Analyzing Ecosystems

Human Ecologists,

  MK Bhadrakumar ,  'Swarming' the US in West Asia, until it folds

The US is so deeply mired in an unwinnable battle from the Levant to the Persian Gulf that only its adversaries in China, Russia, and Iran can bail it out.   While the Yemeni resistance movement Ansarallah is comparable to Hezbollah in certain respects, it is the audacious brand of defensive deterrence practiced by the Islamic Resistance of Iraq that is going to be highly consequential in the near term.
  Last week, citing sources in the State Department and Pentagon, Foreign Policy magazine wrote that the White House is no longer interested in continuing the US military mission in Syria. The White House later denied this information, but the report is gaining ground.   The Turkish daily Hurriyet wrote on Friday that while Ankara is taking a cautious approach to media reports, it does see “a general striving” by Washington to exit not only Syria but the entire region of West Asia, as it senses that it has been dragged into a quagmire by Israel and Iran from the Red Sea to Pakistan... ..Much depends on any “threat of physical impact” on American forces present in Syria. The swift US military exit from Afghanistan took place with virtually no advance notice, in coordination with the Taliban. “In all likelihood, the same may happen in Iraq and Syria,” Lavrentiev said... ..The Islamic Resistance of Iraq has stepped up its attacks on US military bases and targets. In a ballistic missile attack on Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq a week ago, an unknown number of American troops sustained injuries, and the White House announced its first troop deaths on Sunday when three US servicemen were killed on the Syrian-Jordanian border in strikes earlier that day. This situation is untenable for President Joe Biden politically... ..Certainly, what gives impetus to all this is the announcement in Washington and Baghdad on Thursday that the US and Iraq have agreed to start talks on the future of American military presence in Iraq with the aim of setting a timetable for a phased withdrawal of troops... ..Pentagon commanders would be pinning hopes on protracted negotiations. The US is in a position to blackmail Iraq, which is obliged, per the one-sided agreement dictated by Washington during the occupation in 2003, to keep in the US banks all of Iraq’s oil export earnings. But in the final analysis, President Biden’s political considerations in the election year will be the clincher. And that will depend on the calibration by West Asia's resistance groups, and their ability to ‘swarm’ the US on multiple fronts until it caves...  ..That explains the Astana format meeting of Russia, Iran, and Turkiye on January 24-25 in Kazakhstan. The three countries are preparing for the endgame in Syria. Not coincidentally, in a phone call last Friday, Biden once again told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "to scale down the Israeli military operation in Gaza, stressing he is not in it for a year of war."... ..Their joint statement after the Astana format meeting in Kazakhstan is a remarkable document predicated almost entirely on an end to the US occupation of Syria. It indirectly urges Washington to give up its support of terrorist groups and their affiliates “operating under different names in various parts of Syria” as part of attempts to create new realities on the ground, including illegitimate self-rule initiatives under the pretext of ‘combating terrorism.’ It demands an end to the US’ illegal seizure and transfer of oil resources “that should belong to Syria,” the unilateral US sanctions, and so on... ..Simultaneously, at a meeting in Moscow on Wednesday between the Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev and Ali-Akbar Ahmadian, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, the latter reportedly stressed that Iran-Russia cooperation in the fight against terrorism “must continue, particularly in Syria.”... ..Iran’s patience has run out over the US military presence in Syria and Iraq following the revival of ISIS with American support. Interestingly, Israel no longer abides by its “de-confliction” mechanism with Russia in Syria. Clearly, there is close US-Israeli cooperation in Syria and Iraq at the intelligence and operational level, which goes against Russian and Iranian interests...
..These developments are a vintage illustration of defensive deterrence. The Axis of Resistance turns out to be the principal instrument of peace for the issues of security that entangle the US and Iran. Clearly, there isn’t any method or any reasonable hope of convergence to this process, but, fortunately, the appearance of chaos in West Asia is deceiving. Beyond the distractions of partisan argument and diplomatic ritual, one can detect the outlines of a practical solution to the Syrian stalemate that addresses the inherent security interests of the US and Iran that are embedded within an outer ring of US-China concord over the situation in West Asia... The pullout of US troops opens the pathway to a Syrian settlement, which remains a top priority for Moscow and for Putin personally. https://thecradle.co/articles/swarming-the-us-in-west-asia-until-it-folds

