mRNA COVID Vaccines May Be Triggering ‘Turbo Cancers’ in Young People – Experts

by Megan Redshaw, J.D. via The Epoch Times
(Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock)

Experts are seeing a puzzling rise in cancer in people under 50 that appears biologically different from late-onset cancers. While some claim cancer rates have been rising for decades and attribute the increase to sugary drinks, lifestyle, and sleep disruptions, others say mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have caused an emergence of “turbo cancers”—and U.S. regulatory agencies have not addressed the ever-growing problem.

Although there is no official medical definition for what doctors are calling “turbo cancers,” the term is commonly used to define aggressive, rapid-onset cancers resistant to treatment—primarily in young, healthy individuals following COVID-19 vaccination. These cases often present in a late stage with metastasis and quickly turn fatal.

“What’s happening is these cancers we’re used to seeing, their growth patterns and their behavior are completely out of character … So ‘turbo cancer’ is something that wasn’t there and, all of a sudden, it’s everywhere,” Dr. Ryan Cole, a pathologist and CEO of Cole Diagnostics, said in an interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”

Dr. Cole told The Epoch Times in a later interview that he first noticed an uptick in certain types of cancers after the vaccine rollout in December 2020 and believes researchers are starting to understand how these cancers are occurring.

“Physicians are seeing multiple types of cancers in their day-to-day practices—and in young patient cohorts where you typically don’t see cancer. Although the increase in cancer has been blamed on missed screenings, you know it isn’t due to missed screenings because young people don’t typically get screened,” Dr. Cole said.

Cancers are increasing at a rate above what’s expected, and countless doctors and clinicians around the world have confirmed this. Their patients are cancer-free for years, but then after a booster, cancers “pop up,” he added. What’s unique about turbo cancers is that they do not respond to traditional treatment because the cells have been altered in the bone marrow, and the cells “aren’t doing what they’re supposed to.”

Studies and Case Reports of Cancer Following COVID-19 Vaccination

Studies and case reports of various cancers following mRNA vaccination are helping experts understand the potential mechanisms that may be allowing these cancers to proliferate.

In a recent Belgian study published in Frontiers Oncology, researchers presented the first case of malignant lymphoma in mice. Malignant lymphoma is a rare adverse event reported following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination.

Two days after receiving a booster dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, one of 14 mice suffered spontaneous death. Upon examination, the 14-week-old mouse had abnormally large organs and cancerous lymphoma in the liver, kidneys, spleen, heart, and lungs. Although showing direct causality is complex, the authors said their findings add to “previous clinical reports on malignant lymphoma development following novel mRNA COVID-19 vaccination.”

In a January 2023 paper in Medicina, researchers presented the case of a 66-year-old man who developed swollen lymph nodes 10 days after receiving his third dose of Pfizer. After further testing, the patient was diagnosed with stage 2 non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). A literature review found eight additional cases of NHL that developed shortly after COVID-19 vaccination. Five lymphoma cases occurred after vaccination with Pfizer, one case after vaccination with AstraZeneca, one after the Johnson & Johnson shot, and one after vaccination with Moderna.

In an August 2022 Letter to the Editor in the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology & Venereology, physicians described two patients diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma that developed from swollen lymph nodes following vaccination with Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.

The study’s authors found that diffuse large B-cell lymphoma “may rapidly grow” after vaccination with Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine and urged dermatologists to pay attention to swollen lymph nodes or masses near the injection site.

Swollen lymph nodes, or lymphadenopathy, is considered a common side effect of COVID-19 vaccination, more often observed following immunization with novel COVID-19 mRNA vaccines than other vaccines.

Lymphadenopathy is also an acknowledged “non-serious” adverse event of COVID-19 vaccination listed in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) fact sheets for health care providers for both Moderna and Pfizer’s monovalent and bivalent vaccines. However, pharmaceutical companies and U.S. regulatory agencies have not assessed whether there’s a link between vaccine-related lymphadenopathy and cancer.

A year after the vaccine rollout, researchers published a case report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) of a healthy 39-year-old woman diagnosed with “vaccination-associated reactive lymphadenopathy” following vaccination with Pfizer’s vaccine. Six months later, she was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in her right breast—the same side of the body where she received her vaccination and experienced swollen lymph nodes.

Urgent Need to Determine Underlying Causes of Turbo Cancers

The exact mechanism giving rise to turbo cancers is unknown, and it’s unclear whether one or multiple mechanisms are responsible for these cancers, Dr. William Makis, an oncologist, cancer researcher, and nuclear medicine radiologist, told The Epoch Times in an email.

Dr. Makis provided the following several possible hypotheses for how mRNA COVID-19 vaccines could cause turbo cancers:

  1. The current COVID-19 mRNA vaccines contain pseudouridine-modified mRNA,which attenuates or alters the activity of key proteins in the innate immune system, impairing cancer surveillance.

When activated, these key proteins, called toll-like receptors, can prevent tumorsfrom forming and growing.

  1. Vaccination alters T-cell signaling that induces profound impairmentin type 1 interferon and cancer surveillance.

T-cells, a type of white blood cell, help the body’s immune system prevent cancer. Studies show that getting multiple shots increases the level of a particular antibody called IgG4, causing T-cell and interferon suppression, leading to an inability to keep cancer in check, Dr. Cole told The Epoch Times.

“Everyone gets atypical cells in their body every day, and having a surveillance system is important, but when the surveillance system is shut off, that allows these cells to go haywire. How long it stays suppressed, nobody knows, and these are the studies NIH (the National Institutes of Health) should have been doing,” said Dr. Cole.

  1. The shift of the antibody IgG4 caused by repeated mRNA vaccination could create a tolerance for spike protein and impair the production of the antibodies IgG1 and IgG3 and cancer surveillance.

  2. The spike protein produced by the body after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination may interfere with important tumor suppressor proteins—P53, BRCA 1, and two tumor suppressor genes.

  3. The spike protein may interfere with DNA repair mechanisms.

  4. The RNA from the COVID-19 vaccines may be reverse-transcribed and integrated into the human genome.

  5. Pfizer and Moderna vials found to be contaminated with plasmid DNA containing SARS-CoV-2 spike protein may integrate into the human genome.

  6. The presence of the simian virus 40 (SV40) in DNA discovered in Pfizer mRNA vaccine vials may lead to cancers—most notably, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other lymphomas—as it did with SV40-contaminated polio vaccines.

  7. mRNA-based vaccines may be triggering the release of oncogenes—oncomiRs or microRNAs, which can enhance or inhibit cancer development and participate in cancer biological processes, such as proliferation, invasion metastasis, angiogenesis, chemoresistance, and immune escape.

“I believe there is an urgent need to determine the underlying mechanisms of turbo cancers because, at this time, oncologists have nothing to offer patients who have developed a turbo cancer, and conventional cancer treatments offer minimal or no benefit,” Dr. Makis told The Epoch Times.

Mr. David Wiseman, a research scientist in pharmacy, pharmacology, and experimental pathology, told The Epoch Times in an email that neither Comirnaty—Pfizer’s fully approved version of its COVID-19 vaccine—nor Spikevax by Moderna has been evaluated for its potential to cause cancer.

On March 30, 2023, Mr. Wiseman and four other experts submitted a 27-page document to the National Academies Committee, an ad hoc committee tasked with reviewing relevant adverse events associated with COVID-19 vaccines.

Using the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)—a database co-managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and FDA used for reporting vaccine adverse events—Mr. Wiseman and his coauthors found an excess of cancer signals for COVID-19 vaccines from Dec. 14, 2020, to July 24, 2023, compared to all other vaccines for all years beginning in 1990.

A safety signal indicates a condition may be linked to a vaccine but requires further analysis to confirm an association.

The findings complemented the CDC’s Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) analyses obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that assessed adverse events reported from Dec. 14, 2020, to July 29, 2022.

A PRR compares reports of specific adverse events experienced after receiving Moderna or Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to those following vaccination with any other vaccine or all non-COVID-19 vaccines. The CDC’s PRR report detected cancer signals for colon cancer, metastatic breast cancer, metastasis to the liver, bones, central nervous system, lymph nodes, breast masses, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, B-cell lymphoma, and follicular lymphoma.

Mr. Wiseman said it’s clear from the FOIA documents that the CDC is aware of cancer reports and isn’t being forthcoming.

“Government agencies knew there were going to be cancers with these shots, and they were trying to cover it up, but the data is trickling out,” Dr. Cole told The Epoch Times, referring to 490 pages of communications obtained from the NIH through a FOIA request.

