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"There has been war since the beginning of time and we are no smarter than the people that have gone before us. There is apt to be some more war."

-- Will Rogers

News and Opinion

NATO Chief Voices Fear Of War With Russia While US Greenlights Drone Strikes On Russian Territory

In what Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp describes as “a rare acknowledgment of the dangers of backing Ukraine,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg acknowledged a fear of something going “horribly wrong” and leading to a hot war between the nuclear-armed alliance and Russia.

In an article titled “‘I fear a full-blown war between the West and Russia’, Nato chief warns,” The Telegraph writes the following:

“I fear that the war in Ukraine will get out of control, and spread into a major war between Nato and Russia,” said Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, responding to a question about his greatest fears for the winter in an interview.

He told Norwegian broadcaster NRK on Friday that he was confident such a scenario could be avoided but that the threat was there.

“If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,” he added.

NATO Chief Says Full-Blown War With Russia Is a ‘Real Possibility’
Jens Stoltenberg warns things can go 'horribly wrong'
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #NATO #RussiaUkraineWar #UkraineRussiaWar #Russia #Ukraine https://t.co/JzfpRjKgHP pic.twitter.com/FuWOgxxSy1

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) December 11, 2022

And things absolutely can go horribly wrong when dealing with an increasingly aggressive standoff between nuclear superpowers, as we have seen from history. The last cold war saw many nuclear close calls as a result of technical malfunctions and misunderstandings, including an incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the only thing which prevented a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine from deploying its weapon on the US military was one officer refusing to go along with two others who were giving the orders to fire.

We got a taste of this horror once again last month in the long minutes following erroneous reports that Russia had launched missiles at NATO member Poland. The fact that cooler heads have prevailed up until this point does not mean that nuclear brinkmanship is safe, anymore than a game of Russian roulette not ending after the first couple of trigger pulls would mean that Russian roulette is safe to play.

So Stoltenberg is correct to be afraid. There absolutely are too many things that can go horribly wrong in such a standoff, and there are simply too many unpredictable moving parts for anyone to feel confident that this will not happen.

And it’s pretty crazy to hear Stoltenberg voice these concerns even while the Pentagon gives the go-ahead for Ukraine to begin launching long-range attacks on targets inside Russia in its war that is being backed by the United States, because those two positions would seem to be pretty strongly at odds with each other.

In an article titled “Pentagon gives Ukraine green light for drone strikes inside Russia,” The Times reports as follows:

The Pentagon has given a tacit endorsement of Ukraine’s long-range attacks on targets inside Russia after President Putin’s multiple missile strikes against Kyiv’s critical infrastructure.

Since daily assaults on civilians began in October, the Pentagon has revised its threat assessment of the war in Ukraine. Crucially, this includes new judgments about whether arms shipments to Kyiv might lead to a military confrontation between Russia and Nato.

This represents a significant development in the nine-month war between Ukraine and Russia, with Washington now likelier to supply Kyiv with longer-range weapons.

The Times quotes a “US defence source” as saying the following: “We’re not saying to Kyiv, ‘Don’t strike the Russians [in Russia or Crimea]’. We can’t tell them what to do. It’s up to them how they use their weapons. But when they use the weapons we have supplied, the only thing we insist on is that the Ukrainian military conform to the international laws of war and to the Geneva conventions.”

“They are the only limitations but that includes no targeting of Russian families and no assassinations. As far as we’re concerned, Ukraine has been in compliance,” the source says, which is a strange assertion given that US intelligence has reportedly concluded Ukraine was behind the assassination of the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin.

“Ukraine has been careful to use its own drones, not US-supplied weapons, to carry out the strikes,” The Times reports, while also noting that “Pentagon officials have made it clear that requests from Kyiv for longer-range US weapons, including rockets and fighter bombers which could be used for even more effective strikes inside Russia or occupied Crimea, are being seriously considered.”

This revelation comes days after Ukraine launched its most brazen attack into Russian territory yet, with drone strikes on bases which killed multiple Russian soldiers and damaged two nuclear-capable bombers. Not too long ago the US waging a proxy war that features direct attacks on Russia’s nuclear forces would have been an unthinkably terrifying prospect, yet that’s where we’re at now, and it only seems to be escalating.

