A Ukrainian defeat would represent a victory for Europe, French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd has claimed, in an interview with the Italian news outlet Corriere di Bologna published on Tuesday.
According to Todd, who has stressed that he is not an explicit supporter of Moscow, if Russia were to lose in the Ukraine conflict, this would allow “European submission to the Americans to be prolonged for a century.”
The leading intellectual has argued that Europe has effectively delegated the representation of the West to the US and has been paying the consequences ever since. He claims in the interview that nothing can be done to change this fact at the moment due to the ongoing Ukraine conflict, but suggests that its outcome will “decide the fate of Europe.”
“If, as I believe, the US is defeated, NATO will disintegrate and Europe will be left free,” Todd told the outlet, noting that it is unlikely that Russia would be compelled to militarily attack Western Europe after establishing itself on the Dnieper River.
“Russia will have neither the means nor the desire to expand once the borders of pre-communist Russia are reconstituted. The Russophobic hysteria of the West, which fantasizes about the desire for Russian expansion in Europe, is simply ridiculous for a serious historian,” he said.
A number of Western leaders have in recent months raised concerns that if Russia were allowed to defeat Ukraine it would eventually set its sights on other European and NATO countries.
Moscow, however, has repeatedly stressed that it has no intention of attacking any other countries once it accomplishes its goals in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed talk of a ‘Russian threat’ as “nonsense” being peddled by Western governments to scare the European population in order to “extract additional expenses” from them.
October 9, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Militarism, Russophobia | European Union, NATO, United States |
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The EU’s refusal to buy Russian energy has been crippling the bloc’s economic growth, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told a plenary session of the European Parliament on Wednesday.
Orban, whose country currently holds the EU’s six-month rotating presidency, was addressing the parliament in Strasbourg, France.
“EU productivity is growing at a slower pace than that of our competitors. Our share of world trade is declining,” he said.
He added that EU businesses were facing electricity prices that are two to three times higher than in the US. And when it comes to natural gas, “prices are four to five times higher.”
Half of European companies consider the cost of energy to be the main obstacle to investment, according to Orban. In energy-intensive industries that are vital for the bloc’s economy, production has fallen by between 10% and 15%, he claimed.
“Moving away from Russian energy has endangered the European Union’s GDP growth, while significant financial resources had to be redistributed to energy subsidies and the construction of infrastructure necessary for the import of LNG,” Orban said.
The Hungarian PM added that the EU should not be under the illusion that a green transition will solve the problem. He cited study results suggesting that “the share of fossil fuels will not change significantly until 2030.”
The EU declared the elimination of its reliance on Russian energy as one of its key priorities after hostilities in the Ukraine conflict broke out in February 2022. Sanctions imposed on Moscow and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline in 2022 have led to a dramatic drop in Russia’s gas supplies to the EU. The bloc has turned to the US and the Middle East to replace them with costlier liquefied natural gas.
Russia reportedly accounted for over 16% of the value of natural gas imports into the bloc in the first quarter of this year, down from 40% in 2021. According to estimates by Russia’s Energy Ministry, American LNG is 30-40% more expensive than Russian pipeline gas.
Prior to the Ukraine conflict, Washington had for years been pressuring the EU to cut its dependence on Russian energy.
In June, the EU banned some operations related to LNG of Russian origin, including reloading, ship-to-ship transfers, and ship-to-shore transfers with the purpose of re-exporting to third countries via the bloc. Russian seaborne gas imports into the EU remained permitted via LNG terminals that are linked to the interconnected natural gas network. However, the bloc has stopped short of imposing sanctions on the fuel beyond a ban on trans-shipments, which has yet to come into force.
Former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi said last month that the EU’s global economic competitiveness has been substantially eroded due to the loss of cheap energy from Russia.
October 9, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Russophobia | European Union, United States |
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US Navy vessels were operating at the scene shortly before the explosions that crippled the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea, Danish newspaper Politiken has reported, citing a local harbormaster.
The crucial energy infrastructure, built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Europe, was ruptured by underwater blasts in September 2022.
The piece by Politiken was published on September 26 but largely went unnoticed. However, it resurfaced on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday, with claims being reposted by Glenn Greenwald and other prominent independent journalists.
According to the article, American warships had been operating in the area east of the Danish island of Bornholm with their transponders switched off.
The paper spoke to John Anker Nielsen, the harbormaster at the Danish port of Christianso, located near Bornholm. He said he had decided to share details of the events of September 2022, despite initially being “not allowed to say a thing” about them.
According to Nielsen, he launched a rescue operation in the area four or five days before the Nord Stream blasts after spotting ships with their transponders switched off and assuming there was an emergency.
However, when Danish rescuers approached the scene, they saw that the vessels in question were US Navy ships, Nielsen said. The Naval Command then told Nielsen and his colleagues to turn back, the harbormaster recalled.
Politiken said Nielsen does not believe Western media claims that Nord Stream was sabotaged by Ukraine, supposedly using a yacht, named Andromeda, and a small crew to carry out the sophisticated attack.
According to the paper, the harbormaster instead has “some faith” in the version of events provided by legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
In early February 2023, Hersh authored a report claiming that US President Joe Biden had given the order to destroy Nord Stream. According to an informed source who talked to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the explosives that were detonated on September 26, 2022 had been planted at the pipelines during the previous June by US Navy divers under the cover of a NATO exercise called ‘Baltops 22’. The White House denied the report, calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.”
