Friday, June 24, 2016

The USA, World Wars, and Refugees

In early summer of 2016 the world stands on a precipice looking down at a conflict that could easily lead to World War III. The UN has proved itself to be nothing but an aged hooker long past her prime and incapable of any reasonable action. The EU is little more than an adolescent female child still wondering what her role should be in life. The EU might have the tools but is clueless as to what to do with them. With her long tradition of non-alignment and experience with direct democracy, Switzerland alone seems capable of adult mature actions.

The First World War, created mainly by miscommunication and poor leadership led to the deaths of somewhere around 18 million people. No one really started World War I, it just happened because of a minor political assassination in Serbia and a lot of overlapping treaties that may as well have guaranteed there would be war. Largely because of the stupidity of Britain and France, the intolerable requirements of the Treaty of Versailles created the stage for World War II.

World War II dragged nearly every country on earth into the conflict and by the end some 60 million or more had died.

We are one stupid 2nd Lieutenant away from the start of World War III. The war will be short and violent. It may last less than a week. At the conclusion, billions will have died or soon will as a result of the war. It easily could be the end of mankind.

We have the same blind and stupid leadership, overlapping treaties committing countries to conflicts not in their best interests and an economy in the United States that feeds on continuous warfare.

We could fall into the abyss of war almost anywhere. In early 2014 the US sponsored a coup d’état in Ukraine replacing the legally elected government with their own specially selected thugs. US Assistant Secretary of State and Jewish Neocon Victoria Nuland express her admiration for the leadership and wisdom of the EU in a phone conversation over a non-encrypted device when she was quoted as saying, "Fuck the EU.”

Nuland went on later that year to brag about how the US had spent $5 billion to destabilize Ukraine since 1991 using such incredible words in her speech such as justice, modern democratic government, human dignity, and economic health. She talked about how the paid for mob prayed for peace before rioting. How thoughtful of them.

When the eastern Ukraine and Crimea later voted for reunion with Russia Nuland and the rest of the Neocons somehow forgot the words democracy and peace. So today the US and Nato blame Russia and Putin for the conflict in Ukraine when clearly it was a coup organized and financed by the US. I would ask any reasonable person to look at the actions of the US and the Neocons in Ukraine and try to convince anyone that the people of Ukraine are somehow better off with peace or prosperity. Nuland turned Ukraine into a Nazi run cesspool of corruption, blaming Putin the entire time.

The US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 based on the thin premise that Taliban gave shelter to Osama bin Laden after the attacks on 911. Of course papers later showed that the invasion was planned nearly a year before September of 2001. The success of the operation can be gauged by the fact that for 32 years, Afghanistan has produced more refugees than any other country. The United States continues to essentially run the country through their hand-selected warlords. If the US actually won a victory with their destruction of Afghanistan, it’s news to the rest of the world. Likewise the continuing drone strikes against Pakistan where 90% of those killed were innocent victims the US has made no friends and many enemies.

I suppose it would be time to point out that while I was at war we used a phrase saying, “Never create enemies faster than you can build bullets.” If 90% of the people you murder are innocent, you are creating a lot of enemies. And while I hear the subject of refugees discussed on a constant basis with little or no insight, people talk about refugees as if where you send them is the issue. Actually it is not. The real problem is creating refugees and until and unless that is addressed, the problem can only grow. If you don’t want a refugee issue, don’t create refugees.

While the US choose to pretend that they are the sponsors of freedom and democracy so there would be no valid reason to want to attack the US, it just is not so. Clearly anyone attacking the US must be a terrorist in the minds of the US government. But think about it for a minute. If you create 65 million refugees some of them are bound to become terrorists.

Since 1945 the US has started 81% of the conflicts in the world. That’s a scary and illuminating statistic. The conflicts seem to exist just to keep the Congressional/Military/Industrial complex fed and fat. The US has not only lost the vast majority of the wars it fought, the costs are soaring.

Recently the Navy began to operate its first $4.4 billion dollar ship. And lest you think it’s some whiz-bang new and giant Aircraft Carrier, it’s actually a destroyer. You know, like the ones rich people give their kids to play with.

The numbers are interesting. According to the Navy, the guns on the vessel can hit targets from seventy miles away. Alas the Chinese have anti-ship missiles that have 290 NM miles range and probably cost under $100,000. Throwing a $4.4 billion dollar ship against a $100,000 missile doesn’t make a world of sense.

But $4.4 billion row boats can’t compare with $1 trillion dollar airplanes that have faulty software, can’t fight, and require helmets that cost $400,000 apiece. The US F-35 program is referred to as the plane that ate the Pentagon. For those who don’t yet understand the degree of insanity of those running the US, perhaps you should consider the war against Assad in Syria where Pentagon supplied and financed terrorists are fighting CIA supplied and financed terrorists, all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom.

