Sabotage Of Both German-Russian Gas Pipelines -- Whodunit?

I was traveling yesterday while following news of underwater explosions disabling both Nord Stream gas pipelines and a potential repeat of Hurricane Katrina level-flooding with Ian dumping a foot of rain on very low, very flat parts of Florida.

About the latter, the best comment seen so far is:

Link to tweet

About the pipeline sabotage, let me just say I have the same sinking sensation I experienced on 9/11. As a student of history, this looks like a history-changing event no matter who did it. 

But whodunit? 

A digest for today's reading or viewing.

Pepe Escobar

Germany and EU Have Been Handed Over a Declaration of War

George Galloway

The Galloway Show #24

Joe Lauria

The Timing Of The Pipeline Attack

The Saker

Sitrep on Nordstream 1 and 2 gas pipelines

Shared by IntelRepublic on Telegram with this comment:

COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT! Whoever’s manning NATO’s Twitter page seems to not bother keeping up with current events, turning heads after posting BOAST on alliance’s testing of new “unmanned systems at sea” on SAME DAY as alleged SABOTAGE of Nord Stream pipelines, prompting some onlookers to CONNECT THE DOTS and question whether the post is CURIOUS COINCIDENCE or unintentional revelation of supposed NATO interference. 

What’s for sure is NATO’s social media is LEAKY and in DIRE NEED of a plumber 💦

Meanwhile, in what had formerly been the biggest Ukraine war news of the day, all four Oblasts voted to join the Russian Federation. 

Eva Bartlett (Canadian journalist on the ground in Donetsk)

My interview from Donetsk on the people's eagerness to vote to join Russia

Yet another history-changing event as now Ukraine shelling Donbas, as they have done continuously for the last several years, will be attacking Russian territory if the Russian Federation accepts them as anticipated.

What's a concerned mom and grandmother to do? 

1) Find useful information outside corporate media sources.

2) Hold on, this wild ride will only get wilder as the U.S. empire managers lash out in desperation against the threat they perceive in the potential unification of Eurasia. Russia + Germany economic cooperation is currently broken, but the Russia + China bond may be impossible to rend asunder. In fact, it seems to be strengthened with each U.S./NATO action targeting either one of them.

ADDENDUM Sep 30:

I received feedback on this post for including a link to George Galloway's take show episode #24.

I apologize for not listening beyond the initial segment on the Nord Stream attacks. Galloway went on to express transphobic remarks and also to explain his labor stance on the dangers of unregulated immigration.

Had I listened to those segments I would not have promoted his video.

Thanks for reading, and know that I always appreciate hearing from you.

"Failure is feedback, and feedback is the breakfast of champions" -- my favorite fortune cookie message ever, which I carry in my wallet.

Maine Child Woken By Rocket Test In Brunswick, Many More To Come

Source: Popular Mechanics "How The Noise Of Big Rockets Breaks Apart Buildings"

A friend of mine received an email from a friend of his in Brunswick, Maine this week:

Did you hear this last night? I thought of you when my 8 year old came running into my room terrified and crying after they woke him up.

https://www.wmtw.com/article/maine-company-successfully-test-fires-rocket/41347930

If you can imagine being 8 years old again, you are probably aware of the threat of war breaking out. (At least I was at that age.) Even if you are not, a terribly loud industrial sound -- loud enough to wake you up -- could send you running in tears to your parents to ask them what's going on. 

The parents were alarmed by the loud noise also, but didn't find out until the following day that it was bluShift testing one of the rockets it intends to launch from the Maine coast at Steuben, near Acadia National Park. The company's headquarters, however, is in Brunswick, a heavily populated area where they plan several more tests.

Explosion rocks SpaceX test launch site during test"

Brunswick already gets hit hard by excessive noise every time a military air show comes to town. Last time the Blue Angels performed, a sonic boom cracked the sliding glass doors of another friend of mine, a woman in her 90's. Her daughter contacted the Brunswick Landing folks who hosted the airshow, but no compensation for the damage was offered.

I continue to be mystified about two things:

• What democratic process was used in Steuben to determine that rocket launches would be allowed there? Or in Brunswick to determine if the public wants to endure this level of noise pollution?

• When will environmental groups and activists in Maine wake up to the environmental harms of a rocket launch site on the coast? BluShift plans up to 35 launches per year from the Steuben site! I've reached out to Sierra Club of Maine, 350 Maine, and several other groups. But if they are beholden to the Democratic Party, they will likely continue to look the other way.

