Antinuclear

Dutton’s nuclear option would condemn us to pricey power and blackouts.

Simon Holmes à Court, Businessman and political activist, March 6, 2024 ,
https://www.theage.com.au/national/dutton-s-nuclear-option-condemns-us-to-pricey-power-and-blackouts-20240306-p5fa99.html

 Australia’s climate wars will not end – to paraphrase former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull – until the Coalition chooses engineering and economics over ideology and idiocy.

Over the past two decades, the Coalition has made a series of look-over-there attempts to prolong the life of coal: first carbon capture and storage, then HELE (High Efficiency, Low Emissions) “clean coal”, followed by the “gas-fired recovery” and now small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). Not one was a serious proposal backed by analytic rigour. All were just fig leaves to cover embarrassingly small policies.

By proposing we turn to nuclear, the Coalition signals loudly that it does not understand Australia’s massive natural advantages. We have the world’s most abundant wind and solar resources, putting us on track to produce the world’s cheapest energy. Blend our clean-energy advantages with our abundant reserves of critical minerals and add a generous dollop of nation-building vision and Australia can deliver great prosperity to its citizens.

In a decarbonising 21st century, Australia is well placed to be a winner. We can become a clean-energy superpower. Yet the Coalition’s blinkered vision and political gamesmanship would see us squander this great country’s unparalleled natural advantage.

Some might be surprised that I have a deep interest in nuclear energy. In recent years, I’ve visited five nuclear power stations and met four companies hoping to build SMRs. I’ve attended a course on nuclear at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a nuclear conference in Dubai and met nuclear venture capitalists in New York.

I have no doubt there’s a strong and important role for nuclear power in parts of the world less well-endowed than Australia, and I can imagine that one day – if critical barriers are addressed – nuclear could even play a role in Australia.

Meanwhile, Australia’s energy transition continues apace. Twelve years ago, renewables made up just 10 per cent of the national electricity market. Today we’re at 39 per cent and the Australian Energy Market Operator’s biennial scenario plan projects that, just 12 years from now, 95 per cent of our power will come from renewables – wind and solar, firmed with storage and backed up with gas.

There are four key reasons that nuclear won’t play a role in our current energy transition.

First, there’s no conceivable pathway to seeing a single kilowatt-hour generated from nuclear before the early 2040s. Small modular reactors are years away from becoming a commercial reality. It’s quite possible they never will. Gigawatt-scale reactors are a safer bet. A pair I visited six months ago in Waynesboro, Georgia have taken 18 years from announcement to operation and each cost more than the combined valuation of Origin Energy, AGL and Energy Australia.

Of the four other nuclear projects commenced this century in Western Europe and North America, none were faster. Assuming the industry has learnt from all these mistakes, construction here could not begin until a proper regulator and regulatory system were stood up, a site selected, planning permissions granted, appeals lodged and dismissed, the project put out to tender, and the technology and suppliers selected and contracted. All doable, but no chance of the very first unit contributing to our energy mix before the vast majority of our aged coal fleet is long gone.

Second, nuclear cannot compete economically with our clean-energy resources. The CSIRO has calculated that an SMR starting construction in 2030 would produce power for $212–$353/MWh, while power from new wind and solar would cost $69-101/MWh. For the consumer, that translates to a 20c/kWh premium for nuclear. Larger nuclear reactors may produce cheaper power – or may not if recent UK experience is a guide – but there’s no credible sign that anything close to market could come close to any of AEMO’s least-cost pathways.

Third, the politics are currently intractable. A ban on nuclear power exists not only federally – introduced by the Howard government – but in each of the three states with sufficiently large grids: NSW, Victoria and Queensland. Nuclear could not be built without very significant government involvement, most likely as the proponent. Without bipartisan enthusiasm at all levels of government, no investor, let alone contractor, would touch Australia.

The Greens, who more often than not hold the balance of power in the Senate, object to nuclear. A critical mass within Labor is implacably opposed, and I suspect their strategists are delighted for the Coalition to speak about nuclear every day between now and the federal election. And while many in the Coalition’s base go gaga for nuclear, survey after survey shows that a significant number of their voters are uncomfortable with the technology.