The CDC is supposed to report on morbidity and mortality—and when a pathologist diagnoses anything, he or she uses a diagnosis code, and it goes to the federal basis that’s reported to federal tracking agencies, Dr. Cole explained.

“All these data subsets should be easy to find if agencies would report what they have,” he said. “We could see statistical changes in diagnosis in the past two and a half years since shots were rolled out. The question is, why are other governments around the world not doing this?”

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Niger Coup: France 0, Russia 1

The military coup in Niger can be considered pro-Russian. The ousted president of Niger was definitely pro-French. Niger is important to France, there are uranium mines that actually feed France’s nuclear power, which provides more than half of France’s electricity. The President of Niger, at the request of France, by the way, refused to go to St. Petersburg to Putin for the Russia-Africa forum.

Now the US and the EU are demanding that the military transfer power back to him.

PMC Wagner may now appear in Niger, as they are already working in neighboring Mali.

Claire Daly, MEP, Zionism as is Practiced – “A European Settler Colonial Project”

“A EUROPEAN SETTLER COLONIAL PROJECT”, EU Parliamentarian Clare Daly put Israel on blast for committing war crimes and killing children during its latest aggression on Gaza and Jenin, slamming EU politicians for siding with the occupiers against the colonized.

 

The Looming War Against China

Economic Logic has been Replaced by National Security Overrides

by MICHAEL HUDSON via unz

The July NATO summit in Vilnius had the feeling of a funeral, as if they had just lost a family member – Ukraine. To clear away NATO’s failure to drive Russia out of Ukraine and move NATO right up to the Russian border, its members tried to revive their spirits by mobilizing support for the next great fight – against China, which is now designated as their ultimate strategic enemy. To prepare for this showdown, NATO announced a commitment to extend their military presence all the way to the Pacific.

The plan is to carve away China’s military allies and trading partners, above all Russia, starting with the fight in Ukraine. President Biden has said that this war will be global in scope and will take many decades as it expands to ultimately isolate and break up China.

The U.S.-imposed sanctions against trade with Russia are a dress rehearsal for imposing similar sanctions against China. But only the NATO allies have joined the fight. And instead of wrecking Russia’s economy and “turning the ruble to rubble” as President Biden predicted, NATO’s sanctions have made it more self-reliant, increasing its balance of payments and international monetary reserves, and hence the ruble’s exchange rate.

To cap matters, despite the failure of trade and financial sanctions to injure Russia – and indeed, despite NATO’s failures in Afghanistan and Libya, NATO countries committed themselves to trying the same tactics against China. The world economy is to be split between US/NATO/Five Eyes on the one hand, and the rest of the world – the Global Majority – on the other. EU Commissioner Joseph Borrell calls this as a split between the US/European Garden (the Golden Billion) and the Jungle threatening to engulf it, like an invasion of its well-manicured lawns by an invasive species.

From an economic vantage point, NATO’s behavior since its military buildup to attack Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern states in February 2022 has been a drastic failure. The U.S. plan was to bleed Russia and leave it so economically destitute that its population would revolt, throw Vladimir Putin out of office and restore a pro-Western neoliberal leader who would pry Russia away from its alliance with China – and then proceed with America’s grand plan to mobilize Europe to impose sanctions on China.

What makes it so difficult in trying to evaluate where NATO, Europe and the United States are going is that the traditional assumption that nations and classes will act in their economic self-interest is not of help. The traditional logic of geopolitical analysis is to assume that business and financial interests steer almost every nation’s politics. The ancillary assumption is that governing officials have a fairly realistic understanding of the economic and political dynamics at work. Forecasting the future is thus usually an exercise in spelling out these dynamics.

The US/NATO West has led this global fracture, yet it will be the big loser. NATO members already have seen Ukraine deplete their inventory of guns and bullets, artillery and ammunition, tanks, helicopters weapons and other arms accumulated over five decades. But Europe’s loss has become America’s sales opportunity, creating a vast new market for America’s military-industrial complex to re-supply Europe. To gain support, the United States has sponsored a new way of thinking about international trade and investment. The focus has shifted to “national security,” meaning to secure a U.S.-centered unipolar order.

The world is dividing into two blocs: a post-industrial US/NATO vs the Global Majority

U.S. diplomats became increasingly worried as Germany and other European countries came to rely on imported Russian gas, oil and fertilizer as the basis for its steel, glass-making and other industries. They became even more worried as China had become the “workshop of the world” while the U.S. economy de-industrialized. The fear was that growth by China and its neighboring Eurasian countries benefiting from the Belt and Road expansion threatened to make that part of the world the main growth area, and hence a magnet for European investment. The logical prospect was that politics would follow economic interest at the expense of America’s ability to maintain a unipolar world economy with the dollar at its financial center and trade subject to U.S. protectionist unilateralism.

By joining America’s crusade to destroy the Russian economy and promote regime change, Germany’s and other European countries’ refusal to trade with Russia has destroyed the basic energy foundation of their industry. Destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline has plunged the German and other European economies into depression involving widespread bankruptcies and unemployment. In place of Russian gas, the NATO countries must now pay up to six times as high a price for U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG), and must build new port facilities to physically import this gas.

The European leaders sponsored and financed by U.S. election meddling over the past seventy years have done what Boris Yeltsin did in Russia in the 1990s: They have agreed to sacrifice Europe’s industrial economies and end what had been its profitable trade and investment integration with Russia and China.

The next step is for Europe and the United States to stop trading and investing with China, despite the fact that these NATO countries have benefited from the flowering of this trade, relying on it for a wide range of consumer goods and industrial inputs. That line of prosperous trade is now to be ended. NATO’s leaders have announced that importing Russian gas and other raw materials (including helium and many metals) runs the “risk” of becoming dependent – as if Russia or China might find it in their economic or political interest to abort this trade simply to hurt Europe and to do to it what the United States has been doing to force it into submission.

But submission to what? The answer is, submission to the logic of mutual gains along lines leaving the U.S. economy behind!

By trying to prevent other countries from following this logic, U.S. and European NATO diplomacy has brought about exactly what U.S. supremacists most feared. Instead of crippling the Russian economy to create a political crisis and perhaps breakup of Russia itself in order to isolate it from China, the US/NATO sanctions have led Russia to re-orient its trade away from NATO countries to integrate its economy and diplomacy more closely with China and other BRICS members.

Ironically, the US/NATO policy is forcing Russia, China and their BRICS allies to go their own way, starting with a united Eurasia. This new core of China, Russia and Eurasia with the Global South are creating a mutually beneficial multipolar trade and investment sphere.

By contrast, European industry has been devastated. Its economies have become thoroughly and abjectly dependent on the United States – at a much higher cost to itself than was the case with its former trade partners. European exporters have lost the Russian market, and are now following U.S. demands that they abandon and indeed reject the Chinese market. Also to be rejected in due course are markets in the BRICS membership, which is expanding to include Near Eastern, African and Latin American countries.

Instead of isolating Russia and China and making them dependent on U.S. economic control, U.S. unipolar diplomacy has isolated itself and its NATO satellites from the rest of the world – the Global Majority that is growing while NATO economies are rushing ahead along their Road to Deindustrialization. The remarkable thing is that while NATO warns of the “risk” of trade with Russia and China, it does not see its loss of industrial viability and economic sovereignty to the United States as a risk.

This is not what the “economic interpretation of history” would have forecast. Governments are expected to support their economy’s leading business interests. So we are brought back to the question of whether economic factors will determine the shape of world trade, investment and diplomacy. Is it really possible to create a set of post-economic NATO economies whose members will come to look much like the rapidly depopulating and de-industrializing Baltic states and post-Soviet Ukraine?

This would be a strange kind of “national security” indeed. In economic terms it seems that the U.S. and European strategy of self-isolation from the rest of the world is so massive and far-reaching an error that its effects are the equivalent of a world war.

Today’s fighting against Russia on the Ukrainian front can be thought of as the opening campaign in World War III. In many ways it is an outgrowth of World War II and its aftermath that saw the United States establish international economic and political organizations to operate in its own national self-interest. The International Monetary Fund imposes U.S. financial control and helps dollarize the world economy. The World Bank lends dollars to governments to build export infrastructure to subsidize US/NATO investors in control of oil, mining and natural resources, and to promote trade dependency on U.S. farm exports while promoting plantation agriculture, instead of domestic food-grain production. The United States insists on having veto power in all international organizations that it joins, including the United Nations and its agencies.

