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Uncle Sam’s Long Trail of Wreckage

the Biden administration opted to use Ukraine in a Western proxy war against Russia. 

Washington and London appear to have sabotaged a possible peace accord between Moscow and Kiev. 

 The Biden administration is risking nuclear war with Russia to assist a corrupt, authoritarian regime in a country of little importance to the United States.

Until the early 1990s, Ukraine wasn’t even an independent country, much less a U.S. vital interest.

Very few policymakers even concede that Washington’s overseas military adventures often have not turned out as planned.

The American Conservative, Ted Galen Carpenter, Sep 28, 2022, The leaders and most of the news media in the U.S. seem to believe that Washington’s foreign policy over the past several decades has been a success and benefitted both the United States and the world. That assumption wasn’t really true even during the Cold War, although that confrontation eventually resulted in the peaceful demise of America’s nasty totalitarian adversary. There was plenty of collateral damage along the way, with the suffering caused by Washington’s conduct in Vietnam and Afghanistan being the most glaring examples.

The performance of U.S. leaders after the Cold War has been even worse. An array of disruptive, bloody tragedies—most notably those in the Balkans, Afghanistan (again), Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen—mark Uncle Sam’s global trail of wreckage. The Biden administration’s decision to use Ukraine as a pawn in Washington’s power struggle with Russia is fast becoming the latest example.

Very few policymakers even concede that Washington’s overseas military adventures often have not turned out as planned. The news media, which is supposed to serve as the public’s watchdog, have routinely ignored or excused America’s foreign-policy disasters. Instead, when one intervention fails, they simply move on to lobby for the next crusade pushed by U.S. leaders.  Consider how few news accounts now deal with the ongoing violence and chaos in places such as Libya, Syria, and Yemen, even though Washington was a major contributor to all of those tragedies.

Paul Poast, a scholar with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, aptly describes the conflict in Syria as America’s “forgotten war.” “That the war in Syria has become the “forgotten war,” he observes, “points to a more disturbing trend in U.S. foreign policy: The United States is so engaged in wars and interventions around the world that a conflict involving the U.S. military that has killed hundreds of  thousands of civilians does not even register with the American public anymore.”………………………………………

The turmoil in Iraq is less severe, but is still damaging the country. Political disputes and mass demonstrations against the current government regularly surface in Iraq. Pro-Iranian militias continue to play a prominent role in the country’s government, and the three-way split among Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs, and Kurds is becoming ever more contentious. Political violence among rival factions shows no signs of subsiding, nor does public resentment against the presence of U.S. troops. Washington so lacks trust in its “ally” that officials once threatened to seize the country’s bank reserves if Iraqi leaders continued to press for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

The level of human tragedy in Libya and Yemen is horrifying. Washington and its NATO allies bear almost exclusive responsibility for the situation in Libya………………………

The latest application of Washington’s meddlesome policy is in Ukraine. U.S. leaders ignored repeated Russian warnings that making Ukraine a NATO member or even an unofficial NATO military asset would cross a line that threatened Russia’s security.  When Moscow finally responded to the provocations with an invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration opted to use Ukraine in a Western proxy war against Russia. 

The conflict has already done enormous damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure and taken thousands of lives. Worse, Washington and London appear to have sabotaged a possible peace accord between Moscow and Kiev. 

The U.S. foreign-policy record over the past three decades could hardly be worse. It is crucial not to let policymakers and their media mouthpieces get away with convenient collective amnesia and imitations of Pontius Pilate. Instead, they need to be held fully accountable for their blunders and deception.

Future U.S. policymakers also need to avoid repeating the faulty performance of their predecessors. To do so, they must make three significant changes to U.S. foreign policy. 

First, Washington should utterly renounce nation-building. Trying to remake alien societies by force and impose Western political, economic, and social values is the essence of folly.

Even when the United States has not yet been drawn into a new war to enforce crumbling nation-building goals, as in Bosnia and Kosovo, such armed social experiments are an exercise in futility and frustration. Worse, nation-building missions frequently worsen conditions in the targeted country, and the predictable failure of U.S. objectives even can lead to Washington’s outright humiliation. The debacle in Afghanistan is a stark reminder of that danger.

Second, the United States must avoid the temptation to engage in regime-change wars. Such offensives often are a prelude to disastrous nation-building ventures. That was the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Those wars not only made matters worse for the populations in the three countries, but worsened the security situation for neighboring states and even the United States. In both Iraq and Libya, U.S. actions toppled secular dictators, paving the way for chaos that strengthened the position of Islamic jihadists. Granted, the secular dictators were brutal and sometimes caused problems for the United States, but Washington’s “solution” clearly made matters worse, not better.

