Readers disgusted with pro militarism report on Australia getting a “missiles industry”.
‘Hugely significant’: Australia to manufacture and export missiles to US’ (SMH)
‘Australia to manufacture and export missiles to US and others’ (9 News)
‘US to help Australia develop guided missiles by 2025’ (Aljazeera)
Above are just a few of the rapturous headlines in the print media. Then the joyous Australian TV and radio media – orgasmic delight at Australia’s new subservience to USA militarism.
BUT – by today – 204 comments on thed Sydney Morning Herald’s delighted article by Matthew Knott. July 28, 2023. Yes quite a few comments rejoicing in the prospect of the missiles industry . BUT the overwhelming majority of commentators were disgusted. Below are some of the comments.
Australia will be the front line in a US war with China
And make Australia a target for attacks un-necessarily ? Australia should NOT be drawn into any activity that is war-like in nature. We are a peaceful country that should not be militarily engaged in other nations issues. Sure we can have a voice BUT NOT ACT MILITARILY .. If the Americans want to stick their nose in other nation’s affairs, so be it .. Don’t drag us in militarily !!!
We voted Labor and they are throwing any semblance of autonomy we had away.Terrible idea !We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
The Syrian war and Ukraine wars have generated 10 million refugees who have fled into the rest of Europe. The South China Sea has 200 million people living within 10 km of the coastline. Australians were easily convinced to turn back the boats and create a cruel offshore detention program all for the expediency of the LNP’s re election. The obsession with contributing to the US led arms race and the insistence of provoking a war over Taiwan will inevitably lead to our shiny new missiles and military arsenal being used as an expediency to turn back the thousands of boats
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ?
More military lunacy.
We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ?
We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ?As Fraser said, we should have got out of Anzus at the end of the Cold War. Seems now we’re more captured by the US’s foreign policy agenda than ever before.
For Labor it’s clearly about the domestic optics. They want to be seen as the tough guy on military and defence matters, so long that being the Coalition’s political play.
Because of Morrison, and no Choice. We ended up with ALBO the United States Cheerleader.
Albo will NOT
provide leadership and he will not provide intellectual input in the following areas;
•‘Made a public call for building an autonomous Australia in a persistent attempt to shake off Australia’s shackles and prove that it is not the vassal of The United States.
•that Australia should be one pole of multipolarity with its own independent position to serve its own interests, and cannot be a vassal of other forces,
•When dealing with its relations with the US, it is hoped that Australia can truly safeguard its own core interests and get rid of the shackles the US has placed on it in the fields of economy, trade, ideology and even security,
Finally he has no idea on how to make Australia a world class manufacturing hub as declared in his election policy speech.
I’d much rather see Australia manufacturing things like solar panels and wind turbines and exporting them to the rest of the world to help tackle the growing threat of global climate change. Instead we focus on weapons and the machinery of war. Strange priorities from a Labor government…..disappointing really!
Big cheers for this ‘Hugely significant’!!! We finally became like North Korea, soon we will be able to replace New Year celebrations with real deadly missiles.
With the added bonus for politicians: whenever they make a mess they just fire missiles to distract the electorates … and at the same time it would be ‘Hugely Great’. The Rednecks and war mongers will be cheering all the way … it’s win win… well done Albo
We are being conned.
Can we go back to making cars. At least they were useful.
Missiles are for war.
Unless we agree to annilate all Mankind we are walking down the wrong path.
In a car you can go somewhere.
And so the violence industry marches on. By setting such an example is it little wonder there is so much killing & maiming in the world today?
So now new funding just extending the Morrison/Dutton Missile manufacturing policy announced in 2021?
Will it be like the F18 program all over again – assembling kits from the US? How much will the taxpayer subsidise the program?
So we’ve been sold out to the military industrial complex and will become fully integrated into the US War machine as the US makes its last ditch attempt to maintain its global hegemony and it control over the pacific region.
We are being marched into WWIII by the crazy neo cons in the USA and we are too blind to see it, chanting USA, USA, USA as we are led like lambs to the slaughter.
Unbelievable.
How are we a ‘peaceful country’ – name a war we HAVEN’T been involved in! We’re sycophants, hiding under the US’s skirt.