The creation of NATO is often misunderstood. Ostensibly, it depicted itself as a military alliance, originally to defend against the thought that the Soviet Union might have some reason to conquer Western Europe. But NATO’s most important role was to use “national security” as the excuse to override European domestic and foreign policy and subordinate it to U.S. control. Dependency on NATO was written into the European Union’s constitution. Its objective was to make sure that European party leaders followed U.S. direction and opposed left-wing or anti-American politics, pro-labor policies and governments strong enough to prevent control by a U.S.-client financial oligarchy.

NATO’s economic program has been one of adherence to neoliberal financialization, privatization, government deregulation and imposing austerity on labor. EU regulations prevent governments from running a budget deficit of more than 3% of GDP. That blocks Keynesian-type policies to spur recovery. Today, higher military arms costs and government subsidy of energy prices is forcing European governments to cut back social spending. Bank policy, trade policy and domestic lawmaking are following the same U.S. neoliberal model that has deindustrialized the American economy and loaded it down with debt to the financial sector in whose hands most wealth and income is now concentrated.

Abandoning economic self-interest for “national security” dependence on the US

The post-Vilnius world treats trade and international relations not as economic, but as “national security.” Any form of trade is the “risk” of being cut off and destabilized. The aim is not to make trade and investment gains, but to become self-reliant and independent. For the West, this means isolating China, Russia and the BRICS in order to depend fully on the United States. So for the United States, its own security means making other countries dependent on itself, so that U.S. diplomats won’t lose control of their military and political diplomacy.

Treating trade and investment with other countries than the United States as involving “risk,” ipso facto, is a projection of how U.S. diplomacy has imposed sanctions on countries that resist U.S. domination, privatization and subordination of their economies to U.S. takeover. The fear that trade with Russia and China will lead to political dependency is a fantasy. The aim of the emerging Eurasian, BRICS and Global South alliance is to benefit from foreign trade with each other for mutual gain, with governments strong enough to treat money and banking as public utilities, along with the basic monopolies needed to provide normal human rights, including health care and education, and keeping monopolies such as transportation and communication in the public domain to keep the costs of living and doing business low instead of charging monopoly prices.

Anti-China hate has come especially from Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s Foreign Minister. NATO is warned to “de-risk” trade with China. The “risks” are that (1) China can cut off key exports, just as the US cut off European access to Russian oil exports; and (2) exports could potentially be used to support China’s military power. Almost any economic export COULD be military, even food to feed a Chinese army.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s trip to China likewise explained that all trade has a military potential and thus has a national-security element. All trade has a military potential, even selling food to China could be used to feed soldiers.

The US/NATO demand is that Germany and other European countries should impose an Iron Curtain against trade with China, Russia and their allies in order to “de-risk” trade. Yet only the US has imposed trade sanctions on other countries, not China and other Global South countries. The real risk is not that China will impose trade sanctions to disrupt European economies, but that the United States will impose sanctions on countries breaking the US-sponsored trade boycott.

This “trade is risk” view treats foreign trade not in economic terms but in “National Security” terms. In practice, “national security” means joining the U.S. attempt to maintain its unipolar control of the entire world’s economy. No risk is acknowledged for re-orienting European gas and energy trade to U.S. companies. The risk is said to be trade with countries that U.S. diplomats deem “autocracies,” meaning nations with active government infrastructure investment and regulation instead of U.S.-style neoliberalism.

The world is dividing into two blocs – with quite different economic philosophies

Only the United States has imposed trade sanctions on other countries. And only the United States has rejected international free trade rules as national security threats to US economic and military control. At first glance the resulting global fracture between US/NATO on the one hand and the expanding BRICS alliance of Russia, China, Iran and the Global South might seem to be a conflict between capitalism and socialism (that is, state socialism in a mixed economy with public regulation in labor’s interests).

But that contrast between capitalism and socialism is not helpful upon closer examination. The problem lies in what the word “capitalism” has come to mean in today’s world. Back in the 19th and early 20th century, industrial capitalism was expected to evolve toward socialism. The U.S. and other industrial economies welcomed and indeed pressed for their governments to subsidize a widening range of basic services at public expense instead of obliging employers to bear the costs of hiring labor that had to pay for basic needs such as health care and education. Monopoly pricing was avoided by keeping natural monopolies such as railroads and other transportation, telephone systems and other communications, parks and other services as public utilities. Having governments instead of business and its employees pay for these services increased the global competitiveness of national industry in the resulting mixed economies.

China has followed this basic approach of industrial capitalism, with socialist politics to uplift its labor force, not merely the wealth of industrial capitalists – much less bankers and absentee landlords and monopolists. Most important, it has industrialized banking, creating credit to finance tangible investment in means of production, not the kind of predatory and unproductive credit characterized by today’s finance capitalism.

But the mixed-economy policy of industrial capitalism is not the way in which capitalism evolved in the West since World War I. Rejecting classical political economy and its drive to free markets from the vested rent-extracting classes inherited from feudalism – a hereditary landlord class, a financial banking class and monopolists – the rentier sector has fought back to reassert its privatization of land rent, interest and monopoly gains. It sought to reverse progressive taxation, and indeed to give tax favoritism to financial wealth, landlords and monopolists. The Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector has become the dominant interest and economic planner under today’s finance capitalism. That is why economies are often called neofeudal (or euphemized as neoliberal).

Throughout history the dynamics of financialization have polarized wealth and income between creditors and debtors, leading to oligarchies. As interest-bearing debt grows exponentially, more and more income of labor and business must be paid as debt service. That financial dynamic shrinks the domestic market for goods and services, and the economy suffers from deepening debt-ridden austerity.

The result is de-industrialization as economies polarize between creditors and debtors. That has occurred most notoriously in Britain in the wake of Margaret Thatcher and the New [Anti-]Labour Party of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s “light touch” deregulatory approach to financial manipulation and outright fraud.

The United States has suffered an equally devastating shift of wealth and income to the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sectors in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts for the wealthy, anti-government deregulation, Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” takeover by Wall Street. The “Third Way” was neither industrial capitalism nor socialism, but finance capitalism making its gains both by stripping and indebting industry and labor of income. The new Democratic Party ideology of deregulated finance was capped by the massive bank-fraud collapse of 2008 and Barack Obama’s protection of junk-mortgage lenders and wholesale foreclosures on their financial victims. Economic planning and policy was shifted from governments to Wall Street and other financial centers – which had taken control of in government, the central bank and regulatory agencies.

U.S. and British diplomats are seeking to promote this predatory pro-financial and inherently anti-industrial economic philosophy to the rest of the world. But this ideological evangelism is threatened by the obvious contrast between the US-British failed and de-industrialized economies compared to China’s remarkable economic growth under industrial socialism.

This contrast between China’s economic success and the NATO West’s “garden” of debt-ridden austerity is the essence of today’s campaign by the West against the “Jungle” countries seeking political independence from U.S. diplomacy so as to uplift their living standards. This ideological and inherently political global war is today’s counterpart to the religious wars that tore European countries apart for many centuries.

We are witnessing what seems to be an inexorable Decline of the West. U.S. diplomats have been able to tighten their economic, political and military control leadership over their European NATO allies. Their easy success in this aim has led them to imagine that somehow they can conquer the rest of the world despite de-industrializing and loading their economies so deeply in debt that there is no foreseeable way in which they can pay their official debt to foreign countries or indeed have much to offer.

The traditional imperialism of military conquest and financial conquest is ended

There has been a sequence of tactics for a lead-nation to carve out an empire. The oldest way is by military conquest. But you can’t occupy and take over a country without an army, and the US has no army large enough. The Vietnam War ended the draft. So it must rely on foreign armies like Al Qaeda, ISIS, and most recently Ukraine and Poland, just as it relies on foreign industrial manufactures. Its armaments are depleted and it cannot mobilize a domestic army to occupy any country. The US has only one weapon: Missiles and bombs can destroy, but cannot occupy but not occupy and take over a country.

The second way to create imperial power was by economic power to make other countries dependent on U.S. exports. After World War II the rest of the world was devastated and was bullied into accepting U.S. diplomacy maneuvering to give its economy a monopoly on basic needs. Agriculture became a major weapon to create foreign dependency. The World Bank would not support foreign countries growing their own food, but pressed for plantation export crops, and fought land reform. And for oil and energy trade, U.S. companies and their NATO allies in Britain and Holland (British Petroleum and Shell) controlled the world’s oil trade. Control of world oil trade has been a central aim of US trade diplomacy.

This strategy worked for US assertion of control over Germany and other NATO countries, by blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline and severing Western Europe from access to Russian gas, oil, fertilizer and also crops. Europe has now entered an industrial depression and economic austerity as its steel industry and other leading sectors are invited to emigrate to the United States, along with European skilled labor.

