Category: Civil Defense Perspectives

Civil Defense Perspectives November 2024 (vol. 39 #6)

The current paradigm in the nuclear age is deterrence based on the idea that a nuclear attack by one superpower would be met with an overwhelming nuclear counterattack such that both the attacker and the defender would be annihilated: MAD—Mutual Assured Destruction. The term was coined by an opponent of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s goal of maintaining destructive parity as a guide to U.S. defense decisions, according to Britannica (https://tinyurl.com/2u42ctk3).

 The Dr. Strangelove idea that “pushing the button” means the end of human civilization or life is the assumption of many popular books and movies. A motive for nuclear proliferation seems to be that having a few bombs is insurance against invasion, as well as an existential threat to adversaries. Hence, Israel’s focus on stopping the Iranian nuclear program. (One must ask whether nuclear-armed Israel could save itself from destruction by Iran’s conventional arms—the “Samson option” is self-destruction—short of massive U.S. intervention.)

But what if the Old Paradigm, even if it still rules, has lost its ability to sustain belief, asks Ianto Watt, author of The Barbarian Bible: The True History of Man Since the Fall of Troy, in an essay posted by William Briggs (https://tinyurl.com/msz4axt6).

 When scheduled for a gunfight, you need three things, Watts states: a gun (preferably loaded), a quick draw, and a true aim.

Does the West have these? How about Russia?

Watts writes that we are “witnessing two poker players engaged in a very high-stakes game of winner-take-all. At least one of them is, by definition, bluffing. And as the cards are shown, the bluffer jumps up, and claims his opponent is cheating…. Will the bluffer challenge the winner to a gunfight?”

In the escalating game of nuclear chicken in Ukraine, Russia has calmly matched every raise. Biden’s latest raise was permission for Ukraine to use longer-range Western missiles to throw onto actual Russian turf—which can theoretically reach Moscow and can carry a nuclear warhead. Which you cannot discern until they land. Biden is out of ammo for his gun, except for the “Big Red Round.” He wants to provoke the Bear into doing something to justify firing it before Trump (who might fold) comes to power. He seems to think that the Bear won’t retaliate massively.

But what if, as Watts thinks, the Bear has a new weapon for a New Paradigm, and that the West can no longer rule the world by fear? A weapon that is faster, more accurate, and can deliver equal or greater devastation without radioactive results? What would become of the rule of the Military Industrial Complex oligarchy?

The Physics of Energy

It appears that the new weapons system called “the Grove,” as shown in the Russian test of Oreshnik (the hazelnut tree) can not only deter but disarm. This was reportedly demonstrated by the strike at the Yuzhmash Complex in Ukraine, the former production center of most of the USSR’s nuclear weapons production, and the site where the last of the Ukrainian war production facilities currently are (were?) located.

As Watts explained, the Old Paradigm is ruled by E = mc². The New Paradigm uses kinetic energy, E = mass/2 × velocity².

The Grove utilizes an intermediate range missile that can reportedly carry up to 36 sub-munition warheads, each independently targetable. These kinetic kill-vehicles, traveling at hypersonic speed, are claimed to be able to penetrate even to the deepest bunkers (as Yuzhmash was) and destroy them by the shock wave, Watts states. Putin stated that the temperature of the striking elements reaches 4,000 °C., vs. 5,500–6,000 °C at the surface of the sun (https://tinyurl.com/3b9cnmsb). Reuters provides a YouTube description while downplaying its significance (https://tinyurl.com/27pm72ue).

Ronald Reagan, with Brilliant Pebbles kinetic kill-vehicles targeting intercontinental ballistic missiles in their boost phase from space, hoped to make nuclear weapons obsolete. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was ridiculed and died, but the nuclear hegemony may yet end.

Western hegemony also depended on the presumption that the Empire’s strategic (nuclear) might was matched at the tactical (conventional) level of war. This was sustained by never going head to head against an adversary that could challenge U.S. air superiority. But now NATO faces an adversary with formidable air defenses. Against swarms of increasingly sophisticated, cheap drones, might our awesome manned fighter jets be obsolete? Has the West been surpassed in electronic warfare? Could an adversary such as the Houthis overwhelm the defenses of a carrier strike group, so that aircraft carriers must stay out of range?

Why Escalate?

As explained in the November 2024 DDP Newsletter, powerful officials would be willing to provoke war. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) elaborates: “This war’s about money…The richest country in all of Europe for rare earth minerals is Ukraine, two to seven trillion dollars worth… It’s in our interest to make sure Russia doesn’t take over the place” (tinyurl.com/3vu7t928).

According to former British diplomat Alistair Crooke, the escalation has been led by the UK. UK foreign secretary and former prime minister David Cameron said he thought British policy  on Ukraine was “fixed”: to press the Americans to keep sending their money to Ukraine, and…to compel the Americans to escalate the war between Ukraine and Russia” (https://tinyurl.com/492r3tcs).

Why should the British lead? Frank Wright suggests that along with NATO itself and the other liberal-global governments in Europe, the UK is heavily invested in the war in Ukraine. It has propagandized its people to accept higher costs and lower living standards to maintain its support. When the war stops, the real problems for the liberal globalists begin. A Russian victory will shed daylight upon the murky financial dealings under the Zelensky regime in Ukraine. A true cost analysis of this war would destroy many political careers and governments. 

The New York Times described the brinkmanship as a series of “tit for tat” strikes, saying only that Russia responded with a “test-fired intermediate-range missile.” Crooke, however, said  the new Russian system had “checkmated” the Western escalation, of which the last step is nuclear (https://tinyurl.com/2ps6s9r5).

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Stephen Jones, R.I.P.

Our intrepid civil defense warrior and advocate Stephen Jones died after a valiant struggle against cancer. Until the very end, he was mailing sample “Oh Shucks! Meters” to fire departments, offering to donate these expedient safe/not safe radiation detectors to first responders. Few requested them. The OSM uses the same chemical detector as the RADTriage™ card.

Steve predicted that we would soon be at the brink of nuclear war, and when Americans awakened to the danger, suitable instruments would be sold out. He made Herculean efforts to produce enough OSMs to equip first responders. They are now offered for $25 each at ki4u.com/products1.php—discounted for quantities > 100. On Nov 30, the site had registered more than 6,000 visitors from all continents except Antarctica.

