.
TikTok has over 150 million American users spending 90 minutes or more on the platform. While the company pledged in 2021 to isolate US user data on servers owned by tech giant Oracle to assuage spying concerns, Biden prohibited its use by federal employees in December and dozens of state and city governments have followed suit.
California Church Fined For Defying Covid Lockdowns Sues County For Tracking Worshipers Without Their Knowledge
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | August 26, 2023
A church in California punished during Covid lockdowns with a fine of $1.2 million is now suing over geofencing-based surveillance of its members.
The church, Calvary Chapel San Jose, along with Pastor Mike McClure, allege in the federal lawsuit filed this week that Santa Clara County engaged in warrantless and invasive surveillance, using the geofencing method and thus abusing location data harvested from the worshipers’ phones.
The filing is based on claims that both First Amendment related to free speech, and the Fourth Amendment, meant to protect against unlawful searches, were violated by the county as it resorted to spying via geofencing.
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
Advocates for Faith & Freedom, a group that filed the lawsuit, specified that the county turned to SafeGraph data company in order to carry out this activity, and accuses the officials behind the scheme as engaging in tracking of residents not only without appropriate warrants and in an invasive manner, but also keeping this activity a secret from the public.
“This type of expansive geofencing operation is not only an invasion of privacy but represents a terrifying precedent if allowed to go unaddressed,” the complaint states. “As it stands, Defendants assert that, as long as they call it research, any level of government can target and spy on any individual or group at any time for any duration.”
It is further alleged that the operation lasted more than a year, “with seemingly no oversight, boundaries, or limitations.” The implication of this is that those targeted by this controversial, dragnet-style surveillance weren’t safe from it anywhere – be it the prayer room or the bathroom.
Those behind the lawsuit also reject the arguments that the defendants have apparently chosen to go with, namely, that the whole operation was done for the sake of “research,” and is therefore justified.
But, argues Advocates for Faith & Freedom, accepting such logic would mean that there would be no real limits to how government entities at any level could use geofencing to track either groups or individuals. This lack of boundaries means that the spying could go on against anyone and for any amount of time – and potentially be used against opponents.
“This is not just un-American; it is downright Orwellian,” stated Advocates for Faith & Freedom.
Santa Clara County, meanwhile, had nothing to add to its previous comments on the matter, well before the lawsuit was filed. Back in March, the county reacted to a report about tracking of worshipers written by journalist David Zweig.
Deaths by Vaccination Status
Safe and Effective?
NAKED EMPEROR | AUGUST 25, 2023
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) have finally published their ‘Deaths by vaccination status, England’ dataset. This is for deaths occurring between 1 April 2021 and 31 May 2023.
I know many people consider these data unreliable but I always have a look at it nevertheless.
To assess whether the vaccine is safe I decided to look at all cause deaths separated by vaccine status (Table 5). This shows the number of all cause deaths for the unvaccinated and ‘ever vaccinated’ by month. It is also separated by age group (18-39; 40-49; 50-59; 60-69; 70-79; 80-89 & 90+).
For each month I looked at the total number of deaths and calculated what percentage of those deaths were in the ‘ever vaccinated’ category. So if there were 30 unvaccinated deaths and 70 vaccinated deaths, the percentage of ‘ever vaccinated’ deaths would be 70%.
This doesn’t really tell us anything, however. The headline might be shocking, e.g. ‘90% of deaths occurring in the vaccinated’ but if 90% of the population are vaccinated then that is to be expected.
However, if a higher percentage of deaths are occurring in the vaccinated (than the percentage of people vaccinated), then perhaps the vaccines are causing some harm. There are many confounders which confuse things but it is at least a signal that something is up and should be looked at. For example if 90% of the country is vaccinated but 95% of deaths are in the vaccinated then perhaps the vaccine is causing the additional 5% of deaths.
So, I took the data showing the percentage of people vaccinated with at least one dose from the UK government website, cleaned it up so that it matched the ONS formatting and created a few graphs.