According to her recent newsletter to constituents, Brunswick's Senator Mattie Daughtry (a Democrat) is full of self-congratulation over her authorship of this bill. Clearly she is representing moneyed interests in Maine, not schoolchildren who deserve not to be terrified awake on a school night.

Wilson's Plover with debris from SpaceX operations in Boca Chica, Texas. Image credit: Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program (CBBEP)

Those of us in Maine who are paying attention have a website, NoToxicRockets4ME.org, where you can find out more about this environmental issue plus the experiences of other places (Kodiak, New Zealand) where rocket launch sites have been built. Locals are promised that what they will get in return for the industrialization of a pristine coastal spot is jobs (which don't materialize) and no military use (which does materialize).

Steuben, Maine is outlined in red

I hope Mainers wake up before campers in Acadia are awakened by noise disrupting children and wildlife in what was once a peaceful spot.

Worth A Read: Today's Curated Short List

Source: Consortium News

Some days my morning reading is especially rich. It's mostly delivered via email now that the social media platforms are thoroughly controlled by our corporate overlords. 

In the spirit of pre-covid social media, 

here's my curated short list of what's currently worth a read:

Margaret Kimberley

Decolonizing the Mind

Edward Snowden

America's Open Wound: The CIA Is Not Your Friend

Caitlin Johnstone

Biden Keeps Pledging Direct U.S. War With China Over Taiwan

U.S. Lawmakers Say Student Loan Forgiveness Will Hurt Military Recruiting

Matt Taibbi

What Happened to America's Civil Libertarians?

The Justice Department Was Dangerous Before Trump. It's Out Of Control Now.

Sonali Kolhatkar

The Cult Of Positive Thinking (a tribute to Barbara Ehrenreich's book Bright-Sided)

Ray McGovern

"Stable as mountains" Putin and Xi in Samarkand

Chris Hedges

Strike! Strike! Strike!

Leaked RAND Report Suggests U.S. Is Crashing Europe's Economy On Purpose

"Protesters attend a demonstration against rising energy prices on Parliament Square in London on Feb. 12." Photo: CHRIS J. RATCLIFFE/GETTY IMAGES"  Source: Foreign Policy*

If you're like me you may have wondered if the U.S./NATO knew what they were setting in motion when they slapped sanctions on Russia and insisted their allies follow suit or else. Within six months Europe's fuel costs have skyrocketed, factories have shut down for lack of fuel, and citizens are rioting over their energy bills. The Euro is tanking, and the ruble is stronger than ever. With Nordstream 1 & 2 pipelines carrying gas from Russia to Germany fully shut down, a very cold winter is looming.

Was this crisis in Europe unexpected, or planned? 

You gotta love whistleblowers. One day they're pursuing a lucrative career in the service of empire, and the next they've had an attack of conscience and leaked information of historic importance. They often pay dearly for this. Let's hope the mole at the RAND corporation, or one of its many clients, escapes with his or her freedom and life intact.

Here in a series of screenshots is a leaked report published by Swedish news source Nya Dagbladet yesterday (you can read their article on the leaked info here):

Copyright page looks authentic but could of course be a forgery. How to evaluate its authenticity?

RAND denied authorship while throwing around a lot of neocon narrative management tropes like "truth decay" and "firehose of falsehood." Hmm...

One approach to deciding who is deploying the firehose might be to read some authenticated RAND reports and see if this one is consistent in terms of content, strategy, and tone. RAND is best known for being the architect of the first Cold War, and by its own reports in 2020 received more than 75% of its funding from the federal government.

So, for comparison purposes, here is the infamous and fully authenticated RAND study from 2019 planning for regime change in Russia. 

"Overextending And Unbalancing Russia: Assessing the Impact of Cost-imposing Options" is widely viewed as the blueprint for using Ukraine as a proxy for NATO to menace Russia. 

An excerpt:

Russia remains a powerful country that still manages to be a U.S. peer competitor in a few key domains. Recognizing that some level of competition with Russia is inevitable, RAND researchers conducted a qualitative assessment of “cost-imposing options” that could unbalance and overextend Russia. Such cost-imposing options could place new burdens on Russia, ideally heavier burdens than would be imposed on the United States for pursuing those options.

And here is RAND's 2016 report, "War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable." An excerpt:

the United States can prepare for a long and severe war by reducing its vulnerability to Chinese A2AD forces and developing plans to ensure that economic and international consequences would work to its advantage

Both these reports are well worth reading in their entirety especially if, as a U.S. taxpayer, you paid for them. As for the leaked report, the cynical manipulation of the German Green Party to support the war on Russia via Ukraine is foretold (or, if you doubt the report's veracity, reflected).

