Infamy Or Honor
Honest Readers,
Dr. Jane Orient: “Rooting Out the Censorship-Industrial Complex is Essential for Our Survival as a Free Sovereign Nation” As the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) files an amicus curiae brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in a major case focused on government collusion with Big Tech to censor Americans’ free speech, the group’s executive director tells Lumen-News the case’s outcome is monumental “for our survival as a free sovereign nation.”
On Wednesday, AAPS filed its brief against the Biden administration’s argument in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, in which the state attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, and other private parties, argued the administration violated the First Amendment’s right to free speech.
The parties asserted the Biden administration colluded with social media platform giants to censor posts and video that contained opinion opposed to that of the government regarding COVID-19 public health policy and the related vaccines.
AAPS Executive Director Jane Orient, M.D. said that while many Americans perceive the COVID pandemic to be “over,” the devastating consequences of how the pandemic was handled remains a serious concern for the future. “Covid may be a generally mild endemic disease, but it is not over,” Orient told Lumen-News. “Frequent ‘booster’ shots are still recommended annually, like flu shots, and there is already talk of Disease X.”
During a session in January at the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2024, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, when discussing “Disease X”, “You may even call COVID as the first ‘Disease X,’ and it may happen again.”... ..“The Surgeon General of Florida, our third largest state, cannot obtain answers from the Biden Administration about safety concerns with Covid vaccines,” Andrew Schlafly, general counsel of AAPS, said in the AAPS press release. “Instead of censoring issues raised about the Covid vaccines on social media, the Biden Administration officials should be providing answers to the questions raised.” “When the federal government tells social media platforms to take action against postings, then our basic free speech rights are gravely endangered,” he added.
Meryl Nass MD, GOP lawmakers argue pandemic treaty threatens US sovereignty (They may be barking up the wrong tree, but at least they are barking now. The World Health Organization is rushing to finalize a treaty to prevent and combat future pandemics, but some House Republicans say the U.S. should not be a part of the global accord, arguing that the health group is infringing on the rights of American taxpayers.
They’re concerned that the treaty will result in U.S. taxpayer dollars going toward abortion. They’re also concerned about threats to U.S. intellectual property rights...
..Proponents of the treaty say banding together to prepare for the next pandemic is essential, but a group of conservative lawmakers and advocates that gathered Monday on Capitol Hill said the accord is a “global power grab” that uses public health as a method of spreading progressive values... ..The World Health Organization has spent months working to create the world’s first pandemic treaty, an international accord meant to help countries better prepare and respond to future disease outbreaks. WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has described it as “a legally binding pact between countries working together.” Countries hope to finalize the agreement ahead of the annual World Health Assembly in Geneva at the end of May.
The treaty aims to help countries around the world prepare for “Disease X,” the next global disease outbreak... ..“This is about a common enemy, and without a shared response, starting with preparedness, we will face the same problem as COVID,” Ghebreyesus said while speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January.
But a growing coalition of Republicans on Capitol Hill, as well as supporters of former President Donald Trump, have been rallying against the treaty. During a news conference Monday on Capitol Hill, Reps. Christopher H. Smith, R-N.J., and Wenstrup argued the treaty is too political and relies too heavily on financial support from U.S. taxpayers. Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, called the draft “a global power grab” that forces progressive social policies on countries. The agreement calls for the continuation of essential health services, which include abortion.
A Midwestern Doctor , How We Can Stop The WHO's Horrific Pandemic Treaty Reviewing exactly what is inside the worst treaty of our lifetime and the heroic efforts that are stopping it. Story at a Glance:
• “Preventing” pandemics is one of the most lucrative areas in medicine. Unfortunately, despite all the money this industry has received, it has only made the problem worse. This is because most pandemics are the result of lab leaks from “preventative” research, and because whenever an effective solution is discovered for a pandemic, it gets suppressed by the industry since so many business interests depend upon profiting off of an “unsolvable emergency.”
• The way COVID-19 was handled was so egregious that it woke much of the public up to this grift. Because of that, the pandemic-industrial complex is now facing an existential risk to its business model (since much of the general population no longer is willing to go along with it).
