“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
Pablo Picasso

The United Nations Cop28 climate summit wrapped up this week. The best language the participants could agree upon was to transition away from fossil fuels. Did not see any call to decrease military activity contributing to climate change.

New studies keep identifying additional methods we may effect the climate.

Breathing contributes to global warming – study Russia Times Dec 14, 2023

A detailed analysis of test subjects’ diets failed to yield any indication that meat eaters produced more of either gas. While all test subjects exhaled nitrous oxide, only 31% exhaled methane. These individuals, referred to as “methane producers” in the paper, were more likely to be female and over 30 years of age, though the researchers were unable to determine why this was the case.
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The UK has legally committed itself to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 78% by 2035 compared to 1990. Residents have been strongly encouraged to reduce meat consumption in order to achieve this goal, with some estimates placing the share of global greenhouse gas emissions from raising livestock for meat at 15%. However, the researchers behind Wednesday’s study pointed out that shifting to a high-fiber vegetarian diet could potentially cause more methane and nitrous oxide emissions, a phenomenon they called “pollution swapping.”

US must not be making enough of a fuss at the moment about the Taiwan Straight.

UK has right to transit the Strait: British secretary Taipei Times Dec 16, 2023

The British Royal Navy has a right to transit through the Taiwan Strait, British Secretary of Defence Grant Shapps said yesterday, shortly after announcing that a carrier strike group would sail there.
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“The strength and global reach of the UK’s armed forces should never be underestimated,” Shapps was quoted as saying. “The carrier strike group 2025 is another tangible example of our ability to deploy globally.”

“Such deployments send a strong deterrence message while presenting important opportunities for engagements with key partners,” he said.

Time to start expanding knowledge of another part of the world. Brief article on composition of Israeli population.

Israel’s mosaic of Jewish ethnic groups is key to understanding the country The Conversation November 30, 2023

Some 16 million people worldwide identify as Jewish – and more than 7 million of them live in Israel.

The country is home to more than 2 million people who are not Jewish, as well – primarily Arab Israelis, who make up 20% to 25% of the population, and more than 100,000 foreign workers. Most Arab Israeli citizens are Muslim, but small minorities adhere to various Christian denominations, as well as the Druze religion.

Even within Israel’s Jewish population, however, there is dizzying diversity.
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The largest Jewish ethnic group in Israel, about 40% to 45% of the country’s total population, is called Mizrahi, which means “Eastern” in Hebrew. Mizrahi Jews’ ancestors hailed from Jewish communities in the Middle East, including Israel itself.

The word Mizrahi often describes Jews from North Africa, too.
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The second-largest ethnic Jewish group in Israel, about 32% of the population, is Ashkenazi. Ashkenazi Jews trace their ancestry to central Europe, most often via Eastern Europe.
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Since the state of Israel’s founding in 1948, migration has flowed the other way as well. Today in Israel there are approximately 200,000 Jews from English-speaking countries and some 100,000 from Latin American countries.

Since the final years of of the Soviet Union, about 1 million people with Jewish roots have immigrated to Israel from Russia and the former Soviet bloc countries. They and their children now make up about 15% to 18% of the Israeli population.

It was only 3 1/2 years ago Netanyahu was in Ukraine to visit Zelensky and pay respect to victims of a mass slaughter in WWII.

The Arc of History Bends From Ukraine to Israel and Back Again Tablet August 21, 2019

When Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Kyiv this week to meet with the country’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, it was the Israeli prime minister’s first official meeting with another world leader of Jewish descent. Almost two decades earlier, during his first trip to Ukraine as prime minister, Netanyahu had delivered a memorable speech at the mass grave of Babi Yar where tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered after the Germans occupied Ukraine in the Second World War.
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It is a remarkable time in Eastern European history. A month after the unprecedented Zelensky landslide election that ousted the old Ukrainian political elite, Latvia, another post-Soviet state with a complex relationship to Russia, elected Egil Levits another president of Jewish descent. And here was Netanyahu, leader of the Jewish state, traveling back to the Eastern European ‘old world,’ where the Jews in their wandering centuries had dreamed of Jerusalem, and then willed that dream into the political struggle that created the state of Israel. It was one thing for the Israeli prime minister to be in Ukraine, the heartland of the Pale of Settlement where modern Zionism began as well as being the site of the “Holocaust by bullets,” but he was there to meet with, of all things, a fellow Jew, one of two elected in the past year as leader of a former Soviet state.
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With the exception of Theodor Herzl, almost every major early Zionist figure either came from or passed through Ukraine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many among the first waves of immigrants to Israel to Mandate Palestine came through the port of Odessa, the hometown of Netanyahu’s political forebear, Revisionist Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky.