After being a gigantic quarry for so many years, our new major export industry will be providing weapons of war.
This is shameful. Surely we have the intelligence and foresight to do better than this.
Unbelievable.
After being a gigantic quarry for so many years, our new major export industry will be providing weapons of war.
This is shameful. Surely we have the intelligence and foresight to do better than this.
This is a step up from days of Lithgow Small-Arms .303s and these days, our Bushmasters. We’ll just be making them here to another nation’s specs & IP, all for the promise of jobs.
Blinken & Bush: “We have no greater friend, no greater partner, no greater ally than Australia.
A charm offensive that Albanese must take heed.
We import foods & goods from our neighbours for survival only for them to be killed by our missiles. How gross!
While the US and Australia are incessantly focusing on arms and the military in the Pacific, China’s hospital ship, the Peace Ark is in Tonga and will depart Nuku’alofa on 4 August 2023. It will also visit Kiribati, Vanuatu, Solomons Islands and Timor-Leste during its mission. The ‘Peace Ark’, on her third goodwill visit to Tonga on a humanitarian medical mission from 28 July to 4 August 2023.
So which country is doing more for the people in the Pacific?
American owned, designed, parts supplied. We are just like a 3rd world country assembling stuff, all profits going offshore with no tax paid. What a waste………… And paying for the privilege
And another target added to the growing number of American bases.
..and what about all the bs about becoming self-sustaining after the pandemic when we saw how reliant we are on imports? Or this is suddenly irrelevant? They need a Royal Commission into the capabilities of Australia when another and worse pandemic hits. Oh, I can write the summary now “We will be stuffed – starvation, no drugs, no products”. But yes, focus on warheads. Made with Australian metal I hope? Stick some kangaroo prints on it so when it is dug out of children we can be proud.
Yes, “assembled ‘Down Under’ from imported components subject to our strict specifications so you can rest assured that when you get hit by a genuine ‘Aussie’ missile it’s gonna hurt”…………….. Exactly! How gullible we are to trust the Americans? It’s unbelievable!
Now imagine if an LNP government announced we were making killing things for Uncle Sam. You’d never hear the end of it. Oh the hypocrisy.
Nice not, when we have industry again it is all about weapons and destruction.
What have we become? So we are not making products that will make our life easier and more comfortable? We are not making tools and machines to facilitate our normal daily activities? We are no building metro lines to reduce commute times? We are not making electric vehicles to reduce carbon emissions? Yet we are going to making missiles for wars that will kill human beings. What a weird sense of priority we’ve got ???
Lloyd Austin moved from the board of Raytheon to Secretary of Defence. Is it any wonder we are now getting sucked into arms manufacturing a cycle of endless wars, which is a bona fide policy of the US. We need to be much more discerning than “all the way with Uncle Sam” this is a very poor sign of our priorities, and the “jobs and growth” mantra has been taken from the liberal playbook to justify this stupid and dangerous choice.
So the plan is to continue a longstanding trend to make us even more financially and militarily dependent on foreigners right?
“Sydneysiders are aghast at the level of gun violence breaking out. On to happier news, Australia is going to create its very own missile manufacturing plants”.RESPECT8
We’re being used again, it won’t be to our advantage everything the US does is for theirs.
We are their lapdog.
The anti-China brigade in Canberra is pushing hard to get Labor to think China wants to go to war & so we have to be closely allied with the US.
NO it is the USA that always wants to go to war – look how many we’ve followed them into and look at China, only min-wars or skirmishes on their borders, never ever far afield.
I think this idea stinks.
ALP – American Lapdog Party
What is hugely significant is Albo’s lost his marbles.
No way. To restore our manufacturing capacity, I’d rather prefer we start making electric vehicles and solar panels, not missiles.
We’re becoming completely dependant upon the American military machine. AUKUS are about all our government seems to care about anymore. Meanwhile… over 1 million young people are living in poverty and koalas are going extinct. It’s all about priorities and it’s 100% obvious what and who our leaders are working for and it ain’t the people or the country. With friends like Labor, who needs Liberals?
Who cares what Simon Birmingham thinks, or says.