Which brings us to the most suspicious aspect of the leaked report on tanking Germany's economy: from the Executive Summary's opening paragraphs, it appears to have been prepared for the Democratic Party among other clients (see title page above listing "DNC"). Since the other recipients are governmental agencies, may we assume that this analysis and report was funded by U.S. taxpayers on behalf of Democrats? 

After citing fiscal policies under both the previous administration and the current one (so, both R and D), the report warns of a banking crisis a la 2008 in markets flooded by quantitative easing i.e. printing more dollars. Then, the report goes on to reveal a partisan bias which is unusual for RAND reports I have previously read.

Excerpt:

The continuing deterioration of the economic situation is highly likely to lead to a loss in the position of the Democratic Party in Congress and the Senate[sic] in the forthcoming elections to be held in November 2022. The impeachment of the President cannot be ruled out under these circumstances, which must be avoided at all costs.

So, keeping one of the two corporate parties in power is the driving force behind U.S. belligerence and trouble making in Europe? 

Cue the "dark Brandon" memes.

*Foreign Policy is a major source of narratives supporting U.S./UK/NATO ambitions. Since we know that some things are best understood in retrospect, here are a couple of current headlines from FP to ponder:

Nice Manners Uphold White Supremacy & Brutal Class Warfare

A spokeswoman for Police Scotland said: “A 22-year-old woman was arrested..on Sunday 11 September 2022 in connection with a breach of the peace.” This occurred during a public ceremony to recognize Charles as the new King of Scotland. Source: The National

One of the strongest messages a white baby boomer received growing up was the need to behave well. "Pretty is as pretty does," was one such admonition, particularly tailored for girls. "Fools' names and fools' faces are often seen in public places," was another. 

This conditioning must be overcome in order to raise a dissenting voice.

The changing of monarchs in the United Kingdom produced an outburst of fawning over crowned heads as well as an outburst of truth telling and its inevitable companion, tone policing.

Scots were arrested protesting the ascension of the rather unpopular Charles III. Some with signs were put in handcuffs, while others who boo'd appear to have gotten away with it.

The quintessential tone policing remark was predictable. As reported in The National:

Donald Maclaren, 64, of Livingston, said: “It’s very disrespectful, there is a time and a place if you want to protest, but this isn’t it."

 

See, his mother just died, so it's not the time and place to protest a man who just inherited a vast fortune and is exempt from the 40% inheritance tax others must pay. 

No matter how rich you are, you are likely to be totally clueless about how bad tone policing makes you look. Billionaire labor nemesis Jeff Bezos chastised a Black academic on Twitter who wrote: "I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating." 

His criticism and the pushback to it greatly elevated her original tweet (which now appears to have been censored by Twitter). More tone policing came from Carnegie Mellon University where she is employed. They said her remarks did not reflect their values despite Dr. Uju Anya's explanation to a journalist:

"I am the child and sibling of survivors of genocide. 

From 1967-1970, more than 3 million civilians were massacred when the Igbo people of Nigeria tried to form the independent nation of Biafra.. 

this genocide was directly supported and facilitated by the British government.. 

weapons, bombs, planes, military vehicles, and supplies were sent to kill us and protect their interests in the oil reserves on our land."

If you're white and live in a racist country like the U.S., you've probably been in lots of situations where you were hearing white supremacist rhetoric while wondering what to say in response.

 That's if you could find the courage to speak up at all.

You might have been at a family holiday dinner.

You might have been in a hair salon where the person you angered could be holding scissors next to your face.

Is it a coincidence that the part of the U.S. where many still revere the Confederacy has the reputation of being especially polite?

No matter where you live in the U.S., you were probably raised to be conflict averse in a society where "conflict" is a euphemism for war. 

So there's likely an element of fear of violence involved in the calculus about what to say or whether to say anything.

Doris Lessing, one of my favorite authors, grew up white in apartheid colonial Africa, the part that is now Zimbabwe. Her penchant for telling the truth about British colonialism among other things did not always make her popular. She died in 2013 but I'll give her the last word:

9/11 And Covid-19 Have A Lot In Common

Protesters in Kabul December, 2021 demanding "Let us eat" and "Give us our frozen money" Source: Al Jazeera Photo: Mohd Rasfan/AFP

The demise of the U.S. empire is foretold by mass suffering in Afghanistan 20+ years after the unfortunate events of 9/11.