• To solve this problem, a covert WHO treaty has been put together behind the scenes which gives these international health agencies absolute control over anything related to an alleged “health emergency,” and in turn enshrines each awful policy which was conducted throughout COVID-19 (e.g., mass censorship or the promotion of dangerous and experimental vaccines).
• A grass roots activist movement has accomplished something remarkable—despite the fact every single large organization has pushed the pandemic treaty through, in only a few short months, those activists have begun to derail it. I believe stopping this power grab is one of the most important issues of our time... ..This medical monopoly is being established by giving the WHO (rather than your doctor) the authority to choose what responses are adopted to manage a pandemic—which will inevitably lead to the (lucrative) experimental pharmaceuticals being mandated while the competing ones (e.g., repurposed pharmaceutical drugs) are prohibited... ..Since there are so many abhorrent agendas being pushed forward within the pandemic treaty, the treaty could never be approved without “undemocratic” tactics being employed to push it through... ..Tactics being used to conceal what is in the treaty include:
• Having the treaty documents contradict each other (e.g., in one place it says the WHO can’t do something, while in another place which supersedes the previous one it says it can). This allows the treaty advocates to point to the first instance but not the second and hence falsely suggest the treaty does not also contain its reprehensible provisions.
• Having the WHO’s plan be extremely difficult to understand, as it involves two separate legal documents (a treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations) that need to be pieced together. Much of the language within each is complex and contradictory so most people (myself included) will struggle to make sense of what they actually mean and which statement takes priority under which situation.
• Continually change the name of the treaty with each draft so it’s difficult for independent researchers to even find the right document (most recently, the treaty was referred to as the “pandemic agreement”).
• Not allowing the public to see what is within the current version of the amendments until shortly before it will be voted on in May... ..One of major debates in international law is the question of exactly when an international treaty supersedes national (or state) law. Since the underlying purpose of the WHO’s pandemic treaty is to provide a mechanism to bypass populist resistance against the WHO’s edicts, the treaty is attempting to supersede local law, and as the previous section shows, do so in secret so local legislators don’t realize what has been agreed to until the treaty’s “emergency” pandemic provisions kick in... ..A rational examination of the texts in question shows that:
1. The documents propose a transfer of decision-making power to the WHO regarding basic aspects of societal function, which countries undertake to enact.
2. The WHO Director General will have sole authority to decide when and where they are applied [remember that they apply to both “pandemics” and “other health hazards”].
3. The proposals are intended to be binding under international law.
Note: these powers include controlling where people can travel, forcing them to quarantine, implementing contact tracing, and mandating treatment or vaccination. Furthermore, many of the treaty’s provisions also violate existing laws (e.g., mass surveillance which violates basic medical privacy protections, taking away intellectual property rights from members of signatory nations, and as mentioned before, encouraging GoF research which violates the 1972 Biological Weapons Treaty)... ..The WHO has failed to reveal anything about the proposed amendments to its international health regulations since November 2022, even though they have been continuously negotiated since then. Likewise this means the WHO is not followed its existing rules which had require public drafts of the new amendments to be viewable four months prior to being voted on... ..I sincerely believe very few people would support the pandemic treaty if they actually understood what was in it, and it was for that reason that I spent almost a month reading through over a thousand pages of Meryl’s work to put this series together.
Note: Meryl also wrote a 1000 word (easily shareable) summary of the treaty here:
..The pandemic treaty will be voted on at the World Health Assembly in May 2024. Because of this, we have about two months left to hit the critical mass to stop this (and have that vote fail)... ..There are two entirely different things the WHO is trying to push through. One is the treaty itself, while the other is a new set of International Health Regulations. It is very possible the WHO will have to let go of the treaty (due to the pushback it has received) but use that confusion to covertly pass those disastrous regulations... ..Technically, for a treaty to be enacted in the United States, it needs to be debated in the Senate. Since that exposure would quickly turn the public against the treaty (as it is so indefensible it can only be passed in secret), the current presidential administration has been trying to bypass that step (as the State department has some latitude to decide if it wants to skip the Senate’s advise and consent process). Because of this, one of the most viable ways to stop it is by forcing a debate in the Senate (which senators like Rand Paul are already trying to do). However, a bill Senator Ron Johnson introduced that would have required the treaty to be reviewed by the Senate barely failed early last year on a strict party line vote... ..The same people who clearly did the worse possible job of handling the pandemic (demonstrated by the fact we fared far worse than Africa which did almost nothing to mitigate COVID-19) are demanding that “failure” justifies giving them the complete authority to do whatever they want during the next pandemic.