You can see that in the 18-39 age group, as the vaccine rollout started, there was a higher percentage of deaths in the vaccinated versus the number of people vaccinated. This may have been because sick or immunocompromised people were vaccinated first. The two percentages then quickly merged before beginning to separate again in mid 2022.
This is also the exact time when excess deaths began to skyrocket. Ever since that point, the percentage of deaths in the ‘ever vaccinated’ group has been higher than the percentage of people vaccinated.
Here are the graphs for the other age groups.
You can see that in all the age groups, except for the 50-59 year olds, the percentage of all cause deaths in the ‘ever vaccinated’ group is higher than the percentage of that group that is vaccinated. The data for the 80-89 and 90+ groups are particularly shocking.
Worthy of an investigation? Of course not. Instead the NHS is launching a £50,000 probe to uncover why NHS staff aren’t getting Covid and flu jabs. Probably because they can see the data presented above with their own eyes.
Will Scientific Evidence Ever Silence the Pro-Mask Cult?
Facial equity mask
BY DR GARY SIDLEY | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 24, 2023
It is a long-established conclusion from the scientific world that face masks achieve no appreciable reduction in viral transmission. We knew this in 2015-16 with regard to surgeons and their patients (here and here). We knew this in 2020 from a gold-standard Cochrane review, an analysis of 14 studies on influenza and a healthcare investigation that concluded that masks “may paradoxically lead to more transmissions”. We knew this in 2021 based on the Danish mask study and two comprehensive evidence reviews (here and here). We knew this in 2022 in relation to primary schools and universities, and a debunking of premature pro-mask conclusions drawn from the Bangladesh study. And – as if more evidence was needed – at the start of 2023 we had the latest Cochrane review, yet again concluding that covering our faces with cloth and plastic does not significantly reduce the likelihood of contracting respiratory viral infections. Yet, despite this collective scream from the scientific community that the ‘MASKS DON’T WORK’, it seems that nothing will muzzle the strident protestations of the mask disciples, such as those at Independent SAGE.
A recent article in the Daily Mail led with the scary headline: ‘Scientists raise alarm over new Covid variant and call for return of face masks.’ Two of the scientists raising concerns were Professors Trish Greenhalgh and Stephen Griffin, the former announcing, “It’s, once again, time to mask up”, while the latter concurs – albeit more cryptically – with his recommendation of the re-imposition of a “mitigation-based approach”. Both Greenhalgh and Griffin are members of Independent SAGE.
When Independent SAGE was formed in May 2020, as an alternative to official SAGE, it claimed to be a group of multi-disciplinary experts whose mission was to offer the Government scientific advice on how to minimise deaths during the Covid crisis. In reality, it constituted a group of zero-Covid fanatics pushing extreme counter-pandemic measures: whatever non-evidenced, human-rights-infringing restrictions the Government proposed, Independent SAGE typically called for them to be longer and harsher.
A cursory inspection of the group’s membership explains a lot. The previously-mentioned Trish Greenhalgh is, undoubtedly, the most extreme spokesperson for the pro-mask cult, previously asserting that the search for rigorous scientific evidence was the “enemy of good policy“. The founding Chairman of the group, Professor David King, was the senior scientific advisor to the Government of Tony Blair, currently an influential advocate of globalist agendas promoting top-down control of the population. Another core participant is the lifelong member of the Communist party – Professor Susan ‘let’s-wear-a-mask-forever‘ Michie. Also, the current co-Chair of Independent SAGE is Anthony Costello, a Professor of Global Health and Sustainable Development at University College London and a former director at the World Health Organisation. Given the histories and affiliations of these group participants it was predictable that they would grasp the next available opportunity to call for the return of community masking.