Lastly, it will be technically difficult to shoehorn nuclear into our grid. Like coal, nuclear is designed – economically and technically – to stay switched on. Constant output is its sweet spot, yet the need for this output profile is dropping with every passing year. Modern grids value flexibility to meet the difference between variable renewable supply and consumer demand which is why there’s an ongoing boom in large grid battery construction projects in Australia.

March 8, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Is nuclear power a fix for climate change? Experts think it’s too dangerous

Because of the inevitable production of long-lived radioactive wastes, nuclear power cannot be defined as sustainable,”

“Because of the inevitable production of long-lived radioactive wastes, nuclear power cannot be defined as sustainable,”

Some climate activists are pushing for expanded nuclear power — most experts think the risk is too high

By MATTHEW ROZSA, Staff Writer, https://www.salon.com/2024/03/04/is-nuclear-power-a-fix-for-climate-change-experts-think-its-too/

As the climate crisis grows worse every year, alternative energy options are increasingly important. Much recent debate has focused on nuclear energy, which has an understandably troubled reputation after the disasters at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima, and is further tarnished by its association with the devastating potential of nuclear weapons. Nuclear energy is definitely “cleaner” than fossil fuels in terms of carbon emissions, but most experts Salon contacted were skeptical that it can offer a path to climate salvation. 

Some climate activists “promote nuclear power as a possibility to battle climate change,” said Nikolaus Muellner, a professor of safety and risk sciences at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. while others are eager “to avoid the risks associated with nuclear power.”

M.V. Ramana, a physicist at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and author of the upcoming book “Nuclear Is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change,” made clear in an email response to Salon that he falls into the latter camp. “If one evaluates nuclear energy as a way to deal with climate change,” Ramana said, it actually plays “a negative role in reducing emissions.”

There are two reasons for that, he continued: “First, the money invested in nuclear energy — even in the case of keeping old and possibly dangerous plants operational — would save far more carbon dioxide if it were invested in renewables and associated technologies.” So he sees “an economic opportunity cost to investing in nuclear energy.” Furthermore, building new nuclear reactors can take years or decades, compounding the opportunity cost, because “the reduction in emissions from alternative investments would not only be greater, but also quicker.”

Ramana also cited the “variety of risks and environmental impacts” associated with nuclear energy, including catastrophic accidents, the fact that fuel for nuclear power can be diverted to weapons programs, and the production of radioactive waste, which can remain hazardous to human health for thousands of years.

“Because of the inevitable production of long-lived radioactive wastes, nuclear power cannot be defined as sustainable,” Ramana said. As for accidents, he believes they are “inevitable … even with newer reactor designs,” and that the risk “is far higher than proponents of nuclear power admit.”

Also responding by email, Muellner offered a more nuanced and technical view, focusing on the much lower “calculated emission costs” of nuclear power generation compared to electricity generated with fossil fuels. Emissions over the life cycle of a nuclear plant, he said, “are of the same order of magnitude as life cycle emissions from renewable generated electricity.”

Still, Muellner did not deny that the environmental downsides are significant. “Nuclear power plants generate power by splitting uranium atoms — or, more precisely, nuclei — and the fragments of the split uranium are highly radioactive” and generate heat, he explained. In a severe accident such as the infamous Chernobyl disaster, that intense heat and radioactivity could “destroy the barriers that are designed to contain those fission products, the fission products could be released and large areas of land could become inhabitable.” Storing those dangerous fusion products, potentially for millennia into the future, “:is a highly challenging task.”

Benjamin K. Sovacool, director of the Institute for Global Sustainability at Boston University, sounded a similar note of caution, warning that “nuclear power has high future costs, made more expensive by accidents” and that the nuclear industry “still doesn’t have a solution to its waste problem.” Because the process of nuclear fission does not burn or oxidize anything, nearly all the fuel used in producing energy at nuclear plants becomes waste without reducing its mass.

