Month: May 2023

The United States is indisputable leader in defense spending both in absolute figures and per capita.

However, on the latter count the gap is not so dramatic with some Nordic countries demonstrating impressive propensity for making their citizens pay for war…

Source

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity,

Last week the House passed legislation increasing the debt ceiling. The bill was supported by all but four Republicans. For some Republicans, this was the first time they had ever voted for a debt ceiling increase.

Perhaps the reason they did so this time was because the legislation also promised to reduce federal spending by $4.5 trillion over the next decade. Most of those spending reductions are achieved by rolling back Fiscal Year spending to 2022 levels and then limiting increases in spending to one percent for the next ten years. The bill also returns unspent COVID relief money to the US Treasury and eliminates President Biden’s student loan forgiveness programs.

Perhaps the most significant part of the bill is the REINS Act. This legislation requires congressional approval of any new federal regulation that will have an impact of more than $100 million, will have significant harmful impact on the economy, or will increase consumer prices. Even though the bill increases spending and debt, there are reasons a supporter of limited government might vote for it.

However even in the unlikely event that this bill is passed in the Senate and signed into law by President Biden, it is unlikely that the one percent spending cap would remain in force for the full ten years. Historically, spending caps imposed as part of a balanced budget or debt ceiling deal do not last for more than one or two Congressional terms. This is because every spending program is “protected” by members of Congress whose constituents and/or donors benefit from the program. This process already occurred with this bill before it was even voted on, as Speaker McCarthy had to remove provisions limiting ethanol subsidies to appease several farm state Republicans.

Surely lobbyists for the military industrial complex are already plotting to use hysteria over China, Putin, Iran, or one of the US’s many other designed enemies to justify greater than one percent increase in military spending.

The only reason the US government is able to run up such huge deficits without experiencing a complete economic meltdown is the dollar’s world reserve currency status. But the growing de-dollarization movement-fueled by the US government’s fiscal recklessness and hyper-interventionist foreign policy should be a wake-up call to Congress.

Sadly, few in DC seem to be paying attention.

The government’s fiscal situation will soon worsen, as both the Social Security and Medicare trust funds will likely be bankrupt within the next decade, forcing Congress to find an additional $116 trillion to fully fund them.

The looming economic crisis is a symptom of our moral and philosophic crisis. Too many Americans have bought into the lie that government can and should provide them with economic and physical safety while promoting “global democracy” abroad. Therefore, the most important step in the liberty movement now is convincing more people to apply the same moral code to theft and murder committed by government as they apply to those same crimes by private citizens. The government, at the very least, should be held to the same moral codes as the people it governs.

Ensuring that government follows the same nonaggression principle as law-abiding citizens is the key to a society of freedom, peace, and prosperity.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was in Jerusalem on Monday where he deliver an address to Israel’s parliament, and he focused on an anti-China message, a somewhat rare emphasis given the occasion marking the Jewish state’s 75th independence day.

He warned Beijing lawmakers that Beijing acts as “thieves” while calling for the close US ally to scrutinize Chinese investments in the country.

“While the [Chinese Communist Party] may disguise itself as promoters of innovation, in truth, they act like thieves. We must not allow them to steal our technology,” McCarthy said. 

“I’m glad that Israel has put into place a process to review foreign investments. I strongly encourage Israel to further strengthen its oversight of foreign investment, particularly Chinese investment, building on the steps that you first took in 2019,” he added.

2019 was a reference to Israel establishing a foreign investment oversight mechanism amid US officials warning of the dangers of Chinese companies’ expanding role in sensitive technology and infrastructure industries.

China already operates the Haifa port terminal, a major international shipping hub for Israel, after in 2015 its state-owned Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG) won the tender to oversee it for 25 years. The US military from there voiced concerns about American submarines and warships docking in Israel. 

McCarthy also called out China as among severe human rights violators:

“There is no clearer example than the U.N Human Rights Council – which has passed over 90 anti-Israel resolutions since 2006, yet has turned a blind eye to true human rights violations by Iran, North Korea, and China.”

“My colleagues and I in Congress will continue to stand with Israel. ”

“And we will increase pressure on the United Nations to end these outrageous attacks.”

China recently held itself out as a mediator seeking Israeli-Palestine peace, after recent flare-ups in fighting centered on Al-Aqsa Mosque as well as Gaza and the West Bank.

However, Washington and much of the West have looked cynically on these moves by Beijing, also as it pushes its 12-point peace plan for Ukraine.