Today, electronic technology and computer chips have been a focal point of establishing global Economic Dependency on U.S. technology. The United States aims to monopolize “intellectual property” and extract economic rent from charging high prices) for high-technology computer chips, communications, and arms production.

But the United States has deindustrialized and let itself become dependent on Asian and other countries for its products, instead of making them dependent on the US. This trade dependency is what makes U.S. diplomats feel “insecure,” worrying that other countries might seek to use the same coercive trade and financial diplomacy that the United States has been wielding since 1944-45.

The United States is left with one remaining tactic to control other countries: trade sanctions, imposed by it and its NATO satellites in an attempt to disrupt economies that do not accept U.S. unipolar economic, political and military dominance. It has persuaded the Netherlands to block sophisticated chip-engraving machinery to China, and other countries to block anything that might contribute to China’s economic development. A new American industrial protectionism is being framed in terms of national security grounds.

If China’s trade policy were to mirror that of U.S. diplomacy, it would stop supplying NATO countries with mineral and metal exports needed to produce the computer chips and allied inputs that America’s economy needs to wield its global diplomacy.

The US is so heavily debt-laden, its housing prices are so high and its medical care is so extremely high (18% of GDP) cannot compete. It cannot re-industrialize without taking radical steps to write down debts, to de-privatize health care and education, to break up monopolies and restore progressive taxation. The vested Financial, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE sector) interests are too powerful to permit these reforms.

That makes the U.S. economy a failed economy, and America a Failed State.

In the wake of World War II the United States accumulated 75% of the world’s monetary gold by 1950. That enabled it to impose dollarization on the world. But today, nobody knows whether the U.S. Treasury and New York Federal Reserve have any gold that has not been pledged to private buyers and speculators? The worry is that it has sold European central-bank gold reserves. Germany has asked for its gold reserves to be flown back from New York, but the United States said that it was unavailable, and Germany was too timid to make its worries and complaints public.

America’s financial quandary is even worse when one tries to imagine how it can ever pay its foreign debt for countries seeking to draw down their dollars. The United States can only print its own currency. It is not willing to sell off its domestic assets, as it demands that other debtor countries do?

What can other countries accept in place of gold? One form of assets that may be taken as collateral are U.S. investments in Europe and other countries. But if foreign governments seek to do this, U.S. officials may retaliate by seizing their investments in the United States. A mutual grabbing would occur.

The United States is trying to monopolize electronic technology. The problem is that this requires raw-materials inputs whose production presently is dominated by China, above all rare-earth metals (which are abundant but environmentally destructive to refine), gallium, nickel (China dominates the refining), and Russian helium and other gasses used for engraving computer chips. China recently announced that on August 1 it will start restricting these key exports. It indeed has the ability to cut off supplies of vital materials and technology to the West, to protect itself from the West’s “national-security” sanctions against China. That is the self-fulfilling prophecy that U.S. warnings of a trade fight has created.

If U.S. diplomacy strongarms its NATO-garden allies to boycott China’s Huawei technology, Europe will be left with a less efficient, more expensive alternative – whose consequences help separate it from China, the BRICS and what has become the World Majority in a self-reliant alignment much broader than was created by Sukarno in 1954.

Tenth South-South Forum on Sustainability: THINKING NEW HORIZONS, 7 – 30 July 2023.
Program for July 21, 2023: Geopolitics and Political Economy: The Looming War Against China.

The NATO Generals Know the War Against Russia is Lost – the Pentagon Fires Smoke to Screen the Retre at

By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with

Soldiers lay down smoke on the battlefield to conceal their movements, advancing or retreating, from the troops on the other side.

In the US Army manuals for warfighting with smoke, there are four kinds for the battlefield (lead image) – obscuring smoke which is aimed at blinding the enemy so he can’t see what you have coming for him; screening smoke which is laid down between you and your enemy, so he can’t see what you are doing in your positions; protecting smoke which is aimed at disrupting the laser and other targeting systems of the other side’s artillery and rockets; and marking smoke whose purpose is either to pinpoint targets for air attackers or rear artillery, or identify safety positions on a rapid-movement battlefield.

With the White House in the lead, in the war the NATO allies are fighting against Russia to the last Ukrainian, an entirely new kind of smoke has been used – it’s the blowback smoke which blinds its users. On the Ukrainian battlefield this smokescreen conceals nothing from the Russians. Instead, it is being used to deceive the NATO country media, voters, and parliaments which must agree to subscribe the money to pay the Ukrainians to fight, and supply them with NATO ammunition, weapons, intelligence, and support services, including credits and cash. Vladimir Zelensky, the Ukrainian president best known for career comic turns — the most famous of which was playing a piano with his penis (screened, protected, marked) — is the master of the blowback smoke on the present battlefield.

A day ago, he told the Ukrainian deputy prime minister of Canada, Chrystia Freeland: “we are approaching a moment when relevant actions can gain pace because we are already going through some mines locations and we are demining these areas.” The calculated ambiguities – “moment”, “approaching”, “relevant”, “can”, “pace”, “some” – are the smoke. The blowback was started by Freeland who told Zelensky that how his counteroffensive was going against the Russians is “the question in the minds of everyone here [and] the preoccupation of all of your friends in the world”. Zelensky’s smoke was invited by Freeland to blind the world, especially their friends.

In this week’s War of the Worlds discussion with Swiss Army Colonel Jacques Baud, this tactic is exposed, and in its place evidence revealed of the French and other allied general staffs trying to find their way off the battlefield, as Zelensky forces are destroyed, along with the best of US, French, British and other NATO weapons. The programme was pre-recorded on Thursday.

Less than twenty-four hours later at a virtual session of the Russian Security Council, President Vladimir Putin made an unusual introduction to the closed-door plans of his military, security and intelligence chiefs. “It is clear today,” Putin said, referring to the Americans, French, Germans, and British, “that the Western curators of the Kiev regime are certainly disappointed with the results of the counteroffensive that the current Ukrainian authorities announced in previous months. There are no results, at least for now.”

“The whole world sees that the vaunted Western, supposedly invulnerable, military equipment is on fire, and is often even inferior to some of the Soviet-made weapons in terms of its tactical and technical characteristics.”

Then on the topic of Poland and Galicia, Putin makes the most important statement by a Russian leader in more than a hundred years. Putin warns the Polish government, together with the Lithuanians, not to make a troop move on Galicia’s capital Lvov, as the Germans had done in 1941. He also warns Berlin not to imagine they can recover the old Prussian or the more recent Third Reich sway in those territories.

Between the lines also, Putin issued an invitation to two of the ruling factions in Kiev – the military command and the Lvov Banderites – that they should remove Zelensky quickly, before they lose what will be left of their territory, after the Russian Army goes on the offensive. If they want to keep Galicia, “this, I repeat”, Putin said, “is in the end their business. If they want to relinquish or sell off something in order to pay their bosses, as traitors usually do, that’s their business. We will not interfere in this.”

Putin’s smoke signal carried a subliminal meaning. He didn’t identify the Biden administration. Instead, he implied that Zelensky is the Americans’ underboss; and that if the Ukrainians want to survive the war in which everything made in America is “on fire”, the Ukrainians don’t have long.

The Battle of Odessa has begun, Baud says. But Russian strategy for the major cities remaining east of the Dnieper River which will be Russian at war’s end does not involve city siege or urban fighting, like Mariupol, he adds, citing Robert Mardini, the Swiss director of the International Red Cross.

Russian war correspondents reporting on the opening missile barrages against Odessa last week confirm this targeting. When a grain storage terminal was hit, Boris Rozhin (“Colonel Cassad”) reported “an important detail, despite all the tantrums in Ukraine and [NATO], even according to official Ukrainian data, there are no civilian deaths. Despite the large number of incoming. This indicates the high accuracy of the strikes and once again shows that the Russian Federation does not purposefully strike at the civilian population. Unlike the Ukraine.”

“Map of missile and drone strikes against targets in Odessa as published in Ukraine. Once again, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that with all the wealth of destructive means involved, not a single civilian was killed during the strikes. They operated like clockwork.” https://t.me/boris_rozhin/92539

To understand the impact of the electric war on the Odessans, and the way the Stavka in Moscow is calculating the city will switch sides as soon as the Kiev regime’s control is broken, read this.