Clearly, the use of the term ‘independent’ in relation to this group was a misnomer. In stark contrast, Dr. Ashley Croft – the independent expert commissioned by the Scottish Covid Inquiry – appears to be a much better fit for the role of supplier of impartial information, free from the shackles of groupthink and mainstream ideology. Dr. Croft is a Consultant Public Health Physician and Medical Epidemiologist. In his report he lists his conclusions about the physical measures taken against COVID-19 as follows (emphasis mine):
In 2020 there was scientific evidence to support the use of some of the physical measures (e.g. frequent handwashing, the use of PPE in hospital settings) adopted against COVID-19. For other measures (e.g. face mask mandates outside of healthcare settings, lockdowns, social distancing, test, trace and isolate measures) there was either insufficient evidence in 2020 to support their use – or alternatively, no evidence; the evidence base has not changed materially in the intervening three years.
It has been argued that the restrictive measures introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in individual, societal and economic harm that was avoidable and that should not have occurred.
This genuinely independent voice was not well-received in some quarters. Unused to the expression of viewpoints that deviate from the dominant Covid narrative, the mainstream media predictably squealed disapproval about Croft’s perspective and resorted to attempts to smear him for his “vaccine scepticism”. And no doubt those ideologues at Independent SAGE will – as I write – be doing likewise.
As the year advances, the evidence against mass masking continues to accumulate. In April, researchers at London’s St. George’s Hospital reported that a mask mandate in 2020-21 in their healthcare settings “made no discernible difference to reducing hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections”. And – lest we forget – we purportedly live in a free and open society where coercive restrictions should only be imposed where there is unequivocal proof of a pronounced and widespread benefit from adoption of the behaviour targeted; we are a million miles away from that scenario, and that is even before we consider the harms of community masking.
But will this quieten the pro-mask cult? It seems these perpetual advocates of face coverings are driven by some supra cognitive construct that trumps the empirical evidence. Mass concealment of human faces appears to signify something sacred to groups like Independent SAGE: is it equality, egalitarianism, altruism? Or could their persistent pushing of masks be simply due to cognitive dissonance: they have stridently trumpeted the practice for so long that it would now be too psychologically painful, and damaging to their status and self-image, to admit their previous energies have been woefully misplaced? Whatever the underlying reason, we can expect escalating appeals from the muzzle mafia over the coming months.
Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist and co-founder of the Smile Free campaign.
Biden to Ask for More Cash for Vaccines Amid Mutant Variant Spike
By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 26.08.2023
President Joe Biden intends to seek more additional funding from Congress, just weeks after he told lawmakers that roughly $40 billion were needed to prop up Ukraine, replenish America’s federal disaster funds, and boost law enforcement at the crisis-riddled US-Mexico border.
This time, however, Biden will ask for funds that will cover the development of another new COVID-19 vaccine.
“I signed off this morning on a proposal we have to present to the Congress a request for additional funding for a new vaccine that is necessary, that works… It will likely be recommended that everybody get it no matter whether they’ve gotten it before or not,” Biden said on Friday.
The last time Joe Biden, currently vacationing in the Lake Tahoe area, asked Congress for money to address COVID-19 was in November 2022. At the time, he unsuccessfully attempted to get lawmakers to greenlight a $9 billion request.
Ever since Republicans took control of the US House of Representatives in January, many of them have demanded spending cuts, and pledged to oppose blank checks for Kiev. Accordingly, the White House is going to have a tough uphill fight getting supplementary spending through Congress in fall.
The new demand for funds will come as COVID-19 hospital admissions appear to be on the rise in the US. Hospitalizations stood at 9,056 people for the week ending July 29, which is a surge of around 12 percent from the previous week. Some regions have even gone as far as to reignite the debate around bringing back mask mandates.