I interpret this to mean that they are actually paper tigers and are in an extremely precarious situation which is requiring them to take extremely audacious steps to protect their racket and not be held accountable for their crimes against humanity... ..In turn, I would argue we are at a moment in history where we could easily go down two different paths with profound implications for generations to come—our society may end up becoming becoming enslaved to the pandemic-industrial complex but we also have a once in a lifetime opportunity it to break up a predatory industry which has victimized generations of human beings around the world in its relentless pursuit of power and profit.
Meryl Nass MD, Maybe 5% of the WHO Pandemic Treaty and IHR amendment negotiations are about a trade agreement. The other 95% are about global control of information, pandemics and medicine through the WHO Don't let yourself be confused. I wish I didn't need to make this clarification, but many have asked me to do so.
The World's Gyre, Alastair Crooke , Thanks Eleni The U.S. is edging closer to war with Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces, a state security agency composed of armed groups, some of which are close to Iran, but which for the main are Iraqi nationalists. The U.S. carried out a drone strike in Baghdad, Wednesday that killed three members of the Kataeb Hizbullah forces, including a senior commander. One of the assassinated, al-Saadi, is the most senior figure to have been assassinated in Iraq since the 2020 drone strike that killed senior Iraqi Commander al-Muhandis and Qassem Soleimani.
The target is puzzling as Kataeb more than a week ago suspended its military operations against the U.S. (at the request of the Iraqi government). The stand down was widely published. So why was this senior figure assassinated?
Tectonic twitches often are sparked by a single egregious action: the one final grain of sand which – on top of the others – triggers the slide, capsizing the sandpile. Iraqis are angry. They feel that the U.S. wantonly violates their sovereignty – showing contempt and disdain for Iraq, a once great civilisation, now brought low in the wake of U.S. wars. Swift and collective retaliation has been promised.
One act, and a gyre can begin. The Iraqi government may not be able to hold the line... ..The Houthis and AnsarAllah have become heroes across the Islamic World. Look at social media. The Houthis are now the ‘stuff of myth’: Standing up for Palestinians whilst others don’t. A following is taking hold. AnsarAllah’s ‘heroic’ stance may lead to the ousting of western proxies, and so to dominate that ‘rest of Yemen’ they presently do not control. It seizes too, the Islamic world imagination (to the concern of the Arab Establishment)... ..Nothing changed by way of U.S. policies. It was the same old western bromides from decades ago: financial threats, bombing and violence. And the insistence on one mandatory ‘stand with Israel’ narrative (with no discussion).
The rest of the world has grown tired of it; even defiant towards it.
So to put it bluntly: Israel has now come face-to-face with the (self-destructive) inconsistency within Zionism: How to maintain special rights for Jews on territory in which there is an approximately equal number of non-Jews? The old answer has been discredited.
The Israeli Right argues that Israel then must go for broke: All or nothing. Take the risk of wider war (in which Israel, may or may not, be ‘victorious’); tell Arabs to move elsewhere; or abandon Zionism and themselves move on.
The Biden Administration, rather than help Israel look truth in the eye, has discarded the task of obliging Israel to face up to the contradictions in Zionism, in favour of restoring the broken status quo ante... ..The trifecta of U.S. failed responses paradoxically has nonetheless facilitated Israel’s slide to the Right (as evidenced by all recent polling). And has – absent a hostage deal; absent a Saudi credible ‘dangle’; or any credible path to a Palestinian State – precisely opened the path for the Netanyahu government to pursue his maximalist exit from collapsed deterrence through securing a ‘grand victory’ over the Palestinian resistance, Hizbullah, and even – he hopes – Iran.
