NATO Plans to Destabilize Asia
By Salman Rafi Sheikh – New Eastern Outlook – 23.07.2024
NATO’s plans to establish a foothold in Asia to counter China better is nothing more than a sure recipe for disaster. Coming to Asia and beating war drums against a country that has not attacked anyone is akin to pushing it to take any and all necessary steps to protect its interests. NATO, thus, is pushing China to shun its regionally focused pacificism in favour of a more belligerent stance. A more aggressive China will, in NATO’s calculation, push Asian countries to move more towards the US out of their common fear of Beijing as the hegemon. However, Asian countries are not readily buying the US narrative. They remain sceptical, even as they are still committed to maintaining a balance between China and the US to avoid getting trapped in the ‘Cold War 2.0’.
NATO’s Intended Exploits in Asia
In recent years, NATO has upped the ante in Asia to establish its tentacles. The linchpin of this strategy is to hijack the Asian countries’ defence and military strategies and shape them in strictly Western ways. This will include, as in the West, military competition plus a shift away from deep economic ties with Beijing. Once accomplished, this will help isolate China globally. In the US, since 2016, the successive administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden have been taking steps to “de-couple” from China. The European Union, too, is now increasingly coming round to this idea of putting serious curbs on trade with China. A key reason for this is the inability of both the US and the EU to compete with Chinese products. Ultimately, they want Asia to ‘learn’ the same lesson.
This was precisely the idea that Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s existing Secretary General, sold in an article he wrote for Foreign Affairs in early July. Addressing the China-Russia ties and blaming China for the combined failure of the US, EU, and NATO to defeat Russia in Ukraine, Stoltenberg said “this shows that in today’s world, security is not a regional matter but a global one. Europe’s security affects Asia, and Asia’s security affects Europe … These are big challenges that call for bold decisions”.
The bold decision, as it stands, is to link Europe’s security with Asia unnecessarily and at any cost. This will help the West centralize Asia’s security narrative under a common framework, with Asian countries ultimately losing their agency and autonomy. At least this is the idea.
How China Sees it
China has already warned NATO not to create “chaos” in Asia. “China urges NATO to … stop interfering in China’s internal politics and smearing China’s image and not create chaos in the Asia-Pacific after creating turmoil in Europe,” said Chinese spokesperson Lin Jian.
Still, NATO’s narrative could work against it, even as China will make sure to frame it in a way that could wean regional states away from it. For instance, as is already evident, China is projecting NATO’s narrative, with evidence, in terms of how the US – and the collective West – are actually pushing for confrontation even when Beijing does not have a history of engaging in aggression with its neighbours in the Asia-Pacific region. No shots have yet been fired that could draw a global outcry, calling for military solidarities against Beijing.
There is, therefore, a high degree of exaggeration and propaganda. If the imperative is really to counter China, why are the US and NATO countries not putting a premier on building deep economic ties with Asian countries? The reason is that they don’t have any economic plan of such magnitude that can counter China. Therefore, the West cannot help but offer military help. But this is a help that not many countries in Asia are even looking for. Defence cooperation with the US is one thing, but welcoming NATO, a typical military alliance, in their territories and developing a global military alliance is an entirely different thing.
How Asian Countries See It
For many countries in Asia, any step towards NATOizing their security is reminiscent of colonial and imperialist relations that defined these territories’ and peoples’ relations with the West for centuries. Therefore, they seem to put a very high premium on maintaining their strategic autonomy.
Ironically, the opposition to developing a fully-fledged alliance is visible even in such countries as the Philippines that are otherwise known for being ‘pro-US’. President Ferdinand Marcos has called on the region to reject a “Cold War mindset”. Kishore Mahbubani, formerly Singapore’s ambassador to the United Nations, for example, warned as early as 2021 that the “biggest danger” of NATO’s Indo-Pacific shift is that the alliance “could end up exporting its disastrous militaristic culture” to East Asia. Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto, for instance, stated in June that his country would “continue our strong cooperation with China” but “at the same time, we will work to expand and deepen our close partnership with the US and the West”.
Let’s also not forget that this region also includes a critical mass of countries – such as Indonesia – that have a history of ‘non-alignment’. They refused to take sides during the Cold War, and they are again showing strong signs of maintaining a similar stance in the current scenario.
Still, these countries’ scepticism is intensified by NATO’s recent performances. It has thus far badly failed in Ukraine. It wreaked havoc in Libya and Afghanistan, ultimately failing in both cases to bring stability. Does it have a track record of fulfilling its promises and achieving its objectives? For countries in Asia, establishing an alliance with an organization with such a poor record is a poor trade – not only because it will not bring much benefit, but also because it might directly – and negatively – affect their flourishing economic ties with China.
Salman Rafi Sheikh is a research analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs.
NEW STUDIES SHOW PEDIATRIC “BEST PRACTICES” NOT BASED IN SCIENCE
The Highwire | July 18, 2024
Learning nothing from the opioid crisis, research misconduct and regulatory failure has opened the door to widespread public harm from new classes of weight loss and trans medicine drugs classes. Also, a new kind of scientific methodology is being brought to the forefront, driven by AI.
The Titanic scale of floating wind turbines quantified
By David Wojick | CFACT | July 17, 2024
My regular readers know that I have often referred to the huge size of floating wind turbine assemblies. They are much bigger than fixed offshore wind turbine assemblies because there is a big float attached. This makes floating wind far more expensive than fixed wind, which is already far more expensive than reliable fuel-fired electric power.