“Typically, a single nuclear reactor will consume an average of 32,000 fuel rods over the course of its lifetime, and will also produce 20 to 30 tons of spent nuclear fuel per year,” Sovacool told Salon. That equates to “about 2,200 metric tons annually for the entire U.S. nuclear fleet, and almost 10,000 metric tons of high-level spent nuclear fuel” around the world. Most of that waste, he observed, is not reprocessed, and ends up stored on site at nuclear power plants, “because no community wishes to host long-term nuclear storage facilities.” Finding a final resting site for all that nuclear waste is “a pernicious problem in search of a solution,” and plans to build a permanent underground storage repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, “have been indefinitely suspended.”

It’s no surprise that states, regions or communities are less than eager to host nuclear waste storage facilities, Sovacool noted. “The nuclear fuel cycle involves some of the most hazardous elements known to humankind, including more than 100 dangerous radionuclides and carcinogens,” he said. “These are the same toxins found in the fallout from nuclear weapons.” 

Finally, there are the security risks of nuclear energy, also mentioned by Ramana. Several countries “have tried or succeeded in developing nuclear weapons under the guise of civilian nuclear weapons programs,” Sovacool said, quoting Nobel-winning physicist Hannes Alfven’s observation that “Atoms for peace and atoms for war are Siamese twins.” The four world nations with the largest nuclear reprocessing capacity, said Sovacool — those being Belgium, France, Germany and the U.K. — “have acknowledged that they possess at least 190 tons of separated plutonium,” enough material to manufacture more than 20,000 nuclear weapons.

“If we double the number of nuclear reactors worldwide,” Sovacool said, “we double the possibility that countries without nuclear weapons might obtain them. No other energy system has such an acute link to weapons of mass destruction.”

March 8, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The West has set itself on a path of collective suicide — both moral and economic.

the conjectured deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine – would provoke a military response from Moscow. The extreme risks of the ensuing hostilities spiraling out of control to the nuclear threshold are self-evident.

Michael Brenner: The West’s Reckoning? March 6, 2024,  https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/06/michael-brenner-the-wests-reckoning/

The West has set itself on a path of collective suicide — both moral and economic

Western leaders are experiencing two stunning events: defeat in Ukraine, genocide in Palestine. The first is humiliating, the other shameful. Yet, they feel no humiliation or shame. Their actions show vividly that those sentiments are alien to them – unable to penetrate the entrenched barriers of dogma, arrogance and deep-seated insecurities. The last are personal as well as political. Therein lies a puzzle.  For, as a consequence, the West has set itself on a path of collective suicide. Moral suicide in Gaza; diplomatic suicide – the foundations laid in Europe, the Middle East and across Eurasia; economic suicide – the dollar-based global financial system jeopardized, Europe deindustrializing. It is not a pretty picture. Astoundingly, this self-destruction is occurring in the absence of any major trauma – external or internal. Therein lies another, related puzzle.

Some clues for these abnormalities are provided by their most recent responses as deteriorating conditions tighten the vise – on emotions, on prevailing policies, on domestic political worries, on ginger egos. Those responses fall under the category of panic behavior. Deep down, they are scared, fearful and agitated. Biden et al in Washington, Macron, Schulz, Sunak, Stoltenberg, von der Leyen. They lack the courage of their stated convictions or the courage to face reality squarely. The blunt truth is that they have contrived to get themselves, and their countries, in a quandary from which there is no escape conforming to their current self-defined interests and emotional engagement.  Hence, we observe an array of reactions that are feckless, grotesque and dangerous. 

Feckless

Exhibit 1 is French President Emmanuel Macon’s proposed plan to station military personnel from NATO members within Ukraine to serve as a tripwire. Arrayed as a cordon around Kharkov, Odessa and Kiev they are meant to deter advancing Russian forces from moving on those cities for fear of killing Western soldiers – thereby risking a direct confrontation with the Alliance. It is a highly dubious idea that defies logic and experience while tempting fate. France long has deployed members of its armed forces in Ukraine where they programed and operated sophisticated equipment – in particular, the SCALP cruise missiles.  Scores were killed by a Russian retaliatory strike a few months ago that destroyed their residence. Paris cried ‘holy murder’ for Moscow’s unsporting conduct in shooting back at those attacking them.   It was retaliation for the French participation in the deadly bombing of the Russian city of Belgorod. Why then should we expect that the Kremlin would abandon a costly campaign involving what they see as vital national interests if uniformed Western troops were deployed in a picket line around cities?  Would they be intimated into passivity by spiffy uniforms assembled under outsized banners inscribed with the slogan: “DON’T MESS WITH NATO”?