None of these objectives can be achieved without U.S. help. Yet, where is Biden’s limit? https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/02/12/the-worlds-gyre/
The Holocaust, at the Heart of the Gaza Genocide , Thanks Eleni. Since the establishment of a Zionist home in Palestine in the early 20th century, Jewish settlers have massacred tens of thousands of Palestinians – mainly women, children and the elderly – whose lands and homes they have plundered and robbed with impunity.[1][2][3]
Never in the history of mankind has a race of people gone so quickly from being exceptional victims to exceptional murderers determined to exterminate the Palestinians under the pretext of recreating their homeland, the biblical Israel.
But Palestine was never the homeland of the Jews. Biblical accounts are not supported by historical or archaeological discoveries.[4] “It’s a romantic fantasy,”[5] admits Jewish historian Norman F. Cantor in his book on Jewish history, The Sacred Chain. “The whole notion of Israel and its history is a literary fiction,” says Professor Thomas Thompson in his book The Mythic Past: Biblical Archeology and the Myth of Israel. https://www.unz.com/article/the-holocaust-at-the-heart-of-the-gaza-genocide/
Paul Craig Roberts, Israel’s Ever-widening War Rafah is the town that borders Egypt and the Sinai desert, where one million Palestinian refugees have fled to escape the merciless Israeli attacks against them. More than 100,000 Palestinian civilians, including 70,000 Palestinian women and children, have already been killed and wounded. Most of these poor refugees are literally starving to death because of the 3-month long Israeli blockade of water, food, electricity, and medicine to Gaza.
If Israel launches this attack on Rafah, with the aim of driving one million Palestinians into the desert — and killing all those who refuse to leave Gaza– Egypt warns that a regional war will likely result, one which could conceivably become a World War.
Biden could prevent this with a single phone call. If the US cut off all military and financial aid to Israel, the Israelis could not continue to prosecute its genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Gaza. However, just the opposite seems to be happening, with the full support and complicity of the United States...
..The Israeli offensive has left 85% of Gaza’s population internally displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure was damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.
And the Great Moral Western Democracies continue to support the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinians even as Egypt warns of a widening war. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2024/02/12/israels-ever-widening-war/
Mike Whitney, Bibi’s Endgame: A Ghastly Humanitarian Crisis Followed by Forced Expulsion On Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israeli military to prepare a plan for the forced expulsion of Palestinians located in Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza where over 1.3 million displaced civilians have taken refuge in tent cities. The announcement was met with howls of protest from political leaders and human rights groups around the world who understand that Israel is now implementing the final phase of its ethnic cleansing operation which began on October 7. Despite the public outcry and mounting opposition, Netanyahu is moving ahead with his plan to drive the non-Jewish population from their historic homeland in order to establish a permanent Jewish majority on Palestinian territory... ..The reason Israel continues to kill non-combatants who are in-no-way connected to Hamas, is because it convinces everyone else that the bombing is “indiscriminate” which, in turn, suggests that the perpetrator is a deranged madman driven by irrational hatred.
This is how one terrorizes the public into doing whatever is demanded of them. We expect that much of Israel’s current pysops in Gaza was meticulously worked out with a battery of behavioral psychologists long before the first bomb was dropped, perhaps, years before the Hamas attack on October 7.
It’s also worth noting, that Israel’s unexpected blitz on Rafah comes on the heels of explicit promises from senior-level Israeli officials that Palestinians who willingly left their homes in the North would find safety in the South.
Now these same people are being pelted with bombs and pushed into the desert where their prospects for survival are dismal at best. https://www.globalresearch.ca/bibi-endgame-ghastly-humanitarian-crisis-followed-forced-expulsion/5849406
Patrick Lawrence: The Crisis at The New York Times It has been evident to many of us since the genocide in Gaza began Oct. 7 that Israel risked asking too much of those inclined to take its side. The Zionist state would ask what many people cannot give: It would ask them to surrender their consciences, their idea of moral order, altogether their native decency as it murders, starves and disperses a population of 2.3 million while making their land uninhabitable.