  So no decision yet, right? Quiet negotiations? 'Moment Of No Return' Imminent As Biden Has 'Decided' On Response, Says Iran Supplied Weapons Used In Attacks   Biden said the White House sees Iran as responsible for supplying the weapons used in the drone strike on the Tower 22 base along the Jordan-Syria border, an attack which also saw over 40 American troops injured.
Admin officials have repeatedly asserted they do not seek wider war with Iran, even while direct accusations fly against Tehran, and there's talk of military 'options' and warlike threats go over the airwaves. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/moment-no-return-imminent-biden-has-decided-response-says-iran-supplied-weapons-used

  Caitlin Johnstone,  Everything Israel Wants To Destroy Is Hamas   UNRWA is Hamas. The hospitals are Hamas. The ambulances are Hamas. The journalists are Hamas. The schools are Hamas. South Africa is Hamas. People tweeting unfavorable things about Israel are Hamas. Basically everyone Israel and its supporters want killed is Hamas.
  Defunding UNRWA over a handful of alleged Hamas members who don’t even work there anymore makes no sense from a humanitarian perspective or a military perspective, but it makes a ton of sense from a genocidal perspective.
  Cutting off aid to the most aid-dependent population on earth would be a psychopathically monstrous act all by itself, even without having caused their extreme needfulness in the first place by backing a genocidal bombing campaign on a giant concentration camp full of children.

Everything Israel Wants To Destroy Is Hamas

  Surplus Energy Economics , Normalising money and value 

  Why has the global economy become credit-addicted, and why has a post-capitalist kleptocracy replaced the market economy? Why is the much-vaunted transition to EVs decelerating, and why are the costs of renewable energy development rising? Can we really achieve nil-net-cost net zero, switching to more climate-friendly energy sources without becoming poorer in the process?
  The answers to these and many other questions lie in economics, but not, as we shall see, in the way that economic issues are customarily presented to the public, and debated by decision-makers in business and government...
..We can’t explain any of these trends by reference to money alone, but need to bring the material, and the laws of physics, into the equation... ..Effective interpretation of the economy requires the application of a concept wholly unknown in orthodox economics. This is the concept of two economies – a “real economy” of material products and services, and a parallel “financial economy” of money, transactions and credit... ..Having no intrinsic worth, money has value only in terms of the material products and services for which it can be exchanged (the concept of money as claim).

  By excluding the material, the economics orthodoxy manages to promise ‘infinite growth on a finite planet’, something which, in the words of Kenneth E. Boulding, co-founder of general systems theory, could only be believed by “a madman or an economist”...

..The biggest challenge of the SEEDS project has been to translate the substance of the material into the language of the monetary. The whole aim of the project has been to link the financial to the material. Stated at its simplest, the physical economy functions by using energy to convert raw materials into products and services... ..There are two distinct characteristics of the material economy which can guide us to effective interpretation. The first is that energy is never “free”, and the second is that the critical characteristic of energy is its density, something which can be likened, for convenience, to the power-to-weight equation as it affects the performance of vehicles... ..Transitioning to renewables may have environmental benefits – though even this claim needs to be treated with caution – but an economy powered by less energy-dense renewable energy must be smaller than an economy powered by more energy-dense oil, gas and coal... ..The environmental (as well as the supposed economic) merits of renewables need to be heavily qualified, because a system based on less dense energy needs a correspondingly larger physical supply infrastructure. This in turn means an expanded need for raw materials... Moreover, the accessing and processing of these raw materials increases the need for energy inputs. Indeed, the term “renewable” is questionable, because the only energy source capable of supplying everything from concrete and steel to copper, lithium and cobalt, in the quantities needed for transition, is legacy energy sourced from fossil fuels... ..Just like iron ore or arable land, environmental tolerance is a finite resource... ..Here’s an issue that we need to look fairly and squarely in the face. The dramatic growth in the size and complexity of the modern industrial economy is a direct consequence of harnessing the vast amounts of low-cost energy contained in the planet’s reserves of fossil fuels. Nothing like it had ever happened before.
  Its continuity is entirely dependent on the discovery of alternatives, and these must be at least as energy-dense as oil, gas and coal... ..[ECoE, energy cost of energy minimum] probably occurred in the quarter-century after 1945. The second is that the trend ECoE of fossil fuels was probably well below 1% at its lowest point. From 2% in 1980, and 4.2% in 2000, all-sources trend ECoE has already broken the 10% barrier, and is likely to reach 18% by 2040...