More than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million people need humanitarian help and six million are at risk of famine. More than a million children are “estimated to be suffering from the most severe, life-threatening form of malnutrition” and could die without proper treatment.. 

-- Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coodinator, to the United Nations Security Council August, 2022 as reported in Al Jazeera.

$7,000,000,000 in Afghan government assets were frozen by the U.S. when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan amid a messy, embarrassing withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2021. Now, in 2022, many nations have responded by going off the dollar, a process hastened by economic sanctions that have ramped up in the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Sold as a humanitarian intervention, what was two decades of war in Afghanistan really about? 

Some things are best understood in retrospect.

That nearly 3,000 "Americans" (27 were actually foreign nationals) died in the World Trade Center was a fact repeated as often as the videos of both towers collapsing. Oh, and WTC Building 7 which collapsed 8 hours later. This magnitude of death was the pretext for going to war on Afghanistan which allegedly harbored the Saudi masterminds of the terrorist attack. Except it was Pakistan doing the harboring. But they have nuclear weapons, don't they?

The main things that 9/11 provided were an enormous spectacle to justify the endlessly profitable wars of imperial expansion for the U.S., sometimes doing business as NATO.

The other signficant thing that 9/11 provided cover for was the 300 page so-called Patriot Act which gutted constitutional rights of citizens and terrorists alike. Swiftly gutted them, and created the Department of Homeland Security and created ICE -- both of which we had gotten along without prior to 9/11.

A lot of torture happened after 9/11. No, not the torture of being an Afghan or Pakistani child trying to sleep while surveillance robots droned overhead 24/7 waiting to unleash their Hellfire missiles on your home. Torture in secret prisons and in the gulag known as Guantánamo which is on Cuba's territory without their consent.

Torture then led to persecution of torture whistleblowers. 

Persecution amounting torture of Chelsea Manning for refusing to reveal how she shared evidence of U.S. war crimes. 

Persecution amounting to torture of Julian Assange for sharing evidence of U.S. and allied forces' war crimes and dirty financial dealings. 

Persecution of John Kiriakou, the CIA officer who blew the whistle on that agency's role in torture programs in 2007.

9/11 was used to justify war on Iraq via lies that Saddam Hussein had something to do with it. Also bombing people in Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. And justification to support Israel's brutalization of Palestinian people in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.  

Source: Brown University, Watson Institute, Costs of War Project

9/11 was used to drive fossil fuel consumption and thus climate crisis.

Source: The Daily Times "Eagleton fifth-graders study 9/11" Sep. 10, 2016 

9/11 was used to produce a lot of canned curriculum that teachers are told they must use to inform kids that are not upset about 9/11. 

Becuase they were not even born when it happened.

And really, how much should they care about 9/11? Their young lives have been upended by a public health disaster, still rampaging out of control in the U.S. 

A disaster -- like 9/11 -- that many argue was at worst planned and at best allowed to happen. How has the Covid-19 disaster been used?

• To ramp up censorship and narrative management dramatically.
• To set groups in the U.S. against each other.
• To enrich the already wealthy.

Sound familiar?

Proxy War In Ukraine Has Unintended Consequences Corporate Press Are Hiding

Censored mural by Peter Seaton in Melbourne was immediately attacked by Ukranian officials in Australia for its message of shared humanity and the longing for peace. It used to depict Russian and Ukranian soldiers hugging, but has now been painted over.

I've written previously about the intense narrative control that is a key feature of the U.S./NATO proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. As the military becomes an increasingly undesirable option for young people in the U.S. (currently only 9% would consider enlisting, according to Pentagon researchers) the pressure is on to make sure Ukrainians are the ones fighting and dying in the imperial war to topple Russia.

This necessitates:

Lying about the progress of the war and repeatedly claiming Ukraine is "winning" when it is doing no such thing (former U.N. military expert Jacques Baud's current analysis of this is worth a read).

Promoting false claims about the Russian military shelling its own POW camp or the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

Current headlines on Cold War propaganda outlet Radio Free Europe's website

Mischaracterizing the combatants, as Yale professor Timothy Snyder did recently in Foreign Affairs: "Russia, an aging tyranny, seeks to destroy Ukraine, a defiant democracy." (Actually, Ukraine is resolutely undemocratic at this point in its history and maintains a "hit list" of everyone, including international rock stars, who doesn't support the official narrative -- while Putin's approval rating among Russians last month was over 80%.)

Coordinating messaging in corporate media internationally so that specific key words e.g. "unprovoked" are repeated ad nauseum without examination of copious evidence to the contrary.

