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This evening's music features blues guitarist John Lee Hooker. Enjoy!

"What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physcial cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing."

-- George Orwell

News and Opinion

An interesting, detailed article from Sy Hersh worth a click and a full read:

How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions. ...

Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible. There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany. ... In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion. ...

What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President. ... At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline. ...

Sometime in March, a few members of the team flew to Norway to meet with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy. One of the key questions was where exactly in the Baltic Sea was the best place to plant the explosives. Nord Stream 1 and 2, each with two sets of pipelines, were separated much of the way by little more than a mile as they made their run to the port of Greifswald in the far northeast of Germany.

The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult. ...

The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice. ... On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.

Pulitzer Journo: US BLEW UP Nordstream Pipeline

Biden covers up plans for US shooting war against Russia in State of the Union address

President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address was an exercise in deceit. Its central aim was to conceal from the American people plans for an immense escalation, including the deployment of troops, in the ever more direct military conflict with Russian forces as the US-instigated war in Ukraine enters its second bloody year. The annual speech to a joint session of Congress was preceded by a feverish intensification of the war. Over the past several weeks, at the urging of Washington, multiple European powers have begun to send main battle tanks to Ukraine, the US has announced the dispatch of long-range precision missiles capable of striking deep into Russia territory and plans have been unveiled to send advanced NATO fighter jets to the regime in Kiev. ...

In last year’s State of the Union speech, held just days after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reactionary and disastrous invasion of Ukraine, deliberately provoked by Washington, Biden focused almost exclusively on the war, hailing the bipartisan unity it had generated barely a year after the siege of Congress by Donald Trump’s fascist insurrectionists. Yet in Tuesday’s address, there was hardly a mention of the war in Ukraine—a war that has brought the world to the brink of a nuclear exchange, or “Armageddon,” as Biden himself called it last fall. In a speech that dragged on for nearly 90 minutes, he devoted only 200 out of 7,000 words to the war, which is the central focus of his administration.

How is this astonishing fact to be explained? First, Biden knows that the war is unpopular among the broad mass of the American working class. Second, his government is in the process of working out its response to the rapid deterioration of Ukraine’s military position. This will require the deployment of NATO forces to Ukraine, including American contractors and troops, but Biden is not yet ready to reveal it. More time is needed to ratchet up the ongoing media propaganda campaign and generate an even higher level of anti-Russia hysteria.

Propaganda in the Ukrainian Proxy-War, w/ Noam Chomsky, Alexander Mercouris and Glenn Diesen

Shoigu talks about success near Artyomovsk, escalation risk over NATO moves

Russian troops are successfully developing their offensive near Ugledar and Artyomovsk (called Bakhmut in Ukraine) in the Donetsk People’s Republic, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said at the ministry’s conference call on Tuesday.

The deliveries of Western offensive armaments to the Kiev regime are drawing NATO countries into the conflict in Ukraine and can eventually lead to "an unpredictable escalation," the Russian defense chief warned.

Meanwhile, Russian forces "continue grinding down" the West-supplied weapons both at the front line and along the routes of their deliveries, Shoigu said.

Brazil’s President REFUSES To Send Weapons To Ukraine

The hyperventilation continues and intensifies:

Downed balloon one of a ‘fleet’ of Chinese surveillance devices, US alleges

China has a “fleet” of surveillance balloons of different shapes and sizes, which it has deployed over five continents, US officials have claimed.

The allegations on Wednesday came as salvage work continued off the South Carolina coast for the debris from a high-altitude Chinese balloon a US jet fighter downed on Saturday after it had crossed the whole of the continental US.

“We’re not alone in this,” said the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken. “We’ve already shared information with dozens of countries around the world both from Washington and through our embassies. We’re doing so because the United States was not the only target of this broader programme which has violated the sovereignty of countries across five continents.”

On Thursday, Japan said cases of suspected balloons flying over Japan had been confirmed, including in the waters off the south-western region of Kyushu in 2022. Tokyo was exchanging data with the US, said government spokesperson Hirokazu Matsuno. “We will continue to monitor the situation with utmost interest and gather information,” he said.

The Pentagon spokesperson, brigadier general Patrick Ryder, said the FBI and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service were working to catalogue the wreckage of the downed balloon and transfer it to the mainland for further examination. The Pentagon has published photographs of sailors on small navy boats gathering parts of the balloon from the surface, but most of the equipment payload – said to be the size of a regional passenger jet – has sunk to the sea bed.