From the northern front, where Russian and Belarus forces are creating the concentration, or the smokescreen for potential offensives aimed at Chernigov, Suny, Poltava, and Kiev, comes the news from the new Wagner camp at Tsel, Belarus. An old military base which has been revived, it is about 100 kilometres southeast of Minsk; about 200 kms northwest of Chernigov and the Ukrainian border.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/

Source: https://www.bbc.com/

A video clip has been published on the internet in which the soundtrack reveals the unseen Yevgeny Prigozhin speaking to a group of Wagner soldiers; the location appears to be the new Tsel camp. The film also marks the first public appearance, also unseen, of Dmitry Utkin, the military commander of Wagner; from the applause which greeted his remarks, he is a more popular figure among the troops than Prigozhin. Listen to the recording here, If blocked in some areas, this is an English-language version.

“If anyone doesn’t know,” Utkin can be heard introducing himself in Russian. “I am the Wagner. Many thanks to everyone for the work done, thanks to this work, the name PMC [private military company] Wagner has thundered all over the world. This is not the end, but only the beginning! The biggest work in the world that will be done very soon! [In English] Welcome to hell!”

More guarded as double-talk goes was the joint press conference at the Pentagon on July 18. In their remarks Austin and Milley were beating a US retreat.

Left to right: Lieutenant-Colonel Dmitry Utkin; Defense Secretary General Lloyd Austin; JCS Chairman General Mark Milley.

Asked to respond to Ben Wallace, the British defense minister and the first NATO official of active rank to reveal publicly the allies’ doubt towards Zelensky and his regime, Austin was asked by a reporter: “Secretary Austin, you talked about the alliance and the contact group being together. But publicly, there seems to be a bit of fraying. Defense Minister Wallace last week said that he had told his Ukrainian counterparts that, quote/unquote, ‘We are not Amazon, and that they should show us some appreciation.’ Do you agree with the sentiments that Secretary Wallace expressed?”

Austin stumbled in reply: “You know, we’re just off of — just back from the summit in Vilnius, and what I witnessed in Vilnius was indeed unity and cohesion, in every meeting that I sat in. And so I would — it’s the same thing that I witnessed today as I talked to ministers of defense and chiefs of defense. That unity is still there. There’s no question that we have provided Ukraine a lot, we, the international coalition. Ukraine is in a fight, and we have to remember that, when you’re in a fight, you want everything that you can get your hands on. And so that’s to be expected. Ben Wallace and I have worked along with coalition partners over the last year or so on this particular issue, and Ben has done a lot to enable and to help the Ukrainian military. And so he’s been a great partner. But, again, I continue to see unity and cohesion. I continue to hear ministers say that we’re going to support Ukraine for as long as it takes.”

Austin was camouflaging the opposite of what he was trying to say. General Milley then let slip the loss of NATO confidence in the battlefield performance of US and NATO weapons and the Ukrainian army. “So Missy, the — I’d offer two things. One is, you know, what’s the military problem to solve here with the air power? And it’s control of the airspace, and you can do that two ways. You can do that air-to-air or you can do that from the ground to the air. In terms of the most effective and efficient and cost-effective way to do that right now for the Ukrainians is from ground to air through air defense systems, and that’s what they’ve been provided from the beginning if this war ’til now. And that’s important, because what you want to do is protect those assault forces from Russian close-air support and/or attack-helicopter support, and they’ve got air defense systems, the Ru- — Ukrainians do, that can do that.”

Milley almost admitted the truth. It has been the “Ru[ssians]”, not the “Ukrainians” who have demonstrated their superiority in countering and destroying every NATO air defence weapon on the battlefield and around the cities – the most important of which is the US-made Patriot.

“The casualties that the Ukrainians are suffering on this offensive are not so much from Russian airpower; they’re from minefields, minefields that are covered with direct fire from anti-tank hunter-killer teams, that sort of thing. So it’s minefields. So the problem to solve is minefields, not the air piece right this minute. And that’s what the coalition is trying to provide them: additional mine clearing, MICLICs, line charges, Bangalores — that sort of thing, in order to continue to work their way through the minefields.” This was Milley introducing the US decision not to supply F-16 fighter-bombers to the Ukraine.

“So I’m confident that they can do this, and especially if they execute the tactics, techniques and procedures that they’ve been taught, which they are doing, and execute these operations at night, which would deny the Russians the ability to use any of their airpower anyway. So the real problem is the minefields. It’s not right now the airpower. Now, having said that, just do a quick math drill here. Ten F-16s are $2 billion, so the Russians have hundreds of fourth- and fifth-generation airframes. So if they’re going to try to match the Russians one for one, or even, you know, two-to-one, you’re talking about a large number of aircraft. That’s going to take years to train the pilots, years to do the maintenance and sustainment, years to generate that degree of financial support to do that. You’re talking way more billions of dollars than has already been generated.”

“So the key thing is to focus on air defence, focus on the blocking-and-tackling sort of offensive combined arms maneuver, which is artillery, as both long-range and short-range artillery, and then get in your engineers and your mine-breaching equipment. That’s the kind of stuff they need. That’s what they want. That’s what they’re asking for. When I talk to [Ukrainian chief of the general staff, General Valery] Zaluzhny, that’s what he’s asking for, so”.

Milley is also revealing that for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Zaluzhny is in line, not President Zelensky.

The new US and NATO decision not to allow the deployment of the F-16s in the war has followed the declaration on July 12 by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that the aircraft is a nuclear-capable attacker and would be treated as such. Milley was ambiguous in his retreat, but three days later, on July 21, the National Security Advisor Jacob Sullivan was categorical. “Ukrainian emphasis on securing supplies of advanced fighter jets for the counteroffensive was misplaced, because strong Ukrainian and Russian air defences had prevented air power from playing a significant role in the conflict, Sullivan said. ‘The view of our military commanders is that the notion that F-16s would play a decisive role in this counteroffensive given that fundamental reality . . . They have a different view than what you have heard from some Ukrainian voices,’ he said.”

The Russian warning to Warsaw on Galicia beat the Poles to the punch, and to the retreat. On Friday afternoon, Warsaw time, the former prime minister Beata Szydlo issued the bluntest statement yet against the Kiev leadership.

Source: https://twitter.com/BeataSzydlo

“The statement of the Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal,” Szydlo said in a tweet published in both Polish and English, “is simply unfair to Poland. After all, such an experienced politician as the head of the Ukrainian government must understand how much Poland has done to help Ukraine, rescuing the country at the moment of greatest danger. Mr. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal also knows that Ukraine was supposed to transit its agricultural products to third countries through Poland. Meanwhile, Ukrainian producers of grain and other foodstuffs – mark you, large corporations owned by oligarchs, not farmers – decided to seize the opportunity and flood Poland with their products. Such behavior has nothing to do with friendship and cooperation. In fact, the Prime Minister of Ukraine should apologize to Poland for unfair practices, rather than making theses that harm Poland and Polish-Ukrainian relations. For the government of the Law and Justice Party [PiS], the most important thing is the welfare of Polish citizens and the Polish economy, including agriculture. The Polish market must and will be protected from unfair practices”. For more detail on the Polish and European Union embargo on Ukrainian grain exports and the UN scheme for Kiev’s grain profiteering, read this.

The Kremlin posted Putin’s speech to the Poles at 13:05 Moscow, 12:05 Warsaw. The Russian president had spoken several hours before the Polish ex-prime minister and head of the Polish delegation in the European Parliament broke cover. “Have our friends in Warsaw forgotten,” Putin said. “We will remind you.”

“Now the fire of war is being strenuously kindled. In particular, they use for this the ambitions of the leaders of some Eastern European states, who have long turned hatred of Russia, Russophobia, into their main export commodity and into an instrument of their domestic policy. And now they want to warm their hands on the Ukrainian tragedy. In this regard, I cannot but comment on what has just been said: and the reports that have appeared in the press about plans to create a certain so-called Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian connection.”

“That is, we are not talking about some gathering of mercenaries — there are enough of them already there, and they are being destroyed – namely, about a regular, assembled, equipped military unit that is planned to be used for operations on the territory of Ukraine. Including for allegedly ensuring the security of modern Western Ukraine, and in fact, to call a spade a spade, for the subsequent occupation of these territories. After all, the prospect is obvious: if Polish units enter, for example, Lvov or other territories of Ukraine, then they will remain there. And they will remain forever.”

Source: https://ipn.gov.pl/
This is the official Polish version of the history, issued three days after the commencement of the Russian Special Military Operation. In Putin’s version, “They [the Zelensky regime] will trade everything: both people and land. Just, by the way, like their ideological predecessors, the Petliurists, who in 1920 concluded so–called secret conventions with Poland, according to which, in exchange for military support, they gave Poland the lands of Galicia and Western Volhynia. Even today, such traitors are ready to open the gates for foreign owners and once again sell Ukraine. As for the Polish leaders, they probably expect to form a coalition under the NATO umbrella and directly intervene in the conflict in Ukraine in order to then tear off a fatter piece for themselves, to regain, as they believe, their historical territories – today's Western Ukraine. It is well known that they also dream of Belarusian lands.”