Steve’s presentation on “Surviving World War III” at the 2023 meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJld5ljRyys&t=791s) included a demo of a transport bicycle among much invaluable information.

Steve’s unparalleled experience with the home-makeable Kearny Fallout Meter (he and his children made thousands) is included in a 2006 interview (https://tinyurl.com/y42ke8ah). The KFM, which is very accurate if properly made, is likely to be the only detector the average American could get.

In 2008, Stephen Jones, Kevin McDonald, and Logan Connor made the Arizona Nuclear War Survival Skills tour. They drove 5,000 miles, visited about 145 fire stations, photographed more than 400 firefighters with NWSS, sent press releases to 50 newspapers, and did personal interviews with 20 reporters (https://tinyurl.com/4f8e3bfn). Videos are found at https://www.youtube.com/user/roadman911. The training sessions for firefighters are especially valuable.

Fire stations along Steve’s cross-continental bicycle ride, promoting civil defense from Martha’s Vineyard to California, also received information. Steve on his “dragoncycle” visited Tucson briefly (https://tinyurl.com/64chnwxh).

If a nuclear device is detonated, many thousands may be saved because of Steve’s work.

Empty Quiver

In December 2023, Will Schryver wrote: “one of the most strategically significant battlefield humiliations inflicted upon NATO over the course of the Ukraine War [is] the progressively comprehensive defeat of their precision-guided strike missile inventory.” This includes ATACMS and Storm Shadow.

“The Russians have demonstrated that they can routinely shoot down ANY species of strike missile the US/NATO can field against them—not all of them all of the time, but most of them most of the time” (https://tinyurl.com/yyrhexpw). 

He writes that the U.S. is at least a decade away from developing comparable capability, and that this fact “alters the war-fighting calculus that has been assumed for many decades.”

The U.S. also lags Russia by decades in hypersonic (velocity > Mach 5) technology. In June 2023 Putin claimed that about  half of all Russian strategic missile divisions have been rearmed with hypersonic warheads (https://tinyurl.com/4nmbxc3j).

According to the NY Times, “From Rockets to Ball Bearings, Pentagon Struggles to Feed War Machine.” To replace the weapons sent to Ukraine would take 5–13 years with current industrial capacity (https://tinyurl.com/3sepd2cz).         

Russian Civilian War Preparedness

Russia has begun producing mobile bomb shelters that can protect against shock waves, nuclear radiation, falling debris, dangerous chemicals, and fires. They resemble reinforced shipping containers and can easily be transported by truck (https://tinyurl.com/57czyukn).

In February 2023, the Kremlin ordered local authorities to upgrade crumbling Soviet-era bunkers, reinforced cellars, and other safe hideouts. Local authorities appear to be spending hundreds of millions of rubles to again make them fit for habitation. The authorities in Kazan, on the Volga River, said that about 30% of the city’s bomb shelters were not in a fit state to house people. Instead, officials said they would determine whether the city’s metro system could serve as a bomb shelter. 

RT.com has not recently reported on the Russian shelter program, but does carry articles on NATO countries. German citizens are expected to build their own—there are only 579 functional bomb shelters in Germany (https://tinyurl.com/ybduvfyp). Polish officials ran an exercise to test the reliability of emergency water and power supplies in Warsaw’s shelters. With a population of around 1.8 million, the city could accommodate 3 million people in the subway system, underground parking garages, and other designated shelter spaces, although work is needed to bring all of them up to standard. Emergency drills in Warsaw came less than two days after President Andrzej Duda called for “decolonizing Russia by breaking it up into many smaller countries.” Duda has also proposed that Poland should host U.S. nuclear weapons (https://tinyurl.com/37j8ebua).

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Maybe Just a Bluff?

Scott Ritter states that the physics surrounding the effects of the Oreshnik payload remain confusing even to experts. Russian experts have spoken about advances in material sciences associated with the performance of materials at hypersonic speed, which may alter the physics in question. Putin claims that “everything that is in the epicenter of the explosion is divided into fractions, into elementary particles, everything turns essentially into dust.” But how much of an area does the “epicenter of the explosion” encompass? Ukraine has been surprisingly reticent about documenting its claims that the Oreshnik caused “minimal damage.”  The mindset that Oreshnik is “all bark, but little or no bite” has resulted in Ukraine, “with the blessing and assistance of its US and UK masters, continuing to strike targets in the Kursk region using ATACMS missiles” (tinyurl.com/yu8cvvef).

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Russian Economy Surpasses Germany

Despite heavy U.S. sanctions, the Russian economy, based on purchasing power parity (PPP), has surpassed both Germany and Japan, according to the International Monetary fund (IMF) (https://tinyurl.com/34py4pnh). This makes it the world’s fourth largest economy, after China, U.S., and India. The Russian economy is now 15% larger than Germany’s, and while Russia is experiencing a boom, Germany’s economy is in free fall. Volkswagen is thinking of closing plants for the first time in its 87-year history (https://tinyurl.com/u5rbcmuf). Steep energy prices, rundown infrastructure, a heavy bureaucratic burden, and competition from China are cited as reasons for the manufacturing sector’s “formidable crash” (tinyurl.com/32j253b2).

Civil Defense Perspectives May 2024 (vol. 39 #3)           

 Four years after COVID-19, the “excess” death rate seems to be higher than the pre-2019 baseline, and the rate of strokes, unusual and aggressive cancers, infertility, and heart disease also appears to be higher. Drawing conclusions is complicated by confounders, especially the aging of the population. However, people are starting to wonder.

Could it be “air pollution” from PM2.5s, even though air quality has improved greatly? Long COVID? Climate change? Gas stoves? It could be anything except the forbidden “V” word, but two features of industrial society are gaining attention.

Plastics are derived from evil “fossil carbon,” and production is increasing exponentially. Annual output has grown from less than 2 million tons in 1950 to about 400 million  tons today, and is expected to double by 2040 and triple by 2060.

