Friday 29th of March 2024

and on the seventh day, god was pleased with Himself...

god

Trump’s strategy against Russia and China

by Alfredo Jalife-Rahme

The war in Syria has shown that when it comes to conventional weapons, the US Armed Forces are no longer the top dog. Russia is now in control. Moscow has brought a new resource onto the war pitch: the most recent generation of hypersonic nuclear carriers. This introduction should see Russia getting ahead of the United States in nuclear warfare. Unwilling to lag behind and seeking to make up lost ground, the Pentagon intends to profit - in as much as time remains for it to do so— from its quantitative superiority, to impose its choices on Russia and China.

 


Pax in pectore belli iacet (If you want peace, prepare for war)


The influential Council on Foreign Relations’ journal, Foreign Affairs, has just crudely exposed the current debate on a nuclear war that the US could let unfurl against Russia and China [2].


First, there is the article by Elbridge Colby, one of the main authors of the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy [3]. This declares that the war currently being waged against terrorism will come to an end and the Great Powers will once again compete inter se. The motto is: “if you want peace, prepare yourself for nuclear war” [4].


Colby, Joint Under Secretary in charge of strategy and developing the force, provides: all confrontation with Russia and China could become nuclear if during the a battle that is becoming tougher and more uncertain, each fighter was tempted to seize his nuclear sword to test the resolve of his adversary, to rise to the challenge, or quite simply to be able to continue the fight.


Colby’s logic is that the best way to avoid a nuclear war is to get ready to deliver a limited one (sic); and the US is ready to carry out effective, contained nuclear operations (sic).


André Damon, from the Trotskyite website WSWS [5] revisits Trump’s threat to withdraw the US from the INF Treaty (Treaty on Medium Range Nuclear Weapons) [6], that prohibits the US and Russia from developing missiles with a range of between 500 and 5,500 km.


Damon considers that Trump’s threat endangers the lives of millions of people in Europe and East Asia by planning a cross fire against Peking and Moscow. And the USA does not hide its desire to have total discretion in its use of nuclear weapons in its wars so that it can conquer its “adversaries”.


Damon adds that these plans are made in secret with the complicity of the New York Times and the Democratic Party which has stayed almost silent on the consequences and danger of a World War.


George Shultz, the powerful Secretary of State when Republican Ronald Raegan was the US President, defends the INF: “we have to preserve this nuclear treaty [7]”.


Shultz remarks that nuclear weapons pose a threat to the whole world and pro ceeds to defend Ronald Raegan then the Republican President, and Mikhaïl Gorbatchov, the leader of the former USSR signing the Treaty in 1987 [8].


He criticizes Trump’s threats to abandon the INF, threats based on the pretext that Russia has violated it. Shultz exploits the occasion to invite other countries to sign up to the treaty and to resist the US temptation to develop new types of lethal weapons; he proposes that, as a preliminary step, a meeting of experts from the US and Russia be held to discuss possible violations.


At the time, the treaty provoked a high degree of sceptism but George Schultz sustains it has been possible to carry out “extensive on site inspections to check that all the weapons that had been banned, had been eliminated“ and that by 1992, some 2,700 missiles had been destroyed [9].


On this subject Shultz cites a key phrase that Tsar Vlady Putin uttered a year ago: “if someone asked me if nuclear disarmament is possible or not, I will say yes it is. Is it the case that Russia desires universal nuclear disarmament? The response once again is yes, if Russia desires it and is going to work for it”.


Shultz recalls that the Revision of the US Nuclear position [10] provided: “the US remains committed to its efforts to support global elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons”.


The US has reduced its nuclear reserves to 85% of what it had during the Cold War, and it has not deployed new nuclear capacities for more than two decades” [11]. Ronald Raegan’s Secretary of State concludes that now is not the time to build massive arsenals of nuclear weapons. Now is the time to eliminate this threat from the whole world.


The worst would be to think that Russia and China are going to wait with their arms folded.