“By the way,” Putin responded with the Russian history, “there will be nothing new. Let me remind you that after the defeat of Germany and its allies, following the results of the First World War, Polish units occupied Lvov and the adjacent lands that then belonged to Austria-Hungary. Poland, instigated by the West, also took advantage of the tragedy of the Civil War in Russia, annexed some historical Russian provinces. Our country, which was then in a difficult situation, was forced to conclude the Riga Treaty in 1921 and actually recognis the rejection of its territories. And even earlier, in 1920, Poland seized part of Lithuania – the Vilna Region, the territory around modern Vilnius. It seems that together with the Lithuanians they fought against the so-called ‘Russian imperialism’ and as soon as the opportunity turned up, they immediately cut off a piece of land from their neighbours. Poland, as you know, also participated in the partition of Czechoslovakia as a result of the Munich agreement with Hitler in 1938. Completely occupied Tesin Silesia.”

“In the 20-30s of the last century, in the so-called Eastern Districts of Poland – and this is the territory of Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and part of Lithuania – there was a strict polonization and assimilation of local residents; there was a suppression of national cultures, Orthodoxy. I would also like to remind you how such an aggressive policy ended for Poland as a result. It ended with the national tragedy of 1939, when Poland was thrown by the Western Allies to the German war machine and actually lost its independence and statehood, which was restored to a great extent thanks to the Soviet Union. And it was thanks to the Soviet Union, thanks to Stalin’s position, that Poland received significant lands in the West, the lands of Germany. This is exactly the case: the western territories of present–day Poland are Stalin’s gift to the Poles.”

What Stalin gave away, Putin was saying, the Russian Army is prepared to take back – unless Zelensky and the Americans are removed.

Moscow sources express their surprise that the Anglo-American media have failed to report Putin’s remarks and appreciate their significance. “Are the British and Americans all at the beach?” asked one of the sources familiar with the matter. “More likely they realise the game is up for Zelensky. Maybe they are advising him to plan a fake coup to cover his escape, and promising to have the aircraft warmed up in Poland to take him out.”

Is Kazakhstan Next after Ukraine in Russia’s Crosshairs

via  Politnavigator


❗️The ruling Kazakh elite is firmly following the path of Ukraine. We have repeatedly written that Kazakhstan is turning into an outpost of the Anglo-Saxons in Central Asia. This was once again confirmed in the case of detention by Kazakh customs officers of a batch of drones on their way from Kyrgyzstan to Russia. 
We are talking about the actual expropriation by the Kazakh side of 14 DJI AgrasT30 drones. Each such seized Chinese-made heavy drone is estimated at 1.1 million rubles, and the total cost of the entire batch is 15.8 million.
As a result, the Kazakh authorities fined the Kyrgyz company Impuls-Invest LLC, Astana received praise for maintaining the sanctions regime against Russia, and The Washington Post published an article condemning Kyrgyzstan, just before the introduction of secondary measures against this mountainous republic. And then the US imposed sanctions against four companies from Kyrgyzstan. Local authorities began to justify themselves to the Americans – they say that the goods were sent to Russia not by government agencies, but by private traders. Bishkek was forced to promise that it would strengthen control over the flow of goods. That is, in fact, a whole operation was carried out with the participation of the Kazakh authorities, in order to use the example of Kyrgyzstan to intimidate and exponentially punish for participating in gray imports in favor of the Russian Federation.
This is a signal to all the former Soviet Central Asian republics – if you help the Russians – we will strike not only at private companies, but also at the assets of the ruling elites in the West and offshore. Astana, on the other hand, plays the role of an open US agent in Central Asia, which not only participates in the isolation and strangulation of the Russian Federation, but also as a Western provocateur. This is the strongest blow to the EAEU and the principles of free trade.
  In Kazakhstan, two-thirds of the entire extractive industry is controlled by American, British and European companies, and now, as in the 90s, deposits of rare earth metals and precious stones are falling into the hands of the West through enslaving production sharing agreements for decades.
 

UAF Counteroffensive Over by the End of August

via NOVOSTI.RU

Commander of the group “Center”: the reserve forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the offensive will last until the end of August
MOSCOW, July 23 — RIA Novosti. Ukrainian units will continue their offensive attempts until the end of August, Lieutenant General Andrey Mordvichev, commander of the Russian group of troops “Center”, said on the air of the TV channel “Russia 1” and on the platform “Look”.

“They have enough time for the offensive until the end of August, they will pull until the end of August. Then there will be a short break. In winter, they will not achieve much of this. Well, by spring, I think it will all be over,” he said.

Mordvichev also commented on the use of NATO ammunition with shrapnel by Ukrainian troops. According to him, the APU began to use such shells more often, but they are not suitable for a counteroffensive. “There is no effect expected for the enemy for such ammunition, I will say. Noisy, dusty. Elementary old grandfather’s methods of fortification save us completely. And armor protection,” the Lieutenant General noted.

According to him, Ukraine has run out of 150-millimeter high-explosive shells, and cluster munitions are less effective for offensive actions in comparison with them.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive in the South Donets, Artemivsk and Zaporozhye directions began on June 4. Kiev has thrown into battle brigades trained by NATO and armed with Western equipment, including the widely advertised Leopard tanks. As Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stated on July 11, the enemy has not achieved its goals in any direction. At the same time, the losses of the Armed Forces exceeded 26,000 soldiers, 1,244 tanks and thousands of units of other equipment, 21 aircraft and six helicopters.

Against the background of the lack of success of the Ukrainian troops, Western media stated that Kiev had stopped throwing large units and Western equipment into battle. In turn, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken expressed the opinion that the offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine will not be simultaneous, but will go “for a much larger number of months.”

“Nord Stream 1-Blast: It Was a Mini Nuke!”

A report by Attorney at Law Viviane Fischer, photo Wigwam nuclear test of the USA, 1955.

Swiss physicist Dr. Hans-Benjamin Braun has meticulously analyzed the Nord Stream 1 explosion. His finding, presented to the Corona Investigative Committee on June 30, 2023: the blast was made using a thermonuclear (fusion) mini-nuke with the greatest possible shockwave impact on Russia’s Kaliningrad. Like the investigative journalist and Pulizer Prize winner Seymour Hersch, Dr. Braun suspects the USA behind the attack. Among the authorities, politicians, journalists and scientists whom he has informed of the results of his analyses since December 2022, there is one thing above all: radio silence.

Dr. Braun is a renowned scientist specializing in statistical physics, quantum physics, neutron scattering, condensed matter physics and materials science, magnetism and topology. For years he taught as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Catholic University of Dublin. In 2014, he was honored to be one of four “Distinguished Lecturers” (editor’s note) worldwide from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE, Magnetics Society, who has given 50 lectures internationally at the invitation of individual institutions or sections. Dr. Braun has widely cited publications in Nature Physics, Nature Communications, and Advances in Physics.

The puzzling, contradictory public interpretations of the explosion event at the pipeline at 17:03 UTC on September 26, 2022, had piqued his scientific curiosity as a physicist who also holds a master’s degree in earth sciences, Dr. Braun reports. Why, he wondered in this context, did the UN Security Council not initiate an investigation despite the many unanswered questions.

In October 2022, he set to work analyzing what had happened via six entirely independent methods: Evaluation of seismic data according to two methods, analysis of the development of aerosol clouds after the detonation, consideration of underwater currents in the Baltic Sea, especially in an underwater canyon between Bornholm and Kaliningrad during the following days, temperature development on the seafloor, and spread of a possible radioactive fallout after the blast.

The surprising result: the seismic measurements suggest an explosive force in the equivalent of up to 1-4 kilotons TNT, a strong contrast to the estimated data of an equivalent of 250 kg TNT published e.g. in the renowned magazine Nature.

© Dr. Hans-Benjamin Braun

The comparison of seismic measurements in the Baltic Sea, e.g. of Sweden and Finland with the values of the well-documented North Korean nuclear event also identified by the Columbia University Earth Institute on the basis of IRIS data shows a very similar pattern.

© Dr. Hans-Benjamin Braun

According to the infrared satellite data, four hours after the detonation a distinct aerosol cloud with an extension of up to 100 km was formed away from the explosion site in wind direction and in the Kaliningrad region due to the impact of shock waves on the steep Kaliningrad shoreline. Such a phenomenon would not occur to this extent with a much smaller explosive charge, Dr. Braun said. The opening photo of this paper shows aerosol formation during the U.S. “Wigwam” nuclear test, with an explosive force equivalent of 32 kT, in 1955 in the Pacific Ocean, 900 km southwest of San Diego.