Senior Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have previously pointed the finger at the US as the possible culprit behind the Nord Stream explosions. They have argued that Washington had the technical means to carry out the operation and stood to gain the most, considering that the attack disrupted Russian energy supplies to the EU and forced a shift to more expensive US-supplied liquefied natural gas.
October 9, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | European Union, United States |
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A failure to learn lessons from history or Money Talks?
HART recently posted an article titled “The Witch Hunt continues”, which discussed self-censorship of doctors, General Medical Council (GMC) overreach, and how medical professionals are being erased from the medical register, despite no wrongdoing. Yet this is not a new phenomenon. If we delve into the history of how our existing ‘medical monopoly’ was established, with its roots firmly in America, it is an all too familiar disturbing playbook of censorship, corruption and subversion of ethics that spans over 130 years in the making. The existing medical monopoly was contrived by the Rockefeller family and their many contacts, which has been so successful in its takeover of medicine in America. Herein, I discuss an excellent book by Eustace Mullins titled “Murder by Injection: The Story of the Medical Conspiracy Against America”. Despite the book’s off putting title, Eustace’s careful research spanning over 30 years provides a detailed and shocking account of how billionaire tycoons have waged tyranny, economic depressions, wars and revolutions as part of a wider plan to usher in a medical care system to enslave the public through an entirely controlled medical monopoly. The whole book is free to download here.
Until the late 19th century, doctors were freelance practitioners who assumed all the risks associated with their medical decision-making. In 1832, the British Medical Association was chartered and provided the impetus for a similar organisation to be established in the United States (US), namely the American Medical Association (AMA), which was founded in 1847 with its headquarters in Chicago. From its inception, the AMA had one objective: to create a total medical monopoly of the practice of medicine, and ensure allopathy was the basis of its practice. Allopathic medicine required practitioners to receive training in a recognised academic school of medicine, which relied heavily on surgical procedures as well as medicines. Allopathy was to rival homoeopathy, which promoted non-toxic doses of natural remedies; in the mid-1800s, homoeopaths outnumbered allopaths two to one in the US – a statistic that had to be overturned when the AMA was created.
The reason this book is so pertinent in our troublesome times is that it catalogues the long, but very calculated and carefully planned demise of healthcare in America. It chronicles how the introduction of a monopoly through any means possible – including, racketeering, abuse, censorship and murder – enabled the takeover of health by federal agencies and governments, which were inextricably linked to industry and big pharma. How was such a monopoly to be achieved? It had to be orchestrated by the richest man in the world at that time, the monopolist John D. Rockefeller, who had triumphed in organising his oil monopoly. Backed by Rothschild and Wall Street colleagues, it was hoped the medical monopoly would provide even greater profits than oil, which has more than proved to be the case. Rockefeller appointed Frederick T. Gates (related to Mr Microsoft Bill Gates) as his ‘philanthropic’ agent, whose task was to dominate the entire medical education system.
In 1907, the AMA requested the Carnegie Foundation to conduct a survey of all medical schools in the US; the Foundation appointed Abraham Flexner to lead the study of medical schools. Coincidentally, Abraham Flexner’s brother, Simon, was head of the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research, so this was an intentional cosy and conflicted setup from the outset. Flexner, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, which was founded by Daniel Colt Gilman, completed his report in 1910. The report and AMA decided there were too many doctors and the solution was to create a medical educational system so elitist that most students would be prohibited from considering such a career. The undergraduate training was constructed so that allopathic medicine was central to its teaching, and by 1920 the number of medical schools had declined from 650 to 50 in number.
The book goes on to describe how ‘quackery’ was established, with three key players, Morris Fishbein, George Simmons and Albert Lasker, who all began their careers as journalists. Not one of them had any credentials of practising medicine, but their collective journalist and organisational talents propelled them to the heights of power, as full-time ‘quacks’. They utilised their connections with the corrupt AMA to stifle dissent and opposition. For instance, the AMA would grant pharmaceutical companies a ‘Seal of Approval’ for their products but only if they advertised in AMA-affiliated journals. Those that opposed this, such as Wallace Abbott, founder of Abbott Laboratories, soon found out the hard way that no products would be approved, and his reputation would suffer unless he ‘cooperated’. Simmons’ practices were particularly egregious, with one critic positing: “almost every branch of the Federal Government active in the field of medicine was completely dominated by the AMA”.
Ultimately, the monopolists forced government agencies to act against anyone who posed a threat to their monopoly, including arrests and prison sentences. Simmons and Fishbein collectively controlled the AMA for over half a century, through raising money and using political clout. Fishbein had total control over all publications of the AMA and selection of personnel in various committees. Moreover the AMA was instrumental in concealing beneficial (but non-lucrative) therapies, with products of high value being rejected or their acceptance enduring unwarranted delays. The extent of the corruption detailed in this history of American medicine is remarkable. Federal agents were solicited by charitable foundations to instigate police actions to hundreds of unsuspecting health practitioners throughout the US, in a ruthless operation to arrest and imprison people distributing leaflets about natural or herbal formulas, despite no evidence anyone had been injured or killed by these remedies. Terror raids against competitors were carried out, with heavily armed federal agents breaking doors and seizing any herbal stocks from people’s homes. The book describes terrorisation of anyone active in the alternative healthcare field. Thus, the AMA became an autocracy. Physicians were trained under the Rockefeller-based medical system, which had full control over the medical examination boards. So successful was this endeavour that Americans are now treated with expensive, overpriced, ineffective and potentially dangerous drugs, a corruption that has been routinely covered up by federal agencies.