Empire apologists will try to make this a conversation about whether Ukraine has a “right” to attack Russian territory, which is a red herring from the real issue at hand. Obviously Ukraine has a right to attack a nation that is attacking it; that’s not the point. The real issue is the danger of provoking a hot war between nuclear superpowers, which even the NATO Secretary-General is becoming increasingly nervous about.

The western power alliance continually ramping up aggressions to test how far it could provoke Russia is what led to this conflict in the first place. Now we’re at a point where there isn’t much space for Russia to back up before it’s against the ropes and potentially pressed to do something nobody wants. These people should not be talking about escalation, they should be talking about de-escalation. We need diplomacy, de-escalation and detente, and we need them yesterday.

Russia Storming Bakhmut, Marinka Encircled. FT, Ukraine Short of AD Missiles, China Slams Merkel

New spending bill squanders billions on dysfunctional weapons programs

The Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that was made public this week and was passed by the House on Thursday. calls for near record levels of Pentagon spending, but it chooses to devote much of the funding to costly, dysfunctional weapons systems that are ill-suited to addressing current challenges, largely because many of the weapons boosted in the NDAA were chosen based on where they are built, not whether they are the best systems for defending the United States and its allies. Pork barrel politics ruled the day to an extent not seen in recent memory, and we may all pay for it for years to come — in burgeoning expenditures and reduced security. ...

Unfortunately, much of the $858 billion authorized in the FY 2023 NDAA will be wasted. Well over $10 billion will go towards the F-35 combat aircraft, which the Project on Government Oversight has determined may never be fully ready for combat, even as it represents the most expensive weapons program in the history of the Pentagon, at a projected $1.5 trillion over the lifetime of approximately 2,400 of the planes.

The budget plan also doubles down on building aircraft carriers, which can cost up to $13 billion each but are extremely vulnerable to modern high speed missiles. And there are billions more set aside for a new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), dubbed the Sentinel. But as former Secretary of Defense William Perry has noted, ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because a president has only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them on warning of an attack, thereby increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war triggered by a false alarm. We’d be safer without them.

To make matters worse, a full $45 billion of the funds authorized by the new bill are for items the Pentagon didn’t even ask for: extra combat ships, planes, and helicopters built in factories of primary and secondary contractors spread across the country for the greatest political effect. No member wants to vote against jobs in their district — hence the penchant for buying weapons we don’t need at prices we can’t afford.

A particularly interesting — and potentially troubling — section of the bill is the one entitled “Temporary Authorizations Related to Ukraine and Other Matters.” If bought in the quantities authorized, the weapons listed in this section would require a permanent expansion of U.S. weapons manufacturing capability. And once the new factories exist, there will be pressure to keep them open in perpetuity, at a cost of untold billions of dollars.

Chris Hedges: Israel and the Rise of Jewish Fascism

Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed coalition government of Jewish extremists, fanatic Zionists and religious bigots represents a seismic change in Israel, one that will exacerbate Israel’s pariah status, erode external support for Israel, fuel a third Palestinian uprising, or intifada, and create irreconcilable political divides within the Jewish state. Alon Pinkas, writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, calls the coalition government, scheduled to take power in one or two weeks, “a kakistocracy extraordinaire: government by the worst and least suitable collection of ultranationalists, Jewish supremacists, anti-democrats, racists, bigots, homophobes, misogynists, corrupt and allegedly corrupt politicians. A ruling coalition of 64 lawmakers, of whom 32 are either ultra-Orthodox or religious Zionist. Certainly not a coalition Zeev Jabotinsky, the father of Revisionist Zionism, or Menachem Begin, the founder of Likud, could have ever imagined.”

Itamar Ben-Gvir, from the ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit, “Jewish Power,” party, will be the new minister for internal security. Otzma Yehudit is populated with members of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach party, which was banned from running for the Knesset in 1988 for espousing a “Nazi-like ideology” that included advocating the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as all Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation. His appointment, along with that of other far-right ideologues, including Bezalel Smotrich, to be in charge of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), effectively jettisons the old tropes liberal Zionists used to defend Israel – that it is the only democracy in the Middle East, that it seeks a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians in a two-state solution, that extremism and racism have no place in Israeli society and that Israel must impose draconian forms of control on the Palestinians to prevent terrorism. ...