Via The Cradle,

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Algeria, Egypt, Bahrain, and Iran have formally asked to join the BRICS group of nations as it prepares to hold its annual summit in South Africa.

In total, 19 nations have expressed interest in joining the emerging-markets bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, according to Anil Sooklal, South Africa’s ambassador to the group.

“What will be discussed is the expansion of BRICS and the modalities of how this will happen… Thirteen countries have formally asked to join, and another six have asked informally. We are getting applications to join every day,” the South African official told Bloomberg earlier this week.

BRICS will hold its annual summit in Cape Town during the first week of June. The foreign ministers from all five member states have confirmed their attendance.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg revealed that BRICS is expected to soon surpass the US-led G7 states in economic growth expectations.

Per their analysis, while G7 and BRICS nations each contributed equally to global economic growth in 2020, the western-led bloc’s performance has recently declined. By 2028, the G7 is expected to make up just 27.8 percent of the global economy, while BRICS will make up 35 percent.

The estimations came just a few weeks after the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s State Duma, Alexander Babakov, revealed that BRICS is working on developing a “new currency” that will be presented at the organization’s upcoming summit.

BRICS member states account for over 40 percent of the global population and around a quarter of the global GDP.

The interest from Global South nations to join the bloc comes at a time when more and more governments move away from the US dollar.

The greenback has become more unreliable for dollarized economies due to rising interest rates regulated by the US Federal Reserve (FED) and the bank’s weaponization of the dollar through financial sanctions.

In addition, the west – especially Europe – is facing a growing energy crisis resulting from sanctions targeting Russian energy markets due to its invasion of Ukraine and the US sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline.

A new war of words has erupted between Hungary and Ukraine, after President Zelensky in an interview last Friday questioned Hungary’s ‘friendship’ with Russia. 

Zelensky had charged that Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orban had been displaying “inappropriate behavior” for a NATO member, suggesting it shouldn’t be consulted on important defense matters such as whether Ukraine should be let into the alliance.

“It seems to me that confusion reigns among the Hungarian political elite. This is a very strange situation. Can a NATO country simultaneously be with Russia and against NATO?” Zelensky had posited.

In response, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said Zelensky has no right to weigh in on Hungary’s decision-making, stressing his nation and people have already paid a high price for the conflict, even including losing Hungarians, a reference to ethnic Hungarians living in Zakarpattya Oblast in western Ukraine.

“Fortunately, he is not the one to decide this,” the foreign minister said in reference to Zelensky’s words. “The Hungarian people have already paid an extremely high price for this war.”

Szijjártó then took sarcastic tone, reminding Ukraine of everything it has already done: 

“If this statement (by Zelensky) means: ‘I respectfully thank the Hungarians for letting in and taking care of more than a million refugees from Ukraine, and I respectfully thank you for continuously sending aid,’ then they are welcome, and can count on us in the future as well.”

Among the more recent controversial stances of Viktor Orban has been to say that Hungarian authorities would not arrest President Vladimir Putin. He said this in March after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for the Russian leader over alleged human rights violations connected to the war in Ukraine. This despite Hungary’s having signed and ratified the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the first place.

Hungary’s stance has generally been to condemn the Russian invasion, while at the same time resisting a number of EU sanctions measures, particularly related to energy, as well as pushing both sides to negotiate peace. Orban has been a rare European leader who has broken from NATO consensus while maintaining open and positive communications with the Kremlin.

Authored by Conor Gallagher via NakedCapitalism.com,

The New York Times had quite the interesting piece buried in its science section on April 28. Titled “U.S. Wires Ukraine With Radiation Sensors to Detect Nuclear Blasts,” it claims sensors “can detect‌‌ bursts of radiation from a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb and can confirm the identity of the attacker.” More:

In part, the goal is to make sure that if Russia detonates a radioactive weapon on Ukrainian soil, its atomic signature and Moscow’s culpability could be verified.

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine 14 months ago, experts have worried about whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would use nuclear arms in combat for the first time since the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

First off, what would possibly be the Russian rationale for using nuclear weapons?

They’re winning in Ukraine, and the West is running out of ammo. 

Second, about those “experts.” To expand on their worries, the Times links to an October piece titled “Russia’s Small Nuclear Arms: A Risky Option for Putin and Ukraine Alike.” In it, we get this:

The primary utility, many U.S. officials say, would be as part of a last-ditch effort by Mr. Putin to halt the Ukrainian counteroffensive, by threatening to make parts of Ukraine uninhabitable. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe some of the most sensitive discussions inside the administration.