Continue reading “Microplastics and ‘Forever Chemicals’”

Civil Defense Perspectives (vol. 39 #5) 

Along with heartbreaking death and destruction, Hurricane Helene is bringing a deluge of sensational, fantastical accusations. The usual climate-change alarmists assert that tiny increases in atmospheric CO₂ are increasing (or will increase) the number and force of hurricanes. And reputedly right-wing influencers contend that malefactors created or just diverted Helene to western North Carolina in order to kill likely Trump voters, or make it impossible for them to vote. Or even worse, to wipe out opposition to lithium mining in the area and even seize property to be used for mining (https://tinyurl.com/vzp8krbh).

Here are some historical facts:

Records on Hurricanes: Hurricanes are not increasing in number, strength, or size (tinyurl.com/34zydc8d). There is no significant trend in wind speed in hurricanes striking Florida from 1900–2024 (https://tinyurl.com/5cfzdchs).

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website details many of the worst storms (https://tinyurl.com/378rdnh3). The deadliest weather disaster in U.S. history was the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Two major hurricanes, Carol and Edna, hit New England within 11 days of each other in 1954. Category 4 Hazel in 1954 with a similar pressure as Helene hit 400 miles from where Helene hit (https://tinyurl.com/ycypj72e). Carla in 1961 covered 75% of the Gulf; Milton and Helene were much smaller (tinyurl.com/mr48mm26).

Nature Steers Hurricanes. The path of a hurricane is determined by many natural forces. It is an art to forecast it, and impossible to control it. The father of the idea that humans can control the weather, writes Joe Bastardi, was Fidel Castro, who accused the U.S. of blocking Hurricane Flora over Cuba in 1963. It’s a Marxist idea. The best we might do is mitigate things by cloud seeding or possibly disrupting the wall of a hurricane.

NC Flooding Is Not Unprecedented. Asheville, NC, flooded in 1940 and 1916. The latter was larger and caused even more damage than Helene (https://tinyurl.com/ybmp5yer).

Lithium Mining

Kings Mountain in western NC was one of the largest lithium producers from 1938 to 1988 when it shuttered after cheaper sources were found in South America. The Department of Defense (DoD) has committed $90 million to revive the mine,  and Albemarle Corporation plans to begin operations by 2030. The mine, one of the few known hard rock lithium deposits in the U.S.,  may contain 5 million tons of lithium, which could last up to 30 years and support manufacturing approximately 1.2 million electric vehicles annually.

Lithium mining has a huge destructive environmental impact. The extraction process uses more than 500,000 liters of water per ton of lithium. Over a year, producing 60,000 tons of lithium requires moving up to 30 million tons of earth, more than the annual amount dug up to produce all coal output of all but seven or eight U.S. states (tinyurl.com/2x9evufr). Topsoil erosion could have increased mudslides precipitated by Helene’s downpours (tinyurl.com/594tc3zw). Local opposition could derail permitting (https://tinyurl.com/zd8bzm5w).

Human-Caused Climate Change

Meteorology student Chris Martz discusses theories about  humans controlling the weather, dating back to witch trials (also see 2005 DDP lecture by Sallie Baliunas, https://tinyurl.com/y9tawpzz). The Left cites greenhouse gas emissions. Right-wing influencers assert that the government spawns hurricanes and steers them with cloud seeding or lasers. Martz addresses the former and explains contrails from airplane exhaust, and HAARP.  The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program is a University of Alaska Fairbanks program, which researches the ionosphere. To believe that the government has the technological ability to steer a hurricane, he states, you have to believe that it can overpower a hurricane that produces (5.2)(10¹⁹) joules of energy per day, which is more than 10,000 nuclear bombs worth of energy (https://tinyurl.com/mryjz2h8).

The study of weather modification has a long history. Project Cirrus attempted to weaken a hurricane by dumping dry ice into the clouds. Bernard Vonnegut (Kurt Vonnegut’s brother) wrote about it in 1947. It didn’t work, and the hurricane’s sudden turn toward land, even if not caused by the experiment, dampened enthusiasm (https://tinyurl.com/2hyx5kb3).

Cloud seeding has been used in various areas for decades, for example, in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Other geoengineering strategies include attempts to increase the earth’s albedo (reflectivity) to “combat climate change.” There are legal and ethical concerns about unintended consequences. What may benefit one area may harm another (tinyurl.com/5b59f8s7).

Hurricanes vs. Anthropogenic Global Warming

While the popular narrative ascribes bad weather to human-caused global warming or “climate change” from human use of hydrocarbon fuels, hurricane expert Joe Bastardi writes that “global hurricane activity can rebut climate exaggeration.”

“It’s the total picture that is the so-called control knob of climate,” he writes—not atmospheric CO₂. “The oceans are a great reservoir of energy, and air-sea interaction is the vital link.”

He calls attention to increases in undersea volcanic activity, bringing up heat from the crust of the earth in the very years the global temperature has increased.

“The fact is that temperatures are a poor metric for climate. Water vapor quantified and explained is the best. But since that would explain temperature and open up the argument to the oceans and the natural cause for their warming, agenda-driven people do not want to see that.”

“The climate house is built by the ocean” (https://tinyurl.com/msctt44f).

At the 2009 DDP meeting, William Gray explained how “Climate Change Is Driven by the Ocean—Not Humans” (https://tinyurl.com/56nbdv46).

What to Do

On MSNBC, Bill Nye (“the Science Guy”) said that the way to stop hurricanes was to VOTE—for Kamala Harris (https://tinyurl.com/3rbw77z5). [Her husband Doug Emhoff would profit greatly from NC lithium (tinyurl.com/2sdw6bhj).]

https://twitchy.com/amy-curtis/2024/10/09/bill-nye-vote-for-kamala-to-stop-hurricanes-n2401940

The Power of a Hurricane

The winds of an average hurricane can produce 1.5 trillion watts of power, which is about half of the world’s electrical power generating capacity in a year.

The energy released from the formation of clouds and rain in an average hurricane is the equivalent of 200 times the world’s electrical generating capacity. The majority of a hurricane’s energy is released when water vapor is converted into droplets [AI-generated overview provided by Willie Soon].

Flood Control Blocked

The lesson from Hurricane Helene is not the effect of climate change, but what happens to settlements in Tennessee Valley tributaries under “natural” flooding (i.e., where flood control dams have been rejected), writes Stephen McIntyre.

“In 1933, the Tennessee Valley Authority was given the mandate for flood control in the valley of the Tennessee River and its tributaries…. Whereas floods in the Tennessee were once catastrophic, younger people are mostly unaware of them. The French Broad River (Asheville) is an upstream tributary where flood control dams weren’t constructed due to local opposition.”