Moreover, there already are thousands of Westerners bolstering the Ukrainian armed forces. Roughly 4 – 5,000 Americans have been performing critical operational functions from the outset. The presence of a majority predates by several years the onset of hostilities 2 years ago. That contingent was augmented by a supplementary group of 1,700 last summer which was as a corps of logistic experts advertised as mandated to seek out and eradicate corruption in the black-marketing of pilfered supplies. The Pentagon people are sown thought the Ukrainian military from headquarters planning units, to advisers in the field, to technicians and Special Forces. 

 It is widely understood that Americans have operated the sophisticated HIMARS long-range artillery and the Patriot air defense batteries. This last means that members of the U.S. military have been aiming – perhaps pulling the trigger on – weapons that kill Russians. In addition, the CIA has established a massive, multipurpose system able to conduct a wide range of Intelligence and operational activities- independently as well as in conjunction with the Ukrainian FSB. That includes tactical Intelligence on a day-by-day basis. We don’t know whether they had a role in the campaign of targeted assassinations inside Russia.

A critical role also has been played by Britain. Their specialized personnel have been operating the Storm Shadow missiles (counterpart to the French SCALP) employed against Crimea and elsewhere. Too, MI-6 has taken a lead role in designing multiple attacks on the Kerch Bridge and other critical infrastructure. The principal lesson to be drawn from this overview is that the positioning of European troops at key sites as human hostages in not wholly original. Their presence has not deterred Russia from attacking them in the field or, as in the French case, hunting them down in their residences.

Feckless: Exhibit 2 is the American airdrop of a paltry load of humanitarian aid in the sea off of Gaza. This bizarre action overlaps the silly and the grotesque. The United States has been the major accomplice in the Israeli ravaging of Gaza. Its weapons have killed 30,000 Gazans, wounded 70,000+, and devastated hospitals. Washington has actively blocked any serious attempt at aid by the UNWRO in withholding the funds necessary to finance its operations, while staying silent as Israel blocks entry points from Egypt and massacres residents awaiting the arrival of a food convoy. Furthermore, it has vetoed every attempt to end the carnage through ceasefire resolutions of the UN Security Council. This absurd gesture of kicking pallets out an airplane hatch simply underscores American disregard for Palestinian lives, its contempt for world opinion and its shameless subjugation to dictates from Israel.

Feckless: Exhibit 3 is provided by Rishi (Sage) Sunak, interim Prime Minister of the U.K. An ardent backer of Israel, he consistently has criticized Peace demonstrations protesting the assault on Gazans as obstacles to achieving a long-term ceasefire and political settlement. In this, he continues the long tradition of British fealty to its American overlord. Last week, he escalated the attack in denouncing them as tools of Hamas who have been taken over by terrorists – terrorists who threaten to tear the country apart. He likened it to ‘mob rule’ – as punctuated by the electoral victory of maverick George Galloway who crushed the Tories (and Labour) in a by-election. No evidence, of course, as to how half a million peaceable citizens are a Trojan horse for Muslim jihadis. This fecklessness is recognizable for those familiar with the haughty manner cultivated by the English upper crust – infecting even an arriviste in those exalted circles whose origins were in the Indian Raj. Condescension toward the lower ranks, instruction as to where the boundaries of acceptable behavior lie. That attitude often is laced with cute disparagements of groups or nationalities that don’t conform. The fact that Sunak himself is unabashed at now making snide accusations – however implied – about Muslims demonstrates the durability of cultural prejudices along with the historical openness of England’s upper class to those with money or cachet. These days, even a rishi. I suppose that’s social progress.

The dangerous element in Sunak’s unbecoming demagoguery is not its aggravating effect on the West’s culpability in the Palestine. The regional protagonists, as well as the rest of the world, smile at Britain’s grand rhetorical flourishes knowing that it counts only as America’s Tonto. Rather, it opens a breach in the country’s dedication to free speech and assembly. For it comes close to saying that any public disagreement with HMG’s policy is tantamount to treason.