..As extreme disequilibrium emerges between the ‘two economies’, we cannot compel the material to conform to the financial, because the exchange value connection between them doesn’t operate in that direction...

..SEEDS analysis plots two distinct curves, globally, and for each of the 29 national economies covered by the model. The prosperity curve of the “real” economy, though material in character, is presented in monetary terms for the purposes of benchmarking and comparison with the “financial” curve... ..We can calculate that each dollar of reported “growth” between 2002 and 2022 was accompanied – and made possible – by a $3.20 increase in debt. Put another way, we had to borrow at an annual average rate of 11% of GDP to deliver annual average “growth” of 3.5% between those years...

..Just as rising ECoEs are driving down the supply and ex-cost economic value of energy, so the real costs of energy-intensive necessities are being pushed upwards. This can be expected to undercut returns on invested capital, such that capital investment decreases. As this happens, and as asset markets slump, the effect will be to expose enormous malinvestment. Calibrating the scope of this malinvestment, and determining where it has occurred, is perfectly feasible, but not in the compass of this article... ..The affordability of discretionary products and services will be subject to leveraged compression, a process already visible in economies worst exposed to the “cost of living crisis”. https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2024/01/29/270-normalising-money-and-value/#like-39831

  Charles Hugh Smith,   The Era of Easy Money Ruined Us   The rot caused by easy money will only become fully visible when the hollowed out institutions start collapsing under the weight of incompetence, debt and hubris.   Fifteen long years later, the damage cannot be undone because the entire status quo is now dependent on the easy-money bubble for its survival... ..The wealthiest few could buy income-producing assets on the cheap at carrying costs no ordinary investor could match. Since there was so much "free money" sloshing around for financial elites to tap, the demand for income-producing assets soared, pushing prices into the stratosphere. These enormous increases in valuation generated stupendous capital gains for the wealthiest few... .."Nepo(tism) babies selected by accident of birth without any tempering in flames... cocooned in their own reality, disdainful of the unselected, coddled and hothoused, ignorant of history and, worst of all, supremely confident in the superiority of their own righteous abilities... because when you get first dibs on the free money there are no consequences you can't buy your way out of."

The Era of Easy Money Ruined Us

  Boeing’s nosedive: How greed ruined a great American company
What was once essentially a collective of engineers known for innovation and craftsmanship now operates in the interests of Wall Street

  After a few lonely, uncertain years, an aircraft was built that would shrink the world and usher in the glittering jet age. A few short years later, the company would embark on another hugely expensive gamble that paid off when it undertook to build the six-story-high, 225-foot-long Boeing 747.
  In 1957, when the 707 made its maiden flight, fewer than one in ten American adults had ever traveled in an airplane. By 1990, more adult Americans had flown than owned a car...

..For many decades, Boeing was a decidedly unpretentious, engineer-driven company with a culture emphasizing both dazzling innovation and the sober virtue of impeccable craftsmanship. It was a place where the top managers held patents and could talk shop with the floor workers...