Alfredo Jalife-Rahme

Translation 

Anoosha Boralessa

Source 

La Jornada (Mexico)

 

Read more:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article203725.html

 

imaginary sympathy into mere selfishness...

 

It has been said that tragedy purifies the affections by terror and pity. That is, it substitutes imaginary sympathy for mere selfishness. It gives us a high and permanent interest, beyond ourselves, in humanity as such. It raises the great, the remote, and the possible to an equality with the real, the little and the near. It makes man a partaker with his kind. It subdues and softens the stubbornness of his will. It teaches him that there are and have been others like himself, by showing him as in a glass what they have felt, thought, and done. It opens the chambers of the human heart. It leaves nothing indifferent to us that can affect our common nature. It excites our sensibility by exhibiting the passions wound up to the utmost pitch by the power of imagination or the temptation of circumstances; and corrects their fatal excesses in ourselves by pointing to the greater extent of sufferings and of crimes to which they have led others. Tragedy creates a balance of the affections. It makes us thoughtful spectators in the lists of life. It is the refiner of the species; a discipline of humanity. The habitual study of poetry and works of imagination is one chief part of a well-grounded education. A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/othello-and-the-nature-...

 

Leave sciences alone, please... Only the delusions of religions manipulates the "beyond ourselves" in the wrong dimension — the esoteric stultitia. Science is far from mechanical. It has soft randomity on its side, rather than the harshness of a vengeful god who, according to the "good" book, deliberately destroyed His (god is a male) own creation, except for Noah and his 2x2 degenerate species... For god is selfishness by excellence... Him and only Him... Think about it.

 

Gus is a fierce atheist.

down is up...

New sanctions placed on Iran by US President Donald Trump are likely to have the reverse effect the White House is hoping for, according to new reports, as Tehran’s petroleum exports are set to increase just as Washington’s restrictions commence.

According to the hype from Capitol Hill, US restrictions against Iran coming into force at midnight are intended to economically punish the nation by preventing the sale of any Iranian oil outside of the nation's borders, although with the announcement of multiple waivers, the sanctions are instead likely to result in an increase of exports from the Middle Eastern country.

 

As many countries that previously stopped buying oil from Iran are now being given permissions by the White House in the form of waivers to purchase Tehran's petro output, the Middle Eastern nation's exports are only set to rise, according to Bloomberg.

Promoted by the Trump administration as the "strongest sanctions in history," the reality of the new restrictions does not match its original hype, according to the BBC.

In spite of August claims from Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, that oil-buying waivers would be "few and far between," at least eight modern, developed nations will continue their purchase of Tehran's oil output unabated, according to the Japan Times.

Oil-buying nations, including China, India, Japan, Turkey and South Korea, will be given permission by the Trump administration to purchase Iranian output, although no European countries are included in the list, according to reports.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/business/201811051069505022-trump-oil-sanctions-...

 

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whitewashed blues...

by George Galloway

Whilst the Nancy Pelosi-led Democratic Party understandably talked up their House of Representatives victory, there was no fireworks barge on the East River and no blue wave on which to float it. 

The billions of dollars spent by the suddenly flush Blues yielded a Republican majority in the US Senate (and thus the end of the impeachment threat), the victory of the GOP in the states Trump campaigned in (again), and a Republican Party more beholden to the most reviled president in modern US history.

The Democrats have learned little from their defeat by Trump in 2016. Their ‘identity politics’ celebration of “the first this, the first that” elected to office in US history will be scant consolation to those whose lives continue to be blighted by the neo-liberal brigand-capitalism of the American ruling class.

And as someone who lives in a country led by Theresa May, and Margaret Thatcher before her, I can tell you there is nothing necessarily good about electing women. Out of the 101 ‘Blair Babes’ elected in 1997 as women Labour MPs, well over 90 of them voted down the line for the Iraq War (not to mention cuts in benefits for, amongst others, single mothers).

Ditto the Gay and Lesbian Labour MPs who refused to back Jeremy Corbyn in his call to halt weapons sales to Saudi Arabia – capital of a mindset which throws gay people off tall buildings.