Simple physics says that if you want to put a 2,000-ton generator on top of a 500-foot tower with three 300-foot wings attached on a boat and have it still stand up in hurricane-force winds, it will have to be a mighty big boat.
Happily, Philip Lewis from strategic analyst Intelatus has put some numbers on this nonsense in Offshore Engineer.
See https://www.oedigital.com/news/504812-addressing-the-challenges-of-developing-floating-wind-at-scale
Of course, these are just estimates based on proposed designs, not measurements. Keep in mind that no one, anywhere, has ever built one of these Titanic monsters. Governments are setting huge targets for a technology that does not exist.
Based on UK permit applications, we are looking at a colossal individual floater footprint of around 160,000 square feet. That is roughly three football fields, so a mighty big float. And the UK does not get anything like hurricane-force winds. Maybe 100 mph, but never 160.
Weight-wise, Lewis suggests up to 5,000 tons of steel or 20,000 tons of concrete per float. Mind you, 5,000 tons of steel floaters will not keep 2,000 tons on a tall pole upright. These designs are what are called “semi-submersible”. This means the Titanic float is something like half full of water. There is enough air to float it but also a lot of water to hopefully weigh it down. I have yet to see the math on all this and have my doubts about its viability, but this is what is reported.
Of course, these huge floaters make floating wind power extremely expensive. The guess is at least three times as much as the already ridiculously expensive fixed-bottom offshore wind power. It could be a lot more.
These enormous numbers are based on 15 MW turbines, which are the biggest built today, although none has yet been installed and operational offshore. But bigger are coming with 18 MW on order and 20 MW advertised. Floater size and weight scale exponentially with turbine weight and height, so the above huge numbers may actually be quite small.
As an engineer, I would build a few of these monster floating assemblies and run them through a few hurricanes to see how they did, especially if they survived. Of course, the hell-bent Biden folks and green States are doing nothing like that.
For example, next month, Biden’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is selling 15,000 MW of floating wind leases in the Gulf of Maine. California just announced a 25,000 MW floating wind target with 5,000 MW already leased by BOEM.
Just to play with numbers, this 40,000 MW of floaters would take just under 3,000 of these monster 15 MW floaters. In addition to filling up a lot of surface ocean, each has to be anchored to the sea floor with at least three mooring cables, more likely around eight each. Plus each has a live wire cable transmitting its energy output.
Lewis says the depths involved are like this: “In the U.S., the first commercial-scale projects will be off California (500-1,300 meters). Future activity is planned off Oregon (550-1,500 meters), the Gulf of Maine (190-300 meters), and the Central Atlantic (over 2,000 meters).” A mile is roughly 1,600 meters.
So we have many millions of feet of mooring cables and hot wires filling the ocean between the floaters and the sea floor. This is a whole new form of harassment that needs to be authorized (or not) under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
What is really funny is I see no plans for building these thousands of Titanic floating wind assemblies. I recently pointed out that the Biden Transportation Dept was illegally diverting almost a billion dollars to build floating wind fabrication facilities in Maine and California. But, neither facility design has what it would take to actually make this stupendous semi-submersible junk, starting with dry docks.
I strongly suggest we put a big hold on leasing and funding floating wind technology. Let’s first see how and if it works and at what cost.
Scott Ritter: Biden’s Election Withdrawal Shows Who is Actually Running America

Sputnik – July 22, 2024
The timing of Joe Biden’s sudden withdrawal from the presidential race raises questions, argues former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and ex-weapons inspector Scott Ritter.
“There’s no doubt that Joe Biden is unfit to be president of the United States. No doubt. But here’s the question. If he’s unfit to run as the candidate of the Democratic Party, why did they put him up?” former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and ex-weapons inspector Scott Ritter said, noting that signs of Biden’s frailty were visible during the G7 summit in Italy last month.
According to him, the fact that Biden is unfit to be the POTUS but was still allowed to “function” begets the question: who is really in charge in the United States?
“Who’s running America? Because it’s not Joe Biden. We don’t know who. It’s an unelected group of handlers who are drawn from what I guess we can call the establishment. Some people might refer to it as the deep state. And these are the people who are calling the shots,” Ritter stated, noting that “the critical decisions of governance” this group makes are made “for the American people, but not necessarily on behalf of the American people.”
He describes the 2024 presidential election in the US as “a test of American democracy” and a “contest between established elites that are found in the Democratic Party and this surge of populism in the form of Donald Trump who is taking control of the Republican Party.”
Yet while Americans are normally allowed to “have a say in the outcome” of this process, the Democratic Party and the “elites known and unknown” now opted to meddle in this process and “will be selecting who their candidate will be for the presidency in the 2024 elections,” which is “not the way it’s supposed to be,” he noted.
“America is in a crisis, a crisis of democracy, a crisis of identity. And it doesn’t look like we have a solution because for the most part, the American people have been confused and misled and manipulated by the mainstream media into somehow thinking that this is normal,” Ritter lamented.
What Is Joe Biden’s Legacy?

By Oleg Burunov – Sputnik – 22.07.2024
Biden announced he is dropping out of the 2024 presidential race on July 21. It came amid calls by prominent Democrats and donors to withdraw following his performance in last month’s debate against former President Donald Trump.
In a statement on his decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, President Joe Biden also reflected on the results of his four years in office, claiming that the US has built the “strongest economy in the world.”
He touted efforts to expand what he described as “affordable healthcare to a record number of Americans,” also arguing that his administration allegedly provided “critically needed care to a million veterans exposed to toxic substances.”