He represents a government that made defence decisions that were more photo-op than substance; cancelled the SEA1000 project that put us squarely into the ship-building “Valley of Death” that the COALition hyperventilated over; failed abysmally in both defence and foreign policy, all the while telling us what absolute standouts they were in government.
It was the COALition that left us with this mess called AUKUS.
I can’t see us receiving nuclear-powered submarines, despite the efforts to push through with AUKUS. At some point, the taxpayers of Australia will simply say “enough!” The options being offered are far too expensive.
“US defence contracting giants Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have been selected by the government as preferred partners for its guided weapons and explosive ordnance enterprise“. The Hawkei is made by Prime contractors including Thales Australia (French) Boeing (US) Plasan (Israel). The Virginia submarines are designed and built by US General Dynamics Electric Boat (EB) and Huntington Ingalls Industries. Virtually all military equipment purchased or being built in Australia by foreign, usually US companies. Australia is feeding overseas military complexes, not developing anything new.
A gigantic error from the government here. The only priorities here are for shareholders of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. The US are always looking for the next endless war. History repeating itself over and over. We will be used as pawns between the US and China.
Australia – an international nuclear wasteland?
By Richard Broinowski, Jul 29, 2023 https://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/commentary/to-avoid-nuclear-instability-a-moratorium-on-integrating-ai-into-nuclear-decision-making-is-urgently-needed-the-npt-prepcom-can-serve-as-a-springboard/
The spectre of an international nuclear waste dump in Australia hangs over AUKUS and what this secretive agreement commits Australia to. Does it oblige us simply to dispose of spent nuclear reactors from our submarines if and when we get them? Or is there a hidden agenda whereby we also take the expired nuclear reactors from US and British submarines? If so, could it lead to Australia becoming a dump for high-level waste from civil nuclear reactors around the world?
Crikey.com is the latest to set speculative hares running. On 26 July it published an article by David Hardaker claiming the Albanese government had struck a secret deal under AUKUS to build a high-grade nuclear waste facility in Australia. Crikey claimed the deal has echoes that resound from 26 years ago.
Indeed it does. In December 1998, a proposal was made by Jim Voss, an American nuclear evangelist, who through his company Pangea proposed constructing an international nuclear waste repository on Billa Kalina, a pastoral lease near Roxby Downs in South Australia. Roxby Downs is a town built to service the giant BHP uranium, gold, copper and silver mine at Olympic Dam. Water for the town and the mine comes from Australia’s Great Artesian Basin.
As I wrote in Fact or Fission – the truth about Australia’s nuclear ambitions (Scribe 2003 and 2022), Voss’s proposal was leaked to the public by Friends of the Earth. Pangea was flying a kite on behalf of Anglo-American and possibly other nuclear interests. It made the unassailable observation that there is a real risk of nuclear weapons proliferation through the theft of plutonium or highly enriched uranium from nuclear power programs. Voss proposed a nuclear waste dump in Western Australia to take about a quarter of the high-level waste from the 445 commercial power reactors in 30 countries around the globe.
This, he claimed, would achieve several things – support international efforts to reduce nuclear weapons proliferation, further the objectives of nuclear disarmament, strengthen Australia’s relations with the United States, protect the global environment, and support the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the United Nations. How all this would happen he didn’t say.
Such a repository has also been a gleam in the eyes of the Australian nuclear lobby and several politicians for many years. In 2006, John Howard’s Nuclear Review sought to expand Australia’s nuclear footprint by making nuclear power ‘a practical option’ in Australia’s electricity production. He also envisioned an international nuclear waste dump somewhere in the Outback. In 2014, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, supported by then South Australian Premier Adam Giles, proposed to put a high-level nuclear waste depository at Muckaty Station north of Tennant Creek in South Australia. Hawke said the money earned would be of immense value to indigenous communities.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott had similar aspirations. So did Malcolm Turnbull, who in 2015 suggested that Australia should not just export uranium oxide (U3O8), but enrich it, process it into fuel rods, retain Australian ownership by leasing the rods abroad, and take them back as spent fuel for permanent disposal in Australia. That way, he said, Australia retained ownership of the uranium, preventing it from being diverted into clandestine weapons programs.
