The Pulitzer Winner Hersh Unveils Mystery on Death of Navy SEALS in Gulf of Aden | VT Foreign Policy
February 16, 2024
VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

$ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

In the cover image the USS Lewis B. Puller departs Naval Station Norfolk in July 2017. / US Navy photo by Bill Mesta.

The Seals and the Dhow

Originally published by Seymour Hersh on his Substack

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This is a painful story for the families of three Navy SEALs. Two of the SEALs were lost at sea and a third was critically injured on a mission on January 11 in the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and Somalia. It was a mission that never should have been ordered, and when everything went wrong, it was covered up with a series of lies.

Why report a story about two deaths and an injury when there is a president who has put America indirectly into wars in Ukraine, Israel, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Middle East? I have learned in six decades of chasing down hidden stories that it is delving into the little lies that reveals much about the bigger lies. So it has been in the past month with the story of the dead and injured SEALs.

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Their target was a wooden smuggling vessel, operated by Somalis, that was suspected of delivering modern ballistic missiles or missile parts to America’s new enemy: the Houthis of Yemen. Somalis have been smuggling goods through the Red Sea and Indian Ocean in their wooden sailing vessels, known as dhows, since biblical times. Few have motors or any means of electronic communication, and the larger dhows, like the one targeted by the SEALs, often serve as living quarters for the smugglers’ families. (dhow is a a sailing boat with a long, thin hull – ed).

The SEALs were assigned to a ship named the Lewis B. Puller, after a fabled combat general, the most decorated marine of all time, who fought in World War II against the Japanese, as well as in Haiti, in Central America, and in the Korean War. The ship, modeled on an oil tanker, is what the Navy calls an Expeditionary Mobile Base, which means that it is capable, with its landing decks, of supporting a vast number of air and sea military activities from all the services, including those of the Navy SEALs. The Puller was commissioned in 2017 in a port in Bahrain and was not much in the news until it became known that the failed SEAL mission took place.

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On January 13, the New York Times, citing two current and two former Pentagon officials, published the first account of the two deaths, which were said to have taken place while the SEALs were attempting to board a dhow at night.

The Quoting of a Former SEAL Senior Chief

The sea was rough, and one SEAL slipped off the boarding ladder. The initial report claimed that a second SEAL jumped into the water in an effort to save his colleague and both drowned. It was not clear whether he was also on the ladder or jumped from the inflatable speedboat known as a RHIB, for rigid hulled inflatable boat, that the SEALs used to approach the ship. A January 22 Times article about the incident, by Dave Philipps, known for his excellent sources in the special operations community, revealed that a third SEAL attempted to climb the ladder to board the dhow. He fell during the attempted boarding and struck the speedboat. He was rescued and today remains in critical condition.

Philipps quoted a former SEAL senior chief explaining that he and his retired colleagues were convinced the story, as told by administration officials, “doesn’t make sense. Something else must have gone wrong.”

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There were questions at the time about President’s Biden decision in early January to expand the American war portfolio. He has taken on the Houthis, who had survived a seven-year war with the Saudi air force, supported by American bombs and targeting intelligence. That war ended with what amounted to a Saudi surrender. The American attacks, still being supported by British air power, are in their second month, and the world’s major shipping companies are still choosing not to chance a ten-day shortcut by sailing from Europe via the Suez Canal into the Red Sea. The Houthi threat is still there, pending an Israeli decision to cease its onslaught in the Gaza Strip. Ironically, or tragically, Biden is now said to be telling the Israelis that a ceasefire is needed. The world is coming to its own judgment about Biden, who is now seeking a second term.

Refer a friend

The Somali dhow offered the White House a chance to justify its new offensive. It had been tracked by American intelligence since leaving Somalia because it was believed to be carrying ballistic missile parts needed by the Houthis in their ongoing campaign against Western shipping; The basis for that intelligence, which proved to be wrong, has not been made known.