Is It So, Joe?
First and foremost, the US economic meltdown shows no signs of abating, with 36% of Americans recently surveyed by Pew Research rating the national economy as “poor”. Add to this the fact that America’s state debt, which now stands at nearly $34.4 trillion, is rising by $1 trillion about every 100 days.
Also, the US migration crisis persists as new data by the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reveals a significant surge in illegal border crossings, with more than 205,000 apprehensions in June alone, pushing the total for fiscal year 2024 to 2.5 million.
Drug overdose, meanwhile, remains one of the leading causes of injury death in adults in the US and has risen over the past several years. Overdoses specifically pertain to synthetic opioids (fentanyl) and stimulants (cocaine and methamphetamine), according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
Biden’s Foreign Policy Track Record
The Ukraine crisis is in full swing, as the Biden administration continues to add fuel to the fire by providing the Kiev regime with military supplies despite Russia’s repeated warnings that such assistance would only prolong the standoff.
Separately, the Gaza war is still in place despite Biden’s much-hyped plan to help clinch a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. The US president last month said that the Gaza war must end now and Israel must not occupy the Palestinian enclave after the end of hostilities – another statement that apparently fell on the Jewish state’s deaf ears.
As a cherry on the top, Biden failed to deliver on his promise to restore the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, with the Vienna talks on the matter finally coming to a standstill.
U.S. Government ‘Saddled’ With COVID Vaccine Injury ‘Mess’ — While Vaccine Makers Avoid Liability
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 18, 2024
As early as January 2022, National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers were aware of at least 850 peer-reviewed case reports and/or research articles about COVID-19 vaccine reactions, according to emails obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD).
In one email (name and agency redacted), NIH researchers were told the federal government was “saddled” with the “mess” of dealing with those injured by the COVID-19 vaccines, due to the liability shield enjoyed by vaccine manufacturers.
The emails, part of a 309-page batch of documents released to CHD on June 21, originated from a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) request to NIH researchers for input on a report highlighting several injuries common among people who received the vaccines.
CHD requested the documents via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NIH in November 2022. When the NIH hadn’t responded by April 2023, CHD sued the agency.
In an October 2023 settlement, the NIH agreed to produce up to 7,500 pages of documents at a rate of 300 pages per month.
The batch of documents released in June — which include emails to Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research — revealed that by fall 2021, key NIH researchers were aware of scientific studies on serious adverse events, including persistent neurological symptoms, following COVID-19 vaccines.
As with prior releases of the NIH documents, June’s tranche also included several emails from vaccine-injured individuals to NIH researchers, seeking help for their symptoms — with one person asking, “Why aren’t you studying vaccine injuries?”
‘Tinnitus … was a freight train in my head for the first four months’
On Jan. 10, 2022, NIH researcher Dr. Avindra Nath was forwarded an email from someone whose name is redacted, with the subject line: “Followup [sic] Jan 4th Meeting” (pages 281-289).
The original email, dated Jan. 9, 2022, was sent to FDA officials including Marks and Dr. Janet Woodcock, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, who apparently participated in a meeting on this topic on Jan. 4, 2022.
The Jan. 9, 2022 email included a list of “persistent symptoms following the Covid vaccines” and the names of researchers who were studying these conditions, which included dysautonomia, neuropathy, tinnitus, multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS), myocarditis, blood clots and parasthesias.
The email was accompanied by a spreadsheet listing approximately 850 “peer-reviewed case reports/research articles about Covid vaccine reactions.”
Regarding dysautonomia — a nervous system disorder that disrupts automatic bodily functions — the email stated that the condition is “grossly under diagnosed” and “is not diagnosed in ERs or ICUs” but in “autonomic specialty labs.”
The email noted that such labs are less likely than hospitals to file reports with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and added that there “likely are issues with identifying this syndrome if only looking through VAERS or similarly reported databases.”
As a result, the email suggested “it would be reasonable to approach autonomic specialists / long covid specialists about their observations.”
A 2011 Harvard study found that less than 1% of all adverse events are reported to VAERS.
The Jan. 9, 2022, email also noted unusual trends regarding diagnoses of neuropathy — a set of neurological symptoms that includes numbness and tingling in the hands or feet, and a burning, stabbing or shooting pain in affected areas.
According to the email, “Historically, neuropathy presents in the predominantly male population aged 59+. However as discussed previous [sic], neuropathy in our case is predominantly female, aged 29-40.”
As with dysautonomia, the email noted that neuropathy is “likely to be inadequately reported through the VAERS and BEST [Biologics Effectiveness and Safety] systems because of the circumstances previously mentioned for dysautonomia.”
The Jan. 9, 2022 email also acknowledged that tinnitus was a common post-vaccination injury, noting, “Our findings are that this is not just J&J [the Johnson & Johnson, or Janssen, COVID-19 vaccine] … not by a long shot.”
According to the email, “This symptom is more proportionate to the general neuro symptoms by brand as previously reported in our patient led survey of 500 participants.”
The email’s author also noted that, “in my case yes, I have tinnitus now and it was a freight train in my head for the first four months.”
‘Is it reasonable to dismiss … 20 new symptoms … in a single person post vaccine?’
According to the email, myocarditis and blood clots were already “acknowledged by the FDA and CDC” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
“Every person in our groups that have one of these two conditions, also have accompanying neuro issues like those of us who are not currently acknowledged by the FDA and CDC,” the email said.