None of these proposals resulted in practical action. Except for qualified acceptance of the export of Australian yellowcake under safeguards to approved civil nuclear energy companies, the Australian public maintained an aversion to all things nuclear. The earlier careless disposal of nuclear tailings at Radium Hill, the contemptuous and ineffective clean-up of highly toxic plutonium in the aftermath of Britain’s nuclear tests at Emu Field and Maralinga in the 1950s, and French nuclear tests in the Pacific in the 1990s, all consolidated Australians’ aversion.
Following negative public reactions to his proposal, Voss quietly closed his Pangea office In January 2002 and retreated to Europe. But several years later, he was given renewed hope.
In 2016, the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission under former South Australian governor Kevin Scarce concluded that although nuclear energy in Australia would not be economically viable for the immediate future, research should continue regarding the feasibility of an international spent fuel repository.
Voss returned to Australia in 2022, and took over the optimistically-named Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation in Melbourne. Safe disposal of nuclear waste remained on his agenda. According to Crikey, Voss reckons very deep boreholes of around three to five kilometres could safely incarcerate spent fuel from the reactors of Australia’s nuclear-powered submarines for thousands of years.
Could such a storage facility attract US or British attention? Could their governments pressure Australia to take their own submarine spent fuel reactors as well as those of Australia?
They have strong motives to do so. Around 90 British spent fuel submarine reactors are said to be lying around Devonport Docks in Plymouth and the Rosyth dock in Fife, safeguarded only at huge expense. The US Navy has many more in open trenches at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State. There are plans to process and store their transuranic elements somewhere permanently, but the Yukka Mountain Deep Geological repository in Nevada was de-funded in 2010, and has been subject to complex political manoeuvring ever since.
Given Albanese’s and Marles’ supine acceptance of US conditions to keep the reactors from our own submarines after their service lives, they could also easily be leant on to take US and UK used submarine reactors as well.
Could this in turn lead to Voss’s grand vision of Australia becoming a spent fuel repository for the international nuclear industry? Since we cannot even decide on the location of a repository for low-level nuclear waste from hospitals and materials testing laboratories, let alone places for intermediate and high-level waste, such an expansion seems a pipe dream. But we must not under-estimate the persistence of the Australian nuclear industry or its backers in Federal and State parliaments and in the Murdoch press.
There’s no such thing as a new nuclear golden age–just old industry hands trying to make a buck
FORTUNE, BY STEPHANIE COOKE, July 29, 2023 Since the turn of the millennium, at least $50 billion has been spent on a frantic effort to create a new Golden Age for nuclear energy in the U.S. Billions more are being lavished on an even more desperate effort to launch small reactors as supposedly safer, cheaper alternatives to yesteryear’s elephant-sized versions. Most of the money comes from ratepayers and taxpayers, accompanied by an avalanche of public relations that rivals the 1950s “Atoms for Peace” campaign with its claims of “too cheap to meter” electricity.
So far, the effort has produced little in tangible assets: roughly one gigawatt of capacity from the Watts Bar-2 reactor completed after decades of on-and-off-again construction and the promise of 2 GW from the long-delayed Plant Vogtle in Georgia. So far, not a single molecule of CO2 emissions has been avoided by a new reactor, and the primary beneficiaries are not the people who paid but publicly-owned utilities, reactor design companies, and PR and law firms. They are part of a chorus of advocacy groups and government agencies, led by the Department of Energy (DOE), advancing the idea that low-carbon nuclear is essential to any long-term climate change solution.
The story is selling well but the push for more and more money—in direct subsidies, ratepayer financing, and government grants or loans–has a dark side. To cite just a few examples, former state officials and utility executives in Illinois and Ohio face lengthy prison terms for bribery schemes linked to subsidies for unprofitable nuclear plants. In South Carolina, two former Scana executives received prison sentences after pleading guilty to criminal charges in 2020 and 2021 over a nuclear project that ultimately collapsed. Two Westinghouse executives also charged are facing a similar fate, with one still awaiting trial in October.
