Is this another demonstration of America's imperial military might? Visual shock and awe? A political flex for Joe Biden?
War involving Islamic theology is no game. Russia has responded by commencing, over the waters of the Black Sea, around-the-clock rotations of MiG-31 interceptors armed with Kinzhal hypersonic anti-ship missiles, whose operational range extends to 2000 km.
Colonel Douglas MacGregor points out that warfare today is nothing like showing off military might prior to WWI or even in the Iraq War:
"The weapons have changed. The arsenal of rockets and missiles in the region is enormous. People are quoting numbers in the realm of a hundred and thirty thousand rockets and missiles from Hezbollah alone. We don’t even need to mention others in the region. That kind of arsenal is enough in and of itself to destroy much of Israel.
"Then you have a problem with Hamas and Hezbollah and the rest of the region, and that is the rest of the region is as sick of Israel as much of the world and Europe is sick of us. And what I mean by that is that we are on the threshold of total war.
"That's what no one seems to understand. If the Israelis march into Gaza—which I think would be a very unrewarding exercise for them but, nevertheless, they seem determined to do it—they will not only lose soldiers, they will fail to root out the thousands of Hamas fighters that are there. They'll get some, but they won't get them all. They will not improve their position at all with the people of Hamas or the people living on the so -called West Bank. And the rest of the region is prepared to go to war. Stop and think about it. It’s not just Iran. In fact, Iran has militias that can attack us and anyone who works with us in Iraq and Syria. That’s one part of the problem. The Iranians are not going to try to lob theater ballistic missiles at Israel because the Israelis have said they would use a nuclear weapon, but Turkey is different. And the Turks have an unhappy record with the Israelis.
"Just a few years ago, Turkey tried to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. The Israelis boarded their ship, killed some of their citizens, and turned back the aid. This kind of thing did not cultivate support and friendliness in Turkey. And remember, Mr. Erdogan is the de facto leading military power in the Sunni Muslim world.
"Finally, you have the Pakistanis who are very close to the Turks and have made it abundantly clear that the Turks will receive nuclear warheads and other capabilities from them if they need them in order to deter the Israelis from using a nuclear weapon."
"And finally, the Turks have the largest air forces and armies in the region. The Turks can put two million men in the field in the space of a little over a month. And the Turks are ferocious fighters.
"Now, all of this spells doom for the Israelis if they launch this attack on Gaza. What I just described is an unwinnable fight. Even the air power from the United States that we could commit is not going to be enough."
Map: relative range of new missile ordnance
Any investment in bioscience research comes with 100% risk because one never knows if a particular strategy will produce beneficial outcomes.
Publicly traded pharmaceutical companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits and the only sure way to generate profits is through regulatory capture.
So Big Pharma just lies about its products and buys off the regulators (and the politicians and the media) every time.
The biggest profits come from giving a drug to the entire population in the name of preventive care — vaccines and now statins.
By pathologizing natural human emotions, the makers of psychopharmaceuticals also seek to sell treatments to nearly the entire population.
Causing harm increases profits by 100x or more (a single injury can produce a lifetime of profitable treatments).
Said simply, causing harm and disease massively increases the size of the market for pharmaceutical products so that’s Big Pharma’s business model today.
Dr. Toby Rogers
The “Putin apologist” smear is as omnipresent today as the same kind of smear was in 2002 in the US, deployed against anyone who questioned the wisdom of the coming war on Iraq. It’s designed to shut down thought. As usual, Hungary is the one dissenter from the EU consensus.
Rod Dreher
The case for getting out of NATO encompasses four fundamental propositions:
First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.
Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.
Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser commitments elsewhere.
Fourthly, jettisoning NATO requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into the War Capital of the World, dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.
...