The conditions included postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), “brain fog/memory loss, and inflammation (MCAS)” — mast cell activation syndrome.
“Even the perfectly healthy very fit young males with the lasting myocarditis are struggling with the POTS and inflammation/brain fog/memory loss. Makes me suspect that somehow these all are a result of the same mechanism of action,” the email stated.
The Jan. 9, 2022, email also acknowledged parasthesia — a condition that causes a burning, prickling sensation — and MIS, a condition in which numerous organs become inflamed, as concerns.
The email openly questioned why more wasn’t being done to connect these conditions in the vaccinated, to the COVID-19 vaccines themselves, noting that vaccinated people were frequently demonstrating multiple rare symptoms:
“While we understand that correlation does not equal causation, we also find a strong correlation with the change in our blood that mirrors long-haul, and symptomology that mirrors long-haul.
“Because of this, I have to ask what is the process by which Covid PASC [post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, or long COVID] symptoms have been so readily tied back to Covid, whereas the same symptoms due to the Covid vaccines have not?
“Also, while it may be coincidental to have one or maybe two strange symptoms pop up, is it reasonable to dismiss 10, 15, 20 new symptoms that occur in a single person post vaccine.”
‘Insanely challenging for these people suffering … to walk this path alone’
In the Jan. 10, 2022, email to Nath an NIH researcher wrote, “The FDA has asked once again for us to provide any input from those who have experience with this disease. Very prompt responses and more active engagement on their part lead me to believe they will now examine these problems with some effort.”
The author also asked Nath if he knew researchers “who could fill in the gaps” and asked him if he would “kindly be willing to discuss with Peter Marks?”
“The gov has conveniently absolved the drug companies of any liability, and the federal government is now saddled with the responsibility of figuring out this mess,” the email continued. “I am happy to orchestrate a meeting of the minds with NDR [non-disclosure] agreements if that would get the discussion started in a way that is similar to how previous new diseases have been investigated.”
The email also noted talks with public health officials in Germany and France.
“It has been insanely challenging for these people suffering to have to walk this path alone. They grow more and more desperate by the day. Knowing there is someone, somewhere looking into this makes a big difference for these people to just hang on.”
Even though public health agencies were aware of this information and were discussing vaccine injuries in early 2022, official government advice to the public continued to claim the COVID-19 vaccines were “safe and effective,” including statements by Dr. Anthony Fauci in November 2022.
And in testimony before Congress in February, Marks dismissed the COVID-19 vaccine injury reports filed with VAERS, stating that numerous false reports are submitted to the database — a claim some experts have disputed.
As of today, the CDC continues to recommend the COVID-19 vaccines “for everyone ages 6 months and older, including people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or might become pregnant in the future.”
NIH researchers aware of vaccine injury studies in fall of 2021
The June 2024 tranche of NIH documents also revealed that, at least as early as fall 2021, researchers with the agency were aware of scientific studies and surveys highlighting serious adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination.
In a Sept. 2, 2021, email (pages 109-121), Farinaz Safavi, M.D., Ph.D., of the NIH Division of Neuroimmunology and Neurovirology was sent the results of the “Covid Vaccine Persistent Symptoms Survey” conducted by React19, a group advocating on behalf of COVID-19 vaccine injury victims.
The version of the survey included in the email was accurate as of Aug. 31, 2021, and contained the results of 382 questionnaires submitted by people “suffering persistent neurological symptoms after receiving the Sars-CoV2 Vaccine in the United States.”
According to those results, 71% of respondents said they had no preexisting health conditions prior to the symptoms they developed following their COVID-19 vaccination, and 94% said they had never previously experienced a reaction to other vaccines.
The most commonly reported symptoms included paresthesia, tinnitus, heart palpitations, tachycardia, chest pain, visual disturbance or loss, muscle twitching, joint pain, muscle aches, brain fog, fatigue and anxiety attacks.
Almost all respondents said these symptoms began less than two weeks following vaccination.
In a Nov. 15, 2021, email (pages 300-305), Nath was sent a scientific paper, “Neurological side effects of SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations,” authored by Austrian researcher Josef Finsterer, M.D., Ph.D.
According to this paper, “The most frequent neurological side effects of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are headache,” Guillain-Barré syndrome, venous sinus thrombosis and transverse myelitis.
“Safety concerns against SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are backed by an increasing number of studies reporting neurological side effects. … Healthcare professionals, particularly neurologists involved in the management of patients having undergone SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations, should be aware of these side effects and should stay vigilant to recognize them early and treat them adequately,” the paper concluded.
Nath received a review copy of this paper, which has since been published in Acta Neurologica Scandinavica.
And in a May 17, 2021, email (pages 292-299), Nath was sent a preprint of “Sudden Onset of Myelitis after COVID-19 Vaccination: An Under-Recognized Severe Rare Adverse Event,” co-authored by William E. Fitzsimmons, doctor of pharmacy, and Dr. Christopher S. Nance.
According to the preprint, “Myelitis has been reported as a complication of COVID-19 infection. However, it has rarely been reported as a complication of COVID-19 vaccination.”
The paper focused on the example of one of Fitzsimmons’ patients, a 63-year-old previously healthy male who developed myelitis after his second dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine — and treatment that was effective in his case.
Other emails apparently sent by Fitzsimmons highlighted the injuries and the progression of treatment of this 63-year-old man (pages 145-150).