Ditto the minority and even Muslim Labour MPs who voted for the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and other Muslim countries during the last nearly 20 years in the British Parliament.

So, don’t ask me to get excited about the election of the new member of Congress for Miami-Dade County in Florida Donna Shalala for example. Hailed as a victory for ‘Arab women’, the former Bill Clinton cabinet member and Hillary Clinton crony will soon be supporting the bombing of ‘Arab women’ again, I assure you.

READ MORE: US voters re-elect lawmakers facing criminal indictments & corruption charges, because why not?

Of course, it’s good when good women win – as in New York with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan with Rashida Tlaib – but just because somebody is an ex-military martial arts black-belt lesbian (I’m not making that up) doesn’t mean, well, you get my point…

The point is that under the leadership of the exact same corrupt incompetent leaders who delivered Hillary Clinton as the 2016 candidate (having rigged the ballot against Bernie Sanders) the Democrats have wasted two whole years chasing a Russian chimera, teaming up with Trump’s deep-state opponents, and sticking to the Clinton-era orthodoxies on the economy, failing to highlight the extreme voter suppression of poor and minority electors the leaders have led, well, not very far.

If you were a gambler, you’d be on your way to the betting shop now to put your wager on Donald Trump’s re-election in 2020. You can be sure he is.

A measure, by the way, of the extent of voter-suppression is revealed by the results of the accompanying ballot this week to re-enfranchise ‘felons’ in Florida (mainly black felons that is, not the white collar crooks and gold-toothed Cuban emigres). Fully FORTY percent of all Florida’s black men woke up on Wednesday to discover their voting rights had been restored. That is 1 million new Black voters in the next election.

 

READ MORE: 1.4mn former felons will vote again in Florida

 

 Having survived 8 hours of watching CNN on election night, I noted much crowing about the Democrats’ new “candidate recruitment strategy” which on closer inspection revealed that almost ONE HUNDRED Democratic candidates in the midterms were military veterans or ex-members of the CIA and other security services. Nothing could better describe the distance travelled by the former blue-collar party of labor in the United States than this.

My predictions?

The Democrats will waste the next two years poring over Donald Trump’s bank records and tax returns, and the entrails of his global golf courses, offering nothing more than last decade’s health policies. They will offer young people nothing on college fees, offer workers nothing in their pay packets or in job security, do nothing to heal the race cleavages and mass incarceration of young black men in America – how could they? It was Bill Clinton who put them there. They will offer nothing on gun control or any environmental protections which disadvantage their billionaire backers. They will propose no meaningful democratic reforms to cure the grotesquely dysfunctional system which they wish only to inherit (in Georgia, for example, voting machines turned up in poor, mainly black, districts with no power cords to plug them in to the wall). And above all, they will ceaselessly agitate for regime-change all over the world, as they always have.

They will by hook or by crook (probably the latter) ensure that Bernie Sanders is NOT their presidential candidate. And if Trump is really lucky, they will rig the primaries to ensure Hillary Clinton again carries their tattered banner. Some Democrats, some party.

And the world will have to endure four more years of Donald J. Trump, unhinged Tweets and all.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/443469-trump-election-blue-midterm/

 

 

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and by the way...

I don't think that either Vladimir, Donald or Xi want to be remembered in history as having been the presidents who started WW3. Whether the pretext would be "just" or not, the outcome would be too horrendous for history to remember anything. Thus, despite all the noise, especially in the USA with various papers preparing for war, these presidents — as mad, devious or reserved as we wish to paint them — will play the game of cat and mouse, in which everyone is a puppy dog. Confused? You should be. 

 

The game is to please the really madder pundits, especially in the USA, the "hawks" who can see that without war, there is a downturn in profits and a risk of reduced hegemony... Imagine the glut of armament production (the major industry in the USA apart from blaming trump for the plague) if one does not blow up a few bombs here an there. The mad mediocre mass media de mierda is not helping the cause of peace either. Good news does not sell as well as bad news. This is why the women mags nearly always have royal tifs and starlet's bum-fights on their covers rather than love-in.

 

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