In its first 40 years, the TVA built 49 flood control dams, of which 29 were power generating. In the subsequent 50 years, TVA built 0 flood control dams. In the 1980s, it established the Carbon Dioxide Information Centre (CDIAC), which sponsored much influential climate research, including the CRU temperature data (Phil Jones) and Michael Mann’s fellowship (https://tinyurl.com/2daex935).

Developments in Asheville exacerbated flooding. Land fills and buildings in the flood plain and the many bridges across the streams have seriously reduced flood flow capacity. NC lawmakers rejected limits on construction on steep slopes, among other protective rules (https://tinyurl.com/38ecvkkr).

Engineering the Sky

“Global warming is so rampant that some scientists say we should begin altering the stratosphere to block incoming sunlight, even if it jeopardizes rain and crops,” writes Douglas Fox, Scientific American 10/1/23, https://tinyurl.com/yk5uwfb8).

Solar geoengineering, or solar radiation management (SRM)

involves injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to block sunlight. A special airplane can heft 15.7 tons of aerosol to a height of 20 kilometers every flight. Climate researcher Wake Smith envisions 90 to 900 planes flying missions every day by 2100. SRM might, however, cause nightmarish unintended consequences.

Hunga Tonga Eruption

In one of the most remarkable climate events in modern history, underwater volcano Hunga Tonga injected 150,000 tonnes (40 trillion gallons) of superheated water into the atmosphere on Jan 15, 2022. It increased stratospheric water mass by 13%, and the effect will persist for years. Water vapor is the most effective greenhouse gas. It also increased the stratospheric aerosol load 5-fold—a factor of six smaller than from the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. Corporate media has largely ignored the event, and scientists report being “baffled” by ocean warming. Could it be that the earth’s molten core—rather than the atmosphere—is warming the water? Dramatically higher water temperatures are found at abyssal depths, where air temperature has little or no effect. Lately, scientists have been discovering hydrothermal vents with temperatures hot enough to melt lead.

“Hysterical corporate media articles about global warming ignore all these facts,” writes Joel Childers. “‘Science’ has only the barest notion of what heats and cools the Earth, and they even refuse to grapple with the evidence they do have. The climate has been changing ever since God created the World. It is the pinnacle of human hubris to believe that we know what the optimal global climate is, or to think we can somehow freeze that optimal climate into place without breaking everything else” (https://tinyurl.com/53×37869).

Our knowledge of the atmosphere is very limited, but Joe Bastardi writes that “our knowledge of the oceans is laughably small compared to the air.”

Climate Change and Mental Health

According to JAMA Insights, the chronic effects of climate change, such as higher temperatures, increased or decreased precipitation, and claimed sea level rise, can impair mental health, with disparate impact on disadvantaged communities. Clinicians might incorporate the Climate Change Anxiety Scale into their practices (JAMA 5/28/24). The article has no comment on climate-doom-saturated media messages.

The New Yorker asks: “If the goal is to insure that the planet remains habitable, what is the right degree of panic, and how do you bear it?” It discusses “What to Do with Climate Emotions,” and notes that the Climate Psychiatry Alliance lists more than 300 climate-aware therapists (https://tinyurl.com/27wresx8).

Today, “only” 75% of young persons (age 16-25) in 10 countries report finding the future frightening because of climate change (The Energy Advocate, March 2024).

Climate Litigation Soars

More than 3,240 climate cases have been filed since 1986 in 51 countries, two-thirds since the 2015 Paris climate agreement. In its 2022 report (go.nature.com/3szixnv), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledged that litigation causes an “increase in a country’s overall ambition to tackle climate change” (Nature 4/25/24).

A pivotal case was brought against the Dutch government in 2013 by Urgenda Foundation. The court ordered the government to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% compared to 1990 by 2020. The government met that target and passed a law in 2021 phasing out all coal-fired electricity by 2030. After Greenpeace won a case in Germany, the government moved its goal to reach “climate neutrality” to 2045 (ibid.).

Dutch farmer have pushed back against measures that would shut down their farms and slaughter 30% of their livestock (https://tinyurl.com/3zzdfnkr).

♦ ♦ ♦

  “Nobody’s honest. Scientists are not honest. And people usually believe that they are. That makes it worse. By honest I don’t mean that you only tell what’s true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind.”

Richard Feynman, “The Unscientific Age” in The Meaning of It All.

Civil Defense Perspectives vol. 38 #4

Many commentators refer to the “American Empire,” and the state of America is frequently compared with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The U.S. has no formal colonial administrations like the British did, and nations have no formal colonial status. Yet the U.S. could surely be considered  a hegemon, as it has some 600 off-shore military bases, dominant economic power, and strong political influence. “Regime change” occurs often in countries that oppose American policy. “Imperialism” has a strong negative connotation, suggesting exploitation and treatment of vassal states as inferiors.

Victor Davis Hanson explores various empires, noting that a common feature is leaders believing that their policies were motivated by the desire to do good and not merely by self interest.

The Athenian Empire required conquered city-states to become democracies. A good objective? It threatened to destroy any who opposed it, and sent a force of 40,000 troops to Syracuse to conquer the largest democracy in the Greek world. This Sicilian Expedition ended the Athenian Empire itself. Astonishingly, in the war between Athens and the oligarchy Sparta, most Greeks wanted Sparta to win (http://tinyurl.com/mry28cnk).

Continue reading “Imperialism”

Civil Defense Perspectives January 2024 (vol. 39 #1)

The finding of DNA fragments in COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, by standard laboratory methods by professional researchers, has created a great stir. It is actual affirmative evidence of potential danger—but only a first step (tinyurl.com/3af6xf3t).       The scientists, principally Kevin McKernan and Phillip Buckhaults, Ph.D., carefully divulged the limitations of their work, including the small number of vaccine samples and lack of a chain of custody, and emphasized the need for further research.

The reports do not come from the Ivy League or from eminent scientists or from NEJM. Dr. Buckhaults has not yet published his findings, but provided oral testimony before the South Carolina Senate.  McKernan, who has an undergraduate degree in biology, is the founder of Medicinal Genomics, a company that markets test kits and genomics-related services to the cannabis,  hemp, and mushroom industries (tinyurl.com/3ns3ywny). Dr. Buckhaults is a professor in the College of Pharmacy at the University of South Carolina.