‘A blood clot as a cause of your paralysis would make the most sense’
In an email chain to Nath beginning Sept. 20, 2021, (pages 228-233) with the subject “Paralyzed after J&J Covid Vaccine,” the author (whose name is redacted) said that less than 24 hours following vaccination, the patient “lost bladder control.” He later developed a blood clot and erectile dysfunction, before becoming paralyzed.
In a response that day, Nath told the patient, “The temporal association of the symptoms with the vaccine does make is [sic] suspect, but I do not know of any way how to sort it out.”
In a follow-up email that day, Nath said, “A blood clot as a cause of your paralysis would make the most sense, however, proving cause and effect related to the vaccine in a single patient is virtually impossible.”
In a Dec. 13, 2021, email to Nath (pages 234-236), another vaccine injury victim, who “was healthy prior to vaccination,” described injuries following both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, including paresthesia, tachycardia, severe tinnitus, intractable insomnia and “POTs-like symptoms.”
“I have been diligent and determined in seeking care near and far, but have continued to face skepticism, half-interest, and an inability to know how best to treat,” this person wrote.
And in a series of emails beginning Jan. 24, 2022, (pages 246-247), a “woman who was completely healthy before taking the Pfizer vaccines” told Nath about a series of neurological symptoms and inflammation she experienced following her second dose, in addition to symptoms like tinnitus, insomnia and brain fog.
“Why isn’t the NIH doing research on this?” she asked in a follow-up email on Jan. 25, 2022.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Could Trump’s election end NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia?
Strategic Culture Foundation | July 19, 2024
The presidential nomination of Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance as his running mate raises the prospect of a peaceful settlement to the conflict in Ukraine. Both have been vociferous critics of the NATO proxy war and the arming of the Kiev regime. Vance has even proposed a peace settlement that is close to Moscow’s demands.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is recently pushing peace diplomacy, has voiced optimism that the omens are good for a settlement later this year to the worst war in Europe since the Second World War – if Trump and Vance are elected.
Only days after Donald Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt, he was officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate amid ecstatic scenes at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
After the tumult and drama over the last week – a long time in politics, as the saying goes – the Trump election campaign is in the driving seat. His vice presidential running mate is 39 years of age and gives the Republican Party a youthful zest. Both men are very much singing from the same hymn sheet regarding their “Make America Great Again” vision.
Trump has united the GOP under his leadership. All former party rivals lined up this week in Milwaukee to endorse the former real estate magnate in his bid to seek re-election to the White House in November. That helps to solidify his manifesto, which bodes well for diplomacy in Ukraine.
By contrast, the election campaign of Democrat incumbent President Joe Biden has run into a ditch. This week he was self-isolating in Delaware having reportedly incurred a third-time Covid infection. Biden increasingly looks toast. His apparent mental decline – the latest gaffe this week was not remembering the name of his Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, referring to him haltingly as “a black man” – has provoked a crisis in the Democratic Party and the largely favorable U.S. corporate news media. Senior figures including former President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are reportedly urging Biden to stand down and pass the torch to a younger candidate. Panic is in the air.
There are reports that Biden may throw in the towel within the next few days as the Democrats head into their National Convention to officially nominate their presidential candidate. The trouble for the Democrats is they do not have a viable alternative candidate at this late stage in the campaign – with less than four months to election day on November 7.
That means there is now a serious chance that Trump could return to the White House after he lost the election in 2020, which MAGA loyalists hotly disputed as “stolen”.
That election outcome turns attention to one issue in particular: the war in Ukraine. The conflict erupted in February 2022 and has cost the lives of over 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers. Under the Biden administration and aligned European NATO members, there is no sign of the war coming to an end. Biden and European allies have pledged to keep sending weapons to Ukraine and tens of billions of dollars to prop up a hopelessly corrupt NeoNazi regime in Kiev.
Trump and Vance have pitched a diametrically opposite policy on the U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine.
That stance is causing the Deep State and its military-industrial complex acute anxiety. The Ukraine war racket has been a bonanza that vested interests in the U.S. ruling class do not want to end. That tension provides a plausible explanation for the attempted assassination of Trump during an open-air rally at Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. Salient questions remain about how the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old student, gained access to such a high-security position to fire his rifle at Trump.
The Republican candidates have warned that the Ukraine conflict is in danger of spiraling into a nuclear world war. Trump has said that he would end the war immediately by cutting off the military aid spigot and forcing the Kiev regime to begin negotiations with Russia.
Tantalizingly, JD Vance (R-Ohio) has been even more explicit in proposing that the warring parties should accept the territorial gains made by Russia – including Crimea, Donbass, Zaporozhye and Kherson provinces – and that Ukraine must accept Moscow’s demand that it remain neutral and outside of the NATO alliance.
Such a position is a breath of fresh air for its rationality. Many respected American scholars and diplomats have also recommended this historically coherent position as a solution, including Professors John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs. At least Trump and Vance seem to be cognizant of this reality, unlike the Biden administration and the rest of the Democrat Party, along with the Western media establishment and European minions who insanely push a fraudulent war to the last Ukrainian.
Moreover, polls show that the majority of American citizens (and Europeans) would prefer to see a diplomatic solution to the worst war in Europe since 1945.
Hungary’s Orban has admirably advocated peaceful diplomacy and for his troubles, his government has been sanctioned by the European Union establishment. Slovakia’s Robert Fico has also called for an end to the war in Ukraine, which many believe led to an assassination attempt on his life in May.