In 1940, a bill for health insurance was introduced; although it initially suffered setbacks, the seed was sown to create an industry whereby the AMA would fight ‘socialised medicine’, which was the forerunner for Medicare and Medicaid. In the 1960s, the next target for annihilation was the chiropractic sector. No level of intimidation of censorship was spared and many high-profile speakers were forced to cancel lectures and lobby groups were set up to sanction and apply pressure on the Council on Chiropractic Education to the extent that the AMA Joint Committee on Accreditation of Hospitals barred chiropractors and refused accreditation of hospitals that had such practitioners. The AMA also forced the Veterans Administration to refuse payments to veterans for chiropractic services.
With their eyes set on further control, the medical monopolists realised that cancer was a lucrative endeavour and so established the next phase of the monopoly. In 1913, the same year President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, a group of doctors met at the Harvard Club in New York to establish a national cancer organisation, the American Society for the Control of Cancer (later renamed the American Cancer Society, ACS). The Rockefellers (with Rothschild and J. P. Morgan backing) funded the ACS. Similarly, funding for the Memorial Hospital (later to become the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center) was also linked with the National Radium Institute, which stipulated that further funds be permitted, only assuming all cancers were treated with radium. By 1922, more than 100 radiologists had died from X-ray induced cancer. Alfred Sloan, the President of General Motors and Charles Kettering, an inventive genius of electrical systems and auto ignition were deployed. Mullins chronicles in detail how huge industry directors and partners were all interlinked with each other, such as Squibb, Bristol Myers, Johnson & Johnson, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Lehman Brothers, Chase Manhattan Bank and National Geographic. Collaborations with ‘elected’ presidents, industry players, defence industries, CIA, chemical and drug firms go hand-in-hand.
Two key names in patent medicine and journalism were Albert Lasker and Elmer Bobst. One of Lasker’s greatest achievements was his national campaign to persuade women to smoke in public. Lasker became ill with cancer and died in 1952, but before his death, he set up the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, which made Mary (Albert’s daughter) the most powerful woman in American Medicine. It is also no coincidence that 18 members of the ACS Board of Directors were executive officers of banks. Pat McGrady, who served as editor of the ACS for 25 years stated “Medicine has become venal, second only to the law”. Since “the fight against cancer” is totally controlled by the Rockefeller medical monopoly, much of cancer research is bogus and filled with falsified results, albeit by well intentioned and unsuspecting researchers. Since Elmer Bobst played a crucial role in making it possible for Nixon to become President, it was not difficult to persuade him to authorise a new and expensive “war on cancer” in 1971.
The book explains how the ACS, AMA and FDA collaboratively staged a war of censorship and intimidation, preventing discussion of effective compounds, such as laetrile, for treating cancer. The ACS, for example, opposed the regulation of potential carcinogens, such as TRIS (trisaminomethane) and DES (diethylstilbestrol). Chemotherapy was promoted as a cancer treatment in the 1960s, despite evidence that it had many serious side effects and was shown to be highly toxic and carcinogenic in animal models, as well as immunosuppressive. Cancer is as much a disease of poor nutrition and one in which the multiplication of ‘simpler’ cells are unable to differentiate because the energy balance of the body is disrupted causing the disease. One of the Director’s of the National Cancer Institute is Mary Lasker, who has close ties with the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, which is not a coincidence.
Mullins goes on to describe several instances of researchers who had discovered cancer cures either by detoxification or a diet low in salt, protein and fats, but the work was buried or destroyed to ensure the chemotherapy, radiation and surgical approaches to cancer were unchallenged. The Laskers built much of their fortune on the promotion of cigarette smoking. Although cigarette smoking is harmful and causes cancer, studies (cited in the book) have shown that there was no link between traditional air-dried tobacco and lung cancer. The tobacco industries, dominated by the Rothschilds, add chemicals and sugar to tobacco, which creates a carcinogenic substance in the nicotine tar. Air-dried tobacco lacks this carcinogen, as noted by the many primitive tribes who have smoked tobacco for thousands of years without any ill effects. Mullins explains that the ACS has vested interests in established forms of cancer treatment, for example owning 50% of the patent rights for the chemotherapy drug 5-fluorouracil. Dr Hardin James addressed the ACS in 1969, noting that “for a typical type of cancer, people who refuse treatment live an average of 12.5 years. Those who accepted surgery and other kinds of treatment, lived an average of 3 years. I attribute this to the traumatic effect of surgery on the body’s natural defence mechanisms.”