The work is under attack, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) deny that the “small” quantities of DNA fragments are a problem. The FDA sets a regulatory threshold for residual DNA, and the tested samples reportedly exceeded this. An EMA spokesperson said the agency was not “aware of scientific evidence showing that the…residual DNA that may be present in vaccine batches could integrate into the DNA of vaccinated individuals” (ibid.). And “there isn’t evidence to date that the vaccines cause cancer or have led to an increase in cancer” (ibid.).

Continue reading “Beyond Negative Evidence on COVID Vaccines”

Civil Defense Perspectives vol. 38 #6

As of Jan 2, 2024, the lead entry on the website of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) is still “COVID-19 Vaccines.” It states: “COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and free. Everyone 6 months and older can get an updated COVID-19 vaccine.” It adds that “Children aged 6 months–4 years need multiple doses of COVID-19 vaccines to be up to date, including at least 1 dose of updated COVID-19 vaccine.”

Other nations are banning the use of these vaccines in persons under age 30. Social media, especially since Elon Musk bought Twitter, is full of reports of sudden deaths and other catastrophes linked to receipt of these vaccines. Coincidences? Various authorities, of varying credibility, announce detailed theories and “smoking guns” that trend explosively for a time. Click bait for fund-raising campaigns? The theories, such as the hydras, the snake venom, and the self-organizing nanobots, fade away, and the funds disappear. So, what can we conclude about safety?

A series of guest editorials in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (www.jpands.org) considers the negative evidence for many of the possible adverse events.

Continue reading “Negative Evidence on COVID Vaccines”

Civil Defense Perspectives vol. 38 #5

During his invasion of Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush popularized the idea of the New World Order. Today, American diplomats frequently invoke the “rules-based international order,” to which all nations are supposed to submit. The underlying assumption seems to be that the rule maker will be the World’s Only Superpower, the center of a unipolar world. The recognized physical capital might be Washington, D.C., but the ruling elite would be globalists, who might be in Davos, Switzerland, or anywhere else.

The key concept of the globalists’ World Economic Forum (WEF) is that “you will own nothing.” As with communism, private property would be abolished, and “the people” or a few megacorporations would own everything and allow you, if you are sufficiently compliant, to use your fair share for the “common good” and the good of the Planet.

Continue reading “The New World Alignment”

Civil Defense Perspectives March 2023 (vol. 38 #2)

Defeating Russia in Ukraine is “the most important thing in the world right now,” according to U.S. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Tucker Carlson disagrees: maintaining the value of the dollar is far, far more important, though the media and politicians are largely ignoring this issue.

The U.S. dollar has been the currency of the world for 80 years, giving Americans unique privileges of low-cost borrowing. But with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. determined to blow up the Russian economy. The “strong sanctions” were “morally essential” to deter further aggression, politicians said. But since March 2022, it has been apparent that the U.S. has been hurt far more, Carlson stated.

Unlike the U.S., Russia does not have a late-stage finance economy. Oligarchs do not get rich from credit default swaps but from selling things that people actually need, such as coal, gas, wheat, and fertilizer. The largest resource economy on earth can barter if necessary. In contrast, the Biden Administration has depleted the most valuable hard asset the U.S. has, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The sale of 218 million barrels in one year is more than in all previous years combined. And no one knows, Carlson says, how much gold is in Fort Knox.

By converting the dollar, previously an apolitical store of value, into a weapon, the Biden Administration has “done the most destructive thing to America that any president has ever done.” People have learned that if the U.S. government disapproves of what they do, it can seize all their money. If dollars held abroad come home, the massive worsening of inflation will cause poverty and civil unrest, Carlson predicts.

What caused the hyperinflation in Weimar? Carlson says: Germany borrowed too much money, to fund a pointless war. The U.S. has gotten away with this—until now. But instead of ending the war in Ukraine, U.S. rulers are fantasizing about WWII and Winston Churchill  (https://tinyurl.com/4jrxhe4u).

De-dollarization

The destruction of the dollar is occurring at an accelerating rate. Even France is using Chinese currency.

Beijing and Brasilia have signed an agreement on trade in mutual currencies, abandoning the U.S. dollar as an intermediary. China has been Brazil’s largest trading partner for more than a decade, with bilateral trade hitting a record $150 billion last year.

According to Brazil’s Secretary for International Affairs at the Ministry of Finance, 25 countries are already making settlements with China in yuan (https://tinyurl.com/55p39mmt).

An Upside-down Pyramid

A superstructure on a tiny base is bound to collapse eventually. As the U.S. has off-shored its industrial base, its prosperity is based on financial rather than industrial engineering. “It’s as if the whole objective of corporate industry today is to get consumers to run into debt and make money off the interest…rather than to make a profit,” states Michael Hudson. “Even Macy’s used to make more money by getting credit cards for Macy’s customers than they made actually on the store” (https://tinyurl.com/2wecxnmv).

What we  are seeing now, in Hudson’s opinion, is “the unraveling of neoliberal financialization.” He states that for two decades U.S. authorities have “acted like the policeman in the film Casablanca who is shocked to find there is gambling in the casino.” The Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) has resulted in blowing up asset bubbles, in stock, bonds, and real estate—as well as speculative products such as asset-based securities and derivatives. If the banks reported what their assets were really worth, it would be clear that they are broke. The private banking system cannot survive if interest rates go back to normal.

Hudson explains: If private capital takes over a company like Bed Bath & Beyond, it’ll privatize the company, loan it money, take that loan and pay itself a special dividend for management, and leave the company a bankrupt shell. “So you could say that the role of the banking system is to bankrupt corporate industry and to lock in the transition from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism. Really it’s suicide” (ibid.).

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) financed extremely speculative investments and the lavish lifestyles and immense wealth agglomeration of the people involved (ibid.).

“The Treasury has been privatized by the banking system,” Hudson argues. “That is sort of the ultimate victory of finance capitalism, but the result is that it’ll destroy industrialization and what used to be industrial capitalism in the United States” (ibid.).

Reindustrializing the U.S. will require replacing the banking system, Hudson states.