When it comes to costs and schedules, the lack of honesty surrounding nuclear projects is often breathtaking. In Georgia, where two Westinghouse reactors at Vogtle have been under construction since 2009, only one is completed and is now struggling to achieve commercial operation after multiple unplanned reactor and turbine trips, according to recent Georgia Public Service Commission staff testimony. That testimony also included allegations that utility executives have been providing “materially inaccurate” cost estimates over the project’s life. Vogtle’s estimated total $33 billion cost, as outlined in the testimony, versus $13.3 billion originally estimated makes it the most expensive power plant ever built in the United States. Most of the tab is being footed by ratepayers, with the US taxpayer, via DOE, providing $12 billion in loans.
And still, the messaging that nuclear is a must for reducing emissions goes on at a fever pitch. But the message is distorted: The industry cannot deliver what is needed. The U.S. lost its industrial base, including heavy forging capacity, decades ago–and the costs of a major nuclear buildout could now be in the trillions.
Moreover, the billions currently being spent on nuclear are crowding out viable, less costly solutions for decarbonizing the power sector (not only renewables such as wind and power but also high-voltage direct current transmission lines to deliver them to where they’re needed), thus slowing the transition. A surfeit of renewables projects is seeking grid access, enough to meet 90% of the Biden administration’s goal of a carbon-free power sector by 2035, according to a Berkeley Lab report, but the country’s Balkanized electricity market system, monopolistic utilities, and lack of adequate transmission capacity will likely prevent most of it from succeeding.
The transmission capacity needed for renewables will require anywhere from $30 billion to $90 billion to meet demand by 2030, with the figures rising to $200 billion to $600 billion between 2030 and 2050, according to a study by the Brattle Group. Squandering such sums on nuclear should be out of the question.
Our current fleet of 92 reactors generates about a fifth of the nation’s electricity, but most of the plants are slated for permanent closure by 2050, assuming they operate well beyond their 40-year design life. The DOE admits that such “life extensions” put operators in uncharted waters because there is no actual experience to support 60- or 80-year reactor lifetimes.
The problem of where to put used nuclear fuel (radioactive waste) remains after funding was withdrawn for an estimated $100 billion underground repository project at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Proposed privately-owned interim storage sites in New Mexico and Texas, though licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, face intense local and state opposition as well as political obstacles at the federal level.
Industry officials privately acknowledge these challenges. Even so, nuclear is receiving the most favorable media coverage since the 1950s, and the latest annual Gallup poll on nuclear, released in April, showed the highest level of support in a decade for nuclear power among the American public–at 55%. Nuclear opponents in Congress are now silent on the issue or even hinting at changed views, and bipartisan support in Congress has over the past couple of years resulted in billions in tax incentives and other forms of support for both existing and planned nuclear plants.
But public opinion is fickle–and no guarantee for the future. Since Gallup began polling on nuclear in 1994, support peaked at 62% in 2010, a year before the triple meltdowns at Fukushima. After that, it went steadily down, to a low of 44% in 2016. Nor is popular opinion an indicator of whether nuclear’s formidable technical, financial, environmental, and geopolitical challenges can be overcome.
The primary aims of today’s promoters are to prevent aging, uneconomic reactors from closing, and to secure funding for small modular reactors (SMRs) and “advanced” reactors (and associated fuels).
The push for smaller reactors appears to have been an act of desperation by a nuclear-centric energy agency–the DOE (which also oversees the country’s nuclear weapons programs)—after its failed attempt to create a nuclear “renaissance” in the early 2000s. Although that project generated interest (utilities filed plans for 28 large-scale reactors), only the two at Vogtle were ever built………………………………………………………………………………………
It’s hard to see how any of the nuclear hype becomes real unless Congress is ready to ignore market signals, nationalize the electricity sector, and rebuild an industrial infrastructure that disappeared decades ago. https://fortune.com/2023/07/28/no-new-nuclear-golden-age-just-old-industry-hands-trying-to-make-a-buck-energy-politics-stephanie-cooke/
Funny How The UFO Narrative Coincides With The Race To Weaponize Space
does it really sound like a coincidence that we’re seeing all these news stories about UFOs and aliens at the same time we’re seeing news stories about a race between the US and China and Russia to dominate space militarily?