Third, U.S. leaders must do a much better job of distinguishing vital national interests from secondary or peripheral ones. Washington’s current policy of using Ukraine as a proxy for a war against Russia is a troubling example of the failure to make such basic distinctions. The Biden administration is risking nuclear war with Russia to assist a corrupt, authoritarian regime in a country of little importance to the United States.

Until the early 1990s, Ukraine wasn’t even an independent country, much less a U.S. vital interest. To accept the risks the Biden administration is incurring is irresponsible and violates the U.S. government’s responsibility to the American people.

Unless these policy changes are made, it is just a matter of time until a new set of officials repeat the disastrous blunders of their predecessors. If they do, the consequences to America and the world will be equally damaging.  Indeed, the Ukraine adventure reveals that the consequences could be even worse than the wreckage already wrought by Uncle Sam.  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/uncle-sams-long-trail-of-wreckage/

October 1, 2022 Posted by | politics international, USA, weapons and war | 2 Comments

How can Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant stay open? ‘It’s not a done deal’

The Tribune, BY STEPHANIE ZAPPELLI SEPTEMBER 30, 2022,

PG&E is preparing for two futures: one in which it closes Diablo Canyon Power Plant in 2025 and another in which it continues operating the nuclear power plant through 2030. “It’s not a done deal,” PG&E director Tom Jones told the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. “We’re maintaining both tracks.” Diablo Canyon was on track to shut down in 2025, but the California State Legislature passed Senate Bill 846 in October.

The bill, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law on Sept. 2, creates resources to keep the power plant near Avila Beach open until 2030. One of those resources is a $1.4 billion grant to the state Department of Water Resources. That department will then loan the money to PG&E.

The utility company will receive a $600 million loan this year, and another $800 million next year if approved by the California legislature, Jones told the Board of Supervisors. PG&E applied for a grant with the U.S. Department of Energy to “back-fill those funds,” Jones said.

Even though the state provided PG&E with new support, the utility company has to complete a few more steps to keep the power plant open, Jones said. WHAT’S NEXT FOR DIABLO CANYON? In order to continue operating Diablo Canyon, PG&E must renew the power plant’s license to operate with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Jones said. Normally, the federal commission requires a power plant to apply to renew its license five years before it expires…………………………………………….. more https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/environment/article266566596.html

September 29, 2022 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

US intel wants to improve low-dose radiation detection

IARPA unleashes TEI-REX to better track nuclear sources, more

 https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/30/iarpa_radiation_monitoring_research/, Brandon Vigliarolo, 30 Sep 2022 ,

The research arm of US intelligence has begun investigating methods for spotting low doses of ionizing radiation to better protect American service personnel and provide evidence of nuclear technology use.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) announced the start of Targeted Evaluation of Ionizing Radiation Exposure (TEI-REX) on Friday, which will look for non-invasive methods of determining radiation exposure in low doses through samples including hair, skin, sweat, and saliva. 

In its technical explanation [PDF] of the program, IARPA said current methods of collecting biodosimetry data, which looks at the effects of radiation on human or animal tissue, have a number of issues: it can require invasive samples, such as blood; multiple collections are often required; there’s a time limit for getting an accurate reading; the markers used to calculate doses are transient; and there’s a wide standard deviation of dose calculations for low-dose exposure.

“Today’s technology mostly assesses exposure to high doses of radioactive materials by looking at multiple samples that often have limited accuracy for only a few days,” said program manager Dr Michael Patterson. 

Most radiation tests that require blood to be drawn rely on examining chromosomal damage, which IARPA said is unnecessary because recent research “demonstrated that biomarkers associated with ionizing radiation exposure can be detected across numerous biological targets including proteins, peptides, metabolites, and lipids.”  

TEI-REX wants to look at those markers, which IARPA said are long-lasting and can be directly attributed to the initial dose of radiation. The program is looking to establish measurement models and methodologies that can measure accurate low-dose ionizing exposure within 25 days, and beyond 90 days, which it said will help it build a new understanding of the effects of low-dose radiation “through advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, biomarker discovery, and analytical biology.”

IARPA said [PDF] there are several applications for the technology, such as investigating radiation poisoning cases similar to Alexander Litvinenko’s, which took 22 days to confirm.

Other uses include better radiation exposure measurements for military personnel, who often aren’t carrying dosimetry badges; detecting and tracking down radiation sources and nuclear contamination out in the field; and testing in remote locations – such as space – where astronauts are exposed to much more radioactivity than those of us on Earth.