The old tropes Israel employed to justify itself were always more fiction than reality. Israel long ago became an apartheid state. It directly controls through its illegal Jewish-only settlements, restricted military zones and army compounds, over 60 percent of the West Bank and has de facto control over the rest. There are 65 laws that directly or indirectly discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those living in the OPT.

The old tropes are being replaced by screed-filled diatribes that paint Palestinians and Arabs (Muslim and Christian) as contaminants and an existential threat to Israel. This hate speech is accompanied by a vicious internal campaign to silence Jewish “traitors,” especially those who are liberal or left-wing and secular. An Otzma Yehudit-run autocracy will shut down democratic debate, eviscerate the protections of civil society and further codify what has long been reality – Jewish supremacy and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their own land that dates back to the founding of Israel in the 1940s.

Biden faces growing pressure to drop charges against Julian Assange

The Biden administration has been saying all the right things lately about respecting a free and vigorous press, after four years of relentless media-bashing and legal assaults under Donald Trump. The attorney general, Merrick Garland, has even put in place expanded protections for journalists this fall, saying that “a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy”.

But the biggest test of Biden’s commitment remains imprisoned in a jail cell in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been held since 2019 while facing prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act, a century-old statute that has never been used before for publishing classified information.

Whether the US justice department continues to pursue the Trump-era charges against the notorious leaker, whose group put out secret information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, American diplomacy and internal Democratic politics before the 2016 election, will go a long way toward determining whether the current administration intends to make good on its pledges to protect the press.

Now Biden is facing a re-energized push, both inside the United States and overseas, to drop Assange’s protracted prosecution. Five major media organizations that relied on his trove of government secrets, including the Guardian and the New York Times, put out an open letter earlier this month saying that his indictment “sets a dangerous precedent” and threatens to undermine the first amendment.

At the same time, officials in Australia, where Assange was born and remains a citizen, met with American counterparts to appeal for his release. “My position is clear and has been made clear to the US administration: that it is time that this matter be brought to a close,” Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, told the Australian parliament late last month. ...

“This case is hugely significant,” the Columbia University law professor Jameel Jaffer, who runs the Knight First Amendment Institute at the university, said in an interview. “At the end of the day, I find it hard to believe that the Biden administration wants this case to be its press freedom legacy, and it will be its legacy if they continue to pursue it. That will overshadow everything else when it comes to press freedom.”

Ben Norton & Lee Camp: Coup in Peru & Latin America Fights Dollar Hegemony

Peru’s Castillo calls new president a ‘usurper’ as she promises early elections

In a handwritten letter from prison, ousted Peruvian president Pedro Castillo is deriding his successor as a “usurper”, while vowing to continue his mandate as head of state and to not abandon his “high and sacred functions”.

In the letter posted on Castillo’s Twitter account on Monday, the former leader addressed the “great and patient Peruvian people”, saying he had been “humiliated, [kept] incommunicado, mistreated and kidnapped” but added he was “still clothed with your trust and struggle”. He dismissed his successor, Dina Boluarte, as the “snot and slobber of the coup-mongering right”.

The missive came five days after Castillo was removed from office and detained on charges of rebellion, following his attempt to shutter congress and rule by decree in an effort to avoid his third impeachment.

It came shortly after Boluarte gave in to protesters’ demands for early general elections amid escalating unrest in the country. Speaking in a televised address earlier on Monday, Boluarte said she would submit a bill to bring general elections forward by two years, to April 2024. But her proposal was unlikely to stop surging protests as Castillo supporters call for Peru’s widely loathed congress to be closed and for early elections to be held. ...

Boluarte announced a state of emergency in the zones of “high social conflict” in the southern regions of Apurímac, Arequipa and Ica, where protesters angry at what they see as a coup by congress have blocked roads and closed two airports. Protests were widespread in rural strongholds of support for Castillo, a former schoolteacher and political novice from a poor Andean region. On Sunday, congress stripped Castillo of presidential immunity as he faces charges of “breaching the constitution”.

Biden Hosts Summit of 49 African Leaders to Counter China & Russia's Growing Power Across Continent

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Capitol attack ‘would’ve been armed’ if I was in charge

The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has bragged that had she and the former Donald Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon been in charge of organizing the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, the violent crowd would have won, and everyone in it “would’ve been armed”.