The conflict in Ukraine is a senseless, bloody slaughter that should never have escalated if Russia’s peace proposals in December 2021 had been accepted instead of dismissed out of hand by the Biden administration and its NATO lackeys in Europe. Also, a peace deal was possible in April 2022 but again was scuppered by malicious U.S. and British intervention.
If an American presidential candidate is proposing a diplomatic end to the conflict then that should be welcomed. It seems that common sense is prevailing.
Having said that, however, there are caveats. The Trump-Vance rhetoric could be empty pre-election canvassing for votes.
Trump’s record is one of hyping expectations and not delivering. When he ran for the presidency in 2016, he promised to normalize relations with Russia – and did not deliver.
He also boasted about solving the conflict in the Middle East with a “deal of the century” – only to embolden Israeli aggression towards Palestinians and Iran.
A reality check is strongly advised on what Trump and Vance can achieve.
While both men express skepticism about “endless wars” and NATO, it should be borne in mind that the conflicts the U.S. empire is fueling have a systematic cause. The United States is desperately fighting to maintain its failing hegemony against the rise of a multipolar and more democratic global order.
Washington and its European vassals are unleashing wars as a matter of necessity for preserving their erstwhile global dominance. History teaches that wars are always the refuge of the Western imperialist ruling classes.
It is notable that while Trump and Vance talk about ending conflict in Ukraine, they are at the same time talking belligerently about confronting China and Iran.
Trump and the MAGA Republicans are deprecated by the U.S. establishment as being “isolationists” in their vision of pursuing “America First”.
But the notion of “isolationalism” is an oxymoron when one considers the objective reality of U.S. imperialism. Foreign wars are an insatiable appetite for Western dominance.
American relations with the rest of the world are all about power projection, dominance and ultimately using violence to assert its “might is right” presumed national privileges. That applies whether the incumbent in the White House is a Democrat or Republican.
Trump may sound more reasonable on the issue of conflict in Ukraine with Russia. That alone makes him a more plausible candidate compared with the reckless warmongering of Biden and the Democrat-Deep State nexus.
The war in Ukraine must be stopped as soon as possible and a more reasonable security arrangement for Europe must be negotiated as Russia has long been consistently advocating.
Any diplomatic opening towards achieving peace and ending the killing must be welcomed.
Trump and Vance might just deliver on ending the hostilities in Ukraine which in itself would be a huge step forward away from the abyss of all-out war with Russia. On that score alone, their election might bring about an improvement.
But alas there is a contradiction. Don’t expect world peace to break out in other parts of the globe, because U.S. imperialism is cranking up its war machine. Trump and Vance are hawkish in their policy towards China and Iran.
A comprehensive solution to ending U.S. aggression and militarism is not a change of personnel at the White House. A profound, systematic change in American politics and economics is required.
Is partial peace sufficient? Maybe it is for now.
‘Israel’ attacks Yemeni civilian facilities, Sanaa vows heavy price

Al Mayadeen | July 20, 2024
Israeli war jets launched a series of airstrikes on Saturday targeting Yemen’s province of Hodeidah on the Red Sea coast.
The aggression targeted an oil refinery, leading to a massive fire that can be seen kilometers away.
Al Mayadeen’s correspondent reported that the strikes targeted the Ras Kathib power station in Hodeidah, igniting the oil storage facilities.
The Yemeni Ministry of Health reported martyrs and wounded as a result of the aggression, confirming that civilians suffered severe burns due to the fires.
Israeli Kan 11 channel citing a US official reported that the Israelis conducted an attack in Yemen.
Civil defense teams are battling to extinguish the fires and flames engulfing the targeted zone, our correspondent added, noting that the size of the blaze is making the task extremely difficult.
Yemeni sources informed Al Mayadeen that these airstrikes were coordinated between US and Israeli forces, indicating that the nature of the targets hit by the aggression shows the blindness of the enemy.
They emphasized that there will be a response to the aggression.
Israeli media quoted official American sources stating that 25 F-35 fighters attacked multiple targets in Yemen in several attack waves.
Furthermore, an Israeli media platform mentioned that Italians assisted “Israel” with refueling aircraft in Yemeni airspace.
Following the Israeli aggression, the head of Yemen’s negotiating delegation, Mohammad Abdul-Salam, affirmed that pressuring Yemen to cease supporting Gaza is “a dream that will not come true for the Israeli enemy.”
“The brutal Israeli aggression will only increase the determination and the steadfastness of the Yemeni people and its brave armed forces in an escalating manner.”
From Clinton Fraud to Trump-Zelensky Call: Recalling CrowdStrike’s Shady Politics Amid IT Outage
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 20.07.2024
A sloppy update to software made by US cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike has taken PCs and servers used by airlines, railways, banks, broadcasters and even medical facilities around the world offline. For anyone following US politics over the past decade or so, the company’s name should be eerily familiar.
CrowdStrike is making global headlines (and causing global headaches) this week after an update released Friday morning afflicted thousands of corporate machines running Microsoft products with the infamous blue screen of death error.
While the company has already put out a fix, the buggy update is expected to cause billions of dollars and hours in lost productivity, and experts say it may take “weeks” for businesses and governments worldwide to fully recover.
But behind the company’s reputation as a major provider of endpoint security products is the odd routineness of its name popping up in US politics.
During the 2016 US presidential election, the Clinton campaign asked none other than CrowdStrike for help investigating the hack attack against the Democratic National Committee – which had revealed embarrassing info about the party’s efforts to rig the nomination process in Mrs. Clinton’s favor.