Amid the uptick, new vaccines containing the XBB.1.5 version of the Omicron strain are currently in the pipeline, being developed by drugmakers like Pfizer, Novavax, and Moderna. However, according to health authorities in the US, this particular variant is declining, with Omicron subvariant known as EG.5 – dubbed “Eris” – becoming the dominant one. The subvariant has been designated a variant under monitoring by the World Health Organization (WHO), but not yet marked as a variant of interest or of concern. Data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on August 5 showed that EG.5 was responsible for between 14-21 percent of new COVID-19 cases in the US. Accordingly, the Omicron virus’ continuing mutation will likely necessitate updated vaccines, looking ahead. But the new shots will still be effective, health experts have been cited as saying, as EG.5 shares enough common characteristics with the XBB-series of subvariants.
All three abovementioned pharmaceutical companies have been working on vaccine boosters targeting the XBB-series of Omicron subvariants in line with a June directive by the US Food and Drug Administration, and are still waiting for official FDA approval of their vaccines.
Ex-Ukrainian chief prosecutor claims Biden took bribes
RT | August 26, 2023
Former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin has claimed that Joe Biden, while serving as US vice president, received a bribe from a Ukrainian energy company in exchange for helping to get him fired in 2016.
In an interview with Fox News released on Friday, Shokin said that Biden pressured then-Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko to fire him over his investigation into Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden, the incumbent US president’s son, served at the time.
The ex-prosecutor argued that both Poroshenko and Joe Biden understood that if he had been allowed to continue his probe into Burisma, it could have provided “the facts about the corrupt activities” by Hunter Biden, Devon Archer – another American executive with Burisma – and other people involved.
However, Poroshenko offered a different version of events, insisting that Shokin was fired because of his failure to fight corruption in Ukraine.
Shokin said that he had a “firm personal conviction” that both Joe and Hunter Biden had their palms greased in connection with the Burisma case. “They were being bribed. And the fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in US money in exchange for my dismissal, my firing – isn’t that alone a case of corruption?” he asked.
The ex-official was referring to a 2018 interview in which Joe Biden boasted that in 2015 he threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees from Poroshenko unless Shokin was let go. “Well, son of a b***h, he got fired,” Biden said.
However, White House spokesperson Ian Sams dismissed Shokin’s claims, chiding Fox News for “giving a platform for these lies to a former Ukrainian prosecutor general whose office his own deputy called ‘a hotbed of corruption.’”
The allegations of quid pro quo involving Joe and Hunter Biden were raised by Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley in June, when they released a bombshell FBI informant file. According to the document, a “highly credible” confidential source was allegedly told by Burisma owner Nikolay Zlochevsky that Joe and Hunter Biden received $5 million each to use their political influence in Kiev.
US lawmakers rail against more Ukraine aid
RT | August 26, 2023
At least two US lawmakers have objected to earmarking additional funds to support Ukraine, arguing that Washington has failed to articulate a clear strategy in the conflict, Politico reported on Friday, citing a draft letter.
Earlier this month, US President Joe Biden asked Congress to approve an additional $24 billion in security, economic, and humanitarian assistance to Kiev despite growing skepticism among Republicans about further support for the embattled country.
Politico obtained a draft copy of a letter compiled by Senator JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and addressed to Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young. It is dated September 5 and has been left unsigned as the Republican duo is attempting to gain the support of other lawmakers, according to Politico.
The letter chides the Biden administration for failing to provide Congress with a detailed account of US government-wide expenditures related to the Ukraine conflict.
The lawmakers also stressed that the need for a cross-cutting report on the matter had become even more pressing after the Pentagon recently acknowledged a $6.2 billion “accounting error” in Ukraine aid.
While White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan argued that the error did not suggest a lack of oversight of Ukraine assistance, the admission galvanized calls among Republicans to audit the aid. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that Americans “ha[d] no idea where all this money is going.”
Vance and Roy pointed out that Biden’s assertion that the US would back Ukraine “as long as it takes” implies “an open-ended commitment to supporting the war in Ukraine of an indeterminate nature,” arguing that both the American public and Congress have been left in the dark as to the administration’s ultimate goal.
“What is our strategy, and what is the president’s exit plan?” the lawmakers asked, stressing that it would be “an absurd abdication” of congressional responsibility to approve the $24 billion aid package until these questions are answered.