Grotesque

Insofar as violent ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is concerned, it is fair to say that the Western governments’ complicity via its arming and unqualified backing for Israel’s gruesome actions constitutes grotesque behavior. To single out individual elements among individual governments is superfluous. The entire episode is grotesque. So it is seen by nearly the entire world outside the countries of the collective West. That represents about 2/3 of humanity. Still, our nations’ political elites appear oblivious and/or disdainful of that judgment. It matters little to them that they are seen by the ‘others’ as inhumane, arch hypocrites and racists. Those strong impressions are reinforced in many places by traumatic memories of how they themselves were subjugated, trodden upon and exploited over the centuries by people who righteously instructed them on the superiority of Western values – just as they do today.    

There are actions that manifestly represent a clear and future danger of an expanding war in Europe. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s belligerent Secretary-General, boldly stated last week that the Western allies should give Ukraine the green light to use the cruise missiles they have acquired to attack targets in Russia proper. Those weapons include the Storm Shadow, the Scalp, the long-range Tauras that Germany may soon dispatch and similar hardware to be provided by the U.S. (perhaps launched from the F-16s already arriving). Such a drastic move has been hinted at by other Western leaders, and pushed by hardline factions in Washington. Putin has warned that such escalation by the West – as with the conjectured deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine – would provoke a military response from Moscow. The extreme risks of the ensuing hostilities spiraling out of control to the nuclear threshold are self-evident.

Taken together, the actions by Western leaders – supported by their nations’ political elites – are indicative of a behavior pattern that has parted ways with reality. They derive deductively from dogmas unsubstantiated by objective fact. They are logically self-contradictory, impervious to events that shift the landscape, and radically unbalanced in weighting benefits/costs/risks and probabilities of success. How do we explain this ‘irrationality’? There are background conditions that are permissive or encouraging of this flight from sound reasoning. They include: the nihilistic socio-cultural trends in our contemporary post-modern societies; their susceptibility to collective hysteria/overwrought emotional reactions to unsettling events – 9/11, Islamic terrorism, the fable about Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election among other political matters, the conjuring of the menacing Chinese dragon, scary predictions of inevitable war with the PRC, outlandish claims that Putin is planning to launch an all-out campaign to conquer Europe up to the English Channel. 

The last two are fed by the free-floating anxieties, i.e. dread, engendered by the earlier bouts of mass psychopathology. Those allegations, in fact pure fictions, have gained currency among senior military figures, heads of government, and among strategic ‘thinkers.’

Back to the ingredients of panic. We noted fear – of both the identifiable and the unknown, and sub-conscious feelings of insecurity. Those feelings derive from a matrix of disorienting shifts in the global environment inhabited by Western societies. They, in turn, grow in reciprocation with unsetting domestic developments. The outcome is two-fold: a stultifying of any reasonable debate about dubious policies – leaving premises and purposes untested, and opening opportunities for willful persons or factions who harbor audacious objectives of remaking the world’s geo-political space according to American hegemonic specifications. To that end, our leaders manipulate and exploit conditions of emotional disorientation and political conformity. The outstanding example are the so-called ‘neo-cons’ in Washington (who number Joe Biden as a comrade-in-arms) who have crafted a network of like-minded true believers in London, Paris, Berlin and at both ends of Brussels.

What of the puzzle we noted as to the near complete absence of feelings of guilt or shame – especially over Gaza, of being humiliated in the eyes of the world? In conditions of nihilism, matters of conscience are moot. For the implicit rejection of norms, rules and laws frees the individual self to do whatever impulses or ideas or selfish interests impel it. With the superego dissolved, there is no felt obligation to judge oneself in reference to any external or abstract standard. Narcissistic tendencies flourish. A similar psychology obviates the requirement for experiencing shame. That is something that can only exist if we subjectively are part of a social grouping wherein personal status, and sense of worth, depend on how others view us and whether they grant us respect. In the absence of such a communal identity, with its attendant sensitivity to its opinion, shame can exist only in the perverse form of regret that one has been unable to meet the demanding, all-consuming need for self-gratification. That applies to nations as well as its individual leaders.

March 8, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Aiding Those We Kill: US Humanitarianism in Gaza

“We have a situation where the US is airdropping aid on day one, and Israel is dropping bombs on day two. And the American taxpayer is paying for the aid and the bombs.”