CrowdStrike’s probe gave rise to the very first claims that Russia was behind the DNC hack, and the company provided its “forensic evidence and analysis” to the FBI, starting the ball rolling on the Russiagate conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia to “steal” the election.
CrowdStrike executive Shawn Henry admitted under oath in congressional testimony in 2017 that the company had no “concrete evidence” to back up its “Russian hackers” story, but by that point it was too late, and Trump would spend virtually the entirety of his term in office dogged by the “collusion” claims.
CrowdStrike’s name also came up in the infamous 2019 phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, with the then-US president asking Zelensky to “do us a favor” and “find out what happened” with CrowdStrike’s server, which Trump said was in Ukraine. The Trump team was convinced that CrowdStrike planted evidence on the DNC server to frame Russia while covering up Ukraine’s own efforts to “weaken the Trump bandwagon” during the 2016 race. Democratic politicians and anti-Trump media dismissed the president’s suspicions as groundless.
The Trump-Zelensky phone call, in which he also asked Kiev to look into then former vice president Joe Biden’s role in firing of a prosecutor probing his son Hunter Biden’s alleged corrupt activities while working for Ukrainian energy company Burisma, wound up sparking the first Trump impeachment in 2019.
CrowdStrike was also one a handful of firms tapped by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2021 to work out a ‘whole-of-nation’ cyber defense plan. The initiative has been criticized as an attempt to strengthen the US intelligence and Big Tech’s surveillance powers using cybersecurity as a cover.
The same year, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz blamed Russian hackers for the 2020 SolarWinds hack attack on the US Federal Government, but curiously admitted the company had no information of its own “to corroborate that finding.”
‘PR Nightmare’
“The PR aspect is of course a nightmare for CrowdStrike,” veteran independent cybersecurity expert Lars Hilse told Sputnik, commenting on Friday’s outage and the impact it’s had on the company’s image and stock price.
CrowdStrike’s market cap plunged by $12.5 billion, and its CEO George Kurtz saw over $320 million shaved from his personal fortune. The company stock’s price fell from about $343 to $302 per share, signaling that about 12 percent of the company’s market value has been wiped out.
Interestingly, not everyone in the company came out of the outage in the red, with Chief Security Officer Shawn Henry selling off 4,000 shares of CrowdStrike Holdings’ common stock on July 15 for $371.32 per share, or $1.49 million total, according to Security and Exchange Commission data.
Hilse says the main “lesson” from the CrowdStrike mess will be the demand that cybersecurity companies improve testing before rolling out critical updates – something especially important if they’re done as “a single update being pushed to a plethora of customers running cloud-based solutions, including those responsible for the flawless operation of critical infrastructure like airports, banks, etc.”
“With increasing reliance on technology comes exponentially increasing impact on society if these technologies fail, whether through a deliberate/targeted attack, or a faulty piece of software, like in this case,” Hilse emphasized.
Russian cybersecurity specialist Alexei Lukatskiy told Sputnik Russia has been able to dodge the CrowdStrike bullet thanks to strong homegrown cybersecurity companies. Friday’s outages thus serve as another important “lesson” for Russia, which has been “gradually switching away from products by foreign vendors to Russian ones,” that it’s on the right track, he said.
Another important takeaway, according to Lukatskiy, is the modern world’s increasingly critical level of dependence on computers. “IT has penetrated into a wide array of different areas, and the owners of companies working in critical industries must understand all the consequences and evaluate the unacceptable events that may occur due to the seeming failure of an ordinary computer…,” he said.
Recall that CrowdStrike Lied About DNC Server “Hack” in 2016
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse™ | July 20, 2024
second I saw the news yesterday that computers all over the world had been taken down—causing widespread disruptions to travel, medical care and an array of businesses—I couldn’t help wondering if it was an implicit reminder of how dependent we are on global computer systems, and therefore how vulnerable we are.
Then I saw the outage was purportedly traced to CrowdStrike—the same Austin-based cybersecurity hired by the DNC in 2016 to investigate the alleged “hack” of its server. The security breach resulted in the leak of incredibly embarrassing e-mails revealing John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and DNC leadership performing all manner of Machiavellian machinations.
Back then, when I read the Wikileaks e-mails, I immediately wondered, “How are these villains going to change the subject from the content of their e-mails to something else? What misdirection trick are they going to pull?”
Enter CrowdStrike, which the DNC hired to do a forensic cybersecurity analysis of the DNC server. Shortly thereafter, CrowdStrike claimed that Russian agents had hacked it.
It didn’t matter that there was no evidence of this, as CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry admitted under oath in a declassified December 2017 interview before the House Intelligence Committee. The lying mainstream media still ran with the story that became Russian Collusion HOAX—the biggest fraud of the decade.
Even though former NSA Technical Director, William Binney, tried to tell anyone who would listen that the leak must have resulted from a DNC insider who downloaded the e-mails onto a storage device, no major mainstream media outlet would listen to him.
I wondered about Binney’s concept on a DNC insider when I researched the mysterious death of DNC insider Seth Rich (An Extraordinary Unsolved Murder in Washington D.C.) shortly before the accusation of Russian hacking was made.
Did Rich—who was apparently disaffected with the DNC because of its shabby treatment of Bernie Sanders—reveal to someone that he knew that the leak was not the result of an external hack, thereby prompting the perception that he could easily debunk the Russian-Collusion Hoax if he weren’t silenced forever?