“For these reasons, and others, we oppose the additional expenditure for the war in Ukraine included in your supplemental request,” they concluded.
Since the start of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, the US has provided Kiev with more than $113 billion, a significant portion of which is military assistance. Russia has repeatedly warned Washington and its allies that weapons deliveries would only prolong the hostilities but fail to change the outcome.
Is Germany once again the “sick man of Europe”?
By Uriel Araujo | August 25, 2023
In 1999, the Economist described Germany as “the sick man of Europe” – in the following years, however, Germany’s economy prospered as an exporting powerhouse. In the 2010s, after the so-called Jobwunder (employment miracle), Germans went on pretty much unhindered by the global financial crisis of 2007-2009. At the time, there was a boom in emerging markets and manufactured goods were in high demand in China. The German economy grew by 24% in that period – in comparison, the figures for France and Great Britain were 18 and 22% respectively.
According to the Economist, German economic and political models were largely perceived as solid and stable, in contrast with so-called “populism of the Trump-Brexit” persuasion. Today, however, the Economist suggests Germany might once again be “the sick man of Europe”, as the country has experienced its third quarter of contraction and may turn out to be the only big economy to shrink in 2023. Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), often described as a far-right or populist party, is on the rise, and the nation’s economic model is increasingly seen as unable to deliver growth. The IMF forecasts that it will be the only G7 economy to contract in 2023, while the purchasing-managers’ manufacturing index is now at its lowest since the beginning of the pandemics in 2020. Gas prices today are about twice as high as they were before Covid. How has all of this come about?
For one thing, the US-led political West efforts towards “decoupling” or, if you will, “de-risking” ties with Beijing are hurting Berlin in some sensitive areas and this is one of the things which have been driving Germany’s recent interest in “strategic autonomy”. The American subsidy war against Europe does not help much at all.
Interest rates, which have risen a lot in Europe since the pandemic, certainly play a role: they hurt German business investment and the construction sector. The rising interest rates were a response to inflation and the latter, of course, has a lot to do with the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict, as has the rise in energy prices. Then there is Nord Stream – or rather its current absence.
German authorities investigating the September 26 attack on Nord Stream pipelines stated, last month, “traces of subsea explosives were found” in a yacht hired by a Ukrainian-owned company. The Washington Post reported in June that US President Joe Biden “knew of the Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream” three months before the pipeline explosion. Western media, for a while, had been keen on pointing fingers at Russia – which of course makes close to zero sense: the destruction of Nord Stream pipelines has indeed made it quite impossible for German and other European states to reverse sanctions and reopen the pipeline – plus it ensures most Russian energy exports to the European continent transit Ukraine, as Emma Ashford, a senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, writes in her Foreign Policy piece.
Ashford reminds that, while unpopular in part of Eastern Europe, due to disputes between Moscow and the energy transit states, “the original Nord Stream project was backed not only by Germany, but also by the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.” Its first pipeline was completed in 2011 “with only minimal controversy” (in Europe). After 2014, things changed, and the American war on Nord Stream ensued. Her closing thoughts, in the aforementioned piece, are the following: “the destruction of Nord Stream once again places Ukraine and other Eastern European states in a position of greater leverage on the energy question. Destroying Nord Stream is an understandable enough choice from the point of view of a country engaged in a desperate war for survival. But it may prompt Ukraine’s partners to reassess just how closely their interests actually align with Kyiv.”
Far from being merely “conspiracy theory” speculations, the issue of who blew up Nord Stream is increasingly a pressing issue. It is not just of interest to prosecutors and police authorities or the tabloids: it rather has deep geopolitical and geoeconomic implications. It has everything to do with European sovereignty, for instance (or the lack of it). Back in October 2021, Europe was already haunted by the specter of a major energy crisis, with a 600% rise in gas prices. Now, Europe could face a mass recession worse than 2008. As I wrote in December 2021, all of that affected European and British industry production and societies as a whole. The end of Nord Stream is a game-changer, and, as I wrote a number of times, the European energy crisis in fact serves American interests quite well.