The notorious provocateur made her comments about the deadly January 6 attack during a speech to a gala of the New York Young Republicans Club on Park Avenue in Manhattan on Saturday night. ...

She went on: “See that’s the whole joke, isn’t it? They say that whole thing was planned and I’m like, are you kidding me? A bunch of conservatives, second amendment supporters, went in the Capitol without guns, and they think that we organized that? I don’t think so.”

The audience – which included Bannon, Donald Trump Jr, and prominent figures on the far right – met Greene’s incendiary remarks with cheers and whoops of affirmation.

Hundreds of Oath Keepers Have Worked for DHS in Recent Years, Report Finds

Hundreds of Oath Keepers said they are or were employed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a report published Monday found—a revelation that comes about two weeks after two leaders of the far-right militia were convicted of seditious conspiracy in connection with the January 6 insurrection.

In a joint investigation with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) found that more than 300 people on a leaked Oath Keepers membership list described themselves as current or former employees of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies including the Border Patrol, Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Secret Service.

Experts voiced alarm over far-right extremists—who according to DHS pose the greatest domestic terrorism threat—working at a federal agency responsible for combating extremism.

"One active law enforcement official joining a militia group is one too many," Mike German, a former undercover FBI agent who has infiltrated white supremacist and far-right extremist groups, told POGO. "This probably represents that the tip of the iceberg as far as federal law enforcement officers that have been involved in or supported the activities of far-right, militant groups like the Oath Keepers."

Arizona Governor Builds Illegal "Border Wall" of Shipping Containers. Why Isn't Biden Stopping It?

Richmond removes last city-owned Confederate statue after two-year purge

The city of Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy for most of the civil war, removed its last city-owned Confederate statue on Monday, more than two years after it began to purge itself of what many saw as painful symbols of racial oppression.

It took just minutes to free the statue of Confederate Gen AP Hill from its base, before a crane using yellow straps looped under the statue’s arms lifted it onto a bed of tires on a flatbed truck. After the statue was removed, the crew got to work removing the base.

Several dozen people, including neighbors, some of Hill’s indirect descendants and supporters and opponents of the removal, stood in the closed intersection watching the crew work.

Richmond removed its other Confederate monuments amid the racial justice protests that followed George Floyd’s killing in 2020. But efforts to remove the Hill statue, which sat in the middle of a busy intersection near a school, were more complicated because the general’s remains were interred beneath it about 25 years after his death at the end of the civil war.

Many Confederate statues in Virginia were erected decades after the civil war, during the Jim Crow era, when states imposed new segregation laws and during the “Lost Cause” movement, when historians and others tried to depict the South’s rebellion as a fight to defend states’ rights, not slavery. Some Confederate tributes remain in Richmond, but they’re on state land, including on Capitol Square surrounding the Virginia state Capitol building.

Karen Bass declares homelessness as ‘state of emergency’ on first day as LA mayor

Karen Bass, the new mayor of Los Angeles, began her first day in office by declaring a state of emergency to grapple with the city’s homelessness crisis, bidding to move swiftly to help thousands of unhoused people off the streets.

Bass called the declaration “a sea change in how the city tackles homelessness”, making good on a campaign pledge to call the emergency the day she took power. The issue dominated her mayoral race against the billionaire developer Rick Caruso and the crisis has continued to worsen despite vast public spending increases.

Speaking at the ceremony, she said that the many disparate arms of government must unite to confront homelessness in the nation’s second-largest city. To move in a new direction “we must have a single strategy” bringing together government, the private sector and other stakeholders, she said. ...

Bass, 69, ran as the consensus pick of the Democratic establishment and was endorsed by Biden, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Details on the emergency order have yet to emerge, though Bass has said she intends to place 17,000 homeless people into housing in her first year through a mix of interim and permanent facilities.

FBI Won’t Release Seth Rich Laptop Info Because RUSSIA!

Bernie Sanders says Kyrsten Sinema ‘helped sabotage’ key legislation

The popular progressive US senator Bernie Sanders would consider supporting any Democrat who might mount a challenge against his chamber colleague Kyrsten Sinema after she recently left the party and declared herself an independent like him, arguing that she has “helped sabotage” some of Congress’s most important legislation.

Sanders’s comments on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union added to the chorus of detractors against the Arizona lawmaker who has undermined the agenda of the Joe Biden White House and other progressives, including by voting down raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and reforming the Senate filibuster so that voting rights legislation can pass.

