Steve Bull's Blog, page 16
June 21, 2024
David Stockman on The Ukrainian Border War Folly
Someone should tell the European ruling elites to take a long jump off a short pier. Their endless whining about the Ruuskies and Putin is just plain pathetic because—
It’s not justified—Russia bears no hallmarks of an expansionist imperial power.The Russia-Ukraine conflict is none of western Europe’s business—since its essentially a territorial and civil war within the borders of historic Russia.If EU officialdom is really concerned about the purported Russian threat why do they spend just a pittance of their GDP on defense?Yet, here we have Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, former German defense minister and full-throated war-hawk, talking absolute nonsense:
“Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to see empires and autocracies back in Europe, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the European Economic Congress in Katowice.
Speaking alongside Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, von der Leyen insisted that she stands for a European Union that is ready to do whatever it takes to protect Europe, and especially Ukraine.
“ Putin’s war is about redrawing the map of Europe , but it is also a war on our Union and on the entire global rules-based system,” she said.”
Well, that’s rubbish if there ever was such. The only time the borders of Ukraine have been redrawn at the barrel of a gun is when Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev did it between 1922 and 1954. That’s right, this bureaucratic half-wit wants to embroil the world in WWIII in order to enforce borders drawn by a trio if history’s most blood-thirsty tyrants.
As explained below, there never was a country even remotely resembling modern Ukraine until the Soviet communists decreed its existence…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
This Is What Collapse Looks Like
Every day now, the news is replete with evidence that, everywhere, things are falling apart faster and faster, and nothing of consequence is being, or can be, done about it. Every civilization collapses, but the collapse of our current global industrial civilization is occurring at a breathtaking and accelerating pace.
Today, the city of Philadelphia announced that it has given up trying to deal with its share of the US’s epidemic of mass shootings, and has instead outsourced its handling of the horrific trauma these mass murders create to a private consulting firm. Sure to fix the problem, no? The country’s ‘supreme’ court helped out by ruling that the banning of ‘bump stocks’, devices that turn ordinary guns into rapid-fire machine guns, was unconstitutional. When a hastily-prepared new law was proposed outlawing them, Congress blocked it.
Meanwhile, in Louisiana, arguably the country’s most horrifically polluted and dysfunctional state, has its priorities straight: It’s mandating that the Christian “ten commandments” be posted in every schoolroom in the state. Nothing in those rules about mega-pollution, so why not? Honour thy father and mother, ’cause they’re the ones who bought you the guns with the bump stocks. It’ll surely make God real happy to see when the Rapture comes.
And in Europe, the bumbling governments of both the UK and France have called snap elections they’re bound to lose, so out of touch are they with the electorate that they think all they have to do is convince voters that the current economic collapse in their countries isn’t their fault.
And so it goes. I could respond to most of each day’s top news items these days (including the celebrity gossip) by just reciting the title of this post.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) 2024: Marking the Rise of the Global South Century and Decline of Western Economies
This year, SPIEF’s theme was “The Foundations of a Multipolar World – The Formation of New Areas of Growth.”
The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an annual event bringing together global leaders, policymakers, and influential business figures, took place in St. Petersburg, Russia from June 5th to 8th, 2024. Attendees representing 130 countries and roughly 3 billion people worldwide attended. This year, SPIEF’s theme was “The Foundations of a Multipolar World – The Formation of New Areas of Growth.”
Foreign companies are eager to access the Russian market’s potential, despite Western sanctions aimed at isolating Moscow.
Deals involve firms from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, suggesting a pragmatic approach prioritizing commercial interests over politics and avoiding missed opportunities in Russia. The diversity of participants indicates many businesses recognize the risks of being left out of this lucrative market.
What should be a wakeup call for the global West is instead falling on deaf ears. While Washington and European capitals report declining economies, Russia, in spite of severe sanctions, continues to adapt and flourish.
Policymakers are not testing their countries’ long-term economic policies against the implications of the rise of multipolarism. Let’s consider the Green/degrowth policies favored by the Biden administration and former European economic powerhouses like Germany. They are not protecting the future of their people.
SPIEF 2024 introduced concepts the Global South Century will move forward on driving the world economy while the American and European economies recede. Russia is positioning itself as a leader.
What Is the Global South?
“Take the 3.5 billion population of China, India, and the ASEAN countries, for example.
In 2000, only 150 million of these people enjoyed middle-class living standards. Today, the number has exploded to around 1.5 billion, double the total population of Western countries. And it is predicted to grow to 3 billion by 2030.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Netanyahu’s “False Flag” Is a “Copy and Paste”: The Pentagon’s Secret “Operation Northwoods”(1962) Directed Against Cuba. “Casualty Lists Would Cause a Helpful Wave of Indignation”
Author’s Introductory Note
Early Saturday October 7, 2023, Hamas launched “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm.” On that same day, Netanyahu confirmed a so-called “State of Readiness For War.” A complete blockade on the Gaza Strip was initiated on October 9, 2023 consisting in blocking and obstructing the importation of food, water, fuel, and essential commodities to 2.3 million Palestinians. It’s an outright crime against humanity. It’s genocide.