Caitlin’s Newsletter CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, JUL 28, 2023
If Wednesday’s House Oversight subcommittee hearing on UFOs had happened ten years ago instead of today, it would have shaken the world. Imagine someone from 2013 hearing congressional testimonies about “routine” military pilot encounters with giant flying tic tacs, floating orbs, 300-foot red squares, and cubes in clear spheres zipping around in ways that surpass all known earthly technology by leaps and bounds, or about secret government possession of otherworldly aircraft they’re trying to reverse engineer and the dead bodies of their non-human pilots, or about the possibility that these creatures are not merely extraterrestrial but extra-dimensional. Their jaws would have hit the floor.
Now in 2023 we’ve been getting incrementally drip-fed bits and pieces of these stories for six years, so the scene on Capitol Hill on Wednesday didn’t have the impact it would’ve had in 2013. It’s making headlines and getting attention, but not as much as Sinead O’Connor’s death or people’s thoughts on Barbie and Oppenheimer. The response from the general public could be described as a collective nervous laugh and a shrug.
……………………………………………………. the new UFO narrative wasn’t just cooked up at the last minute to distract from current headlines, it’s been unfolding for six years, and people aren’t even paying that much attention to it. The empire doesn’t tend to orchestrate spectacular events as a “distraction” anyway; the adjustment of public attention tends to take the much more mundane form of agenda setting in the media, where some stories receive more attention than others based on what’s convenient for the oligarchs who own the press.
……………………………………. for me what really stinks about all this UFO stuff is the timing. Here we are in the early stages of a new cold war which features a race to militarize space, and we’re hearing congressional testimony about mysterious vehicles posing a threat to US airspace which have the ability to go up and down between earth and space very quickly. That smells off.
I mean, does it really sound like a coincidence that we’re seeing all these news stories about UFOs and aliens at the same time we’re seeing news stories about a race between the US and China and Russia to dominate space militarily?
A Foreign Policy article from last year blares the headline “China and Russia Are Catching Up to U.S. in Space Capabilities, Pentagon Warns” with the subheading “The militarization of space is picking up pace.” These warnings are echoed in articles by Defense One and Time. An article on the United Nations website from last year carries the title “‘We Have Not Passed the Point of No Return’, Disarmament Committee Told, Weighing Chance Outer Space Could Become Next Battlefield.” A 2021 report from the war machine-funded Center for Strategic and International Studies titled “Defense Against the Dark Arts in Space: Protecting Space Systems from Counterspace Weapons” warns of the urgent need to build more space weapons to counter US enemies. A Global Times article from last year carries the title “Chinese experts urge avoidance of space weaponization amid commercial space capability deployment in Ukraine.”
………………………………….it just seems mighty suspicious to me how we’re being slowly paced into this UFO narrative (or UAP narrative for those hip to the current jargon) right when there’s a mad rush to get weapons into space. I can’t actually think of any other point in history when the timing of something like this would have looked more suspicious.
So for me the most disturbing parts of the UFO hearing were the parts that could wind up facilitating the agenda to militarize space, like when this phenomenon was framed as a “national security” threat or when it was mentioned that they can transition from earth to space very rapidly.
When asked by congressman Glenn Grothman “do you believe UAPs pose a threat to our national security?”, former Navy commander David Fravor answered with an unequivocal yes. A few minutes later Fravor described these vehicles as being able to “come down from space, hang out for three hours and go back up.”
When asked by congressman Andy Ogles whether UFOs could be “collecting reconnaissance information” on the US military, all three witnesses — Grusch, Fravor, and former Navy pilot Ryan Graves — answered in the affirmative. Asked by Ogles if UFOs could be “probing our capabilities,” all three again said yes. Asked if UFOs could be “testing for vulnerabilities” in US military capabilities, all three again said yes. Asked if UFOs pose an existential threat to the national security of the United States, all three said they potentially do. Asked if there was any indication that UFOs are interested in US nuclear technology, all three said yes.
Ogles concluded his questioning by saying, “There clearly is a threat to the national security of the United States of America. As members of Congress, we have a responsibility to maintain oversight and be aware of these activities so that, if appropriate, we take action.”
When asked by congressman Eric Burlison if “there has been activity by alien or non-human technology, and/or beings, that has caused harm to humans,” Grusch said he couldn’t get into specifics in a public setting (a common theme throughout the hearing), but said that “what I personally witnessed, myself and my wife, was very disturbing.”