In Germany, the most vocal players calling for an investigation into the pipeline’s sabotage are AfD lawmakers, and this being so, it is no wonder that the populist camp is growing, while this kind of discussion remains largely marginalized within the so-called mainstream political sphere.
Germany might, once again, be seen as the “sick man of Europe”. The sickness, however, is not just German; it is European. And its roots are deep and they pertain to Europe’s great paradox of being dependent on Washington for security while relying on nearby Russia for energy – the latter, by the way, makes total sense, geopolitically and economically, as Nord Stream 2 itself could provide Europe with energy security and lower costs and avoided the energy crisis which now haunts the continent.
For a while, much has been talked about German economic woes (and British ones as well, for that matter). These conversations however cannot fail to take into account the issue of the energy crisis and the issue of de-industrialization in post-Nord Stream Europe. The problem is that such topics are just too unpleasant and the European political establishment does not seem to be ready for this conversation yet.
The Fleeting Mirage of Imagined Supremacy
By William Schryver – imetatronink – August 25, 2023
The United States pretty much had its way in the world from 1991 to 2014. But now the empire’s strength is severely depleted and fatally overextended, whereas the military and industrial capacity of its increasingly allied adversaries is ascendant, and in aggregate, greatly exceeds that of the empire and its compliant vassals.
Perhaps most importantly, the ability of the US to inflict severe economic and financial damage on countries who defy “the rules-based international order” has been rendered effectively impotent by the collaborative countermeasures developed and resolutely employed by Russia, China, Iran, India, Brazil … the list goes on, and is lengthening at an accelerating pace.
And, even as US sanctions power has dramatically waned, its capability to maintain a potent military presence in dozens of strategic “hot spots” around the world has become illusory. Yes, the American military ostentatiously maintains many hundreds of bases dotting the planet, but that simply underscores the extreme degree to which US military power is diluted.
The purported ability of the US military to “project power anywhere on the globe at a moment’s notice” is a meaningless fantasy in the context of anything more than launching a few dozen cruise missiles at a target in a country that lacks the capacity to shoot back.
This is the incontrovertible mathematical reality: to assemble a force sufficient to wage war against Russia, China, or Iran would require the US to effectively abandon every major military base on the planet.
Were they permitted, without opposing interdiction, to concentrate a million combat effectives (they wouldn’t be, of course), it would require at least a full year to stage such a force in the theater of operations.
A “combined-arms” force adequate to make war against Russia, China, or Iran would necessarily constitute the greatest concentration of American military power since the Second World War, with the longest and most vulnerable supply lines ever seen in the history of warfare — choke-points that would be potently contested by what almost certainly would be the combined naval and long-range strike-missile capabilities of Russia, China, and Iran.
But, for the sake of argument, let us imagine a fully equipped American combined-arms force could be miraculously materialized in eastern Europe, or the South China Sea, or the Persian Gulf.
As multitudes of observant and discerning military officers and analysts around the world have now come to see: the US could only sustain high-intensity industrial-scale warfare for 6 – 8 weeks, at most, until severe losses, munitions exhaustion, and broad-spectrum logistical breakdowns compelled them to cease operations.
This reality was little recognized and poorly understood prior to February 2022. But the war in Ukraine has exposed key US military shortcomings and vulnerabilities, and revealed the shocking logistical and industrial debility of what many across the globe still imagined to be “The Greatest Military in Human History” and the peerless industrial production might of the legendary “Arsenal of Democracy”.
By unfounded reputation, and “on paper”, as they say, the United States appears to possess the most powerful military on the planet. But there is a vast difference between perceived power and the actual ability to project power and sustain power against the adversaries the US military must now face and defeat in order to prevent or even meaningfully delay the end of American global hegemony.