Was “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” a “surprise attack”?
Was it a “False Flag” Attack by a faction within Hamas (supported by Mossad and US intelligence) which was intent upon justifying Netanyahu’s all out war against Palestine? That Hamas faction was co-opted and bribed by Mossad.
In the words of Netanyahu:
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas, …this is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
(Benjamin Netanyahu, statement to his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “quoted by Haaretz, October 9, 2023, emphasis added)
At this stage we have scanty evidence regarding who was behind the Hamas attack. False flag agendas are carefully planned intelligence operations.
The following article, which is of relevance to the Hamas Al Aqsa Storm attack, examines the logic of a “false flag agenda” formulated in 1962 by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff as a means to justify an invasion and all-out war against Cuba.
The fundamental premise of Operation Northwoods was to trigger civilian deaths in the U.S. as a justification for military intervention (“on humanitarian grounds”). That same diabolical “false flag” premise largely characterizes Netanyahu’s all-out war against Palestine.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Anxiety Economy
We’re told to stop being so darn negative even as the tsunami of inequality washes away the beach chairs of the bottom 90%.
The disconnect between the happy story of the economy is growing healthily, so all is well and the insecurity and stagnation experienced by the bottom 90% of wage earners has been widening since the wheels fell off in 2008. One would be forgiven for assuming that a smartly growing economy would increase the general sense of security and reduce the general awareness of precarity. But alas, this assumption is false: the sense of precariousness is rising as the sense of security has slid off a cliff.
Welcome to the Anxiety Economy, a term coined by longtime correspondent Bart D., who describes the term thusly:
“By my reckoning the Anxiety Economy is an adjunct to (and perhaps to some degree a product of) the Landfill Economy model.
There was a time when the economy was designed to provide surety and stability. Jobs were stable, opportunities to create increasing wealth (particularly small business creation) were uncomplicated and products were designed to be genuinely better and longer lasting with every iteration. I think this typified the late 1800s to the early 1970s.
Since the 1970s we’ve seen stable jobs drastically reduce along with the durability and usefulness of new product iterations and trying to comply with the massive regulatory burden of businesses as simple as washing dogs or growing vegetables has become mind bending and expensive.
We get bombarded in news and other media with stories of house fires, chronic illnesses and car crashes in places very far away and disconnected from us (interspersed with, and no doubt sponsored by, marketing for insurances of every kind) that make us feel that the risks we face of loss of assets and health are waaaay bigger than they actually are. So that we buy expensive insurances.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Chemicals from East Palestine derailment spread to 16 US states, data shows
Rain and snow samples from Wisconsin to Maine and North Carolina after crash show highest pH levels over last decade
Chemicals released during the East Palestine train wreck fires in February 2023 in Ohio were carried across 16 US states, new research of federal precipitation and pollution data shows.
Analysis of rain and snow samples collected from northern Wisconsin to Maine and North Carolina in the weeks following the crash found the highest levels of pH and some compounds recorded over the last 10 years. That includes chloride, which researchers say was largely released during a controversial controlled burn of highly toxic vinyl chloride carried by the train.
Researchers expected to find some evidence of the burn 50 miles from the site, and the high levels of contamination in the samples across the vast range that it was spread was “very surprising”, said David Gay, a University of Wisconsin researcher and lead author.
“We saw the chemical signal from this fire at a lot of sites and far away,” he added. “There was more than we ever would have guessed.”
Dozens of cars on the Norfolk Southern train derailed and burned in the town of 4,700 at the edge of the Appalachian hills. The fire burned near tankers carrying vinyl chloride, and, two days later, fearing a “major explosion”, officials conducted a controlled burn of of the chemical as a prevention measure.
In the immediate vicinity and in pockets throughout the city, a potent chemical odor hung in the air for weeks. The pollution also spread far and wide because the wreck’s fires burned for so long, and the controlled vinyl chloride burn was extremely hot and concentrated, Gay said. It sent a towering plume into the Earth’s free troposphere, where winds often blow between 50 and 100mph.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
‘Gold mine’ of century-old wheat varieties could help breeders restore long lost traits
Historic traits could make modern wheat more resilient to disease and other stressors
Some of the historic wheat in a century-old collection was gathered from as far as Australia.KGPA LTD/ALAMY[image error]Table of contentsA version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 384, Issue 6702.Download PDFAn antique collection of wheat from around the world could breathe new vigor into the staple. When plant breeders created modern wheat during the 19th and 20th centuries, they focused on crossing and selectively breeding a few key varieties, creating a finicky racehorse of a crop: high yielding but vulnerable to disease, heat, and drought and reliant on a liberal application of fertilizer. Part of the solution, according to a study published today by Nature, may lie in the genetic diversity in 827 kinds of wheat, many of them long vanished from farms.