Grusch would complicate this cryptic statement a few minutes later by saying that he’s never seen a UFO. How this statement doesn’t contradict his previous statement about having witnessed harmful behavior from non-human technology and/or beings was not made clear.
So you’ve got US policymakers being told that there are vehicles using technology not of this world routinely violating US airspace and posing an existential threat to US national security, and that these craft can go from earth to space and back at will, and that they need to help make sure their nation can address this threat.
What conclusions do you come to when presented with that kind of information? If you’re a lawmaker in charge of facilitating the operation of a highly militaristic empire, you’re probably not going to conclude that it’s time to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. You’re probably eventually going to start thinking in terms of military technology.
One of the most important unanswered questions in all this UFO hullabaloo is, why now? Why are we seeing all this movement on “disclosure” after generations of zero movement? If these things are in fact real and the government has in fact been keeping them secret, why would the adamant policy of dismissal and locked doors suddenly be reversed, allowing “whistleblowers” to come forward and give testimony before congress? If they had motive to keep it a secret this entire time, why would that motive no longer be there?
…………………………………So why now? Why the drastic and sudden shift from UFOs and aliens being laughable tinfoil hat nonsense to the subject of serious congressional inquiries and widespread mainstream media coverage?
Well, the timing of the race to militarize space might provide an answer to the “why now?” question. Is it a coincidence that this new UFO narrative began its rollout in 2017, around the same time as the rollout of the Space Force? Are we being manipulated at mass scale about aliens and UFOs to help grease the wheels for the movement of war machinery into space? How likely is it that by pure coincidence this extraplanetary narrative timed out the way it did just as the US empire makes a last-ditch grab at unipolar planetary domination?
I don’t know. I do know that if I’m assigning degrees of probability, “Extraterrestrial or extradimensional beings are here and take a special interest in us and sometimes crash their vehicles and our government recovered them but kept them a secret but suddenly decided not to be so secretive about them anymore” ranks significantly lower than “Our rulers are lying and manipulating to advance their own interests again.”
I am 100 percent wide open to the possibility of extraterrestrials and otherworldly vehicles zipping around our atmosphere. What I am not open to is the claim that the most depraved institutions on earth have suddenly opened their mind to telling us the truth about these things, either out of the goodness of their hearts or because they were “pressured” by UFO disclosure activists.
I don’t know what the hell is going on with this UFO thing, but I do know the drivers of the US empire have an extensive history of manipulating and deceiving at mass scale to advance imperial agendas. And I do know that at this crucial juncture in history where the empire is clinging to planetary domination with the tips of its fingernails, there are a lot of imperial agendas afoot. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/funny-how-the-ufo-narrative-coincides?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=135494785&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
‘Era of global boiling has arrived,’ says UN chief
‘Era of global boiling has arrived,’ says UN chief as July set to be
hottest month on record. The era of global warming has ended and “the era
of global boiling has arrived”, the UN secretary general, António
Guterres, has said after scientists confirmed July was on track to be the
world’s hottest month on record.
Guardian 27th July 2023
TODAY. Jobs! jobs! jobs! – IN THE DEATH INDUSTRY
Quite suddenly, any vestige of Australia being an independent country has disappeared overnight.
An entire continent has been handed over to the American military machine, by Australia’s cowardly and self-serving politicians.
And the Australian media exultantly choruses “ Jobs! Jobs ! Jobs! “
I have often wondered why that chorus is repeated endlessly – in awed, religious, joy?
If you work in a caring industry, or in nurturing animals, plants, the environment, in growing food or in one of the many jobs that support life – you can derive some pride in your work. It’s good to be paid some money, but it’s especially good to be able to derive some dignity, self-respect, genuine joy, in knowing that you are genuinely contributing to well-being – to the common good.
It’s a matter of integrity – dare I mention this? – some spiritual satisfaction. You can hold your head up high.
Where is the integrity in making killing machines, things for massacring thousands of people, destroying the land and animals?
And just to make sure that the Americans really mean it, we have the odious Antony Blinken now emphasising that the USA will certainly punish our courageous Australian truth-teller Julian Assange.
PM Albanese, and wimp Foreign Minister Penny Wong just kow tow and agree!
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 