Historically, most of the Russian Empire’s Jewish population lived in the strip of Eastern Europe known as the Pale of Settlement, and most of the Jews from the other Soviet republics (including my own grandparents who fled Ukraine for Uzbekistan during the war) had lived there for centuries. Half of the million or so Jews from the Soviet emigration to Israel over the last half century were born in Ukraine, and as many as 90% of all post-Soviet Jews can trace their roots back to the country.
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Yet, despite the conversation about a strategic partnership, Israel has been reticent about providing Ukrainians with the most advanced military technology due to the negative impact it could have on Israel’s relationship with Russia. Like Ukraine, Israel also has Russian military forces on its border, and the Syrian civil war where Russia has played a leading role provides the unspoken subtext for security relations with Ukraine. However, open technical cooperation between the Ukrainian and Israel militaries has quietly expanded in recent years. Israelis have also organized material help for Ukrainian military families who have lost men in the war and have provided assistance for wounded Ukrainian soldiers to be rehabilitated in Israeli hospitals.

Weeks before his arrival in Ukraine, Netanyahu had intimated to a gathering of Israeli journalists that despite his not being particularly conversant in the details of the war in Eastern Ukraine, he was ready to get involved in proffering diplomatic solutions for Kyiv and Moscow.

A couple of articles by Pepe Escobar this week.
BRICS and the Resistance Axis: a convergence of goals The Cradle Dec 11, 2023

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a notable pit stop in the UAE and Saudi Arabia to meet, respectively, Emirati President Mohammad bin Zayed (MbZ) and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) before flying back to Moscow to meet Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.

The three key issues in all three meetings, confirmed by diplomatic sources, were Gaza, OPEC+, and BRICS expansion. They are, of course, interlinked.
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As every stunned military analyst remarked, an American F-35 is capable of flying at best 2,500 km without refueling. Yet the most important element is that both MbZ and MbS authorized the Russian Su-35s escorts over their territory – which is something extremely unusual in diplomatic circles.

And that leads us to the key takeaway. With a single move on the aerial chessboard, compounded with the subsequent clincher with Raisi, Moscow accomplished four tasks:

Putin proved - graphically speaking - that this is a new West Asia where the US hegemon is a secondary actor; destroyed the neocon political myth of Russian “isolation;” demonstrated ample military supremacy; and lastly, as the start of Russia’s BRICS presidency approaches, showed that it retains all its crucial geopolitical and geoeconomic cards.
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Yet a renewed appraisal may reveal everything is evolving organically when it comes to the intersection of the Big Picture
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For the moment, what we have are sporadic attacks: Hezbollah destroying Israel’s communication towers facing the southern Lebanon border, Iraq's resistance forces attacking US bases in Iraq and Syria, and Yemen's Ansarallah concretely blocking the Red Sea for Israeli ships. All that does not form a concerted, coordinated offensive - yet.
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And that would explain the desperation within the Biden administration in Washington, complete with rumors that it needs Israel to finish Plan Gaza between Christmas and the start of January.
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The geopolitical goals of Zionism are quite clear: re-establish its self-constructed aura of dominance in West Asia and maintain steady control over US foreign policy and the military alliance.
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So what we have is essentially Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Emigration-or-Annihilation plan - versus what veteran West Asia expert Alastair Crooke has memorably coined as “Sykes-Picot is dead.” That phrase means that Arab and Iranian inclusion in BRICS will eventually rewrite the rules in West Asia, to the detriment of the Zionist project.

There’s even a strong possibility this time around that Israel's certified war crimes in Gaza will be prosecuted, as Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslim-majority nations, with full BRICS support, form a Global South-recognized commission to take Tel Aviv and its armed forces to court.

A quick read of a few discussions at The Astana Club conference.

Pepe Escobar: Clash of Civilizations in Kazakhstan Dec 15, 2023

The Astana Club is now firmly established as an indispensable annual East-West gathering in the Heartland. This year’s forum, taking place at minus 32 degrees Celsius in the Kazakh capital, could not have been scheduled at a more incandescent geopolitical inflexion point.
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The Star Wars-style round table gathered a mix of assorted Atlanticists, mostly American and British, and Eurasia-wide specialists from China, Russia, India, Turkiye and Azerbaijan. Now let’s get straight into the action.

Col. Douglas Macgregor: How Israel is Isolating the US. (29:27 min)

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Can the US Say NO to Israel and Ukraine? (27:37 min)
The Coronal also mentions how the Muslim countries are starting to work together.

The livestream videos this week by Judge Napolitano channel ongoing discussions regarding current events in Israel/Hamas/Gaza, China and third subject Ukraine/Russia conflict. The interviews are generally posted on Monday through Friday if would like to view them in a more timely manner. The link opens in the LIVE column, occasionally an interview only appears in VIDEOS section.

What is on your mind today?