The University of Washington, Ohio State University, Signature Science, and Areté Associates were awarded grants to carry out this three-and-a-half year study project, and the research will be performed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Lab, and the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute. 

September 29, 2022 Posted by | radiation, USA | Leave a comment

US Senate Approves $12 Billion In New Aid For Ukraine Amid War

Russia-Ukraine War: It comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to declare the annexation of parts of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops on Friday.

NDTV WorldAgence France-Presse September 30, 2022,

It also provides $4.5 billion for Kyiv to keep the country’s finances stable.

Washington: 

The US Senate approved $12 billion in new economic and military aid for Ukraine Thursday as part of a stopgap extension of the federal budget into December.

The measure, agreed by senators of both parties, includes $3 billion for arms, supplies and salaries for Ukraine’s military, and authorizes President Joe Biden to direct the US Defense Department to take $3.7 billion worth of its own weapons and materiel to provide Ukraine.

It also provides $4.5 billion for Kyiv to keep the country’s finances stable and keep the government running, providing services to the Ukrainian people.

It comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to declare the annexation of parts of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops on Friday……………

The Ukraine aid is part of a short-term extension of the federal budget, which is to expire at the end of the fiscal year on September 30 without the parties in Congress having agreed to a full-year allocation for fiscal 2022-23……….  https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-senate-approves-12-billion-in-new-aid-for-ukraine-amid-war-3390355

September 29, 2022 Posted by | business and costs, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

US, UK sabotaged peace deal because they ‘don’t care about Ukraine’: fmr. NATO adviser

 https://thegrayzone.com/2022/09/27/us-uk-sabotaged-peace-deal/ AARON MATÉ· SEPTEMBER 27, 2022,

Former Swiss intelligence officer and NATO adviser Jacques Baud on the next phase of the Russia-Ukraine war and new allegations that the US and UK undermined a peace deal that could have ended it.

The West’s aim “is not the victory of Ukraine, It’s the defeat of Russia,” Baud says. “The problem is that nobody cares about Ukraine. We have just instrumentalized Ukraine for the purpose of US strategic interests — not even European interests.”

Guest: Jacques Baud. Former intelligence officer with the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service who has served in a number of senior security and advisory positions at NATO, the United Nations, and with the Swiss military.

Corrections:

  • In his Sept. 21 speech, Putin did not make an explicit threat to use nuclear weapons. He vowed to “make use of all weapon systems available to us,” in the event of “a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people.”

On nuclear weapons, the US did not have a “No First Use” policy. On the 2020 campaign trail, Joe Biden said that he supported the idea of “No First Use.” He abandoned that in his presidential nuclear posture; but that was reversing his campaign stance, not official US policy.

September 27, 2022 Posted by | politics international, UK, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

USA government, Pentagon, happy to escalate to a nuclear war – at the behest of Volodymyr Zelensky ?

As I really dislike Rupert Murdoch’s News Corpse, Tucker Carlson, and the whole pro Trump brigade, it pains me to have to promote them in any way. BUT – if they happen to be telling the facts, with a credible interpretation of what is going on in Ukraine – can we afford to just dismiss them, while the “respectable” corporate Western media idolises Zelensky, and promotes the escalation of the war?

September 27, 2022 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Pilgrim power plant owner Holtec still considering dumping nuclear waste into Cape Cod Bay

Holtec International has 1.1 million gallons of radioactive wastewater to get rid of.

Boston.com By Susannah Sudborough, September 28, 2022 ,

The company working to decommission the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth is still considering dumping radioactive waste into Cape Cod Bay despite pushback from activists, lawmakers, and the EPA.

Holtec International has 1.1 million gallons of leftover wastewater from the plant, which closed in 2019, that it needs to get rid of.

NBC 10 Boston reported Tuesday that a representative from Holtec gave an update on the company’s plans at a town hall meeting Monday evening.

“When you do liquid discharges, it is diluted with seawater to non-detectable levels pretty quickly once it’s released, and doing it in small batches is actually the safest manner,” Holtec spokesman Patrick O’Brien told the news station.

But activists from Save Our Bay, a coalition of conservation groups, local leaders, and citizens who oppose the proposed dumping, say Holtec wants to dump the nuclear waste in Cape Cod Bay simply because it’s cheaper.

While O’Brien denied to NBC 10 Boston that dumping is the cheaper option, the group, which protested in Plymouth before the meeting Monday, says the waste will make the bay’s and local waters unsafe.

“The contaminated water will inevitably flow into Plymouth, Duxbury, and Kingston Bays. The bays are semi-enclosed, and circulation currents tend to keep the water in them. It [does] not quickly flush out and disperse in the ocean, but is likely to end up in the sediments at the bottoms of the bays or beaches,” the group wrote on its website.