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Back to the Lewis B. Puller. The more than a dozen senior officers from all services assigned to the ship’s command center were gung-ho to send the hot-shot SEAL team to intercept the dhow, compel the boat to stand to, and board it to find ballistic missiles or parts of weapons that were coming to the Houthis from Iran, known to American intelligence as a longtime supporter and supplier of weaponry to Yemen. But there was a serious problem. The issue is what is known in the Navy as the Sea State Code, which is based on terminology used in oceanography to describe the general conditions of the ocean’s surface, as determined by three key factors: wind, waves, and swell.

The Serious Problem of Sea State

There are ten categories of sea state, and SEALs can operate with ease and safety up to sea state 3. One experienced retired senior American Navy officer told me that even four- and five-foot waves can sometimes create difficulties for a Navy tanker attempting to refuel an aircraft carrier, but it can be done with skilled maneuvering. No ship loaded with high-octane fighter fuel wants to crash into the side of a carrier.

When the seas get higher, to level 4 or 5, the waves and stronger current make boarding a targeted vessel, even a wooden dhow, an extremely dangerous prospect, in part because of the difficulty in handling steel ladders, known as caving ladders, that are standard SEAL boarding gear. The steps are lightweight aluminum tubes linked by equally lightweight steel cables.

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What is hard to do at sea state 3 is deadly dangerous at sea state 4 or 5, a retired Navy officer, with years of experience in special operations, told me. “The waves are going up and down eight feet and more and you do not board a ship in heavy sea,” he said. He added that Navy captains of combat ships finishing a long deployment understand that crews due for shore leave are not permitted to leave the ship in such churning waters.

The retired officer said that when the officer on the Puller who was in charge of all special operation missions, an Army colonel, told “the SEAL team leader to ‘saddle up,’ the team leader told him to look outside the window.” His message was that “it was dark, and the sea was too rough. And it was beyond the capabilities of his team.” The retired officer added: “It was an argument between the on the scene commander and a guy in charge of the SEALs.”

The SEAL team leader said no. But he was ordered to carry out the mission, despite the obvious weather issues, and he did so.

The Mystery on a Ballistic Missile

The questions that were not asked, the retired officer said, were these: “Do we know if the dhow is carrying a ballistic missile or a box full of missile parts?” No. “Can you get a key to a launch site?” No. “Or a map of all the Houthi launch sites?” No. “Do Somali smugglers know the difference between a case of Johnny Walker Red and one of Johnny Walter Black?” Yes.

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The decision to ignore the concerns of the SEAL commander has been seen by the angered SEAL community in America as “beyond rational planning” and “a disaster waiting to happen.” I learned that one high-ranking member of the community, now retired, wrote a private letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, asking that the officer who overruled the SEAL commander be court-martialed for dereliction of duty as the buck-stops-here boss of the operation. “It will never happen,” the former officer told me. “Dead SEALs will go down in Navy annals as heroes, not victims.” His point was that the Navy would never acknowledge that the SEAL team had no business being sent on a search-and-destroy mission in such weather.

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As many as nine SEALs may have been aboard the SEALs’ inflatable speedboat—there was a second boat with no SEALs aboard as backup—as it dashed to the dhow that, as ordered, came to a stop and acknowledged that it was to be boarded. Three SEALs began the treacherous climb aboard the vessel. It is not known just what happened—did one fall off the special ladder, made up of steel tubes and chain links? Or did the ladder, swaying to and from in the heavy sea with two SEALs making the climb and a third waiting to do so, suddenly get rocked by a huge wave that flung the men against the side of the dhow, leaving both unconscious or worse, with only to drop into the sea? The badly injured third SEAL survived only because he fell into one of the speedboats.

Only Obsolete Rocket Motors and Pieces of Old Missiles on the Dhow

The SEALs who made the climb into the dhow “did find the treasure,” the retired officer sardonically told me. “There were some obsolete rocket motors, all Iran-made, and some pieces of Styx missiles from the 1950s and ’60s, but no significant missile components among the cargo, other than ancient engines and some random tubes that had been used in missile attacks. There was the usual cargo of liquor, cigarettes, random knock-off clothing, porn cassettes.”