Now, less than one week after whoever is running this country allowed a would-be assassin to climb onto a roof and take a shot at Donald Trump on a stage 400 feet away, we are told that CrowdStrike’s defective update to its security software knocked out global IT systems.
It seems to me that CrowdStrike should be viewed with grave suspicion and that businesses should be asking if it is prudent to have CrowdStrike software running on their computer systems.
Retro Israel panel defies ‘America First’ foreign policy

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos | Responsible Statecraft | July 10, 2024
The National Conservatism Conference, which professes to represent a new conservatism to “understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing,” has a foreign policy problem.
On the one hand the organizers and proponents rail against a globalism dominated by supranational neo-liberal institutions, and progressive litmus tests and ideas, but on the other they want borderless solidarity with other like minded nationalists across the globe. And for some reason this precludes them from talking too much about the biggest U.S. foreign policy issue in years, the Ukraine war, for which there is no panel scheduled over the course of the event, Monday through today.
It also means talking about Israel from a predominantly Israeli nationalist perspective. And talking about the Gaza war purely in the frame of Islamic extremism and the “mullocracy” of Iran. In other words, this is only an American interest insofar as, according to the speakers on Tuesday, U.S. presidents are accused of going too easy on Iran, which in part led to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. And now Washington has to help fix it.
Moreover, American political elites have allowed the “Islamosupremacists” to influence college campuses and Democratic administrations and turn Americans (in this case, Democrats) against not just Israel, but all Jews.
As Ben Weingarten charged in the one Israel panel — “Islam, Israel & the West” — the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas have had a grip on Washington since the George W. Bush administration, where the then-president had the temerity to declare that “Islam is peace.”
If that sounds familiar it is because the same people in the room today, 20 years older and graying at the ears, said the same exact thing after 9/11. But the difference here is that Israel is fighting its own war and making it an American war on terrorism and Islam is not going to work this time. What this national conservatism conference was missing was a true conversation about what is in America’s interest as it pursues policies with Israel, Iran, and the greater Middle East.
Instead we got old chestnuts from Weingarten, an “investigative reporter” for the Federalist, talking about “the troubling views held by large percentages of American Muslims (who) are or subscribe to the same worldview as Islamic supremacists who seek to impose… a theopolitical, Sharia-based ideology on America, wholly antithetical to our constitutional republic; while leftists and Islamic supremacists are in some ways polar opposites, traditional patriotic Americans are the chief stumbling block to each side achieving its objectives.”
To him, American protests against Israel’s military operations in Gaza, which have resulted in at 38,000 (or more) dead, the vast majority of the population displaced and hungry, most of the Strip’s civilian infrastructure (homes, electricity, hospitals, schools) damaged if not destroyed by American-made bombs, is merely the “the predictable consequence of an unholy alliance between progressives and Islamic supremacists that has for several years been fundamentally transforming not only the Democratic Party but America.”
Eugene Kontorovich, an Israeli legal scholar who now teaches at George Mason University’s Anton Scalia Law School, spent his time on the panel railing against international institutions including the United Nations, which he said were dominated by anti-Jewish, pro-Islamist ideologues that were in essence working for Hamas. This conveniently renders, at least to his mind, International Criminal Court charges against Israel, including the deliberate starvation of the Palestinian population, absolutely meaningless (plus, as he has suggested, the U.S. military does it too, a favorite justification among Israeli military apologists since Oct. 7).
Instead he calls the Israel operation in Gaza “clearly the most restrained war in modern times, with the lowest proportion of civilian casualties of any war in modern times.” Again, no conversation about whether the current U.S.-backed strategy will actually protect Israel in the long-term or destroy it from within, or whether it is in America’s interest to push it along.
No doubt, the discussion appealed to the paranoia among this retro crowd that Islamists have more power than they actually have in Washington (which is why Netanyahu is getting a red carpet on Capitol Hill this month, weapons and money slushing to Tel Aviv, and votes sailing through Congress cutting off aid to Palestinians and the very institutions Kontorovich abhors?).
But the National Conservatism conference, founded by the Edmund Burke Foundation under the tutelage of Israeli nationalist Yoram Hazony, should not be confused with the America First foreign policy now being debated in conservative circles today. After three days of programming, that much is clear.
There were a few counterbalances — a thoughtful discussion about the future of NATO, which included realist Sumantra Maitra, and remarks from Elbridge Colby, a self-described conservative realist. During a plenary speech, he said U.S. foreign policy must be rooted in the goals of preserving fundamental American interests of freedom, security, and prosperity, and cast in the lens of prioritization and power balancing. While North Korea, Russia, and Iran pose threats, he contended, they are regional threats to traditional U.S. allies and partners but not existential threats to those aforementioned American core interests. Therefore, he said, they are not foreign policy or security priorities for which the U.S. needs to militarize.
He does suggest, however, that China is a threat to the U.S. economy and the security of our allies in the region, and that requires priority. “Strategy and conservative realism would call for balance of manifest strength in Asia, but also openness to a modus vivendi in China. We must be laser focused on the rightful conservative goal here, to preserve peace, if at all possible, but decent peace, one that ensures Americans are safe, free, and prosperous, and most high necessity prevents China from dominating Asians.”
While not all realists and restrainers agree with Colby’s China perspective here, his brief against the primacist foreign policy of the last 70 years sits well with a growing faction of conservative foreign policy (American interest-focused) today, much to the contrast of the Israel panel dominated by the throw-back ideological rhetoric of the past.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is Editorial Director of Responsible Statecraft and Senior Advisor at the Quincy Institute.