March 7, 2024, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark,  https://theaimn.com/aiding-those-we-kill-us-humanitarianism-in-gaza/

The spectacle, if it did not say it all, said much of it. Planes dropping humanitarian aid to a starving, famine-threatened populace of Gaza (the United Nations warns that 576,000 are “one step from famine”), with parachuted packages veering off course, some falling into the sea. Cargo also coming into Israel, with bullets, weaponry and other ordnance to kill those in Gaza on the inflated premise of self-defence. Be it aid or bullets, Washington is the smorgasbord supplier, ensuring that both victims and oppressors are furnished from its vast commissary.

This jarring picture, discordant and hopelessly at odds, is increasingly running down the low stocks of credibility US diplomats have in either the Israel-Hamas conflict, or much else in Middle Eastern politics. Comments such as these from US Vice President Kamala Harris from March 3, made at Selma in Alabama, illustrate the problem: “As I have said many times, too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. And just a few days ago, we saw hungry, desperate people approach aid trucks, simply trying to secure food for their families after weeks of nearly no aid reaching Northern Gaza. And they were met with gunfire and chaos.”

Harris goes on to speak of broken hearts for the victims, for the innocents, for those “suffering from what is clearly a humanitarian catastrophe.” A forced, hammed up moral register is struck. “People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to act.”

It was an occasion for the Vice President to mention that the US Department of Defense had “carried out its first airdrop of humanitarian assistance, and the United States will continue with these airdrops.” Further work would also be expended on getting “a new route by sea to deliver aid.

It is only at this point that Harris introduces the lumbering elephant in the room: “And the Israeli government must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid. No excuses.” They had to “open new border crossings”, “not impose any unnecessary restrictions on the delivery of aid” and “ensure humanitarian personnel, sites, and convoys are not targeted.” Basic services had to be restored, and order promoted in the strip “so more food, water, and fuel can reach those in need.”

In remarks made at Hagerstown Regional Airport in Maryland, President Joe Biden told reporters that he was “working with them [the Israelis] very hard. We’re going to get more – we must get more aid into Gaza. There’s no excuses. None.”

In a New Yorker interview, White House National Security spokesman John Kirby keeps to the same script, claiming that discussions with the Israelis “in private are frank and very forthright. I think they understand our concerns.” Kirby proceeds to fantasise, fudging the almost sneering attitude adopted by Israel towards US demands. “Even though there needs to be more aid, and even though there needs to be fewer civilian casualties, the Israelis have, in many ways, been receptive to our messages.”

The other side of this rusted coin of US policy advocates something less than human. The common humanity there is tethered to aiding the very power that is proving instrumental in creating conditions of catastrophe. The right to self-defence is reiterated as a chant, including the war goals of Israel which have artificially drawn a distinction between Hamas military and political operatives from that of the Palestinian population being eradicated.

Harris is always careful to couple any reproachful remarks about Israel with an acceptance of their stated policy: that Hamas must be eliminated. Hamas, rather than being a protean force running on the fumes of history, resentment and belief, was merely “a brutal terrorist organization that has vowed to repeat October 7^th again and again until Israel is annihilated.” It had inflicted suffering on the people of Gaza and continued to hold Israeli hostages.

Whatever note of rebuke directed against the Netanyahu government, it is clear that Israel knows how far it can go. It can continue to rely on the US veto in the UN Security Council. It can dictate the extent of aid and the conditions of its delivery into Gaza, which is merely seen as succour for an enemy it is trying to crush. While alarm about shooting desperate individuals crowding aid convoys will be noted, little will come of the consternation. The very fact that the US Airforce has been brought into the program of aid delivery suggests an ignominious capitulation, a very public impotence.

Jeremy Konyndyk, former chief of the USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Obama administration gives his unflattering judgment on this point. “When the US government has to use tactics that it otherwise used to circumvent the Soviets and Berlin and circumvent ISIS in Syria and Iraq, that should prompt some really hard questions about the state of US policy.”