..The singular event cited as marking the beginning of Boeing’s downfall was its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, which put it on a collision course with a culture steeped in cost-cutting and financial performance. Somewhat perversely, although Boeing had acquired McDonnell, it was the latter that took over. McDonnell’s executives ended up running the company and its culture became ascendant. Scores of cut-throat managers battle-hardened in the company’s perform-or-die culture were brought in. A federal mediator once likened the partnership to “hunter killer assassins meeting boy scouts.”

https://swentr.site/business/591332-boeing-wall-street-profit/

  Another Fast & Furious Scandal? Mexico Demands Answers As Cartels Acquire US-Military Grade Weapons   Mexico is furious and demands an investigation into how belt-fed machine guns, rocket launchers, and grenades are ending up in the hands of cartel members, the country's top diplomat said. https://www.zerohedge.com/military/another-fast-furious-scandal-mexico-demands-answers-cartels-acquire-us-military-grade

Celia Farber points out another potential trap. These patriots must already be aware. I think they are being strictly careful.   New Greg Reese Video: Documentary Film Maker Who Penetrated "Pat-Con" Dark Agenda To Use False Flags To Criminalize US Patriots Warns Us NOT To Fall For The Texas Border Trap Which Is Their New Jan 6

New Greg Reese Video: Documentary Film Maker Who Penetrated "Pat-Con" Dark Agenda To Use False Flags To Criminalize US Patriots Warns Us NOT To Fall For The Texas Border Trap Which Is Their New Jan 6

Clayton Baker MD ,  Medicine Has Been Fully Militarized   Among its many harsh lessons, Covid has taught us this: if you substitute Pfizer and Moderna for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, and swap the NIH and CDC for the Pentagon, you get the same result. The “medical-industrial complex” is every bit as real as its military-industrial counterpart, and it is every bit as real a problem.
  As a physician, I am embarrassed to admit that until Covid, I possessed only an inkling that this was so – or more accurately, I knew it, but didn’t realize how bad it was, and I didn’t worry about it too much... ..At this writing, virtually all the major healthcare systems, specialty regulatory boards, specialty associations, and medical schools are standing at attention, still in lockstep with the received – and by now, clearly false – narrative. Their funding, after all, be it from Pharma or the Government, depends upon their obedience. Barring dramatic change, they will respond in the same fashion when orders come down from above in the future. Medicine has been fully militarized.
..In his farewell address, Eisenhower said something else that I believe is most prescient here. He described that a military-industrial complex fostered “a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.” https://brownstone.org/articles/medicine-has-been-fully-militarized/

  Sasha Latypova gives some clear history of the CIA, potentially the largest criminal organization in the world, and joined at the hips to MI-6 and Mossad. The Largest Intelligence Agency That Goes Largely Unnoticed , Guest post by a secret agent

The Largest Intelligence Agency That Goes Largely Unnoticed

Secret Agent Man , Johnny Rivers

Gilbert Doctorow:  Speech for a now cancelled ‘Holocaust in Latvia’ program in the European Parliament   The event was cancelled today by order of the President of the European Parliament in the context of charges just leveled against Zdanoka of being a Russian spy. I expect to learn more about these charges tomorrow, but ahead of the specifics I can say that anyone following Zdanoka’s long-time activities on behalf of her electorate in Riga and her open and brave criticism of Moscow’s policy failings till now with respect to the Russian-speaking population of Latvia would know at once the utter falsehood of such accusations.   Over the past decade, I have been honored to be an invitee each year to the various panel discussions that Zdanoka arranged in the premises of the European Parliament, including Russia-EU Forums that attracted the participation of prestigious Americans including Ray McGovern and Ambassador Jack Matlock...

..My intention as speaker at this event was to break taboos about who is and who is not a neo-fascist among the political elites in Europe. In fact, I wanted to go beyond the designation ‘neo-fascist’ to the more emotive but more accurate term ‘neo-Nazi.’ Neo-fascism is a Europe-wide phenomenon today if by the term we mean viciously enforced state censorship, utter conformism in political thinking and utter intolerance for heterodox views.  Neo-Nazism is more violent and its emergence is more concentrated. geographically than neo-fascism... ..My thesis in this speech is that the neo-Nazism rising in the Baltic States and Ukraine is enabled by the revisionist politics of the Federal Republic of Germany in the new millennium...
..The reunification of Germany after the fall of the Wall gave it that much more population and economic heft, leaving France far behind.  And in the 2000s, France lost its way politically. The pitiful fool Hollande was installed by the Americans after they destroyed the presidential candidacy of the intellectually very strong but morally weak Dominique Strauss-Kahn...