​Additionally, Save Our Bay says, the nuclear waste could contaminate the fish, oysters, clams, and mussels that support the local aquaculture industry, making a major local product dangerous.

The loss of the local fishing and potentially tourism, due to contaminated waters would devastate the local economy, the group says.

Save Our Bays is not alone in opposing the proposed dumping. In January 2022, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Ed Markey, Rep. Bill Keating, and Rep. Seth Moulton sent a letter to Holtec stating their opposition.

Additionally, in July, the EPA wrote to the company saying it doesn’t think the company is allowed to dump the waste according to its permit.

According to The Boston Globe, Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules say Holtec can dump the water as long as its radioactivity is not above specified limits……………………….

A decision could come early next year, NBC 10 Boston reported. https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2022/09/28/pilgrim-power-plant-owner-considering-dumping-nuclear-waste-into-cape-cod-bay-holtec-international-plymouth/—

September 27, 2022 Posted by | oceans, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

White House requests Ukraine nuclear security funding to expand assistance due to nuclear power plant concerns

By Phil Mattingly, CNN, September 27, 2022,

The White House requested $35 million be included in the short-term government funding bill to assist Ukraine’s nuclear security as US officials continue to closely watch the precarious conditions around Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, according to an administration official.

The additional funds would serve to bolster the significant assistance already provided by the US National Nuclear Security Administration to Ukrainian officials in the months since Russia invaded the country, the official said. It comes as US officials and their international counterparts have been on high alert over the potential for a nuclear accident at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine.…………………….

The facility, held by Russian troops since March, has for weeks served as an increasingly hazardous flashpoint in the war. Shelling at and around the site has damaged infrastructure, cut power lines and drawn a sustained international effort to de-escalate the situation. Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other for the shelling……………………  https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/27/politics/ukraine-funding-request-nuclear-power-plant/index.html

September 27, 2022 Posted by | safety, USA | Leave a comment

Subsidies to Nuclear Power in the Inflation Reduction Act still won’t save the poor economics of nuclear power – Cato Institute

Subsidies to Nuclear Power in the Inflation Reduction Act, Cato Institute By David Kemp and Peter Van Doren, 28 SEpt 22, Last month, the United States enacted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA),……… The act includes many provisions to subsidize clean power plants, including nuclear generators.

Many believe that nuclear is the perfect solution to climate change…….. Our recent working paper examines the economics of nuclear power and concludes that it is very high‐​cost relative to natural gas generators. Most importantly in the context of climate change, we also determine that the potential climate benefits of nuclear are insufficient to offset its costs.

From the 1960s to 1980s, many nuclear power plants were built, but nuclear construction costs rose dramatically resulting in a severe decline in new construction. Very few plants have been built in the United States and Western Europe in the past several decades. In fact, the most recent projects in the West (the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Finland) have experienced numerous issues with quality control, supply chains, and labor force management, leading to a more than doubling of construction schedules and costs. The fact that nuclear construction costs increased dramatically in countries with different regulatory regimes suggests that the problem is not simply overly cautious regulators.[1]………………..

Nuclear power is capital intensive. Thus, its  levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) depends mostly on its construction cost. To model different scenarios, our calculations use three levels of construction costs for nuclear. The highest level (a cost of $9,000 per kilowatt of capacity constructed) represents the average construction costs of the West’s most recent projects. The middle and low levels ($6,700 and $4,000 per kilowatt, respectively) envision substantial reductions in nuclear construction costs through some combination of regulatory reform, improvements to construction management, or innovation. The low level, which is nearly 65 percent lower than the most recent nuclear project in the United States (the Vogtle plant in Georgia where ongoing construction has reached costs of about $11,000 per kilowatt), is particularly optimistic. Whether such a reduction is achievable is not known, but historically US nuclear construction costs have increased as new capacity has been built………………………………………………………..

The IRA expands subsidies to new nuclear plants through two options for tax credits, a production tax credit (PTC) and an investment tax credit (ITC)……………………………………………………………………………………..

The IRA subsidies are not sufficient to change the economics of nuclear power. ………..https://www.cato.org/blog/subsidies-nuclear-power-inflation-reduction-act

September 27, 2022 Posted by | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

Brainwashed for War With Russia

 https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2022/09/21/brainwashed-for-war-with-russia/ by Ray McGovern ,

Thanks to Establishment media, the sorcerer apprentices advising President Joe Biden – I refer to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jacob Sullivan, and China specialist Kurt Campbell – will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China. And, shockingly, under false pretenses.