© Dr. Hans-Benjamin Braun

During the days following the detonation moment, significant underwater currents have been formed in the Baltic Sea (~50km and more), focusing into the underwater canyon directed directly towards Kaliningrad. As a result, a vortex current formed in the Bornholm Basin. According to the Nature publication of March 15, 2023, the explosion stirred up 250,000 tons of sediments that were subsequently deposited. Indeed, it appears that this process also affected water temperatures on the seafloor during the whole winter time.

Remarkably, according to satellite data, the water temperature at the seafloor increased by up to 5 degrees Celsius year-on-year over an area of circa 100 km x 100 km in the winter of 2023 compared to 2022. Dr. Braun clarifies that this cannot be explained by natural fluctuations, especially since the mean temperature in the more distant regions of the Baltic Sea tends to be even lower.

© Dr. Hans-Benjamin Braun

In Poland, radioactive fallout was detected one day after the blast; in Switzerland, it showed up three days after the event.

Highly noteworthy, Dr. Braun said, is that the blast site apparently must have been chosen to reflect and amplify shock waves due to the elliptically shaped Swedish coastline, allowing them to focus precisely on Kaliningrad via the underwater canyon. The city, 500 km away, experienced a seismic effect 10 times greater than that of neighboring Bornholm, which is only 70 km from the pipeline blast site.

Dr. Braun’s investigative conclusion: “None of the seven independent geophysical observations can be explained by the use of a conventional explosive; a thermonuclear weapon must have been used. The Nord Stream sabotage was also a targeted shockwave attack on Kaliningrad, which to me makes the U.S. the only plausible culprit.” He considers a tactical self-endangerment of the Russians by the detonation unlikely, Ukraine as another possible aggressor does not possess nuclear weapons. The U.S., however, had nuclear weapons, delivery systems and, through NATO’s BALTOPS 22 exercise in the Baltic Sea, which took place in June 2022, extensive fresh barythmetric knowledge of conditions at the eventual site. “BALTOPS also provides a unique opportunity for the U.S. Research, Development, and Acquisition communities to exercise the current and emerging UUV technology in real-world operational environments. This year featured the current and future programs of record for mine hunting UUVs in the MK-18 and Lionfish systems. Both systems were put through the paces over 10 days of mine hunting operations, collecting over 200 hours of undersea data,” writes the U.S. NAVY under the heading “BALTOPS 22 a perfect opportunitey for research and testing new technologies.” Of course, a collaboration of other geopolitical interest groups besides the U.S. would also be conceivable, Dr. Braun adds.

Precisely such an autonomous underwater drone as the Lionfish, which was tested during the NATO exercise BALTOPS 22, could have been used to transport the explosive charge to the scene, Dr. Braun elaborates. To actually carry out the detonation using such an unmanned vehicle would have required the involvement of only a few people. It is clear, however, that if the USA were involved, it would have to be assumed that the blast was carried out with the knowledge and will of US President Joe Biden. The U.S. company Sandia Labs, a longtime partner of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), writes on its website: “The nation’s nuclear weapons must always work when commanded and authorized by the president of the United States, and must never detonate otherwise.” The U.S., Dr. Braun notes, is incidentally the only country in the world that has not joined the international ban on a nuclear first strike.

Dr. Braun reports that he made his findings available to selected journalists and politicians on December 22, 2022, seven weeks before Seymour Hersh’s article appeared. On January 3, 2023, he reportedly informed the Swiss government, and on January 25, 2023, he informed the Swiss parliament. At the same time, he wrote to a colleague at MIT, who drew his attention to the imminent article by Seymour Hersch. On March 27, 2023, he had contacted Prof. J. Sachs as a representative of the UN Security Council, and on April 4, 2023, he had formulated an open letter to the Secretary General of NATO, the Finnish and Swedish governments, and three Nobel laureates in physics. On April 4, 2023, he had written to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the White House, the Kremlin, the Russian and Chinese embassies in Switzerland, and on April 24, 2023, again to the UN Security Council, this time under the new Russian chairmanship. The answer: radio silence.

Dr. Braun demands that the matter be completely clarified. Due to their easy scalability, with which one can adjust the detonation strength by a factor of 100 with a flick of the wrist (so-called “dial a yield”), thermonuclear weapons pose an increasing threat to humanity, especially through the combination with rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, which is used in autonomous air and underwater vehicles, and can also be used in covert operations.

The U.S. Wars Against Russia And China – Have No Economic Logic, But Self-Destruction

via MOA

The U.S. politician Zbigniew Brzezinski was a hardliner with a (neo-)liberal core. He had a wide influence on U.S. policies:

Brzezinski is the author of The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, a 1997 book on geopolitics that was based on Mackinder’s Heartland Theory. Brzezinski argued that the US could retain global supremacy only if it prevented the emergence of a single power on the World-Island.

The Brzezinski Doctrine remains influential in the US foreign-policy establishment. His protégés, among them Ukrainian émigré Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs, are a powerful voice in the US State Department.

Brzezinski had argued that without Ukraine, Russia would be unable to rule the Asian heartland and could not challenge U.S. power.

But I just learned via a Pepe Esobar essay about Henry Kissinger’s visit and a potential great power war with China, that Brezezinski had in later years changed his mind:

“The Grand Chessboard”, published in 1997, before the 9/11 era, argued that the US should rule over any peer competitor rising in Eurasia. Brzezinski did not live to see the living incarnation of his ultimate nightmare: a Russia-China strategic partnership. But already seven years ago – two years after Maidan in Kiev – at least he understood it was imperative to “realign the global power architecture”.

In a longer piece published in 2016 in American Interest, Brzezinski indeed argued for great power cooperation:

A constructive U.S. policy must be patiently guided by a long-range vision. It must seek outcomes that promote the gradual realization in Russia (probably post-Putin) that its only place as an influential world power is ultimately within Europe. China’s increasing role in the Middle East should reflect the reciprocal American and Chinese realization that a growing U.S.-PRC partnership in coping with the Middle Eastern crisis is an historically significant test of their ability to shape and enhance together wider global stability.The alternative to a constructive vision, and especially the quest for a one-sided militarily and ideologically imposed outcome, can only result in prolonged and self-destructive futility. For America, that could entail enduring conflict, fatigue, and conceivably even a demoralizing withdrawal to its pre-20th century isolationism.

The U.S. did not follow Brzezinski’s advice. It alienated China by launching an economic war against it and pushed the Ukraine into a proxy-war against Russia that was supposed to destroy Russia’s capabilities. In consequence Russia and China united their capabilities against their common new enemy, the United States of America. We will see during the next years if the consequences Brzezinski foretold for the U.S. under these circumstances will come into light.

It is interesting that the old rivals and political opponents Kissinger and Brzezinski have late in their lives come to the same conclusions.

As Stephen Roach in his take on Kissinger’s visit to China states:

For several years, Kissinger has expressed great concern over the worrisome state of the US-China relationship. As far back as late 2019, he warned that that the United States and China were already in the “foothills of a new cold war.” Given the trajectory of conflict escalation in the ensuing four years, there is a new urgency to his concerns. In the Chinese readout of this week’s meeting with [Defense Minister] Li Shangfu, Kissinger is reported to have said. “Neither the United States nor China can afford to treat the other as an adversary. If the two countries go to war, it will not lead to any meaningful results for the two peoples.”

Opposition to the U.S. bi-partisan policy of economic warfare against China is now also coming from the bigwigs of the U.S. economy:

Leaders of the largest US chipmakers told Biden officials this week that the administration should study the impact of restrictions on exports to China and pause before implementing new ones, according to people familiar with their discussions.During meetings in Washington on Monday, Intel Corp.’s Pat Gelsinger, Nvidia Corp.’s Jensen Huang and Qualcomm Inc.’s Cristiano Amon warned that export controls risk harming US leadership of the industry. The Biden officials listened to the presentations but didn’t make any commitments, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks were private.

Economic logic provides that the U.S. (and European) economy would be better off by avoiding a conflict with Russia and China. But, as Micheal Hudson explains, this now gets overwritten by national security preferences which have remarkable conseqences:

Instead of isolating Russia and China and making them dependent on U.S. economic control, U.S. unipolar diplomacy has isolated itself and its NATO satellites from the rest of the world – the Global Majority that is growing while NATO economies are rushing ahead along their Road to Deindustrialization. The remarkable thing is that while NATO warns of the “risk” of trade with Russia and China, it does not see its loss of industrial viability and economic sovereignty to the United States as a risk.