..Unfortunately for us all, the new self-confident Germany has too many bad habits from the Germany that brought about WWII, beginning with rabid Russophobia. This is the common legacy of all the main parties:  CDU, Social Democrats, Greens, Free Democrats. From my own personal experience with the European Parliament, I understood that it was precisely the German Greens, through their spokespersons like Rebecca Harms, who were the fiercest enemies of normal relations with the big neighbor to the East.  The mindset of German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock is nothing new to the Greens... ..It is in this context that we have to view Germany’s years-long coddling of the Baltic States with their never-ending recommendations of anti-Russian measures and provocations...

..I think of the meeting that Scholz had with Putin a couple of weeks before the outbreak of the Special Military Operation. When Putin raised the issue of neo-Nazism in Ukraine, Scholz laughed in his face.

  Here and there in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine, in the Baltic States monuments to the Soviet liberators of these countries from occupation by Nazi Germany are systematically removed or destroyed...  The literal rewriting of history comes elsewhere, from the mouth of none other than President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen when in her speech this past weekend dedicated to the liberation of prisoners from the Auschwitz concentration camp, she said it was done by ‘Allied Forces.’ ...  Von der Leyen’s intent was to deny that the Red Army was the liberator... ..The greatest sin of the CDU, Social Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens is to deny the outcome of WWII out of sheer hatred for Russia, those barbarians to the East who out-produced and outfought their forebears at a cost of 26 million Russian deaths in 1941-45... ..I found a remark by Vladimir Solovyov in his talk show of last night to be worthy of repetition. Solovyov does not throw bouquets to the USA often or willingly, but last night he reminded his audience that America is probably the freest nation in the Collective West, while Europe sinks into dictatorship and authoritarianism... ..I close this speech with a recommendation to guide the ‘fight against the resurgence of neo-fascism’: this fight can gain traction only if we speak openly about who is enabling these truly anti-democratic developments, and that puts Germany under the microscope. https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/01/30/speech-for-a-now-cancelled-holocaust-in-latvia-program-in-the-european-parliament/

  The Role of the Forest Holobiont in Earth's Climate: Another Talk by Anastassia Makarieva, Ugo Bardi   I had several comments on the interview that Anastassia Makarieva gave for a film produced by the New England Forest Group. One was that, lacking images, the presentation was not so easy to understand. So, here is the talk she gave at the International Conference on Basic Science for Sustainability in Belgrade, on Sep 22, 2022. This one is longer and clearer, recommended if you want to understand the mechanisms that make the biotic pump work.   The biotic pump is part of an innovative and important interpretation of the current climate situation. Anastassia is proposing that the warming of the atmosphere may be caused not just by the accumulated CO2, but by a radiative forcing of the same order of magnitude generated by deforestation. Earth's forests are giant holobionts coupled and embedded in the even larger holobiont that's the whole ecosystem. It is not surprising that they strongly affect climate, and not just by the conventional factors, albedo and carbon sequestration. There is much more than that... ..If it turns out to be true (and I think it might well be), it means that a significant fraction of what we have been doing to mitigate global warming may well have worsened the situation. For instance proposing "biofuels" obtained from wood means damaging the forests, and that damages climate.

​  But there is much more in this concept: it is a complete revolution in the way we see Earth's climate system. Forests not only cool the atmosphere, but also stabilize the climate. This means not only that we need more forests, but that some ideas such as carbon sequestration and geoengineering could do a lot of damage if not coupled with reforestation.​ ​ [It's Old Growth Forests that do the climate work with Mother Gaia.]

The Role of the Forest Holobiont in Earth's Climate: Another Talk by Anastassia Makarieva

​Proud Holobiont (currently supporting some kind of flu-virus, so no fresh image today)