The Israelis took this risk and they have lost. We are now able to watch videos of Israeli soldiers celebrating as they murder Palestinian mothers and children, as they dance and sing while detonating entire neighborhoods, as they mock Palestinians in a carnival of racist depravity one would have thought beyond what is worst in humanity—and certainly beyond what any Jew would do to another human being... ..Since late last year The Grayzone has exhaustively investigated The Times’s “investigations” of Hamas’s supposed savagery and Israel’s supposed innocence... ..What we find as we read The Times’s daily report from Israel, and from Gaza when its correspondents unwisely accept invitations to embed with the IDF, is a newspaper unwilling to question either its longstanding fidelity to Israel or its service to American power... ..There is also the question of humanization and dehumanization. We have read very numerous and intimately detailed Times stories of Israelis attacked last Oct. 7—individuation being essential to shaping this kind of coverage—while Palestinians are an indistinct blur so far as Times correspondents report on them. The Times has fully indulged the pretense that history began on Oct. 7, erasing the previous 76 years or the previous century, depending on how one counts—the history, this is to say, wherein the Palestinian story is told. There is no Palestinian story in pages of The New York Times... ..There is one feature of The Times’s coverage that must be singled out, as it is very key to the whole of it. This concerns the question of evidence. Almost all of the reportage coming out of Israel, and on rare occasions Gaza, relies on evidence Times correspondents have obtained from the Israeli military, Israeli government officials, the Israeli police, or those representing some other part of the Israeli power structure... ..“According to Israeli officials,” “Israeli military sources said,” etc. is all readers get. On goes the report from there, in which evidence or “evidence” the Israelis have supplied is presented at face value... ..Jeffrey Gettleman seems to have been other than careful in his reporting after he transited from Ukraine to Israel immediately after the events of Oct. 7... The Israelis began alleging that Hamas militias were guilty of rape and sexual violence during their Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel more or less immediately after the events of that day. They claimed to be developing “considerable evidence”—Gettleman’s phrase in his initial report, on Dec. 4—from witnesses, photographs, and emergency medical teams. In the same piece, Gettleman quoted a police official saying that women and men numbering in the dozens had been raped on Oct. 7...
..“Extensive witness testimony and documentary evidence of killings, including videos posted by Hamas fighters themselves,” Gettleman wrote, “support the allegations.” ... .. How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct.7.” It took as its central figure “the woman in the black dress.” This refers to a corpse found and videoed on the side of a road on Oct. 8. “In a grainy video,” Gettleman writes, “you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.” Gettleman reports this woman’s identity as Gal Abdush, a 34–year-old mother of two who was partying with her husband along the Gaza border in the early hours of Oct. 7 and was later murdered, as was her husband... ..Based largely on the video evidence—which was verified by The New York Times—Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped, and she has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks... ..The Times “verified” the video, did it? In what way this? What did it verify, exactly? That the video existed? Is Gettleman suggesting that The Times verified from the video that Abdush was raped? No video of a dead body could verify this...
..This video has a strange story, to stay with it briefly. Gettleman wrote that it “went viral,” but it is nowhere to be found on the internet, and nobody recalls referring to Abdush as “the woman in the black dress.” There is also a chronology question attaching to this video, as a Jan. 3 report in Mondoweiss analyzes. Gettleman recounts the last text message, with time-stamp, Gal Abdush sent to her family. During this time Abdush’s husband, Nagy, was with her and sent his own texts to the family, also time-stamped. Four minutes elapsed between Gal Abdush’s last message and the time Nagy Abdush messaged the family to report his wife’s death—a message Gttleman did not mention. Nagy Abdush made no reference to rape. He sent his own final message 44 minutes later – a message Gettleman’s report does mention.
Did one or more Hamas militiaman rape a woman in the presence of her husband, then, in one or another sequence, murder her and burn her, then murder the husband—all not in 44 minutes, as the Gettleman piece implies, but in four? Since Gettleman published, Abdush’s family, evidently irate, has accused him of distorting the evidence and manipulating them in the course of his reporting. “She was not raped,” Mira Alter, Gal Abdush’s sister, wrote on social media a few days after Gettleman published. “There was no proof that there was rape. It was only a video.”... ..There is a witness who told Gettleman he saw two teenage girls lying naked and alone on the floor of a house, one of them with semen all over her back, while it was later proven they were burned so badly they were hard to identify and they were found not alone but in the embrace of their also-burned mother... ..I rarely urge readers of this column to read The New York Times—some, indeed, write to thank me for reading it so they don’t have to do so. On this occasion I think reading the Gettleman pieces is a good idea—but only back-to-back with The Grayzone’s work. https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/12/patrick-lawrence-the-crisis-at-the-new-york-times/
Last week, special counsel Robert Hur released a bombshell report, declining to press charges against US President Joe Biden partially because his report said, the president would appear to the jury as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and therefore would have trouble convincing the jury of his intent.