Most Americans are oblivious to the reality that Western media are owned and operated by the same corporations that make massive profits by helping to stoke small wars and then peddling the necessary weapons. Corporate leaders, and Ivy-mantled elites, educated to believe in U.S. “exceptionalism,” find the lucre and the luster too lucrative to be able to think straight. They deceive themselves into thinking that (a) the US cannot lose a war; (b) escalation can be calibrated and wider war can be limited to Europe; and (c) China can be expected to just sit on the sidelines. The attitude, consciously or unconsciously, “Not to worry. And, in any case, the lucre and luster are worth the risk.”

The media also know they can always trot out died-in-the-wool Russophobes to “explain,” for example, why the Russians are “almost genetically driven” to do evil (James Clapper, former National Intelligence Director and now hired savant on CNN); or Fiona Hill (former National Intelligence Officer for Russia), who insists “Putin wants to evict the United States from Europe … As he might put it: “Goodbye, America. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

Absent a miraculous appearance of clearer heads with a less benighted attitude toward the core interests of Russia in Ukraine, and China in Taiwan, historians who survive to record the war now on our doorstep will describe it as the result of hubris and stupidity run amok. Objective historians may even note that one of their colleagues – Professor John Mearsheimer – got it right from the start, when he explained in the autumn 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault.”

Historian Barbara Tuchman addressed the kind of situation the world faces in Ukraine in her book “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.” (Had she lived, she surely would have updated it to take Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine into account). Tuchman wrote:

“Wooden-headedness…plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.”

Six Years (and Counting) of Brainwashing

Thanks to US media, a very small percentage of Americans know that:

  • 14 years ago, then US Ambassador to Russia (current CIA Director) William Burns was warned by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that Russia might have to intervene in Ukraine, if it were made a member of NATO. The Subject Line of Burns’s Feb. 1, 2008 Embassy Moscow cable (#182) to Washington makes it clear that Amb. Burns did not mince Lavrov’s words; the subject line stated: “Nyet means nyet: Russia’s NATO enlargement redlines.”Thus, Washington policymakers were given forewarning, in very specific terms, of Russia’s redline regarding membership for Ukraine in NATO. Nevertheless, on April 3, 2008, a NATO summit in Bucharest asserted: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”
  • 8 years ago, on Feb. 22, 2014, the US orchestrated a coup in Kiev – rightly labeled “the most blatant coup in history’, insofar as it had already been blown on YouTube 18 days prior. Kiev’s spanking new leaders, handpicked and identified by name by US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in the YouTube-publicized conversation with the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, immediately called for Ukraine to join NATO.
  • 6 years ago, in June 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Western reporters of his concern that so-called antiballistic missiles sites in Romania and Poland could be converted overnight to accommodate offensive strike missiles posing a threat to Russia’s own nuclear forces. (See this unique video, with English subtitles, from minute 37 to 49.) There is a direct analogy with the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Moscow put offensive strike missiles in Cuba and President John Kennedy reacted strongly to the existential threat that posed to the US.
  • On December 21, 2021, President Putin told his most senior military leaders:

  • “It is extremely alarming that elements of the US global defense system are being deployed near Russia. The Mk 41 launchers, which are located in Romania and are to be deployed in Poland, are adapted for launching the Tomahawk strike missiles. If this infrastructure continues to move forward, and if US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7–10 minutes, or even five minutes for hypersonic systems. This is a huge challenge for us, for our security.”     [Emphasis added.]
  • On December 30, 2021, Biden and Putin talked by phone at Putin’s urgent request. The Kremlin readout stated:
  • On February 12, 2022, Ushakov briefed the media on the telephone conversation between Putin and Biden earlier that day.

Unprovoked?

The US insists that Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked”. Establishment media dutifully regurgitate that line, while keeping Americans in the dark about such facts (not opinion) as are outlined (and sourced) above. Most Americans are just as taken in by the media as they were 20 years ago, when they were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They simply took it on faith. Nor did the guilty media express remorse – or a modicum of embarrassment.

The late Fred Hiatt, who was op-ed editor at the Washington Post, is a case in point. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review [CJR, March/April 2004] he commented:

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.


“If you look at the editorials we wrote running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction.” “If that’s not true, it would have been better not to say it.”

(My journalism mentor, Robert Parry, had this to say about Hiatt’s remark. “Yes, that is a common principle of journalism, that if something isn’t real, we’re not supposed to confidently declare that it is.”)