This is not what the “economic interpretation of history” would have forecast. Governments are expected to support their economy’s leading business interests. So we are brought back to the question of whether economic factors will determine the shape of world trade, investment and diplomacy. Is it really possible to create a set of post-economic NATO economies whose members will come to look much like the rapidly depopulating and de-industrializing Baltic states and post-Soviet Ukraine?

This would be a strange kind of “national security” indeed. In economic terms it seems that the U.S. and European strategy of self-isolation from the rest of the world is so massive and far-reaching an error that its effects are the equivalent of a world war.

The question is really why the U.S. is doing this harm to itself instead of following Brzezinski’s and Kissinger’s advice. As Yves Smith says in her preface to Hudson’s piece, it is a quite bizarre spectacle:

One of the subthemes of the latest offering from Michael Hudson on the bizarre spectacle of the US escalating against China is puzzlement that the West is not operating in its best interest. Lambert has been chewing over this conundrum too.Perhaps it’s that they really do believe their propaganda, and still don’t recognize that the military and economic clout of the US/EU bloc on a relative basis isn’t anywhere near substantial enough for them to push the rest of the world around. But you think their self-delusion would have started to crack with the failure in their efforts to pressure many countries, such as India and South Africa, to side with the US and condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine, and now with the supposedly superior US/NATO war machine not performing too well.

Another possibility is the so-called Iron Law of Institutions, that individuals and interests are operating to maximize their own position, with little/no concern to the impact on the system.

I have come to the conclusion that the main actors in this game, the Bindens, Blinkens, Sullivans and their bipartisan supporters, are driven by a blind ideology that has dismissed or replaced global realities with wishful thinking.

The failure of their sanctions against Russia should have demonstrated to them that the real word is by far not the one in which they believe to be living. They however are now repeating their errors by waging a similar war against China.

It will not end well for the people they are supposed to lead.

Neocons Want War With China

by Pepe Escobar via Sputnik Globe

It was a photo op for the ages: a visibly well-disposed President Xi Jinping receiving centenarian “old friend of China” Henry Kissinger in Beijing.

Mirroring meticulous Chinese attention to protocol, they met at Villa 5 of the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse – exactly where Kissinger first met in person with Zhou Enlai in 1971, preparing Nixon’s 1972 visit to China.

The Mr. Kissinger Goes to Beijing saga was an “unofficial”, individual attempt to try to mend increasingly fractious Sino-American relations. He was not representing the current American administration.

There’s the rub. Everyone involved in geopolitics is aware of the legendary Kissinger formulation: To be the US’s enemy is dangerous, to be the US’s friend is fatal. History abounds in examples, from Japan and South Korea to Germany, France and Ukraine.

As quite a few Chinese scholars privately argued, if reason is to be upheld, and “respecting the wisdom of this 100-years-old diplomat”, Xi and the Politburo should maintain the China-US relation as it is: “icy”.

After all, they reason, being the US’s enemy is dangerous but manageable for a Sovereign Civilizational State like China. So Beijing should keep “the honorable and less perilous status” of being a US enemy.

The World Through Washington’s Eyes

What’s really going on in the back rooms of the current American administration was not reflected by Kissinger’s high-profile peace initiative, but by an extremely combative Edward Luttwak.

Luttwak, 80, may not be as visibly influential as Kissinger, but as a behind the scenes strategist he’s been advising the Pentagon across the spectrum for over five decades. His book on Byzantine Empire strategy, for instance, heavily drawing on top Italian and British sources, is a classic.

Luttwak, a master of deception, reveals precious nuggets in terms of contextualizing current Washington moves. That starts with his assertion that the US – represented by the Biden combo – is itching to do a deal with Russia.

That explains why CIA head William Burns, actually a capable diplomat, called his counterpart, SVR head Sergey Naryshkin (Russian Foreign Intelligence) to sort of straighten things up “because you have something else to worry about which is more unlimited”.

What’s “unlimited”, depicted by Luttwak in a Spenglerian sweep, is Xi Jinping’s drive to “get ready for war”. And if there’s a war, Luttwak claims that “of course” China would lose. That dovetails with the supreme delusion of Straussian neocon psychos across the Beltway.

Luttwak seems not to have understood China’s drive for food self-sufficiency: he qualifies it as a threat. Same for Xi using a “very dangerous” concept, the “rejuvenation of the Chinese people”: that’s “Mussolini stuff”, says Luttwak. “There has to be a war to rejuvenate.

The “rejuvenation” concept – actually better translated as “revival” – has been resonating in China circles at least since the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911. It was not coined by Xi. Chinese scholars point out that if you see US troops arriving in Taiwan as “advisors”, you would probably make preparations to fight too.

But Luttwak is on a mission: “This is not America, Europe, Ukraine, Russia. This is about ‘the sole dictator’. There is no China. There is only Xi Jinping,” he insisted.

And Luttwak confirms the EU’s Josep “Garden vs. Jungle” Borrell and European Commission dominatrix Ursula von der Leyen fully support his vision.

Luttwak, in just a few words, actually gives away the whole game: “The Russian Federation, as it is, is not strong enough to contain China as much as we would wish”.

Hence the turn around by the Biden combo to “freeze” the conflict in the Donbass and change the subject. After all, “if that [China] is the threat, you don’t want Russia to fall apart,” Luttwak reasons.

So much for Kissingerian “diplomacy.”

Let’s Declare a “Moral Victory” and Run Away

On Russia, the Kissinger vs. Luttwak confrontation reveals crucial cracks as the Empire faces an existential conflict it never did in the recent past.

The gradual, massive U-turn is already in progress – or at least the semblance of a U turn. US mainstream media will be entirely behind the U turn. And the naïve masses will follow. Luttwak is already voicing their deepest agenda: the real war is on China, and China “will lose”.

At least some non-neocon players around the Biden combo – like Burns – seem to have understood the Empire’s massive strategic blunder of publicly committing to a Forever War, hybrid and otherwise, against Russia on behalf of Kiev.

This would mean, in principle, that Washington can’t just walk away like it did in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Yet Hegemons do enjoy the privilege to walk away: after all they exercise sovereignty, not their vassals. European vassals will be left to rot. Imagine those Baltic chihuahuas declaring war on Russia-China all by themselves.

The off-ramp confirmed by Luttwak implies Washington declaring some sort of “moral victory” in Ukraine – which is already controlled by BlackRock anyway – and then moving the guns towards China.

Yet even that won’t be a cakewalk, because China and the about-to-expand BRICS+ are already attacking the Empire at its foundation: dollar hegemony. Without it, the US itself will have to fund the war on China.

Chinese scholars, off the record, and exercising their millennia-old analytical sweep, observe this may be the last blunder the Empire ever made in its short history.

As one of them summarized it, “the empire has blundered itself to an existential war and, therefore, the last war of the empire. When the end comes, the empire will lie as usual and declare victory, but everyone else will know the truth, especially the vassals.”

And that brings us to former national security adviser Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski’s 180-degree turn shortly before he died, aligning him today with Kissinger, not Luttwak.

“The Grand Chessboard”, published in 1997, before the 9/11 era, argued that the US should rule over any peer competitor rising in Eurasia. Brzezinski did not live to see the living incarnation of his ultimate nightmare: a Russia-China strategic partnership. But already seven years ago – two years after Maidan in Kiev – at least he understood it was imperative to “realign the global power architecture”.

Destroying the “Rules-Based International Order”

The crucial difference today, compared to seven years ago, is that the US is incapable, per Brzezinski, to “take the lead in realigning the global power architecture in such a way that the violence (…) can be contained without destroying the global order.”

It’s the Russia-China strategic partnership that is taking the lead – followed by the Global Majority – to contain and ultimately destroy the hegemonic “rules-based international order”.

As the indispensable Michael Hudson has summarized it, the ultimate question at this incandescent juncture is “whether economic gains and efficiency will determine world trade, patterns and investment, or whether the post-industrial US/NATO economies will choose to end up looking like the rapidly depopulating and de-industrializing post-Soviet Ukraine and Baltic states or England.”

So is the wet dream of a war on China going to change these geopolitical and geoeconomics imperatives? Give us a -Thucydides – break.

The real war is already on – but certainly not one identified by Kissinger, Brzezinski and much less Luttwak and assorted US neocons. Michael Hudson, once again, summarized it: when it comes to the economy, the US and EU “strategic error of self-isolation from the rest of the world is so massive, so total, that its effects are the equivalent of a world war.”