The report also noted that he forgot when his term as Vice President ended and started, and couldn’t remember what year his son died.
Biden attempted to quell concerns about his age by calling a press conference addressing the report but proceeded to confuse Mexico and Egypt while speaking to reporters... ..On Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris told a US media outlet she is “ready to serve” while slamming the report as “wrong” and “politically motivated.”... ..Lazare argued that is impossible for the Biden campaign. “Biden cannot go on that kind of tour,” he said. “He can't sit down with Hannity or go on Fox News or do anything like that because he'll only make things worse.[...] It’ll become completely clear that he doesn’t know what’s going on around him.” https://sputnikglobe.com/20240213/ground-is-shifting-under-bidens-feet-after-hur-report-1116748950.html
The Nuts And Bolts Of Replacing Candidate Biden, Before Or After The Convention While a Biden pre-convention withdrawal would make for quite a spectacle, things would really get wild if Biden were to be nominated at the convention only to subsequently die, resign or be disabled. In that scenario, party rules direct the party chair to "confer with the Democratic leadership of the … Congress and the Democratic Governors Association" and then report to the approximately 450-member Democratic National Committee, which would then choose a new nominee.
The chaos wouldn't be confined to the Democratic Party: States would be forced to scramble to produce new ballots. Ballots for overseas military service members are shipped just a couple weeks after the late-August Democratic convention, and in-person voting kicks off on Sept. 20 in Minnesota and South Dakota.
None of this is to say that Biden won't keep mumbling, shuffling, blank-staring and gaffing his way all the way to the Nov 5 general election finish line. However, after last week, fewer people are willing to wager that Biden will be the Democratic nominee. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/nuts-and-bolts-replacing-candidate-biden-or-after-convention
Russian President Vladimir Putin, like Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, is "anathema to Davos globalists", Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel told Sputnik, stressing that the timing of Putin-Carlson interview was perfect... .."I also think the contrast between Putin’s measured and thoughtful perspectives, having been a world leader for a quarter century with the lack of gravitas — to put it politely of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and many others in both parties who are surface-level, donor-captured, soundbite specialists was stunning. This contrast was remarkable considering Biden’s post-interview meltdown before what remains of the 'press'," Ortel continued.
The Wall Street analyst noted that judging from viewership statistics, the corporate — and political donor-controlled — media is destroying itself.
He stressed that "no political interview has garnered nearly as much coverage as Putin’s recent sit down with Tucker," adding that he expects "it will, in the end, change the thinking of most open minds." https://sputnikglobe.com/20240211/carlsons-interview-putin-and-trump-seen-as-threat-by-davos-globalists--wall-street-analyst-1116731246.html
Moon of Alabama, Ukraine SitRep: A Collapse Is Coming - And Then? In the last Ukraine situation report I discussed the choice of General Oleksandr Syrski as the new Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He is likely to support the more aggressive choices the Ukrainian president Zelenski will make. For mostly public relation reasons Zelenski demands constant attacks on Russian forces and no retreat of Ukrainian forces until absolutely necessary. Syrski is willing to deliver on that even as history says that he is unlikely to be successful... ..The new Ukrainian mobilization law, which is supposed to refill the army with fresh bodies, is still creeping through the Ukrainian parliament. It will likely come into force only by April. The first new troops conscripted under it will take until July to be combat capable.
But even if the existing Ukrainian forces can hold out that long they still will lack the ammunition to hit back at Russian efforts. Even if the U.S. agrees soon to spend more money on Ukraine, which seems unlikely, it would take many months to refill the Ukrainian arsenals.
For all these reasons I expect that the Ukrainian frontline will break rather sooner - within weeks - than later - i.e. within months. https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/02/ukraine-sitrep-a-collapse-is-coming-and-then.html#more
In his speech at a rally in South Carolina, Donald Trump appeared to double down on his previous insistence that all NATO members should follow the bloc’s guidelines and spend at least two percent of their respective gross domestic products on defense.