In the ‘holy church’ of allopathic medicine, there are what might be termed the four ‘holy waters’, which include immunisation, fluorination of water, use of fertilisers and contamination of the food chain. The practice of immunisation is the most pernicious in terms of its long-term effects. This practice goes directly against the discovery of modern holistic medical experts that the body has a natural immune defence against illness. The greatest heresy any clinician can commit is to publicly voice any doubt about any one of the four ‘holy waters’. The most deeply entrenched in the fabric of modern medical practice, as is glaringly apparent, is the vaccination programmes, as well as being one of the most profitable aspects of the medical monopoly. One physician, Dr Henry R. Bybee of Norfolk, Virginia, stated “My honest opinion is that vaccines are the cause of more disease and suffering than anything I could name.” Additionally, Dr Herbert Snow, a senior surgeon at a cancer hospital in London voiced similar concerns “In recent years, many men and women in the prime of life have dropped dead suddenly. I am convinced that some 80% of these deaths are caused by the inoculation or vaccination they have undergone.” The chilling accounts continue with another practitioner Dr W. B. Clarke of Indiana remarking “cancer was practically unknown until compulsory vaccination when the cowpox vaccine began to be introduced. I have had to deal with at least 200 cases of cancer, and I never saw a case of cancer in an unvaccinated person”. Is this not at least an observation worth exploring? It is unlikely modern medicine advocates will examine this alarming connection. Eventually, the outraged public will bring pressure to abandon the modern ritual of vaccinating children.
Another well-known practitioner from San Francisco, Dr J. M. Pebbles, revealed “The vaccination practice…has not only become the chief menace and the greatest danger to the health of the rising generation, but an outrage upon the personal liberties of the American citizen.” The book tells of how Wyeth laboratories was charged with $15 million in damages to an 8-year-old girl who suffered permanent brain damage after receiving a diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus vaccine. In the US, vaccines are actively and incessantly promoted as the solution for all infectious diseases. It is not a coincidence that agencies, such as the AMA, WHO, FDA, are in favour of the vaccine programmes given the revolving door that exists between Big Pharma and these agencies. It is well known that Edward Jenner ‘discovered’ the cowpox vaccine to purportedly prevent smallpox. However, smallpox was already declining before the introduction of the vaccine and many believe it would have disappeared by the end of the 19th century. After the cowpox vaccine became widespread in England, a smallpox epidemic ensued killing over 22,000 people. By 1872, 44,480 were killed, and the vaccine was finally banned in 1948. This trend is mirrored elsewhere: Japan introduced compulsory vaccination in 1872 and by 1892 there were 165,774 cases of smallpox resulting in nearly 30,000 deaths. Other European countries that submitted to compulsory vaccination saw similar high numbers of cases and deaths, whereas countries (such as Norway) who did not vaccinate had a fraction of the cases. Historians are reluctantly concluding that the 1918 ‘great flu epidemic’ was attributable to the widespread use of vaccines, as survivors were those who had refused the vaccines.
The book chronicles how dissenters and researchers who spoke out lost their jobs, had their laboratory notes seized and burned, and laboratory animals destroyed. In the 1970s, the swine flu vaccination campaign was ushered in, but insurance companies refused to cover against lawsuits as there were inadequate studies. This prompted a propaganda campaign by the monopolists to trick Americans into saving themselves by taking the vaccines, which resulted in billions in damage claims. The next iteration by Dr Jonas Salk in the 1950s was the polio vaccine, which Simon Flexner helped to recommend. It is disturbing that a national conference in Washington in 1988 declared that “all the cases of polio in America come from the vaccine. The naturally occurring (or wild type) polio virus has not been shown to cause a single case of polio in the US since 1979”. Even back in 1955, the Surgeon General of the US highlighted in the AMA conference that “no batch of vaccine can be proven safe before it is given to children”. Moreover, James R. Shannon of the NIH declared “the only safe vaccine is a vaccine that is never used.”
Importantly, the death by injection playbook is not new; rather, a well-orchestrated agenda has been implemented with calculated precision in multiple cycles to gradually harm and decimate populations across the globe. This book further discusses how fluorination of water has been another Rockefeller-deployed monopoly to poison millions of Americans by adding the poisonous chemical sodium fluoride to drinking water. Large quantities of fluorides are waste contaminants and byproducts from large agricultural firms, pesticides and chemical firms, such as Hooker Chemical. Predictably, Hooker Chemical became part of the Rockefeller unit when one of the Hooker family married into the Rockefeller family. Fluorides can cause serious chromosomal damage and animal model studies have shown it promotes cancer development, even at the one part per million threshold in drinking water that has detrimental consequences especially when consumed cumulatively over time. Soviet studies have further shown that fluorides were useful in inducing docile obedience in the general population. Combined with aluminium that was included in many foods, cooking pots and packaging, this has aided in slowly poisoning the mass population and of course produced Alzhiemer’s disease, in what constitutes a build up of toxic levels of aluminium, leading to cognitive and nervous system decline.
Not content with disrupting the medical and water supplies, the Rockefeller-based medical monopoly had its eye on the ‘green revolution’ and agricultural control through the contamination of crops using a ‘co-opted’ carefully constructed money laundering system. This time they developed ‘super crops’ or grains that would serve as an excellent cash cow for the US to sell to ‘developing’ nations. To achieve this goal required the soil to be pumped with huge quantities of fertiliser (the product of nitrates and petroleum), commodities controlled by the Rockefellers that helped to build an entire chemical empire. At the end of the second World War, a concerted effort was made by the monopolists to dump surplus nitrates into the American food chain. Farmers were instructed to increase their use of fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides and create a capital intensive payback scheme for the monopolists. The final sections of the book discuss how fertilisers have been used to reduce nutrients in the soil and how the food chain has been slowly contaminated. Chapter 9 lists and discusses the 18 largest drug firms and their close associations with major banking cartels and federal agencies, such as the CIA.