So the experts are anonymous. Who is running this operation? The Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST), which is the Nation Nuclear Security Administration’s arm that deals with emergency response functions.  The Times also notes the following:

Jeffrey T. Richelson, author of “Defusing Armageddon,” a 2009 book on the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, reported that it often teamed up with the Joint Special Operations Command, an elite military unit so secretive that the Pentagon for years refused to acknowledge its existence.

The Times’ April 28 piece gets more bonkers from there. There’s this:

Public knowledge of such defensive planning, nuclear experts say, can deter Moscow by letting it know that Washington can expose what is called a false-flag operation.

For instance, Moscow could falsely claim that Kyiv set off a nuclear blast on the battlefield to try to draw the West into deeper war assistance. But in theory, with the sensor network in place, Washington would be able to point to its own nuclear attribution analyses to reveal that Moscow was in fact the attacker.

So Russia would conduct a false-flag operation in order to risk accomplishing what Kiev would want to accomplish with its own false flag?

Again, what would Moscow have to gain? It’s steadily winning the war and depleting western stockpiles.

But for the inhabitants of the alternate universe where Russia is on its last legs it all makes perfect sense. Speaking to that audience, the Times again invokes “nuclear experts” and “western experts” who are presumably the same aforementioned anonymous officials, and they put an ominous spin on Ukraine’s coming counteroffensive:

Nuclear experts say such defensive precautions could face their greatest test in coming weeks as the Ukrainian army launches its spring offensive. China has leaned on Russia to discontinue its nuclear saber rattling and Mr. Putin has not recently invoked a nuclear threat. But Western experts worry that Russia’s battlefield failures are making Mr. Putin, if anything, more dependent on his nuclear arsenal, and they worry that fresh setbacks could increase his willingness to pull the nuclear trigger.

One of the many alarming aspects of all this is that these “experts” certainly must know that the idea “that Russia’s battlefield failures are making Mr. Putin, if anything, more dependent on his nuclear arsenal” is complete fantasy, yet they’re peddling it anyways. Why? That’s an ominous thought.

Russia was warning NATO back in October that Ukraine might detonate a “dirty bomb” and blame Moscow. Washington, Paris, and London dismissed it all as “transparently false.”  Instead the West has continued to insist that Moscow might do so. The Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence state that Russia would not use a nuclear weapon of any kind unless the country is attacked using weapons of mass destruction or faces a conventional attack so severe it threatens the country’s existence.

Could Kiev create a dirty bomb? The US GAO admits it’s not hard to find the materials and build a dirty bomb. Ukraine returned all its Soviet-era nuclear weapons to Russia in the 1990, but still has stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. Dirty bombs can also be made out of byproducts from nuclear power plants of which Ukraine has several. According to Russia, it would be no problem for Kiev to build such a weapon:

Russian Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops chief Igor Kirillov warned that Ukraine has the technological prowess and ample radioactive material reserves to build a dirty bomb. This includes some 1,500 tons’ worth of spent nuclear fuel from the country’s three operating nuclear power plants, and 22,000 spent fuel assemblies stored at the defunct Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s waste repositories, including Uranium-235 and Plutnoium-239 – the primary fissile isotopes used in nuclear weapons.

…Furthermore, the officer stressed, Kiev has the scientific know-how allowing it to easily build a dirty bomb, including the legendary Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology involved in the creation of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons, and the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Nuclear Research, which operates the BBP-M research reactor.

The Times’ piece has virtually no information on what the deployed sensors actually do. Presumably they would detect radiation and then a forensics team would try to determine the origin of the weapon. Thing is, there are already institutions for that.

The European Radiological Data Exchange Platform, which monitors radiation levels, already covers Ukraine. According to its website, it “consists of data exchange mechanism and presentation website for radiological monitoring data which is collected and shared by 39 participating countries in almost REAL TIME.” But it is not a rapid alert system, and while the EU has one of those, it only covers member states.

The IAEA, on the other hand has its EMERCON system for radiological or nuclear emergencies and which does cover Ukraine. And the IAEA can help prepare for the investigation into a nuclear incident:

The IAEA supports States in developing technical capabilities by providing: Technical assistance, including, upon request, to prepare for the conduct of a nuclear forensics examination in the context of the investigation of a nuclear security event. Important considerations involve procedures to collect and preserve evidence and properly sequence non-destructive ahead of destructive analysis in the laboratory.

Additionally, the IAEA notes that there are international organizations that provide various forms of nuclear forensic support, including the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, INTERPOL, and the Nuclear Forensics International Technical Working Group. But the US apparently does not want to rely on these international institutions.