Suppressing narratives in the alternative press and on social media (and, apparently, the sides of buildings) by canceling accounts, deleting archives, unleashing trolls, and shadow banning.

Intervening to squelch any attempt at peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

Source: TeleSUR "In Prague, 70,000 people took to the streets on Saturday [Sep 3] to protest against the sharp rise in energy prices and to demand a neutral position on the war in Ukraine. Photo: Twitter @oriolsabata"

Blaming Russia for the fact Europe is reeling from the effects of economic sanctions that cut off much of Europe's fuel supply -- for home heating, among other uses.

At a time when Russian pipeline gas supplies have been in free fall, the EU had no choice but to ramp up imports from the US at all costs, generating unprecedented profits for US gas suppliers, Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Saturday.

Pushing the false claim that the Russian economy is in trouble after six months of war in Ukraine. In fact, the ruble has never been stronger while the nations of the world are abandoning the petrodollar like rats fleeing a sinking ship. And as of this week the € is trading below the US$, a two-decade low for that currency.

What's a U.S. taxpayer to do? 

Find some sources of reliable information (you can use many of the links above for that purpose), grow your own food, and diversify your heating fuels. Note that false narratives enrich weapons manufacturers, but will do little to keep you warm and fed this winter.

Divide & Conquer, Part 4: VBNW v. MAGA

This installment in my series examining how our corporate overlords stoke the flames of civil war in the hopes of avoiding a revolution will focus on the two corporate parties.

After a divisive speech in Philadelphia with the inflammatory title "Remarks by President Biden on the Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation," I was inspired to do some compare and contrast on this topic. Rather than a Venn diagram which offers a very small space for similarities, I used a "top hat" graphic organizer from my teaching days. Not exhaustive by any means, but here's what I came up with:

Why such divisive, inflammatory rhetoric on the eve of midterm elections? Because, with the scene below repeated all over the planet, the ruling class in the U.S. fear they are next.

One of the huge differences we were supposed to believe distinguished red from blue was a scientific approach to the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic. The demogogue with bad hair that leads the MAGA cult disinguished himself in the White House spouting unscientific nonsense about a disease the public knew almost nothing about at that point. Oddly, his administration still delivered more "covid relief" at least in economic terms than has Biden's. 

Once the current administration came to power, we got plenty of vaccines and boosters that didn't actually keep us from getting infected but no mitigation effects like N95 masks for all to protect the vulnerable, nor high quality air filtration in public spaces like classrooms. Science became "the science" which is science in the service of commerce -- not the same thing. And economic relief from the effects of layoffs, illness, lack of free public school daycare? Fuggidaboudit.

I think history will show that, if not for the pandemic, 45 might very well have been a two term president. But never mind about the current ~400 deaths per day. It's pretty clear that our rulers of either color have lost interest in protecting us from premature death. Neither party supports the universal health care fundamental to success in adressing public health elsewhere.

But what about January 6?

It's clear that the outgoing president incited his followers to stage a riot at Congress on the day the election results were to be certified. The legal fallout from that is pretty intense for said followers who are receiving hefty jail sentences for their participation. The fallout for 45 remains to be seen. It would, however, be unprecedented for him alone among presidents to be held to account for any of his crimes, including a new possibility, that of mishandling classified documents.

The war crimes of each successive president are never called to account, no matter whether the man in the White House has a D or an R after his name.

The other science topic that was once supposed to be -- and is still heavily sold as -- a HUGE difference between blue and red was protecting access to reproductive health care, including abortion.

I say supposed because Democrats for decades did nothing to codify Roe v. Wade into law. They were able to fearmonger and fundraise so successfully off the prospect of it being overturned that they didn't want to give it up.

The fact that the Supreme Court is now a swamp of sex offenders and religious zealots was the fundamental reason used to promote the need to Vote Blue No Matter Who. But this argument doesn't hold up. The Obama administration failed to insist on hearings for their 11th hour nominee Merrick Garland, and failed to block the 11th hour confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett. For that matter, the Democratic Party failed to convince elderly, ailing Ruth Bader Ginsberg to step down in time for Obama to replace her.

Once upon a time, we were able to distinguish the two parties by their differing aesthetics. When the GOP was in the White House, we were embarrassed on the international stage. 45 pandering to his base had to stoop pretty low, and George W. Bush was the most inarticulate president since the advent of television.

Those days are gone. Or maybe the White House just kept on the same art director?

I'll end with a few of the zillions of tweets commenting on Biden's speech.

Onward, to Civil War 2.0.