Collectively, these insidious links with Big Pharma and the medical monopoly, are not only a massive cash cow, but have maimed and decimated the population and continue to do so. Since the rest of the world is intimately tethered to the well-oiled Rockefeller US medical monopoly machine, it is not hard to see how the censorship, corruption and silencing of dissenters has become all too commonplace today.
October 9, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | AMA, American Cancer Society, FDA, Human rights, United States |
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We are now a year into the Israel government’s military action devastating the people and infrastructure of Gaza and since expanded into escalating violence against countries including Lebanon and Iran. Yet, even today, United States Senate members are repeating flagrant lies produced in the war’s early days to trick Americans and others around the world into supporting Israel’s war.
On Monday, Republican US Senators introduced a resolution repeating some of these old lies that helped build support among Americans for Israel’s war — that “Hamas terrorists” killed “approximately 1,200 individuals” in their October 7, 2023 attack and that Hamas used “rape as a weapon of war.” Why repeat the lies? To support the resolution’s conclusions, including that the Senate wants to “ensure the forever survival of Israel.” Left unsaid in the resolution is that the way the US government continually acts to purportedly achieve this goal includes shoveling more and more money, weapons, and intelligence to Israel for Israel to use in whatever way it chooses. Indeed, the US government’s commitment seems unfazed no matter Israel’s level of barbarity and no matter how much Israel’s actions cause further geographic expansion of the war.
To the extent American politicians repeating these baseless claims regarding October 7 are doing so because they are ignorant about what happened, they would do well to watch a new documentary — Atrocity Inc. — featuring reporter Max Blumenthal. Blumenthal was there from the beginning calling no dice on the propaganda promoted by Israel and US politicians, along with American media, that has been used to gain public support for Israel’s aggressive actions. The widespread rape allegations are ridiculous fabrications and a significant portion of the death toll is from the willful killing of Israelis by agents of their own government, Blumenthal explains in the documentary. Blumenthal also debunks other outrageous lies, including claims related to the killing of, and even beheading of, babies on October 7.
Senators, and everyone else, can watch the documentary here.
October 9, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | Gaza, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Hezbollah has ordered its fighters not to attack Israeli forces who established a forward operating base behind UN peacekeeping troops (UNIFIL) near a Lebanese border village, effectively using them as human shields.
“The Israeli enemy is attempting to use UNIFIL forces as human shields to cover its failure to advance toward the village, especially after its repeated and unsuccessful attempts to advance toward Maroun al-Ras and the loss of dozens of its soldiers, both killed and wounded,” a statement issued by the Islamic resistance movement on 7 October said.
“The operations room of the Islamic Resistance instructed the fighters to hold back and not engage with the movement to protect the lives of international soldiers,” the statement added.
The day before, UNIFIL had warned Israel’s operations near their position at Maroun al-Ras were an “extremely dangerous development.”
“It is unacceptable to compromise the safety of UN peacekeepers carrying out their Security Council-mandated tasks,” UNIFIL stated while reminding all actors in the conflict of their obligations to protect UN personnel and property.
On Saturday, UNIFIL said it remained in all positions near the border despite what it said was an Israeli request to “relocate.”
In response to the peacekeepers’ refusal, US foreign policy advisor Matthew Brodsky suggested in a post on X, “Israel should carpet bomb Irish area, then drop Napalm on it.”
Hezbollah fighters are resisting an Israeli ground invasion that began last week.
On Monday, Hezbollah fighters attacked a gathering of Israeli forces in Maroun al-Ras with rockets, while the Israeli army said it had deployed a third division to participate in ground operations in Lebanon.
Israel’s ground maneuvers follow its intensified bombing campaign of Lebanon that began on 23 September. Israel has bombed targets in south Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Beirut, killing more than 1,110 people since then. The widespread bombing of civilian homes has left over one million people internally displaced.
Hezbollah released a statement on Monday, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, saying it and the Lebanese people have paid a “heavy price” for its decision to enter the battle against Israel and open a support front for Gaza.
“The enemy continues its crimes and aggression without limits, but we are confident, if Allah wills, in our resistance’s ability to repel the aggression, and in our great and resistant people to endure and hold out until this calamity is lifted,” the statement affirmed.
October 8, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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The US government spent at least $22.76 billion between 7 October 2023 and 30 September 2024 to support Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and fuel the raging regional war, according to a report published by Brown University’s Costs of War project.
Since the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood by Hamas one year ago, Washington provided Israel with $17.9 billion in military aid alone, the highest amount in the two countries’ histories, adjusted for inflation. Nevertheless, the report highlights that “this figure represents only a partial picture of total US support for the Israeli [army] over that time period.”

A large portion of Washington’s “security assistance” for Israel consists of munitions, from artillery shells to 2,000-pound bombs that have been dropped over residential areas in Gaza and Lebanon.
“The weapons have come through a variety of channels, including existing US stocks, including the multi-billion dollar WRSA-I stocks located in Israel, commercial sales approved by the State Department, Foreign Military Sales (FMS) approved by State and negotiated and brokered by the Pentagon, Foreign Military Financing (FMF), which provides grants for the purchase of US defense articles and services, and the Excess Defense Articles (EDA) program, which provides used systems no longer needed by US forces for free or at a steep discount,” the Costs of War report details.