The US is apparently going with its own team. So should such a weapon be used in Ukraine, would the US Nuclear Emergency Support Team be able to determine who did it? It’s hard to tell – but probably not with any certainty.

The Times piece has few details on how the process works, saying only that it developed rapidly after 9/11, has some secrets, and “its outlines are publicly known.”

The Times then links back to two articles – one from 2004 and another from 2006. They’re fairly similar and both describe the process of identification this way:

The basic science relies on faint clues — tiny bits of radioactive fallout, often invisible to the eye, that under intense scrutiny can reveal distinctive signatures. Such wisps of evidence can help identify an exploded bomb’s type and characteristics, including its country of origin.

While tracking a missile from the blastoff point is not difficult, tracking unconventional devices, such as a dirty bomb that uses ordinary explosives to spew radioactivity, can be a major challenge. Both articles described “federal experts” participating in drills to establish the origin of a weapon. From the 2004 piece:

In a drill this year, dozens of federal experts in fallout analysis met at the Sandia laboratories in Albuquerque to study a simulated terrorist nuclear blast. Mr. Worlton said they were broken into teams and given radiological data from two old American nuclear tests, whose identities remained hidden, and were instructed to try to name them. Some teams succeeded, he said.

While hyping that apparent success, the 2004 piece noted that success was only partial. The Times also mentioned that there were numerous complexities involved that made attribution less of a sure thing, including “that knowing who made a bomb may say little about who detonated it.” And there’s this:

Experts agree that such detective work can prove difficult. For years, the International Atomic Energy Agency has struggled with limited success to identify the source of highly enriched uranium, a potential bomb fuel, found by the agency’s inspectors on Iranian nuclear gear.

According to the IAEA, forensic investigations are rarely slam dunk cases:

Nuclear forensic analysis and interpretation involve a deductive and iterative process, as depicted in Fig. 2. Implementing the analytical plan produces results that can be compared with information on existing or known materials, and such comparisons lead to interpretation, which puts the analytical results into context. The comparative process involving analytical results and known material information is iterative because each successive comparison may provide new information that can identify further analyses or comparisons that, in turn, may uncover additional signatures that will help to identify the material more precisely.

This comparative process may also be deductive because it can be used to progressively exclude particular processes, locations or other origins as possible sources of the material. For example, comparisons of analytical results from seized nuclear material with known production processes will identify likely production processes that could have made the seized material, as well as those processes that could not have made the seized material. Additional comparisons with other existing production processes or analytical measurements will serve to narrow the list of likely production processes responsible for the production of the seized material.

Fig. 2

But American officials claimed in the Times articles from 2004 and 2006 that scientific advancements were being made in the US, which would make identification more accurate.

Have they advanced enough? And maybe the real question is, who would trust the US’ conclusion? Would it matter?

Dr. Jay C. Davis, a nuclear scientist who helped found the Pentagon’s part of the US effort to trace an explosion, told the Times back in 2004 that the identification effort would be crucial in ”dealing with the desire for instant gratification through vengeance.”

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via DailyReckoning.com,

“When we see the few truth-tellers who are the stars of their organizations jettisoned – Tucker Carlson from Fox News, Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone, Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept, James O’Keefe from Project Veritas… we must face the fact that there is an organized conspiracy to suppress truth.” 

– Paul Craig Roberts

The weird part the news media isn’t telling you about World War Three is that America’s main enemy in this struggle is… the US Government itself!

America is looking like that crazy person on the street, punching himself in the head. How else do you explain this epic act of national self-destruction?

The “Joe Biden” regime is “standing up for our democracy” by trying to silence all and any public speech about what it does in the world and how it treats its own citizens. Meanwhile, the entire scaffold of American life crumbles and you are supposed to not notice it’s happening. The funny part is that the Democratic Party thinks this is an election strategy. The funniest part of the funny part is that we bother holding elections at all.

You understand, “Joe Biden” is only pretending to run for president again, in the same way that he’s only pretended to be president the past two years. Are we to believe, for instance, that the old zombie has become a fervent Maoist? Or that he follows any known structured political philosophy at all, other than cashing checks from favor-seekers from all  over the world?

“Joe Biden” is pretending to run — no matter how preposterous it seems — because his handlers know that only a titanic pretense of political strength can stave off the reveal of his family’s awesome criminality and the fall of everyone hitched to that broke-down wagon.