You’re Being Lied To About The Chinese “Spy” Balloon

Railway Unions Strike Deal on Sick Leave With Industry Giant CSX

After sustained pressure from organized workers and their allies, freight rail giant CSX Transportation agreed Tuesday to provide 5,000 employees in two unions with four days of paid sick leave each year—an industry-first move progressive said should serve as an example for other companies to follow.

The agreement reached between Jacksonville, Florida-based CSX and two unions—the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen (BRC) and the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division (BMWED)—will provide four days of fully paid sick leave each year, while allowing union members to take up to three personal leave days annually. Additionally, employees can apply their unused paid sick days to their 401K retirement accounts or take payouts.

Rail Companies Blocked Safety Rules Before Ohio Derailment

Before this weekend’s fiery Norfolk Southern train derailment prompted emergency evacuations in Ohio, the company helped kill a federal safety rule aimed at upgrading the rail industry’s Civil War-era braking systems, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.

Though the company’s 150-car train in Ohio reportedly burst into 100-foot flames upon derailing — and was transporting materials that triggered a fireball when they were released and incinerated — it was not being regulated as a “high-hazard flammable train,” federal officials told The Lever.

Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials — including the one in Ohio — from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.

Amid the lobbying blitz against stronger transportation safety regulations, Norfolk Southern paid executives millions and spent billions on stock buybacks — all while the company shed thousands of employees despite warnings that understaffing is intensifying safety risks. Norfolk Southern officials also fought off a shareholder initiative that could have required company executives to “assess, review, and mitigate risks of hazardous material transportation.”

Twitter Hearings Reveal BIPARTISAN Censorship

Republicans grill ex-Twitter executives over handling of Hunter Biden story

US lawmakers held a combative hearing on Wednesday with former senior staffers at Twitter over the social media platform’s handling of reporting on Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

The proceedings set the stage for the agenda of a newly Republican-controlled House, underscoring its intention to hone in on longstanding and unsubstantiated allegations that big tech platforms have an anti-conservative bias.

The House oversight committee called for questioning recently departed Twitter employees including Vijaya Gadde, the social network’s former chief legal officer, former deputy general counsel James Baker, former head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth and former safety leader Anika Collier Navaroli.

The hearing centered on a question that has long dogged Republicans – why Twitter decided to temporarily restrict the sharing of a story about Hunter Biden in the New York Post, released in October 2020, the month before the US presidential election. But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle used the opportunity to interrogate moderation practices at Twitter and other tech firms.

“The government doesn’t have any role in suppressing speech,” said Republican committee chairman James Comer, hammering the former employees for censoring the Post story.

Mississippi Republicans pass bill to create separate, unelected court in majority-Black city

The Republican-dominated Mississippi house of representatives has passed a bill to create a separate, unelected court system in the city of Jackson that would fall outside the purview of the city’s voters, the majority of whom are Black.

The bill, which local leaders have likened to apartheid-era laws and described as unconstitutional, would also expand a separate capitol police force, overseen by state authorities. The force would expand into all of the city’s white majority neighborhoods, according to Mississippi Today. Jackson’s population is over 80% Black.

Speaking after House Bill 1020 passed on Tuesday evening, Jackson’s mayor Chokwe Lumumba branded the proposed law “some of the most oppressive legislation in our city’s history”.

“It’s oppressive because it strips the right of Black folks to vote. It’s oppressive because it puts a military force over people that has no accountability to them. It’s oppressive because there will be judges who will determine sentences over people’s lives. It’s oppressive because it redirects their tax dollars to something they don’t endorse nor believe in,” Lumumba said.

The bill passed largely along party lines in a 76-38 vote and will now travel to the state senate, where Republicans also hold a significant majority. The passage was preceded by an intense, four-hour floor debate in which members of the state’s Black caucus made impassioned pleas to reject the legislation and compared the bill to the state’s Jim Crow-era constitution of 1890.

FBI Agent Provocateur SPARKED BLM Violence

Kenosha off-duty officer sued for kneeling on 12-year-old girl’s neck

A white Wisconsin police officer, working as a school security guard while off duty, is facing a lawsuit from the family of a 12-year-old Black girl after he held his knee on her neck for more than 20 seconds while breaking up a fight at school.

The lawsuit accuses the officer, whose actions were caught on tape, of using an illegal chokehold.