In his remarks to The Independent, Konyndyk finds the airdrop method “the most expensive and least effective way to get aid to a population. We almost never did it because it is such an in-extremis tool.” Even more disturbing for him was the fact that this woefully imperfect approach was being taken to alleviate the suffering caused by an ally of the United States, one that had made “a policy choice” in not permitting “consistent humanitarian access” and the opening of border crossings.

Even as this in extremis tool is being used, US made military hardware continues to be used at will by the Israel Defence Forces. The point was not missed on Vermont Democratic Senator Peter Welch: “We have a situation where the US is airdropping aid on day one, and Israel is dropping bombs on day two. And the American taxpayer is paying for the aid and the bombs.”

The chroniclers of history can surely only jot down with grim irony instances where desperate, hunger-crazed Palestinians scrounging for US aid are shot by made-in-USA ammunition.

March 8, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

TODAY. Oh for a bit of sanity and genuine leadership!

I couldn’t resist this facebook comment. It encapsulates the madness of what America and its allies – the Anglosphere and Europe, are doing about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Does the “West” – slavish followers of the USA – understand that they are observing and apparently accepting a repeat of genocidal atrocities, as they did in the 1930s about Nazi Germany? (At least there was some excuse in the 30’s. that “they didn’t know about it”)

We all know about it now. We know that Joe Biden and co are supplying Israel with the weapons and know-how for its mass murder of Gazans, while mouthing pious statements about humanitarian aid, and about ending the atrocity that they are in fact prolonging.

That lovely word “zeitgeist” – I’m not sure what it means really. But I think it’s time to change the zeitgeist that says that the important goal for human beings is the individualistic one, to make ever-increasing profit. You see, making and selling weaponry is America’s big export industry – and it provides ever-increasing shareholders’ profits, – and jobs and industry and pride and blah blah blah.

So – the Israeli’s disastrous genocide in Gaza is after all – good for business.

And so is the interminable war in Ukraine – in which “negotiation” “diplomacy” “agreement” are dirty words, never to be contemplated. Ukraine is being steadily destroyed militarily, environmentally, humanly, under the messianic Zelenksy cult. The Raytheon, Norhrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Halliburton etc etc celebrations party on…………

Who knows how much money from these, and many other corporations, goes to the USA’s Republican and Democratic parties? Does any politician get in, without that backing? At the moment – all the USA fuss about Biden versus Trump. It is irrelevant. Whoever gets to be president will be the puppet of the corporations and especially of the military-industrial-nuclear complex.

All of which means that getting a decent leader in the USA is an impossible task – as he or she must always be beholden to big business.

It is probably a pretty difficult task anywhere, with the power of corporate lobbies to influence politicians, and the USA’s history of CIA-backed removal of leaders in other countries.

Still – we’d better try. If we can’t change from the paradigm of individualism, and ever-increasing profit – to a paradigm of collective action for human and environmental good, – well, we’ve had it!

March 7, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The West’s over-involvement in Ukraine

at the same summit those present joined to support sending long-range missiles to the Ukrainians, weapons fully capable of reaching cities, power grids, industrial plants and other targets deep inside Russia. So: No troops, plenty of offensive hardware.

Scholz confirmed what everyone already knows, that NATO officers and trained personnel are in Ukraine operating weapons such as the Patriot and NASAM air defense system, the HIMARS multiple launch rocket system, the British–French Storm Shadow cruise missile (SCALP–EG in France), and many other complex weapons provided to Ukraine.”

Consortium News, PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Russians in Ukraine, March 6, 2024

Recent disclosures provide an incomplete inventory of the West’s covert activities in Ukraine. There is more than we have been told, surely.

You may have read or heard about the freakout that ensued after Emmanuel Macron convened a summit of European leaders in Paris last week. At a press briefing afterward, the French president allowed that NATO may at some point send troops to Ukraine to join the fight against Russian military forces.   

The Paris gathering precipitated a significant moment of truth, if we can call it such. Scholz, who is on a knife’s edge politically in part for his government’s support for Ukraine, immediately asserted that Germany would not send its Taurus long-range missiles to Ukraine because German troops would have to go with them, as the Ukrainians could not operate them on their own. 

Look at the British, Scholz added indelicately. When they send their Storm Shadow missiles (and I must say I love the names the West’s arsenal minders come up with for these things) British personnel have to go with them. 