So much for the funny stuff. Things are getting to the point where we stop laughing. It’s only a question now of how the calamity rolls out. There are so many more parts to our national fiasco and they are all out-of-hand in the most disastrous way.

The Ukraine Fiasco

The Ukraine project is a big part. It was prodigiously stupid to provoke a war at Russia’s door-step and the side we backed, the corrupt Zelensky regime, has already lost. You just don’t know it because the American news business is a joke on the American public. It reports nothing honestly.

Ukraine is the last in a string of hapless military adventures that has exhausted America’s credibility in the world, especially as regards our military superiority. (Think: Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic missile.) There will be many unexpected consequences of the Ukraine screw-up. One will be the crack-up of NATO, which has only been a false front for American military power.

Germany couldn’t fight its way out of a duffle bag with what it’s got, and it is supposedly Europe’s leading economic power. The sad truth is that it will stop being any kind of power without the cheap Russian natural gas it was running on, and later this year Germany will be in a panic to try and restore its horribly damaged trade relations with Russia to get that natgas.

Since NATO’s essential mission is to oppose Russia on everything, that will be the end of NATO. Europe will return to what it has always been: a region of squabbling national interests. Let’s hope Europe does not become again the slaughterhouse it was in the last century.

You Go Broke in Two Ways

The failure of the Ukraine project could easily stimulate a collapse in Europe’s banking system, which would instantly spread to America’s banking system as obligations dissolve and payments stop.

The net effect of all that will be the vanishing of a whole lot of capital, including the money in bank accounts, the money invested in stocks and bonds, the money lodged in pension plans, and the money controlled by insurance companies.

As I’ve mentioned before — it’s worth repeating — you can go broke two ways: you can have no money, or you can have money that’s worthless. We’ve been steadily following the latter path through the “Joe Biden” years, but we’re close to simply not having money at all. Being broke will get Americans’ attention. And the first place they’ll look is the party in power.

Multiple scandals have finally caught up to “Joe Biden” and are escaping the formidable suppression apparatus erected by the Deep State’s legal department. Attorney General Merrick Garland himself is now directly implicated in obstruction of justice by an IRS whistleblower.

Election Interference?

The allegation is that Mr. Garland interfered in the case against Hunter Biden in the Delaware US attorney’s office and lied about it to Congress. On top of that comes a new allegation, with hard documentary evidence (testimony by former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell), that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan arranged, as “Biden” campaign officials in 2020, for fifty-one intel officers, including five retired CIA directors, to sign a phony letter denouncing the Hunter laptop as a Russian disinfo project, knowing it to be untrue. A case can be made for that amounting to election interference.

All that is fairly fresh news. For many months, it’s been known that Rep. James Comer (R-KY), Chair of the House Oversight Committee, has possession of bank records that show more than a hundred instances of the decanting of millions of dollars from foreign lands into various Biden family accounts.

Doesn’t look good. Looks impeachable. Will DOJ try to stonewall everything? Yeah, probably.

A Civil War Strategy

On top of all that, observers are reporting that more than ten thousand illegal immigrants a day will be crossing into the USA from Mexico in the weeks ahead. Alejandro Mayorkas’s Dept. of Homeland Security and Mr. Blinken’s State Department have made arrangements with international NGOs working through the UN, to systematically conduct these immigrants across the border, furnishing them with pre-cooked phony asylum documents.

This week, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) introduced legislation to allow unrestricted immigration to any person claiming to be LBGTQ. Co-sponsors of the bill include Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. How is any of this a re-election strategy?

It’s not. If these matters are not adjudicated, it will be a civil war strategy.

An earthquake swarm rattled the Salton Sea region of Southern California and the US-Mexico border over the weekend, with seismic activity reaching up to 4.5 magnitude, as reported by The Sacramento Bee. 

US Geological Survey data shows the first quake struck around 12:08 p.m. local time Saturday in Heber near the US-Mexico border, about 60 miles south of the Salton Sea, measuring 4.1 magnitude. There were dozens of tremors reported after the initial shock. 

Then on Sunday morning, a 4.5 magnitude quake struck 4 miles west-southwest of Niland and just east of the Salton Sea, USGS data showed. Dozens of tremors were reported as well. 

According to a USGS intensity map, the quakes were felt in Palm Desert, Indio, El Centro, and Mexicali. 

Last month, a series of earthquakes shook Pacifica in Northern California. Earlier this year, Los Angeles experienced a quake, and Humboldt County was hit in December. 

As for the state’s southern region, it remains to be seen whether these swarms signal the potential for larger quakes.