Lest the reader come to the conclusion the US pentagon is the only military leadership capable of grotesque stupidity, there is the example of the $2 billion dollar UK destroyers that lose all power when having to operate in the Persian Gulf because the ships weren’t designed to operate in high temperature environments. Who could have imaged conflict in the Middle East?

In hearings before the UK Defense Committee, a representative from Rolls Royce was quoted as saying, "The equipment is having to operate in far more arduous conditions that were initially required." Not to be outdone in memorable quotes, BAE Systems Maritime said, "The operating profile at the time was that there would not be repeated or continuous operations in the Gulf." 

In the South China Sea a number of countries including the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei and Malaysia have conflicting claims over a vast area of open water dotted here and there with tiny islands and shoals. The area is believed to be rich in oil and natural gas. As far back as 1988 the area provided fishing, enough to supply 8% of the world’s consumption. No doubt that number has increased today.

Half the oil transported by sea passes through the area. Sea traffic is three times greater than through the Suez Canal and five times greater than through the Panama Canal.

There is no easy solution to the conflict. But notice I did not include the United States in the list of countries with conflicting claims in the South China Sea. That’s because the US is 6,500 nautical miles away. Unless you believe the US has some inherent right to global dominance, it’s not our problem.

The solution is fairly easy. The directly affected countries need to send their senior diplomats to a conference where they have agreed to make an honest effort at a reasonable determination. The solution is not for the US to try to bully China as it has been doing for the past several years. In simple terms, the US can make the problem worse but not better. It would be better for the countries directly involved to make a good faith attempt at a solution. Making a treaty is a lot like buying a car. What the seller demands is never what the seller will really take.

A number of good and thoughtful writers have recently written convincing arguments that the US and Nato need to think about playing with fire lest they get burned. Those writers would include Dmitry Orlov who wrote here. In a recent podcast John Batchelor and Stephen F Cohen discuss the dangers of Nato encircling Russia. Less than a week ago, Chris Martenson of PeakProsperity wrote a somber piece he called "Tensions between US/NATO & Russia are Flaring Dangerously."

Philip Giraldi entered into the fray a month ago with a thoughtful piece titled, "How the World Ends." Patrick J Buchanan wrote just a few days ago in a piece he called, "Trolling for War With Russia." Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts wrote just a couple of days ago something he named, "If You Value Life, Wake Up!” All of these people are warning of a potential devastating conflict with Russia and they all agree the US/Nato will lose the most.

None of these guys actually have the courage to call a spade a spade. We all know intuitively that if you can’t identify the source of a problem, you can’t solve that problem. So we mumble about Nato and Ukraine and Iraq and Syria but never ask just who is behind all the chaos. Who actually initiated the events that led to the greatest number of refugees in world history?

The answer will surprise you but the evidence has been in writing right in front of your eyes. You have to read it and think about it and ask yourself if the events of the past thirty-four years resemble what the writer suggested?

In the Oden Yinon Plan written in 1982 the author quotes,
“Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi'ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarization.

The entire Arabian Peninsula is a natural candidate for dissolution due to internal and external pressures, and the matter is inevitable especially in Saudi Arabia. Regardless of whether its economic might based on oil remains intact or whether it is diminished in the long run, the internal rifts and breakdowns are a clear and natural development in light of the present political structure
.”
This was followed up with a derivative of the Yinon Plan written for Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 called, "A Clean Break..." In this paper written by a number of Jewish citizens, they clearly made their allegiance to Israel known. The writers included Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser and Douglas Feith.
Two of the three new policies outlined in the position paper suggested,
1. Rather than pursuing a "comprehensive peace" with the entire Arab world, Israel should work jointly with Jordan and Turkey to "contain, destabilize, and roll-back" those entities that are threats to all three.
2. Changing the nature of relations with the Palestinians, specifically reserving the right of "hot pursuit" anywhere within Palestinian territory as well as attempting to promote alternatives to Arafat's leadership.
In an interesting aside, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the position paper as being too extreme. If what the writers suggested sounds familiar, it may be because it is a carbon copy of the events of the last thirteen years. The idea that somehow a civil war began in 2011 in Syria is utter rubbish and everyone claiming it knows that it is rubbish. Those same Jewish citizens also hold US passports and would later lie the Bush administration into war in Iraq that continues today.

The festering boil that is the Middle East all goes back to the Balfour Document issued by the British Government in 1917 to Baron Rothschild. In it UK Foreign Secretary Balfour said,
“His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object...”
Everyone is quite familiar with that part of the declaration but has forgotten what he wrote next.
… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.
The UN made it clear in 1948 that the partition of Palestine was to create two individual countries, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs.
There are three and only three possible solutions to the intractable issue of rights for the Palestinians. There is the two-state solution that Israel firmly rejects. There is the one-state solution that Israel firmly rejects and there is genocide of the Arabs. That appears to be the direction Israel is headed.