The research is the culmination of a massive, decadelong effort to characterize those crop populations, or landraces—sequencing their genomes, planting them in fields, and scrutinizing their traits. “It is a herculean work,” says geneticist Jorge Dubcovsky of the University of California, Davis, who wasn’t involved in the study. “This will be a fantastic new resource for the global wheat research community.” Already scientists have identified genes that, if bred into modern wheat, could reduce the crop’s need for nitrogen fertilizer and increase its resistance to wheat blast, a disease now threatening harvests in much of the world.
The landrace collection was assembled in England starting in 1924, when Arthur Ernest Watkins joined the University of Cambridge’s Plant Breeding Institute. Watkins was studying wheat anatomy, examining variation in traits such as the leaflike structures at the top of the stalk. He realized these traits might help with differentiating landraces…
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Selling a Mirage
The world is drowning in plastic.
Experts say we need to stop making so much.
But the plastics industry is peddling a “solution” that works like magic.
Don’t be fooled.LAST YEAR, I became obsessed with a plastic cup.
It was a small container that held diced fruit, the type thrown into lunch boxes. And it was the first product I’d seen born of what’s being touted as a cure for a crisis.
Plastic doesn’t break down in nature. If you turned all of what’s been made into cling wrap, it would cover every inch of the globe. It’s piling up, leaching into our water and poisoning our bodies.
Scientists say the key to fixing this is to make less of it; the world churns out 430 million metric tons each year.
But businesses that rely on plastic production, like fossil fuel and chemical companies, have worked since the 1980s to spin the pollution as a failure of waste management — one that can be solved with recycling.
Industry leaders knew then what we know now: Traditional recycling would barely put a dent in the trash heap. It’s hard to transform flimsy candy wrappers into sandwich bags, or to make containers that once held motor oil clean enough for milk.
Now, the industry is heralding nothing short of a miracle: an “advanced”type of recycling known as pyrolysis — “pyro” means fire and “lysis” means separation. It uses heat to break plastic all the way down to its molecular building blocks.
While old-school, “mechanical” recycling yields plastic that’s degraded or contaminated, this type of “chemical” recycling promises plastic that behaves like it’s new, and could usher in what the industry casts as a green revolution…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
June 20, 2024
NYT: Zelensky’s Government Crushes Press Freedoms in Ukraine
Reporters and press freedom monitors say the pressure, intimidation, and restrictions imposed on the media go well beyond the country’s wartime security needs
Journalists and media groups have come under intense pressure from the Kiev regime, including spying and other forms of persecution during Ukraine’s war with Russia, according to the New York Times. Reporters have been spied on and even presented with draft notices after exposing media restrictions imposed by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. In addition to Zelensky calling off elections and staying in power well past the end of his term, this is more evidence that Kiev is not the democratic bastion its Western military backers claim it is.
Following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky nationalized the country’s media, among other authoritarian measures such as banning opposition parties. According to the NYT, Ukrainian journalists mostly went along with the wartime restrictive measures, that entailed prohibiting, among other things, the publication of locations where Russian missile strikes have taken place, accounts of military casualties, and reports on Ukrainian troop movements or positions.
Self-censorship has also become common, local reporters told NYT, as journalists have been “holding back on critical coverage of the government to avoid undermining morale or to prevent reports of corruption from dissuading foreign partners from approving aid.”
In addition to whitewashing the failures of Ukraine’s war, which it is fighting as a proxy for NATO, analysts say the pressure is “aimed at crimping positive coverage of the opposition and suppressing negative coverage of the government and the military.”
Journalists working for Ukrinform, an ostensibly non-partisan state news agency, were furnished with a list from their higher-ups late last year, telling them which local elected officials and opposition figures were “undesirable” and thus should not be quoted in articles…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Our Propagandized Society Is Like A Sick Man Who Doesn’t Know He’s Sick
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I write a lot more about the problems our society faces than I do about solutions. I do this because we are so far from being able to implement real solutions that most people don’t even really know the problems exist yet.
I could spend my time talking about the need for a giant people’s revolution to dismantle the US-centralized empire, end capitalism and replace the competition-based systems which are driving us to our doom with collaboration-based systems where all of humanity cooperates with each other and with our ecosystem, but those solutions aren’t going to emerge anytime soon because public consent for the status quo order is still being manufactured with a very high degree of success. At this point in history’s unfolding I may as well say we should solve all our problems by inventing free energy and living in the sky like the Jetsons.
Right now our society is like a sick man who (A) doesn’t know he’s sick, (B) refuses to believe he is sick, (C) believes the medicine is poison, (D) has no health insurance and can’t afford the medicine anyway, and (E) also has no means of transportation to get to the doctor. The very first step in that long list of obstacles to his health is to get him to understand that he is sick. That’s why I spend so much energy showing evidence that the media are lying to us, that we are ruled by psychopaths, and that our status quo systems are driving us toward annihilation.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