The independent from Vermont who votes in line with Democratic interests told the show host, Dana Bash, that the leftwing party’s members in Arizona were “not all that enthusiastic about somebody who helped sabotage some of the most important legislation that protects the interests of working families and voting rights and so forth”.

And, Sanders added, if Arizona Democrats eventually ran someone to challenge the newly-declared independent, “I will take a hard look at” supporting that candidate, though some are concerned that hopeful could unwittingly give Republicans an opening.

“I support progressive candidates all over this country – people who have the guts to take on special interests,” said Sanders, adding that he wasn’t interested in speaking much more on Sinema. “I don’t know what’s going to be happening in Arizona – we will see who they nominate.”

Debate: Will MORE DEMS Leave The Party Like Kyrsten Sinema?

End of Destructive Subsidies Key Demand at COP15 Biodiversity Talks

With just one week left at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference for countries to reach a deal to protect Earth's ecosystems, environmental campaigners on Monday implored negotiators gathered in Montréal to ensure that the elimination of harmful government subsidies is a core component of any agreement.

Climate Home News reports the European Union announced its support for a proposal at the U.N. biodiversity summit—also known as COP15—to eliminate harmful subsidies by 2025 and redirect the funds toward activities that protect ecosystems.

"As a priority, existing resources need to be used more effectively, including by aligning all financial flows with nature-positive objectives," the European Commission said in a statement.

Experts have shown that governments spend at least $1.8 trillion annually—or about 2% of global gross domestic product—on subsidies to support ecosystem-destructive industries including fossil fuels, agriculture, and fishing.

Greenpeace amplified its pre-COP15 contention that "governments must address subsidies to extractive and otherwise harmful industries and stop encouraging such business models through trade and investment."

"Governments must also act to stop fossil fuel, forestry, and big agricultural companies from insidious attempts to co-opt nature protection through 'nature-based solutions' or offsets," the group said. "Biodiversity offsets are not a substitute for real action to stop destruction of nature, just as carbon offsets are not a substitute for real emissions reductions."

"Biodiversity offsets risk becoming as big a scam as carbon offsets," warned Greenpeace. "We don't have time for these false solutions."

Writing about ocean biodiversity in a Monday opinion piece in The Guardian, progressive British economist Guy Standing asserts that "countries should commit to scrapping the subsidies given to industrial fisheries, £22bn of which contributes to overfishing and illegal fishing, devastating fish populations and marine food chains."

"They should also end subsidies to offshore oil and gas, which pose a direct pollution threat as well as fuelling the climate crisis," he added.

However, many countries including Japan—one of numerous nations that tried to remove references to agricultural and fishing subsidies in the Global Biodiversity Framework—and India oppose eliminating all subsidies.

"We are against the use of words like elimination, and are pushing for words like reducing, restoring, or repurposing of the subsidies," Vinod Mathur, who chairs India's National Biodiversity Authority and who is leading his country's COP15 negotiations, told CarbonCopy.

"The way the Western world interprets subsidies is different from how countries like India do," he added. "A subsidy can be pervasive or normal. Our farmers who are poor and disadvantaged need both social and economic support."

'Tragedy Unfolding' as Cleanup of Largest-Ever Keystone Pipeline Oil Spill Continues

Cleanup and assessment efforts continued Monday after a Canadian fossil fuel company's pipeline spilled nearly an Olympic-sized swimming pool's worth of crude tar sands oil into a northern Kansas creek that feeds a watershed providing drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people.

In what's being called the largest U.S. onshore crude oil leak in nearly a decade and the largest by far in the accident-prone Keystone Pipeline system's history, approximately 14,000 barrels, or 600,000 gallons, of crude tar sands oil spewed from the Keystone 1 pipeline onto surrounding land and into Mill Creek just north of Washington, Kansas at around 8:00 pm on Wednesday.

Mill Creek flows into the Little Blue River, which in turn drains into the Big Blue River, which then runs into the Tuttle Creek Reservoir before draining into the Kansas River.

Aerial footage published by Nebraska Public Media over the weekend showed the extent of the damage:

"Over 61,000 square miles of watershed in Kansas, southern Nebraska, and eastern Colorado drain to the Kansas River, the drinking water source for over 800,000 Kansans and a vital natural resource," the local environmental group Friends of the Kaw said in a statement Friday.