There are six major news conglomerates that control what every American watches, hears and thinks. Ten hours a day on average for Americans. Those corporations are either Jewish owned or Jewish controlled. Americans are fed a constant diet of Zionist propaganda. No wonder Americans see Israel as the victim of the nasty Arabs. Israel is not the victim now and they have never been the victim. They have always been the aggressors even while they put their diabolical plans into writing for the world to ignore.

The media likes to paint Israel as reacting to events only when they are forced to but the lack of response from Western nations tells the tale of what politicians are deathly afraid to say. Israel has bought and paid for through AIPAC the entire American political process. The US doesn’t have two political parties. It’s one snake with two heads. The US is a vassal state controlled by Israel. How do we know? Because throughout all of history, you were never allowed to be critical of your master.
In America any person can be critical of Obama or Clinton, even the Pope or Buddha or Trump. You can say terrible things about Islam or Mormon or Catholics. You cannot be critical about Israel no matter how outrageous their behavior. A couple of days ago I was reading about how Israel killed 180 Arabs including young children they claimed were responsible for killing 15 Israelis. Guess who the victims were? Not the 180 Arabs, after all, they are just Arabs, but the 15 chosen people, the Jews.
With the admission from recently released Clinton emails Hillary Clinton actually confessed that she is a prostitute owned and operated by Israel. She was quoted as saying, in writing,
“The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.”
She continues a couple of paragraphs later with a chilling suggestion realizing Assad will not accept a diplomatic solution from the outside. And he would have no reason to step aside; in a supervised and fair election he won 88% of the vote in 2014.
“With his life and his family at risk, only the threat or use of force will change the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s mind.”
That’s cold. But to hear her cackle chills the soul.
There are a couple of issues here that pretty much define the question of just who is a vassal state of whom. While the US pays the most tribute to Israel there are a number of other vassal clients of Israel, all terrified of being critical of their masters.

In 2007 in the most pro-Zionist administration in US history sixteen US intelligence agencies came out with a remarkable National Intelligence Estimate(NIE) that said Iran had no nuclear weapons program and showed no intentions of restarting a program they had dropped as far back as 2003.

Let me repeat that. All the US intelligence agencies agreed there was no Iranian nuclear weapons program and there hadn’t been for years. In 2012 they said the same thing. Clinton talks about an Iranian nuclear program as being a threat to Israel. That’s very funny, the world understands Israel alone has WMD in the Middle East and may have as many as 400 nuclear weapons.

Nobody in the Canadian government said anything on the NIE. That’s because they, too, are a client state of Israel. In Canada you can go to prison by merely suggesting that maybe the story of the six million Jews killed in World War II didn’t actually add up. The UK thought that sanctions against Iran for a fictional nuclear weapons program was just spiffy. They are a vassal state of Israel. France didn’t mind ignoring the truth. Everyone that should have known did know. And did nothing. And said nothing.

The US stood to gain nothing by attacking Iraq. Their master ordered. They obeyed. Israel thought the destruction of Iraq was just wonderful, they wanted the country destroyed 30 years before.

Israel told their paid agents in France and the US it was time to destroy Maummar Gaddafi and Libya. So using the same lies from the exact same dual national Neocons that wrote the Clean Break and dragged the US into the biggest military fiasco in US history in Iraq instigated yet another “Civil War” consisting of outside paid and organized terrorists destroying a country that Israel feared might one day be some sort of rival.

You know, with a few million refugees from Afghanistan, millions more from Iraq, and Syria and Lebanon and then Libya, sooner or later that UN number of 65 million refugees is going to sound quite reasonable. I wonder how many will become terrorists and how the US and the EU are going to feel about sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

We need to lance the boil in the Middle East that is Palestine. If we do not and if the US/Nato doesn’t stop pressurizing both China and Russia we will be at war. Peace is always a better alternative.
I wrote about it on Amazon. It’s called The Art of Peace.

The world is on the road to perdition. A peace conference right now would be a good idea.
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Bob Moriarty

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A View From Space with Gary Bell the Spaceman, June 18, 2016



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Friday, June 10, 2016

200 Years Ago, We Endured a 'Year Without a Summer'

Snow in June, freezing temperatures in July, a killer frost in August: "The most gloomy and extraordinary weather ever seen," according to one Vermont farmer.

Two centuries ago, 1816 became the year without a summer for millions of people in parts of North America and Europe, leading to failed crops and near-famine conditions.