Also named in the action against the security guard are the city of Kenosha and the Kenosha unified school district that the girl’s father, Jerrel Perez, hold responsible for the “unreasonable and excessive force” used against his daughter during the incident last year.

The officer, who was working off-duty security at the school, was named as Shawn Guetschow. He has since resigned from the school district, but remains a police officer. His lawyer, Sam Hall, will “vigorously defend” him and the district, according to a statement reported by the Washington Post.

Officer took and shared photos of bloodied Tyre Nichols, documents say

Newly released documents in the case of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police last month provide a scathing account of what authorities called the “blatantly unprofessional” conduct of five officers, and include new revelations about how one of them took and shared pictures of the bloodied victim.

The officer, Demetrius Haley, stood over Nichols as he lay propped against a police car after the assault, and took photographs, which Haley sent to other officers and a female acquaintance, according to documents released by the Tennessee peace officers standards and training commission on Tuesday.

“Your on-duty conduct was unjustly, blatantly unprofessional and unbecoming for a sworn public servant,” the Memphis police department wrote in requesting that Haley and the other officers be stripped of their professional certification as law enforcement personnel.

All five have already been fired and charged with second-degree murder and other felonies following the attack on Nichols after a traffic stop on 7 January and his death in hospital three days later.

Trump’s ‘24 game plan: Be the dove among the hawks

Donald Trump is settling on a simple foreign policy pitch in his second bid for the White House: Want World War 3? Vote for the other guy.

Over the past week, Trump has assailed President Joe Biden’s handling of Afghanistan. He has said he could end the almost year-long conflict in Ukraine within “24 hours,” but without any indication how, and suggested sending tanks to the country could spark nuclear war. He has railed against China and called Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis a “globalist.” ...

Those close to Trump’s campaign operation say he plans to try and paint himself as an anti-war dove amongst the hawks. They believe doing so will resonate with GOP voters who are divided on, but growing wary of, continued support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.

“Trump is the peace president and he’s the first president in two generations to not start a war, whereas if you look at DeSantis’ congressional record, he’s voted for more engagement and more military engagement overseas,” said a person close to the Trump campaign, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.

“Trump is the only person who has said no more funding for the Ukraine war. I haven’t heard Nikki Haley say anything like that... Pompeo or Pence? Where do they stand on Ukraine?” In fact, Haley, Pence and Pompeo have all, to varying degrees, called for the U.S. to fund Ukrainians and even, on occasion, criticized the Biden administration for not doing enough.

Rick Scott FLAMED, Walks Back Plan To Cut Social Security, Medicare After Biden SOTU CALL OUT

A solution to the climate crisis: mining the moon, researchers say

Proponents of a “moonshot” idea to deal with global heating have been handed a new, very literal, interpretation by researchers who have proposed firing plumes of moon dust from a gun into space in order to deflect the sun’s rays away from Earth.

The seemingly outlandish concept, outlined in a new research paper, would involve creating a “solar shield” in space by mining the moon of millions of tons of its dust and then “ballistically eject[ing]” it to a point in space about 1m miles from Earth, where the floating grains would partially block incoming sunlight.

“A really exciting part of our study was the realization that the natural lunar dust grains are just the right size and composition for efficiently scattering sunlight away from Earth,” said Ben Bromley, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Utah, who led the research, published in Plos Climate.

“Since it takes much less energy to launch these grains from the moon’s surface, as compared with an Earth launch, the ‘moonshot’ idea really stood out for us.”

Bromley and two other researchers considered a variety of properties, including coal and sea salt, that could dim the sun by as much as 2% if fired into space. The team eventually settled on the dust found on the moon, although millions of tons would have to be mined, sifted and loaded into a ballistic device, such as an electromagnetic rail gun, and fired into space each year into order to maintain this solar shield.

Much more detail at the link:

‘A national scandal’: how US climate funding could make water pollution worse

The $369bn Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was applauded by a chorus of US organizations and activists enthusiastic about the generous funding earmarked for projects designed to mitigate climate change and improve environmental health. But some researchers and activists are raising concerns that several provisions of the new law will actually worsen a growing environmental disaster in the nation’s heartland by increasing the tide of farm-related pollution washing into waterways and groundwater.

The sweeping new statute, which includes more than $140bn in incentives designed to promote renewable fuels and cleaner electricity generation, could slash greenhouse gas emissions 40% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade. But in its efforts to promote climate-friendly agriculture, it also promotes corn-fed ethanol refineries and manure-based energy production that could unintentionally supercharge fertilizer and fecal contamination.