"This area includes the creek, rivers, and reservoir potentially impacted by this Keystone pipeline spill. While Washington County is seemingly far away from the Kansas River, disasters like this one illustrate how connected the people and places in our watershed truly are," the group added.

Calgary, Alberta-based TC Energy said Sunday that the company has "contained" the spill and "continues to progress in our response" to the accident. The firm also said it is working with federal, state, and tribal agencies in response to the spill.

"We appreciate the patience and collaboration of the surrounding community and partner agencies for their support in responding to this incident," the company added. "We recognize this is concerning to the community and commit that we will continue our response until we have fully remediated the site."

While part of the same system, the Keystone 1 pipeline—which carries an estimated 720,000 barrels of Canadian tar sands oil per day—is a separate conduit from the proposed Keystone XL extension that was defeated by Indigenous, green, and progressive activism and rejected by the Obama and Biden administrations.

The Keystone system carries tar sands oil—what the National Congress of American Indians calls "the world's dirtiest and most environmentally destructive form of oil"—from Alberta, Canada to refineries in Illinois and the Texas Gulf Coast. The pipelines are staunchly opposed by Indigenous and environmental activists, many of whom have been arrested and some of whom have been criminally charged.

Keystone XL opponents warned of the danger of leaks prior to and during its construction, which was halted last year. According to the anti-pipeline group Bold Nebraska, there have been 22 Keystone spills since 2010.

"As we wait to hear how much tar sands and toxic chemicals like benzene have polluted our water from TC Energy's Keystone 1 pipeline, it is critical to note our state and counties need better laws on the books for pipelines," Bold Nebraska founder Jane Kleeb said in a statement.

"Thankfully, landowners and tribal nations came together to stop the larger Keystone XL pipeline from cutting through sensitive areas of the Ogallala Aquifer and the Niobrara River," Kleeb added. "Now is the time to get stronger laws on the books to protect our state's assets—the land, the water, and the people."

Breakthrough in nuclear fusion could mean ‘near-limitless energy’

Researchers have reportedly made a breakthrough in the quest to unlock a “near-limitless, safe, clean” source of energy: they have got more energy out of a nuclear fusion reaction than they put in. Nuclear fusion involves smashing together light elements such as hydrogen to form heavier elements, releasing a huge burst of energy in the process. The approach, which gives rise to the heat and light of the sun and other stars, has been hailed as having huge potential as a sustainable, low-carbon energy source.

However, since nuclear fusion research began in the 1950s, researchers have been unable to a demonstrate a positive energy gain, a condition known as ignition. Now, it seems, the Rubicon has been crossed.

According to a report in the Financial Times, which has yet to be confirmed by the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that is behind the work, researchers have managed to release 2.5 MJ of energy after using just 2.1 MJ to heat the fuel with lasers. ...

Prof Justin Wark, professor of physics at the University of Oxford, added that while, in principle, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory could produce such a result about once a day, a fusion power plant would need to do it 10 times a second.

And there is another point: the positive energy gain reported ignores the 500MJ of energy that was put into the lasers themselves.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Britain’s Secret Propaganda on Vietnam War

UN Report Shows 11,000 Children Killed or Maimed in US-Backed Yemen War

Israel Strikes Southern Syria, Drops Threatening Leaflets

US trial of Venezuela’s Alex Saab exposes diplomatic espionage

Varoufakis Details Vision for Ending 'Global Empire of Capital' to Avert Catastrophe

Is Canada Euthanizing the Poor?

Progressive Lawmakers Demand Fraud Probe Into Medicare Privatization Scheme

Why Supertanker Rates Are Suddenly Crashing

Twitter Files: Censors INVENTED Reason To Ban Trump

Video: Jack Dorsey Lied To Congress About Twitter Censorship

A Little Night Music

Floyd Jones - Stockyard Blues

Floyd Jones - Playhouse

Floyd Jones - On The Road Again

Floyd Jones - You Can't Live Long

Floyd Jones - Big World

Floyd Jones - Floyd's Blue

Floyd Jones - Hard Times

Big Walter Horton & Floyd Jones - Take A Little Walk

Floyd Jones - Rising Wind

Floyd Jones - Dark Road