It’s worse now. Russia is not Iraq. And Putin has been so demonized over the past six years that people are inclined to believe the likes of James Clapper to the effect there’s something genetic that makes Russians evil. “Russia-gate” was a big con (and, now, demonstrably so), but Americans don’t know that either. The consequences of prolonged demonization are extremely dangerous – and will become even more so in the next several weeks as politicians vie to be the strongest in opposing and countering Russia’s “unprovoked” attack on Ukraine.

THE Problem

Humorist Will Rogers had it right:

“The problem ain’t what people know. It’s what people know that ain’t so; that’s the problem.”

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

September 22, 2022 Posted by | media, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

64 years later, the Golden Rule takes to the water again to challenge nuclear arms

A crew will sail down the Mississippi, up the East Coast and through the Great Lakes to back the prohibition of nuclear weapons.  

By Randy Furst Star Tribune, SEPTEMBER 23, 2022 ,

In the spring of 1958, four pacifists including David Gale,who grew up in Carver, Minn., set sail from California to the Marshall Islands to protest nuclear tests conducted there by the United States. Their 34-foot boat was named the Golden Rule.

Gale, then 25, became gravely ill and the boat developed mechanical problems, and a huge storm on the Pacific Ocean forced the crew to turn back. A second trip was launched, this time with another pacifist replacing Gale. But the crew was arrested by the U.S. Coast Guard near Honolulu and went to jail.

On Sunday, the newly refurbished Golden Rule will set sail again to protest nuclear weapons, this time setting out from St. Paul down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. It’s the start of a 15-month, 11,000-mile journey sponsored by Veterans for Peace that will eventually take the crew up the Eastern Seaboard, through the Great Lakes and back to the Gulf of Mexico, with stops in 100 towns and cities.


“We want to put pressure on the United States to sign the United Nations treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons,” said Helen Jaccard, the trip’s project manager.

Kiko Johnston-Kitazawa of Hawaii will captain the boat for the first five months, taking it as far as Jacksonville, Fla. He was working last week on some rigging lines at the St. Croix Marina in Hudson, Wis. “I’ve been interested in peace work and nuclear disarmament since I was 15,” he said.

Mike McDonald, past president of the Twin Cities chapter of Veterans for Peace, which is sponsoring Golden Rule events in the metro area, will be on the boat for the first leg of the trip. “If somebody starts a nuclear war, it isn’t going to be good for anybody,” he said.

The 1958 voyage of the Golden Rule to the Marshall Islands was a national news story. During the previous 12 years, the U.S. had dropped 67 nuclear bombs at Bikini and Enewetak atolls, equaling the energy yield of 7,000 Hiroshima bombs, according to Scientific American.

Gale died in 2016 at 83, but his family remains enthusiastic that the Golden Rule is still making a splash — and carrying the anti-nuclear message.

“I’m thrilled it is being renewed,” said his widow, Margaret Gale of Princeton, Ill., also a committed pacifist. “I still believe in what that boat stands for.”

“This is who he was,” said Andy Gale of San Diego, one of David’s sons. “He was a pacifist and felt strongly against war his whole life………………………………………………………………………………….

There will be a Golden Rule Project program at 11:30 a.m. Sunday at Crosby Farm Regional Park in St. Paul, with a potluck and an opportunity to meet the crew before the boat departs.  https://www.startribune.com/sixty-four-years-later-the-golden-rule-takes-to-the-water-again-to-challenge-nuclear-arms/600209583/

September 22, 2022 Posted by | opposition to nuclear, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

A Nebraska county of only 625 people contained nearly 100 deep underground nuclear missiles, so the US Air Force halted a green-power project that would have revitalized its economy

MSN lvaranasi@insider.com (Lakshmi Varanasi) 22 Sept 22,

  • There are hundreds of underground nuclear missiles across Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana. 
  • The US Air Force says wind turbines can’t be constructed within a 2-mile radius of these missiles.
  • Due to underground missiles, a wind turbine project in Banner County, Nebraska, was limited in scope.

The Democrats’ new climate and tax bill will invest billions in clean energy. Here are 21 high-paying green careers for people who want to save the planet. (Business Insider)

  • There are many occupations out there that help the environment, such as wind turbine service technician.
  • The Inflation Reduction Act could mean more clean energy jobs created.
  • Here are the 21 fastest-growing green jobs that also have an annual pay greater than the overall median pay.

Saving the earth and having a lucrative career aren’t always mutually exclusive, and the Democrats’ big climate and tax bill that just passed could mean even more investment in green jobs.

The Inflation Reduction Act could mean many more workers will be needed to fill various clean energy and other jobs in the coming years. The bill also says it will cut carbon emissions by about 40% by 2030……………………………… (Read the original article on Business Insider)

In Nebraska’s Banner County, the remains of Cold War America are buried right below the surface. 