“It’s going to end up in the water,” Rebecca Ohrtman, a water quality specialist from Iowa, said of the contaminants from crop production and what are commonly called “confined animal feeding operations” (CAFOs). Ohrtman spent much of her career as a water protection coordinator with the state of Iowa. “I can’t believe they’re going to provide all this funding with no strings attached.”

The Great Lakes and midwest regions face nothing short of a water quality emergency, say those on the frontlines. Farming-related contaminants have already fouled thousands of drinking water wells from Minnesota to Missouri, and virtually every waterway in Iowa is degraded with little regulation to rein in the pollutants.

“It’s already a national emergency and a national scandal,” said Emma Schmit, a senior organizer in the Midwest for Food and Water Watch, an environmental advocacy group. “When we test our waterways, the main pollutants are E coli and nitrates and phosphorus from agriculture. These are pathogens and contaminants that can cause serious issues for people. We’re about to give large corporate farms carte blanche to make it worse.”

Brazil launches operation to drive illegal miners from Yanomami lands

The Brazilian government has launched its campaign to drive tens of thousands of illegal miners from the country’s largest Indigenous reserve, with special-forces environmental operatives destroying aircraft and seizing weapons and boats during an operation deep in the Amazon’s Yanomami territory.

Members of Brazil’s environmental protection agency Ibama – with support from the Indigenous agency Funai and the newly created ministry for Indigenous peoples – launched the long-awaited operation on Monday, with troops establishing a base along the Uraricoera river. Wildcat tin ore and gold miners use the waterway – as well as dozens of illegal airstrips – to reach and supply their illegal outposts in Yanomami lands.

In a statement on Wednesday lunchtime, Brazil’s government said the environmental squad had destroyed a helicopter, an airplane and a bulldozer used by mining mafias to drive clandestine roads through the region’s jungles. Footage of the raid showed the chassis of a helicopter smoldering near a patch of rainforest after it was torched by Ibama agents in order to prevent it being used again. ...

Illegal goldminers known as garimpeiros began pouring on to Yanomami lands in the 1970s and 80s, after the 1964-85 military dictatorship urged impoverished Brazilians to populate a region they claimed foreign powers sought to seize.

A global outcry – which included Prince Charles condemning the “collective genocide” of the Yanomami – prompted government action. Tens of thousands of miners were removed from Yanomami lands in the early 1990s during a security operation called Selva Livre (Jungle Liberation). Brazil’s then president, Fernando Collor de Mello, created a supposedly protected 9.6m-hectare territory for the Yanomami which exists to this day. However, the assault rekindled after the 2018 election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who publicly railed against how such a large expanse of mineral-rich land had been set aside for the Indigenous group.

Also of Interest

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

Seymour Hersh: Navy Divers + Spooks + Norway Took Out Nordstream 2 on Biden’s Orders, Using Timer

Hersh: "How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline"

Austrian Colonel claims NATO soldiers are fighting in Ukraine as mercenaries

China Rejects "Shoot First, Talk Later" Attitude

Hi-Tech Military Weapons Breed New Danger

Patrick Lawrence: No, Joey, It Still Isn’t Morning in America

Before and after satellite images show scale of earthquake destruction in Turkey

Drought may have doomed ancient Hittite empire, tree study reveals

Earth’s Core Starting To Spin In OPPOSITE Direction

AOC Is A Big Victim & Won’t Stop Talking About It

Roger Waters Smeared By Pink Floyd Bandmate Over Ukraine

AOC Clueless? Says Hunter Biden Laptop Story 'HALF FAKE' At Twitter Censorship Hearing

Briahna Joy Gray: Matt Taibbi DRAGGED For Not Reporting Chrissy Teigen Censorship Request By Trump

A Little Night Music

John Lee Hooker - Mustang Sally & GTO

John Lee Hooker - Huckle Up Baby

John Lee Hooker - It Serves Me Right To Suffer

John Lee Hooker - No Shoes

John Lee Hooker & The Groundhogs - I'm Leaving

John Lee Hooker - Goin' to Louisiana

John Lee Hooker - Big Legs Tight Skirt

John Lee Hooker - Blues For Big Town

John Lee Hooker - "The Boogie" - Live with The Coast to Coast Blues Band