While they didn't know the chill's cause at the time, scientists and historians now know that the biggest volcanic eruption in human history, on the other side of the world — Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815 — spewed millions of tons of dust, ash and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, temporarily changing the world's climate and dropping global temperatures by as much as 3 degrees.

In addition to food shortages, the natural climate change caused disease outbreaks, widespread migration of people looking for a better home and religious revivals as people tried to make sense of it all.

The gloom spread to the literary world, too: that foul, frigid year inspired the plot of Mary Shelly's epic horror novel Frankenstein.

And it could happen again. Big volcanoes can erupt at anytime and with little warning, potentially changing the climate and giving a temporary reprieve to man-made global warming.

"We cannot reliably predict exactly when a volcano will erupt, or how powerful it will be, until the eruption is nearly upon us," said Nicholas P. Klingaman, co-author of the book The Year without Summer.

A volcano erupts

The eruption of Tambora, on April 10, 1815, on the island of Sumbawa in what's now Indonesia, was 100 times more powerful than the 1980 Mount St. Helens blast, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which ranked the eruption as a seven on its eight-level volcanic explosivity index.
The volcano spewed out enough ash and pumice to cover a square area 100 miles on each side to a depth of almost 12 feet, according to the book, The Year without Summer, by Klingaman and his father, William K. Klingaman.

It was by far the deadliest volcanic eruption in human history, the Klingamans wrote, with a death toll of at least 71,000 people, up to 12,000 of whom killed directly by the eruption, according to the journal Progress in Physical Geography.

When a volcano erupts, it does more than spew clouds of ash, which can cool a region for a few days and disrupt airline travel. It also spews sulfur dioxide, NASA reports.

If the eruption is strong enough, it shoots that sulfur dioxide high into the stratosphere, more than 10 miles above Earth's surface. Up there, sulfur dioxide reacts with water vapor to form sulfate aerosols.
Because these aerosols float above the altitude of rain, they don't get washed out. Instead they linger, reflecting sunlight and cooling the Earth's surface, which is what caused the weather and climate impacts of Tambora's eruption to occur more than a year later.

Miserable summer

Heavy snow fell in northern New England on June 7-8, with 18- to 20-inch high drifts. In Philadelphia, the ice was so bad "every green herb was killed and vegetables of every description very much injured," according to the book American Weather Stories.

Frozen birds dropped dead in the streets of Montreal, and lambs died from exposure in Vermont, the New England Historical Society said.

On July 4, one observer wrote that "several men were pitching quoits (a game) in the middle of the day with heavy overcoats on." A frost in Maine that month killed beans, cucumbers and squash, according to meteorologist Keith Heidorn. Ice covered lakes and rivers as far south as Pennsylvania, according to the Weather Underground.

By the time August rolled around, more severe frosts further damaged or killed crops in New England. People reportedly ate raccoons and pigeons for food, the New England Historical Society said.

Europe also suffered mightily: the cold and wet summer led to famine, food riots, the transformation of stable communities into wandering beggars and one of the worst typhus epidemics in history, according to The Year without Summer.

Scientists’ best estimate is that the global-average temperature cooled by almost 2 degrees in 1816 said Nicholas Klingaman, who is also a meteorologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Land temperatures cooled by about 3 degrees, he added.

 

How soon could it happen again? 

Eruptions on the scale of Tambora occur once every 1,000 years on average, but smaller events can still substantially impact the climate, Klingaman said. Krakatoa's 1883 eruption in Indonesia caused global cooling nearly five years later, even though it ejected less material into the atmosphere than Tambora.

Similarly, Pinatubo in 1991 in the Philippines caused global temperatures to cool by about 1 degree, Klingaman said. Eruptions of that magnitude — about one-sixth the size of the Tambora eruption — happen about once every 100 years.

"Any of those other volcanoes could erupt again, perhaps on a scale of Tambora or greater," said Mike Mills, an atmospheric chemist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

The subject of how volcanoes affect climate is relatively new: Scientists didn't confirm the link between volcanic eruptions and global cooling until the 1960s and 1970s, Klingaman said.

A new area of research delves into how volcanic eruptions could interact with global warming, Mills said. The chemist says his own investigation found the role of volcano eruption in global climate change could be underestimated. And it could help explain why global warming appeared to temporarily slow down early this century when volcanic activity increased.

With global temperatures at record highs, a massive eruption today could halt man-made climate change. But the effect would be only temporary: Warming would pick up where it left off once all the stratospheric dust settled out, a process that could a few years or up to a decade, Weather Underground reported.

The fallout on the people affected by the event, though, could last far longer. The colorful, dusty skies from Tambora's epic blast inspired some of British artist J. M. W. Turner's most spectacular sunset paintings — some of which were painted decades after the eruption.

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