During the 1960s, when the US was locked in a nuclear stalemate with the then-Soviet Union, it began planting hundreds of nuclear missiles across rural swaths of the country like Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, North Dakota and Montana in case it needed to shoot them into the enemy camp at a given moment. 

Now, those missiles are preventing the region from harnessing its most valuable resource: strong, gusty winds.

The Flat Water Free Press, an independent news outlet in Nebraska, reported last week that in 2019, the US Air Force began to thwart a wind turbine project in the state’s southwest Banner County. 

Two renewable energy companies, Invenergy and Orion Renewable Energy Group, had singled out Banner for its “world class winds,” the Flat Water Free Press reported. They were ready to construct a combined 300 turbines across the region. 

Each turbine would have brought in an additional $15,000 in annual income to the landowner whose property it would be built on. The capital from the turbines would have flushed into Banner’s school system and revitalized the 625-person county. 

But the Air Force contended that the turbines would pose a “significant safety hazard” to pilots — especially during storms or blizzards. The Air Force decided that the turbines needed to be constructed 2.3 miles away from each other to ensure that pilots had enough space to land without potentially digging their wheels into a missile. Until then, a quarter mile between each turbine was had been sufficient.

 “The new guidelines, explained to residents earlier this spring, significantly cut the number of possible turbines that could be constructed.”

Banner’s residents have been left frustrated and disillusioned by the Air Force’s new guidelines. “This resource is just there, ready to be used,” one Banner landowner said. “”How do we walk away from that?” Read the full story by The Flat Water Free Press here.  https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-nebraska-county-of-only-625-people-contained-nearly-100-deep-underground-nuclear-missiles-so-the-us-air-force-halted-a-green-power-project-that-would-have-revitalized-its-economy/ar-AA126fRl?li=BBnbcA1

September 22, 2022 Posted by | renewable, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

NuScale Faces Class Action Lawsuit Brought by Former Employees

  https://www.wweek.com/news/courts/2022/09/20/nuscale-faces-class-action-lawsuit-lawsuit-brought-by-former-employees/   By Lucas Manfield, September 20, 2022

Former employees of NuScale, a Tigard company that designs nuclear reactors, have filed suit in U.S. District Court in Portland, alleging the company denied them $100 million in proceeds when it went public earlier this year.

NuScale began trading under the ticker symbol SMR after a merger with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company in May. It was valued at nearly $1.9 billion, thanks to its innovative nuclear reactor design, which was recently greenlit by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The company emerged from research at Oregon State University.

The lawsuit is being brought by 13 former employees who allege that the company diluted the value of their stock without their approval using an “unlawful amendment” to an agreement between them and company. It’s similar to a lawsuit filed earlier this year, before NuScale went public, but this version is a class action on behalf of at least 600 shareholders.

They’re asking for $200 million in damages, along with the return of the money lost in the dilution.

After nearly going broke, NuScale’s founders sold a majority of the company to the Texas-based multinational conglomerate Fluor Corporation for $3.5 million in 2011. Fluor is named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

“They’re screwing the employees of the company,” says Timothy DeJong of the Stoll Berne law firm, who represents the former employees, most of whom were once NuScale executives.

NuScale released a statement to WW saying the “claims are without merit” and promised to defend itself in “the appropriate forum.” Fluor did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

September 22, 2022 Posted by | legal, USA | Leave a comment

US Media Held Murdered Russian Journalist to a Dangerous Standard

Whether or not one agrees with what they are saying, journalists of every nationality deserve protection from those who would use violence to silence them.

FAIR, LUCA GOLDMANSOUR, 23 Sept 22

After the August 20 car-bomb assassination of Darya Dugina, the daughter of a Russian ultranationalist political philosopher, US media outlets quickly branded the 29-year-old as an agent in Russia’s “disinformation war.” Rather than treating her as a member of the civilian press, they seemed to downplay her death as a casualty of war.

CNN (8/27/22) ran an article to this effect, failing to characterize her murder as an assassination, instead stating Dugina was “on the front lines” of Russia’s war effort, linking her to “Russia’s vast disinformation machine.” NPR (8/24/22) reported that  Dugina was a “Russian propagandist” whose killing signaled the war was coming to Russian elites in their own territory. Foreign Policy (8/26/22) called Dugina a “dead propagandist” whose “martyrdom” did more to achieve her goals in death than she could have hoped for in life.