Yikes! Such indiscretion.    

As Stephen Bryen reported in his Weapons and Strategy newsletter, “The British cried foul and accused Scholz of ‘flagrant abuse of intelligence.’” Abuse of intelligence is a new one on me, but never mind. Bryen, who follows these matters closely as a former Defense Department official, continued:

“Scholz confirmed what everyone already knows, that NATO officers and trained personnel are in Ukraine operating weapons such as the Patriot and NASAM air defense system, the HIMARS multiple launch rocket system, the British–French Storm Shadow cruise missile (SCALP–EG in France), and many other complex weapons provided to Ukraine.”

There we have it — or there we have had it, if covertly, for a long time. 

Before I go further, let me suggest a couple of thoughts readers can tuck somewhere in the corners of their minds for later consideration.

One, Russia’s intervention in Ukraine two years ago last month was unprovoked. Two, all the Kremlin’s talk about the threat of NATO hard by its southwestern border is nothing more than the distortion and paranoia of “Putin’s Russia,” as we must now refer to the Russian Federation.  

It went this way in Paris last week. At the presser following the summit Macron was asked whether Ukraine’s Western backers were considering deploying troops in Ukraine. The French president replied that while European leaders had not reached any kind of agreement, the idea was certainly on the table when they gathered at Elysée Palace. 

And then this:

“Nothing should be ruled out. We will do anything we can to prevent Russia from winning this war.” 

Instantly came the vigorous objections. The Brits, the Spanish, the Italians, the Poles, the Slovakians, the Hungarians: They all said in so many words, “No way.” Even Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s war-mongering sec-gen, objected to Macron’s assertion. 

No one was more vehement on this point than Olaf Scholz. “What was agreed among ourselves and with each other from the very beginning also applies to the future,” saith the German chancellor, “namely that there will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil sent there by European countries or NATO states.” 

Plenty of Offensive Hardware

O.K., but at the same summit those present joined to support sending long-range missiles to the Ukrainians, weapons fully capable of reaching cities, power grids, industrial plants and other targets deep inside Russia. So: No troops, plenty of offensive hardware.

Last week The New York Times published a long takeout on the Central Intelligence Agency’s presence and programs in Ukraine, which extend back at least a decade and almost certainly much further……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

 “If NATO is so much against sending troops to Ukraine,” he asks, “why doesn’t NATO demand that the soldiers already there be sent home?”

Over-Invested in the Conflict 

Excellent question. My answer: The Western powers, radically over-invested in Ukraine’s confrontation with Russia, are panicking as the Armed Forces of Ukraine retreat in the face of Russian advances and as support for this folly wanes on both sides of the Atlantic.

If anything, the covert presence of Western personnel in Ukraine may increase.    

It is obvious that Ukraine is losing its war against Russia, and at a faster pace than most analysts seem to have anticipated even last autumn. I am reading reports now that the final collapse of the AFU may prove three or so months away.  …………………………………………………………………….

 The Ukraine crisis is merely the latest phase of the West’s long campaign to surround the Russian Federation up to its borders, destabilize it and finally subvert it. Regime change in Moscow was and remains the final objective.   

This is not a war in defense of “Ukrainian democracy” — a phrase that causes one either to laugh or do the other thing. It is the West’s proxy war, start to finish, Ukrainians cynically cast as cannon fodder, expendable stooges. 

Russia had no choice when it intervened two years ago, this after eight years’ patience as the Europeans — Germany and France, this is to say — broke every promise they made by way of supporting a settlement. The Americans didn’t break any promises because they never made any — and no one would take them seriously if they had.

I come to the judgment I offered when the war that began in 2014 erupted into open conflict two years ago. The Russian intervention was regrettable but necessary. I took some stick for this view back in 2022. I learn lately it is recorded in some European intelligence files as if it were a major transgression. 

It is as true now as then. All we learn in drips and drops about the Western powers’ various covert doings in the sad, failed state they have done much to ruin, confirms this.
 https://consortiumnews.com/2024/03/06/patrick-lawrence-the-russians-in-ukraine/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=c61faf77-5689-491d-afa5-bc607e7454cf

March 7, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment