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https://edwardcurtin.com/trinitys-shadow/

Trinity’s Shadow

I sit here in the silence of the awakening dawn’s stillness stunned by the realization that I exist.  I wonder why.  It is my birthday.  The first rays of the rising sun bleed crimson over the eastern hills as I imagine my birth. The house and my family sleep.

Someday I will die and I wonder why.  This is the mystery I have been contemplating since I was young.  That and the fact that I was born in a time of war and that when my parents and sisters were celebrating my first birthday, my country’s esteemed civilian and military leaders celebrated another birth: the detonation of the first atomic bomb code-named Trinity.

Trinity has shadowed my life, while the other Trinity has enkindled my days.

Sick minds play sick word games as they inflict pain and death.  They nicknamed this death bomb “the Gadget,” as if it were an innocent little toy.  They took and blasphemed the Christian mystery of the Trinity as if they were mocking God, which they were.  They thought they were gods.

Now they are all dead gods, their fates sealed in their tombs.

Where are they now?

Where are all their victims, the innocent dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Where are the just and the unjust?

Where are the living now, asleep or awake as Trinity’s progenitors in Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon prepare their doomsday machines for a rerun, the final first-strike run, the last lap in their race to annihilate all the living?  Will they sing as they launch the missiles – “So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night?”

Joseph Biden, the second Roman Catholic president, while mocking the essence of Jesus’s message, pushes the world toward a nuclear holocaust, unlike JFK, the first Catholic president, who was assassinated by the CIA for pushing for the elimination of nuclear weapons and the end of the Cold War.

The wheel turns.  We count the years.  We wonder why.

Years ago I started my academic life by writing a thesis entitled “Dealing With Death or Death Dealing.”  It was a study of the transformation of cultural symbol systems, death, and nuclear weapons.  The last hundred years and more have brought a transformation and disintegration of the traditional religious symbol system – the sacred canopy – that once gave people comfort, meaning, and hope.  Science, technology, and nuclear weapons have changed all that. Death has been socially relocated and we live under the nuclear umbrella, a sinister “safeguard” that is cold comfort. The ultimate power of death over all life has been transferred from God to men, those controlling the nuclear weapons. This subject has never left me.  I suppose it has haunted me.  It is not a jolly subject, but I think it has chosen me.

Was I born in a normal time?  Is war time our normal time?  It is. I was.

But to be born at a time and place when your country’s leaders were denouncing their German and Japanese enemies as savage war criminals while execrably emulating them and then outdoing them is something else again.  With Operation Paperclip following World War II, the United States government secretly brought 1,600 or more Nazi war criminals into the U.S. to run our government’s military, intelligence, space, chemical, and biological warfare programs.  We became Nazis.  Lewis Mumford put it this way in The Pentagon of Power:

By the curious dialectic of history, Hitler’s enlargement and the refurbishment of the Nazi megamachine gave rise to the conditions for creating those counter-instruments that would conquer it and temporarily wreck it. In short, in the very act of dying the Nazis transmitted their disease to their American opponents; not only the methods of compulsive organization or physical destruction, but the moral corruption that made it feasible to employ those methods without stirring opposition.

There are always excuses for such moral corruption.  When during WW II the U.S. firebombed almost all Japanese cities, Dresden and Cologne in Germany, and then dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in gratuitously savage attacks, these were justified and even celebrated as necessary to defeat evil enemies.  Just as Nazi war criminals were welcomed into the U.S. government under the aegis of Allen Dulles who became the longest running CIA director and the key to JFK’s assassination and coverup, the diabolic war crimes of the U.S. were swept away as acts of a moral nation fighting a good war.  What has followed are decades of U.S. war crimes from Korea through Vietnam and Iraq, etc.  A very long list.

The English dramatist Harold Pinter, in his Nobel Address, put it bluntly:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force  for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Nothing could be truer.  When in 2014 the U.S. engineered the coup in Ukraine (coups being an American specialty), it allied itself with neo-Nazi forces to oppose Russia.  This alliance should have shocked no one; it is the American way.  Back in the 1980s when the U.S. was supporting death squads in Central America, Ronald Reagan told the world that “The Contras are the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.”  Now the Ukrainian president Zelensky is feted as a great hero, Biden telling him in an Oval Office visit that “it’s an honor to be by your side.”  Such alliances are not anomalies but the crude reality of U. S. history.

But let me return to “Trinity,” the ultimate weapon of mass destruction since I was reading a recent article about it.

Kai Bird, the coauthor of  American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the book that inspired the new film Oppenheimer about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist credited as “the father of the atomic bomb” and the man who named the first atomic bomb Trinity, has written an Op Ed piece in The New York Times titled, “The Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” True in certain respects, this article is an example of how history can be slyly used to distort the present for political purposes.  In typical NY Times fashion, Bird tells certain truths while concealing, distorting, and falsifying others.

I do not consider Oppenheimer a tragic figure, as does Bird.  Complicated, yes; but he was essentially a hubristic scientist who lent his services to a demonic project, and afterwards, having let the cat out of the bag by creating the Bomb, guiltily urged the government that used it in massive war crimes to restrain itself in the future.  Asking for such self-regulation is as absurd as asking the pharmaceutical or big tech industries to regulate themselves.

Bird rightly says that Oppenheimer did not regret his work inventing the atomic bomb, and he correctly points out the injustice of his being maligned and stripped of his security clearance in 1954 in a secret hearing by a vote of 2 to 1 of a security panel of The Atomic Energy Commission for having communist associations. “Celebrated in 1945 as the ‘father of the atomic bomb,’” Bird writes, “nine years later he would become the chief celebrity victim of the McCarthyite maelstrom.”  A “victim,” I should add, who named names to save his own reputation.

But tucked within his article, Bird tells us: “Just look at what happened to our public health civil servants during the recent pandemic.”  By which he means these officials like Anthony Fauci were maligned when they gave the public correct scientific information.  This is absurd.  Fauci – “attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” – and other government “civil servants” misinformed the public and lied over and over again, but Bird implies they too were tragic figures like Oppenheimer.

He writes:

We stand on the cusp of another technological revolution in which artificial intelligence will transform how we live and work, and yet we are not yet having the kind of informed civil discourse with its innovators that could help us to make wise policy decisions on its regulation. Our politicians need to listen more to technology innovators like Sam Altman and quantum physicists like Kip Thorne and Michio Kaku.

Here too he urges “us” to listen to the very people responsible for Artificial Intelligence, just as “we” should have listened to Oppenheimer after he brought us the atomic bomb.  Implicit here is the belief that science just marches progressively on and there’s no stopping it, and when dangerous technologies emerge from scientists’ work, we should trust them to control them.  Nowhere does Bird suggest that scientists have a moral obligation before the fact to not pursue a certain line  of research because of its grave possible consequences.  Maybe he has never read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, only written over two hundred years ago.

Finally, and most importantly, Bird begins his concluding paragraph with these words:

Today, Vladimir Putin’s not-so-veiled threats to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine are a stark reminder that we can never be complacent about living with nuclear weapons.

This is simply U.S. propaganda.  The U.S. has provoked and fueled the war in Ukraine, broken all nuclear weapon treaties, surrounded Russia with military bases, stationed nuclear weapons in Europe, engaged in nuclear blackmail with its first strike policy and threats, etc.  Putin has said in response that if – and only if – the very existence of the Russian state and land is threatened with extinction would the use of nuclear weapons be considered.

A little history is informative.

“Barely six weeks after the Hiroshima-Nagsaki bombings,” Michel Chossudovsky tells us, “the US War Department [Pentagon] issued  a blueprint  (September 15, 1945) to ‘Wipe  the Soviet Union off the Map’ (66 cities with 204 atomic bombs), when the US and the USSR were allies. This infamous project is confirmed by declassified documents.” (For further details see Chossudovsky, 2017)

Below is the image of the 66 cities of the Soviet Union which had been envisaged as targets by the US War Department.

The 66 cities. Click here to enlarge 

See also Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War. “90 Seconds to Midnight”: The Pentagon’s 1945 “Doomsday Blueprint” to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map”

But back to Bird, who, in writing a piece about Oppenheimer’s “tragedy” and defending science, has also subtly defended a trinity of other matters: the government “science” on Covid, the transformative power coming from AI, and the U.S. propaganda about Russia and nuclear weapons. There is no mention of JFK’s call to abolish nuclear weapons.  This is how the “paper of record” does its job.

I sit here now at the end of the day.  Shadows are falling and I contemplate such trinities.  I am stunned by the fact that we exist, but under a terrifying Shadow that many wish to ignore.  Jung saw this shadow side as not just personal but social, and when it is ignored, the collective evils of modern societies can autonomously erupt.

Bird argues that nuclear weapons are the result of a scientific quest that is unstoppable.  He writes that Oppenheimer “understood that you cannot stop curious human beings from discovering the physical world around them [and then making nuclear bombs or designer babies].”

This is the ideology of progress that brooks no opposition since it is declared inevitable. It is a philosophy that believes there should be no limits to human knowledge, which would include the knowledge of good and evil, but which can then be ignored since it and all thought and beliefs are considered a priori to be relative.  The modern premise that everything is relative is of course a contradiction since it is an absolute statement.  Many share this philosophy of despair disguised as progress as it has crept into everything today.  It is tragic, for if people accept it, we are doomed to follow a Faustian pact with the devil and all hell will follow.

I think of Bob Dylan singing :

I just don’t see why I should even care
It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there

But I do care, and I wonder why.  As night comes on, I sit here and wonder.

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 https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-downfall-of-blobism/

The Downfall of Blobism

You might not know it these lazy, hazy, muggy days of midsummer, but things are getting pretty wildly out-of-hand in our republic. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. blew up the Democratic Party yesterday in the House Subcommittee on Weaponization of Government hearing, acting like a normal human while being set upon by a flock of harpies desperately screeching “Russia, Russia, Russia,” as if that means anything anymore. He branded them as worse than the McCarthyites of the 1950s, rebuked their insane scurrilities supporting censorship, and left them in a state of exhausted disgrace.

     It happens that he is running for the nomination of that very party knocking itself out to destroy him. To win that prize he would have to put a thousand top Democrats through some grueling act of repentance and contrition — and then you’ve got to ask yourself: who would even want to win the support of such vile creatures as Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Jerrold Nadler, and Adam Schiff, let alone be associated with them in the same club?

    Elsewhere around the scene this week, we have the ever more degenerate antics of the FBI on view as whistleblowers pour out of the woodwork disclosing the rot behind Director Chris Wray and his boss AG Merrick Garland. This Deep State Blob of turpitude has been growing and festering with so many overlapping cover-ups that they’ve run out of rugs to sweep their crimes under. The massive moneygrubbing misdeeds of Hillary Clinton from Skolkovo and Uranium One beat a direct path through the Ukraine coup of 2014, to RussiaGate, to the Biden Family’s global influence-peddling operation and every mendacious act in-between including the FISA falsehoods, the J-6 entrapment caper, hundreds of malicious and deceitful prosecutions, the Covid-19 fraud, the censorship and medical tyranny, and God-knows how many ensuing deaths from a poisonous vaccine… and now, a brain-dead government trifling with nuclear war.

     And whose brilliant idea was it, anyway, to install this disgusting and incompetent grifter, “Joe Biden,” as our head-of-state? They surely knew well before 2019 that his bag-man son was rooting out bribes in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere, at the same time he was consorting with whores and trafficked children while destroying his brain with crack and downing a fifth of vodka a day. And you’re telling me that the CIA and FBI did not know about any of this, even before October 2019 when Hunter’s laptop stuffed with graphic evidence fell into their hands? If they didn’t know any of this, then what’s the point of having an intel community?

     My guess is that it was Barack Obama’s idea to stick “Joe Biden” in the White House in the vain effort to use this captive criminal to stave off any accounting for the aforesaid villainies that occurred during Mr. Obama’s two terms. The mission was originally Hillary Clinton’s — she had plenty at stake herself — but she botched the job in 2016 and allowed the Golden Golem of Greatness to slip into power. It is amazing to look back and see how the mighty Blob congealed after that election — like a giant rogue macrophage — to surround and eliminate Mr. Trump, who apparently did not know for many months what he was up against: the entire permanent bureaucracy. Obviously, the Blob only partly succeeded in deactivating Mr. Trump, who has worked sedulously since 2021 to marshal about half the country militantly against the Blob and Blobism, while he still suffers one rear-guard legal affront after another.

     Trouble is, the Blob itself has become an immune disorder for the polity known as the USA, and now threatens to destroy everything the country stands for and all the stuff deployed on the landscape from sea to shining sea, if the hypersonic nukes fly. These are dangerous weeks ahead. The pedal’s on the metal… the rubber’s meeting the road, and we seem to be watching a Thelma and Louise type denouement writ large.

     The Blob itself, with the Democratic Party at its nucleus, and evil organelles Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and their like floating in the endoplasmic reticulum, has gone insane trying to protect its Precious, liberalism’s sacred bowling trophy, Barack Obama, from scrutiny. To call Mr. Obama to account, of course, would be viewed as the ultimate act of American “racism,” a place too many will not go. So, he may evade responsibility until he (and the rest of us) are gone and history catches up with him.

     But is there any doubt now that “Joe Biden” must go, and as soon as possible? Surely there is enough evidence to mount an impeachment in the House, and rev it up as expeditiously as the Democrats revved up their two Trump impeachments. An impeachment would, of course, force a trial in the Senate. It is probably the one news event that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN can’t run and hide from — as they have been hiding from this week’s whistleblower hearings and Mr. Kennedy’s sturdy performance against the House censorship activists. In a Senate trial, the rot will finally be laid out before the people to judge, whether the Senate can bring itself to convict “JB” or not. Anyway, it will end this president’s pretense of running for reelection, and on the off-chance he’s convicted, his pardon powers do not extend to that particular extraordinary Senate proceeding. And then we can see about Ms. Harris.