Financial Weapon of Self Destruction

Hanging over the whole banking system is the threat of a quadrillion-dollar derivatives tsunami. Pull out one card and the whole house collapses, writes Ellen Brown. SVB held $27.7 billion in derivatives, no small sum, but it is only .05% of the $55,387 billion ($55.387 trillion) held by JPMorgan, the largest U.S. derivatives bank (https://tinyurl.com/2jw3dejb).

The unwinding of this precarious system will probably be unimaginably catastrophic. If a new BRICS currency emerges,  we can, according to The Consciousness of Sheep, “expect roughly a 33 percent devaluation of the western currencies…something which would result in what can only be described as hyper-stagflation, with prices of imports—including essentials like food and fuel—rising beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest westerners, even as that mountain of unrepayable debt comes tumbling down so rapidly that it will render most of what we still consider repayable bad as well” (tinyurl.com/337yt3rm).

Perpetual Motion Machine Is Failing

In the finance economy, the expansion of credit pulls money into risk assets whose valuation grows as demand increases, serving as collateral for more borrowing, setting in motion a feedback loop. But now the globalized West has pawned everything and owns nothing but debt. The Great Reset is our owners’ attempt to take control of the collateral—our lives—in order to retain control in the face of socioeconomic breakdown, through Central Bank Digital Currency, which can cancel any account at will (https://tinyurl.com/2eszcx5p).

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Macron Calls for Ditching Dollar

Returning from his visit to China in early April, French president Emmanuel Macron told journalists of his theory of “strategic autonomy” for Europe, presumably led by France, to become a “third superpower.”

In his meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, Macron also argued that “Europe had increased its dependency on the U.S. for weapons and energy and must now focus on boosting European defense industries” and also suggested that “Europe should reduce its dependence on the ‘extraterritoriality of the U.S. dollar,’ a key policy objective of both Moscow and Beijing.”

“Russia, China, Iran and other countries have been hit by U.S. sanctions in recent years that are based on denying access to the dominant dollar-denominated global financial system,” write  Jamil Anderlini and Clea Caulcutt in Politico. “Some in Europe have complained about ‘weaponization’ of the dollar by Washington, which forces European companies to give up business and cut ties with third countries or face crippling secondary sanctions” (https://tinyurl.com/ukhpscxs).

In France, Macron is facing riots as he’s planning to extend the retirement age. One reason France can’t afford to pay social security is that banks needed more money for the bailout (https://tinyurl.com/2fc95ye3). 

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Debt and Civilization

In Dante’s Inferno, usurers are in the eighth circle of hell, with blasphemers and sodomites. They crouch with purses around their necks in a steady stream of flakes of fire.

In modern English, “usury” means charging an exorbitant rate of interest, but originally it meant charging any interest at all. In the Old Testament, the Israelites were forbidden to charge “usury,” or interest, on loans to fellow Israelites (Deuteronomy 23:19), but they were permitted to charge interest on loans to foreigners (Deuteronomy 23:20). This seemed to be in the context of not profiting from aiding the needy. Financing risky but possibly profitable ventures or keeping up with inflation (possibly not invented yet) were evidently not considered.

Some ancient kings, as in Babylon, Egypt, Sparta, China, and others, resolved the widespread problem of crushing debt, which  would cause people to lose their land or even their freedom, by declaring debt amnesties. The ancient Israelites removed debt relief  from the realm of a king’s whims and encoded it into their laws, making a Jubilee recur the year after seven cycles of seven years: “Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made to a fellow Israelite” (Deuteronomy 15:2-3). Note: this was not a bail-out of imprudent creditors at the expense of non-debtors.

Greece and Rome and subsequent societies were different in that they did not cancel debts, writes Michael Hudson, an independent Wall Street financial economist who describes himself as an anti-imperial leftist. Rome had a Dark Age, when creditors took over and reduced all the rest of the economy to bondage.  Today, this is called “austerity” or “debt deflation.” Today’s feudal lords are a financial class, not landlords.

Hudson states that the common denominator in all Western financial systems is that debts grow by compound interest. That is, any rate of interest has a doubling time. Debts “sweep up steadily, and the real economy grows much more slowly, so that debts mount up without the economy being able to pay them and there’s a crash” (https://tinyurl.com/tucw5h57).

Rising debt destroys economies when it is not being used to finance new capital investment in means of production. Most Western credit today is created to inflate stock, bond, and real estate prices, not to restore industrial ability. As a result of this debt-without-production approach, the U.S. domestic economy has been overwhelmed by debt owed to its own financial oligarchy, even though it has had a free lunch in running up foreign debt based on  dollar hegemony.

Classical political economy defined a free market as one free from unearned income and related creditor privileges. But by the end of the 19th century the rentier oligarchy sponsored a fiscal and ideological counter-revolution. This rejection of the classical critique of rentier income has been accompanied by re-defining “democracy” to require having a “free market” of the anti-classical oligarchic rentier variety. The result has been to centralize economic planning in Wall Street and other imperial financial centers, writes Hudson. A defining characteristic of Western legal systems for the past 2,000 years has been the oligarchy’s “security of contracts” giving creditors the right to expropriate debtors (ibid.).

The goal of reaching a unipolar Western neoliberal financialism as the “end of history” is being blocked by the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia. The war is a catalyst for fracturing the world into competing economic systems. The global South owes enormous dollar debts that they cannot afford to repay. International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank loans are “odious debt”—that does not help the client countries earn the money to repay the debt with interest (tinyurl.com/2je6csa4). What if the Bank of China offered credit on better terms?

Would it mean the end of Western civilization—or just of financial hegemony? How important could it be?

In 2013, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych ditched a long-pending EU affiliation agreement and IMF stabilization plan  in favor of  a more favorable deal with Moscow, which included a $15 billion loan without the IMF’s preconditions and a discount on gas purchases from Russia. The U.S. State Department decided that such a deal could not be allowed and undertook a $5 billion “regime change” (https://tinyurl.com/yekdvehb).

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Cheating 20th Century Prophets

“Scipio [the Roman general who defeated Hannibal in the Second Punic War] dreaded for you, when he stopped the building of theaters, when he saw how easily you could be corrupted and perverted by prosperity…. He did not think that a city is fortunate when its walls are standing, while its morals are in ruins. 