It is certainly true that during her life, Dugina, who espoused the philosophy of Russian Eurasianism, an expansionist political doctrine veiled as an objective analysis of Russian interests, had very little impact on Western audiences. This is true of most Russian journalists, despite the frequent warnings in US corporate media about the threat posed by Russian media messages. For instance, RT, often considered the foremost Russian outlet in the West, accounted for only 0.04% of Britain’s total viewing audience in 2017 (New Statesman, 2/25/22), and reached about 0.6% of the UK’s online population from February 2021 to the start of 2022—and this was before Western media platforms sharply restricted access to RT and other pro-Moscow outlets in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.

Far more prevalent for Western viewers is the constant barrage of pro-NATO, pro-Western propaganda that vastly overstates the significance of Russian disinformation. Such was the case when CNN noted that Dugina ran a “disguised English-language online platform that pushed a pro-Kremlin worldview to Western readers.” By “disguised,” CNN is suggesting that the site she worked for, United World International, engaged in outright deception by not disclosing its Russian origins—much like CNN does not describe itself as a US-based outlet, but rather as a “world leader in online news and information.”

Whether UWI is purposefully misleading or not, CNN‘s underlying assumption is that Western audiences are so fickle that the most minimal exposure to pro-Kremlin viewpoints represents a threat to national security. It’s this stance that turns journalists with foreign ideologies into the equivalent of enemy combatants.

If CNN thinks disclosure is what separates journalism from propaganda, it might have disclosed the biases of the sources it used to contextualize Dugina’s murder. The article mostly relied on information from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and the Center for European Policy Analysis, both of which are “used to promote the information interests of the US-centralized power alliance in Europe and North America” (Transcend.org, 9/5/22) and are funded by the US government, European allied nations and weapons manufacturers.

Whether or not one agrees with what they are saying, journalists of every nationality deserve protection from those who would use violence to silence them. So when CNN or other Western media downplay the assassination of Dugina on the grounds that she spread Russian propaganda, or even disinformation, that supported a war of aggression and other war crimes, they are setting a standard that puts their own colleagues at risk. (The exceptionalism that holds that US institutions can avoid the consequences faced by others is, of course, a central pillar of US propaganda.)

US corporate media have a long track record of advocating for illegal US aggression while knowingly parroting their government’s false pretenses. The New York Times, for instance, hasn’t opposed a US war since its tacit disapproval of Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983 (FAIR.org, 8/23/17). The Times advocated for the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (8/8/01, 2/12/03); the CIA’s attempted regime change in Syria (8/26/13); and US drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia (2/6/13). With the body count from these conflicts far surpassing that of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, how would the assassination of a New York Times editorial board member differ from Dugina’s murder? Aside, of course, from the fact that Dugina supported Washington’s geopolitical adversary…………………….. more https://fair.org/home/us-media-held-murdered-russian-journalist-to-a-dangerous-standard/

September 22, 2022 Posted by | civil liberties, media, USA | Leave a comment

Nuclear Weapon Development and Manufacturing Needs More Cybersecurity, Watchdog Says

Next Gov, By Kirsten Errick,.Tech Reporter, SEPTEMBER 23, 2022

The National Nuclear Security Administration, its contractors and subcontractors need to take cyber steps, according to a new report.

As the National Nuclear Security Administration and its contractors increasingly utilize advanced computers and digital systems to “integrate information systems into nuclear weapons, automate manufacturing equipment and rely on computer modeling to design weapons,” it needs to implement foundational cybersecurity risk management because these systems can be targets of cybersecurity attacks, according to a report released on Thursday.

The Government Accountability Office report noted that federal law and policies identify six practices for a cybersecurity management program. These practices are as follows: “identify and assign cybersecurity roles and responsibilities for risk management”; “establish and maintain a cybersecurity risk management strategy for the organization”; “document and maintain policies and plans for the cybersecurity program”; assess and update organization-wide cybersecurity risks”; designate controls that are available for information systems or programs to inherit”; and “develop and maintain a strategy to monitor risks continuously across the organization.” 

However, GAO found that NNSA and its contractors have not fully implemented these key cybersecurity practices. NNSA has three types of technology or digital environments: traditional informational technology, operational technology and nuclear weapons information technology. GAO stated that NNSA has not fully implemented the cybersecurity practices in its operational technology and nuclear weapons information technology environments………………………………………….

GAO made nine recommendations for NNSA. For example, GAO suggested that the agency should fully implement a continuous cybersecurity monitoring strategy; determine the resources needed for operational technology efforts; delegate risk management roles and responsibilities; develop a nuclear weapons risk strategy; enhance oversight and monitoring of subcontractor cybersecurity. ….  https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2022/09/nuclear-weapon-development-and-manufacturing-needs-more-cybersecurity-watchdog-says/377578/

September 22, 2022 Posted by | safety, USA | Leave a comment

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