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http://endoftheamericandream.com/this-is-why-the-global-food-crisis-is-about-to-go-to-a-whole-new-level/

This Is Why The Global Food Crisis Is About To Go To A Whole New Level…

Most people that live in the western world don’t realize that global hunger has been absolutely exploding and has now become a major worldwide issue.  According to the UN, 2.4 billion people do not have enough food to eat on a consistent basis, and 900 million of them are facing severe food insecurity.  Unfortunately, things are about to get a whole lot worse.  The deal between Russia and Ukraine that had allowed so much grain to be shipped through the Black Sea has completely broken down, and now both sides are threatening to attack any transport ships that come through the area.

When the war between Russia and Ukraine began, wheat prices quickly soared to the highest level that we have ever seen.

But then a miracle happened.  A deal that was agreed to in July 2022 allowed vast amounts of grain to be safely transported through the Black Sea.

Since it was implemented, nearly 34 million tons of grain has been shipped out to the rest of the world.

But now the deal is over.  On July 17th, the Russians announced that they were pulling out, and then on Thursday they warned that any ships sailing to Ukrainian ports “will be regarded as potential carriers of military cargo”…

On Thursday, Moscow’s defense ministry declared that “all vessels sailing in the waters of the Black Sea to Ukrainian ports will be regarded as potential carriers of military cargo,” a warning that has sent wheat prices rising.

“Accordingly, the countries of such vessels will be considered to be involved in the Ukrainian conflict on the side Kyiv, the defense ministry said in a Wednesday statement. It added that several pockets of international water are “declared temporarily dangerous for navigation,” and vessels have been warned that there are no longer safety guarantees.

Needless to say, the Russians are not bluffing.

They mean it when they say that the shipping of Ukrainian grain is done, and they have already conducted military strikes against key port facilities in southern Ukraine…

Russian forces have launched extensive missile and drone attacks against port and grain infrastructure in southern Ukraine in recent days.

The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based think tank, said Wednesday that it believes the recent attacks were likely to reaffirm Russia’s objections to the renewal of the Black Sea grain deal and hinder Kyiv’s ability to export agricultural commodities.

Ukraine’s Agriculture Ministry said Wednesday that recent attacks on Ukraine’s southern port of Odesa and other cities had destroyed 60,000 tons of grain as well as crucial infrastructure.

Ukraine is one of the most important breadbaskets on the entire planet, and normally the Ukrainians export grain to dozens of different nations.

On the other side, the Ukrainians have decided to make similar threats.  From now on, any ships that are heading for ports controlled by Russia will be fair game…

Ukraine, however, went on to issue its own measures in response to Moscow’s initial escalation. Kyiv’s defense ministry said that beginning on Friday, any vessels heading to ports in mainland Russia and in Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine — like in Crimea or along the Sea of Azov — may likewise be viewed as transporters of military cargo.

Russia normally accounts for more than 20 percent of all global wheat exports.

So this is really bad news.

Exports from both Russia and Ukraine will be substantially reduced from this point forward, and wheat prices are already soaring…

Global inflation is finally coming down, but heightened geopolitical tensions could mean that food is about to get a lot more expensive.

Wheat futures soared by nearly 9% on Wednesday and are on track to hit their highest level in three weeks as tensions in Europe rise following Russia’s surprise decision to pull out of a crucial deal allowing the export of grain from Ukraine.

Corn futures were also nearly 2% higher on Tuesday as traders feared an impending supply crunch of the staple foods.

The last time grain prices spiked like this, it was just a temporary phenomenon because the grain deal of July 2022 was the miracle that the world desperately needed.

But there isn’t going to be a miracle this time around.

So I would very much encourage you to stock up on storable wheat while prices are still relatively low.

Right now, global food production is being hit by one disaster after another.

In California, some of the most important farmland in the entire state is now underwater because Tulare Lake has filled back up for the first time in 40 years…

Tulare Lake, which refilled for the first time in 40 years after atmospheric river storms pummeled California with snow and rain, is now receding, but it will take at least a year to evaporate entirely, experts said.

“We are still going to have a Tulare Lake next year,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Water Policy Center of the Public Policy Institute of California.

The sudden reappearance of the lake, which was drained for farmland in the late 1800s, has caused hundreds of millions of dollars in agricultural losses and will require a substantial cleanup effort once the water has gone, as flooded farm buildings, vehicles, homes and electrical infrastructure still lurk within its waters.

California is the most important agricultural state in the entire country.

They grow more of our fruits and nuts than anyone else by a very wide margin, but now all of the flooding that has occurred is going to hamper production for quite some time to come.

You may have noticed that I write about this new global food crisis quite a bit.

Most people don’t realize this yet, but it is going to become such a huge story in the years ahead.

No matter what decisions our leaders make now, there will be global famine.

There are multiple long-term trends that are going to make it increasingly difficult to produce enough food, and meanwhile global demand for food just continues to increase.

Our leaders know this, and they will even talk about these things when they gather for conferences, but they don’t want to alarm the general public.

We are transitioning from an era of plenty to an era of great suffering, but most people in the general population still have absolutely no idea what is coming.