–St. Augustine, City of God, Bk I. Ch 33

 Reflecting on the ways in which our current political society resembles the decline of Rome (tinyurl.com/6hcjkk8w),  Frank Connor sees signs that people may again be playing the game of “Cheat the Prophet” (https://tinyurl.com/29xu4n66). Humanity has begun to undermine the predictors of perpetual liberal enlightenment. The liberal world values were embodied in the Bretton Woods System, United Nations, European Union, and even NATO. The prophets of this order foresaw perpetual economic prosperity and lasting peace ensured by an integrated international economy. But instead of clear-headed secular enlightenment, we see a hazy popular paganism. Heroes come from Marvel comics, and belief in witchcraft and Satanism is on the rise.

“The fruit of liberalism, however, has been spoiling and increasingly it feels like a new vine is growing.”

Civil Defense Perspectives January 2023 (vol. 38 #1)                        

The collapse of the USSR in 1991 set off a chain reaction that changed the global geopolitical landscape forever, writes Simplicius The Thinker (https://tinyurl.com/euwts8fn). “The USSR represented a balance of powers between global blocs, a multipolarity of sorts, which inherently fostered a deterrence system preventing one bloc or the other from exerting too much influence and bringing too many key geographical areas under one or the other’s control.”

After 1991, the U.S. was the “world’s only superpower.” But geographically, it has a problem. It is one of the “lands of outer or insular crescent.” Eurasia is the World Island and the “center of global power” as described by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book The Grand Chessboard (https://tinyurl.com/3tw4afxn). This was based on the work of Halford Mackinder, the founding father of “geopolitics” and “geostrategy.” Mackinder wrote:

“Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”

The Heartland contains 50% of the world’s resources. Russia alone has the world’s largest forests for timber, and Lake Baikal holds one-fifth of the entire world’s fresh water supply.

The basic idea of the World Island has evolved and been adapted by such writers as Russia’s Aleksandr Dugin— “colloquially (and erroneously) called ‘Putin’s brain/mysticist,’” according to Simplicius. In his work, Dugin characterizes Russia as the land power of  “Eternal Rome,’” fighting against the Atlanticist sea powers (UK/US) of “Eternal Carthage.”

Destroying Russia, the center of the World Island, as a sovereign power appears to be the objective of globalists.

As part of the USSR, the “Eurasian Balkans” (Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan—the “Stans”) blocked the way into the Heartland. Independent, they became vulnerable and weak. Peripheral to the Stans is the Arab world, which the USSR has frequently supported.

Simplicius outlines what he considers to be U.S. efforts to destabilize the Middle East, as part of the Wolfowitz Doctrine to prevent the emergence of another rival to U.S. power.

In a famous interview, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO forces, General Wesley Clark, spoke of a memo he was given immediately after 9/11 about how the U.S. military would take out “seven countries in five years” (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran). Simplicius notes how those countries align with a direct route straight into that “backdoor” of the “Heartland” zone.

The real purpose of U.S. support of Ukraine appears to be to weaken Russia as much as possible. Ret. Gen. Keith Kellogg, former advisor to Mike Pence, said it was “the acme of professionalism” to use Ukraine to fight Russia because that “takes a strategic adversary off the table” without “using any U.S. troops.”  And then “we can focus” on “our primary adversary, which is China” (https://tinyurl.com/5h9e5z6u).

As discussed in Jordan Peterson’s interview of Sen. Mike Lee (tinyurl.com/27djmy46), there is no clear definition of victory in Ukraine, and removing Vladimir Putin is unlikely to lead to a better regime. Might the Russian Federation splinter into pieces, with dispersed nuclear weapons?

While he may have destroyed democracy, some credit Putin with saving Russia in 1999–2004 by stopping the implosion of what was left of the USSR. He reputedly stopped widespread social unrest, converted Chechens from archenemies of Russia to the one of her best allies, and curbed oligarchs. 

Looking at the results of “two decades of America’s violent attempts at gatecrashing the Heartland’s vulnerable rear entrance,” Francis Fukuyama has recanted, Simplicius states. One of the earliest and staunchest supporters of the neoconservative movement, and one of the founding signatories of the Project for the New American Century, he wrote that neoconservatives “believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support” (Simplicius, op. cit.).

Rivals for the Heartland

Putin has said that if NATO (the U.S.) does not prevail in the Ukraine, we are likely to see a “multipolar” world instead of a unipolar one led by the U.S. Russia is moving closer to China, Turkey, Iran, and even Saudi Arabia.

A tripartite Russia-China-Persia axis is not the one U.S. planners focused on. Rather, the Anglo-American foreign policy establishment has been heavily invested in preventing the formation of a new collective security architecture in Europe centered on Russia and Germany rather than the U.S., writes William Schryver. Russo-German reconciliation and economic collaboration had to be prevented at all costs. The U.S. repeatedly opposed and openly threatened the Nord Stream gas pipelines, which were sabotaged in September 2022 (tinyurl.com/2p8uenm4).

Reporter Seymour Hersh concluded that the U.S. was responsible (https://tinyurl.com/4275wbvk). While the White House called Hersh’s report “false and complete fiction,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the result “a tremendous strategic opportunity” to remove Europe’s dependence on Russian energy (https://tinyurl.com/3yrptbwj).

 It also removed the only means by which Russia could negotiate an end to the war (https://tinyurl.com/567vtpjv).

The nearly 90% of the world that does not support the U.S. on Ukraine is working on its own arrangements for trade and security. The organizing economic engine, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is an ambitious plan to connect Asia and more than 100 nations with 21st-century economic infrastructure, from highways and high-speed rail lines to power generation, energy pipelines, communication systems, cities, ports, and more. The plan is to serve most of the 5 billion people in Eurasia, 30 times more than the 150 million people Eisenhower’s interstate highway project helped, with the goal that all of the participating nations will be enriched. This Mackinder-feared Eurasian integration puts the U.S. outside the world’s most dynamic trading bloc. Ukraine may be the turning point, showing the hollowness of U.S. systems (https://tinyurl.com/5n6duf8y).

Anti-European Policy

The original version of the Defense Planning Guidance document was authored by Paul Wolfowitz in 1992.  It speaks of a new world order in which the sole superpower would have only temporary alliances. The UN and even NATO would be increasingly sidelined. The Wolfowitz Doctrine theorizes the need for the U.S. to block the emergence of any potential competitor to U.S. hegemony, especially “advanced industrial nations” such as Germany and Japan—and the European Union.

In 2000, Paul Wolfowitz and Zbigniew Brzezinski, speaking at  a large Ukrainian-U.S. symposium in Washington, pledged to support independent Ukraine, to provoke Russia to go to war with it, and ultimately to finance the destruction of the resurgent rival of the U.S. These commitments were implemented in the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022.

The rise in energy prices in the EU and its increasing scarcity threaten not only the heating and transportation of individuals, but the survival of all their industries. If this phenomenon continues, the economy of the EU will suddenly collapse, taking its population back at least a century.

Thierry Meyssan predicts that the architects of U.S. policy, followers of Leo Strauss, will “go all the way” to destroy Europe unless European citizens stop them (tinyurl.com/2r9xb9xu).

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Europe’s Last Chance

For 70 years, Europe meant “no more war,” write Ulrike Guérot and Hauke Ritz (https://tinyurl.com/4tjzbh8c). The plan envisioned construction of a cooperative, pan-continental peace order, the European House from Lisbon to Vladivostok, backed by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. However, it  was never taken seriously. The EU allowed the U.S. to determine Europe’s strategic interests. Today, the U.S. still acts as if the unipolar moment after the fall of the Berlin Wall still persists. Its worldview “disregards classical diplomacy and divides the world in friend and foe, democracy and dictatorship, Good and Evil.” In contrast, Entspannungspolitik envisaged a consensual and economically prosperous relationship with Russia.

“Without Siberian raw materials or the Chinese market, there can be no lasting prosperity for Europe,” the authors state. Europe needs a strategic capacity to act independently from the U.S. “Ultimately, lasting peace in Europe can only be achieved with, not against Russia.”

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Call It World War E

The “E” is for Economics, writes Mathew Crawford (https://tinyurl.com/yc7b4ut7). “Economics is ultimately what all the other wars are about, one way or another.” Figuring out who is friend and who is foe is complicated, he states.

“I suspect that the powers in the U.S., along with the corporations that play on a global scale, are doing to Europe what European proto-megacorps once did to Africa, Asia, South America, and elsewhere, which is to enforce total financial subjugation.”

He asks, “Will the European economy be crushed first?”

He wonders whether Putin just announced World War III, “or has it already been going on for years?”

“How hard is this topic to discuss among friends given the emotion of eight different vectors of partisan bias on everything Russia? Is the difficulty associated with discussing Russia really just an erected barrier to discussing World War E? Perhaps that’s the only way to sell the relinquishing of national sovereignty to a corporate-sponsored NGO?”

In summary, Crawford states: “World War E is The Club against everyone else.” We do not know who all is in The Club.

Crawford frequently quotes David Rockefeller: “We are on the edge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”

“The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries,” Rockefeller said.

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What’s Up with the Balloons?

After providing a major diversion, “Chinese spy balloons” have vanished from the media, though not from the atmosphere.

Balloons are not new. The Defense Post featured an article about American balloons on Jul 6, 2022 (https://tinyurl.com/j6vbkh6j). The balloons, capable of flying at up to 90,000 feet (27.4 kilometers), would reportedly become a part of a surveillance network for tracking hypersonic weapons.

According to Threat Journal, the U.S. Dept. of Defense’s Covert Long-Dwell Stratospheric Architecture (COLD STAR) program would add inflatables to the Pentagon’s extensive ground-based, airborne, and space-based surveillance network. Tracking a fast-moving object coming from over the horizon requires a high-altitude platform (https://tinyurl.com/4dbdm979). 

China has the world’s most advanced hypersonic wind tunnel facility. It has constructed working glide vehicles that can travel at Mach 10. It has married ultra high-tech tracking devices to low-tech balloons to monitor U.S. Navy ships in the South China Sea (https://tinyurl.com/3tpacxk4).

Ret. Gen. Jack Keane argues that China is probing America’s defenses against threats coming from different directions. The  balloons have been mostly in the south, while systems looking for bombers and ICBMs are watching for threats coming over the pole from the north (https://tinyurl.com/mraww58x).

Since March 2021, the U.S. has catalogued 247 reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs). In the prior 17 years, there had been 263. Of 366 analyzed reports, 163 were characterized as balloons (Nature 2/23/23).

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Rumors of War

Because of the Ukraine conflict, Russian arms manufacturers are switching to a six-day working week. Shifts at defense enterprises may also be extended to 12 hours (https://tinyurl.com/4c78bhmr).

Authorities are equipping shelters in apartment buildings and shopping centers in the Moscow region, which should protect about 15 million residents (https://tinyurl.com/2p8htp3v). 

The World Health Organization (WHO) has updated its critical medicines list for radiological and nuclear emergencies. These include stable iodine to reduce thyroid uptake of radioactive iodine; chelating and decorporating agents (Prussian blue, applied to remove radioactive cesium from the body, and calcium- / zinc-DTPA used to treat internal contamination with transuranium radionuclides); cytokines used for mitigation of damage to the bone marrow in case of acute radiation syndrome; and medicines used to treat vomiting, diarrhea, and infections (https://tinyurl.com/bdh7wjv3).

Civil Defense Perspectives Vol. 36 #6

Russia invaded Crimea on Feb 20, 2014, officially marking the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War. On Mar 16, a referendum was held, in which 95.5% of voters in Crimea voted in favor of joining Russia. The vote was condemned by the EU as “illegal and illegitimate.” UN considered it illegal because the whole of Ukraine did not vote and both options on the ballot would have resulted in a separation from Ukraine.

The pretext for the invasion was to rescue elected pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in the Maidan coup (tinyurl.com/3d5y72an; tinyurl.com/yvba829t). 

Troubles between the EU, NATO, and Russia were brewing long before. Observers commenting on the current situation recommend a review of the speech Vladimir Putin presented to the Munich Conference on Security Policy in 2007 (https://tinyurl.com/5kmuxj54). Key points included:

“Only two decades ago the world was ideologically and economically divided and it was the huge strategic potential of two superpowers that ensured global security….

Continue reading “End of Unipolar Rule?”