"One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, 'Well, sir, if we don't pay, and we're attacked by Russia, will you protect us?' I said, 'You didn't pay, you're delinquent?'" Trump said as he recalled an exchange that allegedly took place at some NATO meeting. "No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want."
Trump’s statement, however, does not mean that the United States would not honor its obligations under NATO’s charter, argued Earl Rasmussen, retired lieutenant colonel of the US Army and an international consultant. https://sputnikglobe.com/20240212/european-nato-members-know-russia-threat-rhetoric-is-a-lie---expert-1116744370.html
Gilbert Doctorow, Will NATO be dismantled? Interview on India’s WION television channel I tried to make plain in the interview that Trump is intent on the break-up of NATO for reasons that make sense to those of us who had the good fortune to listen a couple of years ago to the late Russian politician, founder and long-time chairman of the center-right LDPR party. Vladimir Zhirinovsky explained at the time why and how Russia, with a defense budget ten times smaller than the US, could pull ahead of the US in developing and deploying state of the art strategic nuclear weapons systems... ..Zhirinovsky told us the reason. With its vast network of overseas military bases built to ensure U.S. global hegemony, the U.S. military budget of 800 billion to 1 trillion dollars, as he said with a bit of humor, ‘goes to buy toilet paper’ for those bases and to fight hot wars in places that have no strategic value to the States instead of developing and fielding weapons systems to match its peers Russia and China.
One might look still further and remark on the corruption in the U.S. military procurement system from interaction with private for-profit manufacturers who lobby Congress on their own behalf using retired generals and Pentagon officials. But that source of reduced efficiency in spending is a topic for another day... ..In this interview I argue that the greatest contribution to Russian-American relations is being made by Trump precisely now when he is acting as a private person to influence Congress to stop funding the war. Once in office, he will be subject to constraints imposed by those elites whom Putin mentioned in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson.
Elections in Pakistan. Victory of Imran Khan’s PTI Party , Junaid S. Ahmad Thanks Eleni.
The elections in Pakistan today were much freer and fairer than I had expected. Hence, the preliminary results simply reflected the obvious for most of us: former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s political party, PTI (the movement for justice) – facing ruthless repression over the past year – have swept the elections in every single province of the country. Khan, surviving two assasination attempts and languishing in a supermax dungeon since last August, is more popular than ever. Among the youth, Gallup Pakistan surveys have consistently reported around 80-90 percent support for Khan and his party.
The tyranny of the generals in the military high command along with the kleptocratic and dynastic political parties entailed even the suppression of PTI’s symbol (a cricket bat) and virtually a ban, with horrific consequences if violated, on candidates running on a PTI ticket. Thus, all of these candidates ran as independents...
..There is one sign of both hope and danger. For the first time in Pakistan’s history, the normally unified and disciplined armed forces are now experiencing deep divisions. The majority of military officers and and 95 percent of soldiers are repulsed by the behavior of Wasington’s minions in the top brass. To the surprise of many of us, these divisions also exist within the intelligence agencies. We are witnessing in an unprecedented way a refusenik impulse within the military. Not to sound like the bogus alarmism we’re used to from Washington think tanks, it’s still worth remembering that Pakistan is a country of 240 million, nuclear-armed. https://www.globalresearch.ca/elections-pakistan/5849194
Saluting The Honorable (pictured with Jenny and St. Valentine's Day flowers)
Recovering Military Brat
John - I applaud your noble efforts here in your second career as a journalist/blogger/commentator. As this world becomes more contentious and confusing, your posts act as koans which keep me tethered to terra firma.
Whoever was Truman’s military chief of staff back in 1947 warned him about getting involved with Israel, but, alas, you’ll be fighting or creating havoc for them in perpetuity it seems. Britain, Palestines occupier at the time, couldn’t believe its luck that somebody else would take responsibility for them. I can’t believe people are so daft they still believe this promised land bs, or the faked bibles the evangelicals read and absorb,,need I go on.
As for that other poisoned chalice Ukraine,,Putin did warn it may take 10 years.