However, Washington has worked to obscure “the full amounts of aid and types of systems through bureaucratic maneuvering,” in particular, by making sure that over 100 arms deals signed with Tel Aviv over the past year did not exceed the threshold that would have required reporting them to Congress: “$14 million for major defense equipment and $50 million for defense articles and services, ranging from weapons systems to equipment maintenance and military training.”
Based on publicly available information cited by the researchers, the $17.9 billion figure is divided as follows: $4 billion to replenish Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defense systems; $1.2 billion for the Iron Beam defense system; $3.5 billion for the procurement of advanced weapons systems, defense articles, and defense services through the FMF program; $1 billion to enhance the production and development of artillery and critical munitions; $4.4 billion to replenish defense articles and defense services provided to Israel from US stocks; finally, the total figure also includes Israel’s usual annual military aid installment of $3.8 billion.
The amount surpasses what Washington spent during the 1973 Arab–Israeli war and is about four times the amount Israel received in the 1980s during its war with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon, its 15-year occupation of Lebanon, and the 2006 war with Hezbollah.
“Israel receives favorable financing arrangements related to US military aid. For example, US aid is provided on a ‘cash flow’ basis, which means that Israel is able to finance multi-year purchases from the US based on future commitments before the funds have been officially appropriated by Congress … Unlike any other country in the world, Israel is allowed to spend 25% of its routine annual military aid from the United States on its own arms industry,” the report highlights.
Since October 2023, the US has spent an additional $4.86 billion funding its illegal war against Yemen and its failed efforts to protect western trade interests in the Red Sea and beyond. This figure includes $2.4 billion approved by Congress in April for “military operations in the broader region to respond to attacks over the next year,” another $2.4 billion in operation costs for “additional Aircraft Carrier Strike Groups and additional actions against [Yemen],” and between $50 to $70 million in additional combat pay for troops.
“There are an estimated 40,000 American personnel stationed in the region, (including personnel on ships, aircraft, and bases) (compared with 34,000 prior to October 7, 2023). This number rose to 50,000 in early August 2024, when Secretary Austin ordered a second carrier strike group to the area after Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran,” the report states.
By June, the US navy estimated it had fired $1 billion worth of munitions to confront Yemeni attacks. Furthermore, the Yemeni armed forces have downed at least 11 US MQ-9 Reaper drones over the country. With each costing $30 million, Sanaa has handed Washington at least $330 million in losses.
Finally, the Costs of War investigation reveals that western arms dealers are the ones reaping the benefits of Washington’s unchecked spending to support Israel’s genocidal war, chief among them Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, and other equipment producers such as Caterpillar.
October 8, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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On Saturday, former US First Lady Hillary Clinton called for increased federal regulation of the internet and repealing Section 230. “If the platforms… don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control,” she said, raising the question of who “we” represents in that statement.
From the recent purge of YouTube accounts, including those from Mark Sleboda, Rachel Blevins, Glenn Diesen, DD Geopolitics, Fiorella Isabel, Larry Johnson, and Eva K. Bartlett, it is clear that the Western leaders are scared of their populations finding out the truth about their policies and actions.
“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people,” Former US President John F. Kennedy.
“That’s what they’re afraid of,” Sleboda, an expert in geopolitical relations and a frequent guest on Sputnik Radio, told The Final Countdown. “They don’t trust you to hear an alternate view from the official US government narrative and come to what they consider the right political conclusions.”
Many Americans were taught that freedom was proof-positive that Western-style democracies were superior to other systems.
In separate interviews, Sleboda and Blevins both said that their channels were taken down without warning or strikes. Both were accused of violating YouTube’s policies on hate speech and said their appeals were denied within minutes.
“Just anyone who is critical of a US foreign policy, of hegemony, has had their YouTube channels deleted,” Sleboda contended.
While the censorship technically came from Alphabet, the mega-monolith tech company that owns both Google and YouTube, a comprehensive program between the US government and large social media companies has slowly been revealed over the past couple of years making the line one without distinction.
“My lawyer called that First Amendment censorship via proxy, or government censorship via proxy,” Political cartoonist and The Final Countdown co-host Ted Rall explained. “The US government has reached out to big tech companies, talked to people like [Meta CEO] Mark Zuckerberg and so on, and said, ‘we want you to control and squish what we call misinformation and disinformation.’”
With the internet practically ubiquitous in modern society, an expansion of the First Amendment to public and private sectors of the internet is needed to protect our speech rights.
“What does the First Amendment actually mean in today’s age when just about everyone is on social media or on the internet in some way, and it has become sort of the new public square?” asked Blevins, an independent journalist, and host of The Backstory on Radio Sputnik. “What are we okay with when it comes to the ongoing censorship? Because I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon.”
Even if the government were removed from the equation, and censorship came exclusively from the tech companies themselves they have become so powerful that acts of self-censorship would be indistinguishable from government-ordered censorship, especially during wartime.
In post-9/11 America, large media companies kept dissenting voices off the air, limiting the reach of those who, for example, opposed the war in Iraq.
“And you get that corporate mentality of what will the advertisers think?” legendary Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson argued in an August 2002 interview with Media Report.
“A kind of we’re all in this together thinking.” The consolidation of the internet from disparate groups of message boards and newsgroups into a handful of omnipresent tech companies raises that specter again.
“As we saw this weekend, YouTube can come in and just delete your channel and take your life’s work away from you,” decried Blevin, noting that her channel was backed up on the free speech platform Rumble.
The majority of the deleted accounts offered views that opposed the NATO-led proxy war in Ukraine and/or Western support of Israel. As the war drums beat ever louder in Europe, the Middle East, and the South Pacific, not to mention the US Presidential election next month, the crackdown is likely to increase.
“They haven’t really thrown out the term election interference just yet, but I have a feeling that’s coming in some way,” warned Blevins.
“We’ll tell our grandchildren about the golden age of a global internet,” before censorship took it over, predicted Sleboda. “I think we’re going to see our internet fractured into either individual states’ internets or geopolitical block’s internets. And I think the process has already begun,” he warned.
October 7, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, United States, YouTube |
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Who can develop reliable, cheap, clean power? In the parlance of baseball, the U.S. led early with a leadoff home run. It invented, developed and perfected the first ultra-super critical (USC) coal-powered plant.
Coming online in 2012, the 600-megawatt (MW) John W. Turk Jr. Coal Plant in Arkansas employed new technology, most notably, an advance in metallurgy that allowed pipes and boilers to operate for extended periods at extremely elevated temperature and pressure.
This higher temperature allows efficiency of 40%, instead of the more usual 33%. Also, Turk had the best pollution controls, its emissions being mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor. Power Magazine was so impressed that it gave the plant its highest honor in 2013.
It looked like the U.S. was set to win the game, until it took its eye off the ball and made numerous errors. Instead of exploiting its remarkable technological achievement, U.S. policymakers decided to abandon coal and promote wind and solar.
Powerful environmental groups fought to end coal; Michael Bloomberg bragged that he contributed $500 million to the effort. Companies in the coal industry suffered, some went out of business, and domestic consumption of the country’s most abundant fuel declined. Turk is still the only USC plant in the U.S.
Solar and wind do not provide reliable power, as they fluctuate with the weather and time of day.
Also, they are not cheap. Germans, whose electric system relies heavily on solar, pay more than twice as much for electricity as the nuclear-dominant French and nearly triple the amount paid by U.S. consumers.
Furthermore, solar and wind technologies, contrary to popular belief, are not clean; not where their materials are mined, nor where they are used, nor at the end of life.
First, the mining: These technologies use many exotic and rare earth materials like praseodymium, terbium, cadmium, indium and dysprosium. Such materials are available mostly in Western China and Africa, under who-knows-what environmental and working conditions.
Secondly, where they are used, solar and wind take up tremendous amounts of land – many times the acreage of a coal plant. The average solar power reaching Earth is about 200 MW per square kilometer. Hence, with a perfectly efficient conversion to electricity, a 1,000 MW solar farm would require 5 square kilometers. But maximum solar efficiency is only 20%, boosting the land requirement to 25 square kilometers, space that could not be used for anything else. Even the maximum theoretical efficiency is only 30%.
The numbers for wind are worse: A 1,000 MW wind farm would require a whopping 500 square kilometers – equal to about 27,000 big league baseball fields. This land could be used for crops and grazing animals, but not much else.
Finally, disposal of the huge amount of material used in the fabrication of solar and wind facilities, whose life spans are mere fractions of traditional generating plants, must be disposed of. Many of these exotic materials are not suitable for standard landfills, as their compounds are harmful to humans and are water soluble. Frequently, the solar or wind company has just walked away and left the relics in place for others to worry about.
Solar and wind are more of an environmental disaster than an environmental savior.
With the U.S. relegated to the locker room, China came to bat and staged a tremendous scoring rally. Out of the top 100 Chinese coal plants, 90 are ultra-supercritical units.
Having improved on USC technology, Chinese plant efficiency is around 44%. The new 1,350 MW Pingshan Phase II plant achieves 49% efficiency! The best Chinese coal plant is now cleaner and 22 % more efficient than its American counterpart.
Since 2010, India has constructed more than 90 super critical and ultra-super critical coal plants.
Has the U.S. played its last coal-fired season?
Perhaps- unless America’s free enterprise system were brought fully into the game, with the private sector mostly doing the engineering and the federal government sponsoring long-range scientific research.
However, U.S. policymakers must abandon their obsession with solar and wind as answers for a climatic “existential threat.” Otherwise, sensible people play a fool’s game in a fantasy league that demonizes a gas sustaining all life — carbon dioxide – as others compete in the majors.
Such absurdity is no match for the technical leadership displayed in China and India.
Dr. Wallace Manheimer is a life fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and is a member of the CO2.Coalition. He is the author of more than 150 refereed papers.
October 7, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | China, India, United States |
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Recently released emails from Reuters show that officials in the White House ignored warnings from their counterparts at the Defense and State Department warning that Israel was committing war crimes and creating a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Reuters reviewed emails from the Departments of Defense and State from last October, showing that high-ranking officials warned about supporting Israel as it committed war crimes in Gaza.
“As Israel pounded northern Gaza with air strikes last October and ordered the evacuation of more than a million Palestinians from the area, a senior Pentagon official delivered a blunt warning to the White House, the outlet reported. “The mass evacuation would be a humanitarian disaster and could violate international law, leading to war crime charges against Israel.”
The warning came from Dana Stroul, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East in an Oct. 13 email sent to senior White House aides. She explained an assessment by the International Committee of the Red Cross that had left her “chilled to the bone.”
Stroul and other officials were pushing the White House to take a more sympathetic position on the suffering of Palestinians and ask Israel to give Gazans more time to comply with Tel Aviv’s evacuation orders.
While the Biden administration claims that it did pressure Israel early in the onslaught and that did make a difference, Reuters reports that the White House had little impact on Tel Aviv’s military operations.
“But Washington was slow to address the suffering of Palestinians, said three senior U.S. officials involved in the decision-making process,” the article explains. “And while the ground invasion was ultimately delayed by about 10 days, the three officials attributed the pause more to operational preparations by the Israeli military than U.S. pressure.”
In one concerning email exchange, officials asked the White House to pressure Israel to extend the deadline for one million Palestinians to leave northern Gaza beyond 24 hours. A top Biden official, Brett McGurk responded by telling Egypt to prepare to receive refugees from Gaza.
“In an email replying to Stroul, McGurk said Washington might be able to persuade Israel to extend the deadline for Palestinians to evacuate beyond 24 hours,” saying the administration “can buy some time.” “But the Red Cross, the UN and aid agencies should work with Egypt and Israel to prepare for the evacuation, he wrote,” according to Reuters.
When the request for a more sympathetic position towards the Palestinians was relayed to the White House, it was also rejected.
Reuters reports the State Department’s top Middle East diplomat, Barbara Leaf, sent an email to White House officials including Brett McGurk, Biden’s top Mid East aide. Her main concern was the damage Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, along with US support, was doing to Washington’s relationship with its Mid East Arab partners.
McGurk interpreted the email as a request for a ceasefire and replied, “no.”
October 7, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Middle East, United States, Zionism |
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Over the weekend, the Commander of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), General Michael Kurilla, arrived in Israel to “coordinate” with the Israeli military and plan a military strike against Iran. Think about that for a moment: one of the highest-ranking officers in the US military is planning a war in a foreign country against another foreign country which will be fueled by American weapons, American intelligence, and American tax dollars.
Did that foreign country – Iran – attack the United States or threaten Americans? No, it did not. What did Iran do to warrant a CENTCOM commander bringing the weight of the US military into play to plan a war – possibly WWIII? It retaliated against Israeli airstrikes including the assassination of a Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.
It was the Israeli missile attack on Tehran – an unprecedented event – that set off this chain of escalation, but few would know it from media coverage. This war fever between Israel and Iran not only has nothing to do with us, but our increasing involvement actually hurts our national interests in the region.
After a deadly and futile three-year proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the last thing we need is another war in the Middle East, especially against Iran. But make no mistake, war is what we are getting. This Administration has even offered to “compensate” Israel with even more weapons and diplomatic support if they hit targets of the US choosing and avoid others in Iran.
Imagine if China sent military officials to Iran to pay Tehran to make sure some US targets were struck and others avoided. Would we consider it Iran’s war against us, or China’s war against us? Both?
Has Congress declared war on Iran or even authorized the war? No. Has this Administration explained to us why Americans suffering after the catastrophic Hurricane Helene are on their own because we need to spend billions on a war that is none of our business? No. The neocons have wanted this war for decades and for them it’s always America last.
This war will make us less free, less safe, and much poorer. There will be no benefits at all, only downside.
Will the Biden/Harris Administration greenlight Israel taking out Iran’s oil production and other energy facilities? That would mean the average American already suffering under high inflation and an economic downturn would be paying orders of magnitude higher for not just gasoline, but everything. Consider the cost of shipping and trucking and every aspect of our lives that depends on world energy prices. It would be an economic calamity for Americans for the benefit of a foreign country. This is what they call patriotism?
We are sleepwalking into a catastrophic war, lulled into compliance by non-stop media propaganda. More billions will be drained from our economy and many more innocent lives will be lost in this madness. Almost a quarter of a century later we still have not learned the lessons of 9/11. When we go abroad wreaking havoc and destruction on foreign populations who have not harmed us we create enemies who will seek revenge. We harm ourselves. And we risk blowback. The time to oppose this impending war is NOW!
October 7, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Iran, Israel, United States, Zionism |
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WASHINGTON – The United States should not interfere with China’s right to develop relations with the government of Hungary, the Chinese Embassy in Washington told Sputnik after US lawmakers lambasted Budapest for growing ties with Beijing.
A group of US senators was in Hungary last week to meet with government officials. Following the visit, the senators issued a joint statement criticizing Hungarian officials for developing ties with Russia and China, adding that Budapest has ignored allies’ concerns regarding its deepening cooperation with Beijing.
“China’s right to develop bilateral relations and conduct normal exchanges with other countries in the world should not be interfered with or disrupted,” the Chinese Embassy spokesperson said.
The Chinese Embassy added that the remarks by the US senators advocate bloc confrontation and are full of Cold War thinking and zero-sum game concepts, coercing other countries to choose sides.
The US senators did not go into detail about their concerns in the joint statement but urged Hungary to work closely with its allies, and listen to their concerns and act on them.
The delegation of US senators that visited Hungary included senators Jerry Moran, Susan Collins, John Cornyn, John Boozman and John Hoeven.
October 7, 2024
Posted by aletho |
Russophobia | China, Hungary, United States |
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