The Somali smugglers were taken prisoner and placed on Navy vessels that came to the scene, and the dhow sent to the bottom.

The two deaths were reported, but over the next few days, the retired officer said, all involved “were playing the game,” keeping as many details as possible under wraps. The Lewis B. Puller was locked down in extreme secrecy. The names of the dead were made public, but not that of the survivor, if he does survive. His is a story that no one in the Navy wants told. I learned that the commanding officer of the Lewis B. Puller, who graduated from the Naval Academy in 2000 and spent his career in Navy aviation—not as a pilot but as a backseat radar intercept officer—may be quietly retired, if the system works as it usually does.

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There is a Navy history for such arrogance and deception that dates to the end of the Second World War. The chief of Naval Operations was crusty Admiral Ernest King, a brilliant officer who played a key role in advising President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on military matters. When asked at one point by an aide what to tell the press about the progress of the war against the Japanese fleet, King famously said: “Don’t tell them anything. When it’s over, tell them who won.”

Originally published by Seymour Hersh on his Substack

All links to Gospa News articles (and headlines) have been added aftermath, in relation to the topics highlighted

Subscribe to the Gospa News Newsletter to read the news as soon as it is published

Seymour Myron “Sy” Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandalfor The New York Times, also reporting on the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the CIA’s program of domestic spying. In 2004, he detailed the U.S. military’s torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won a record five George Polk Awards, and two National Magazine Awards. He is the author of 11 books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), an account of the career of Henry Kissinger which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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In 2013, Hersh’s reporting alleged that Syrian rebel forces, rather than the government, had attacked civilians with sarin gas at Ghouta during the Syrian Civil War, and in 2015, he presented an alternative account of the U.S. special forces raid in Pakistan which killed Osama bin Laden. In 2023, Hersh highlighted that the U.S. and Norway had sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines.

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Fabio G. C. Carisio
Fabio is investigative journalist since 1991. Now geopolitics, intelligence, military, SARS-Cov-2 manmade, NWO expert and Director-founder of Gospa News: a Christian Information Journal.

His articles were published on many international media and website as SouthFront, Reseau International, Sputnik Italia, United Nation Association Westminster, Global Research, Kolozeg and more…

Most popolar investigation on VT is:

Rumsfeld Shady Heritage in Pandemic: GILEAD’s Intrigues with WHO & Wuhan Lab. Bio-Weapons’ Tests with CIA & Pentagon

Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter when he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became director of the local newspaper Notizia Oggi Vercelli and specialized in judicial reporting.

For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime.

With independent investigations, he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians.

In July 2018 he found the counter-information web media Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East, and military intelligence.

In 2020 published the book, in Italian only, WUHAN-GATES – The New World Order Plot on SARS-Cov-2 manmade focused on the cycle of investigations Wuhan-Gates

His investigations was quoted also by The Gateway Pundit, Tasnim and others

He worked for many years for the magazine Art & Wine as an art critic and curator.

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The Four Horsemen of Gaza’s Apocalypse. Chris Hedges
Joe Biden relies on advisors who view the world through the prism of the West’s civilizing mission to the “lesser breeds” of the earth to formulate his policies towards Israel and the Middle East.


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Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.

In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They are endowed with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as ill-advised and dangerous.

Biden has always been an ardent militarist — he was calling for war with Iraq five years before the U.S. invaded. He built his political career by catering to the distaste of the white middle class for the popular movements, including the anti-war and civil rights movements, that convulsed the country in the 1960s and 1970s. He is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern segregationists to oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools. He opposed federal funding for abortions and supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to restrict abortions. He attacked President George H. W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.” He was one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of other draconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a strident defender of Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator.

“As many of you heard me say before, were there no Israel, America would have to invent one. We’d have to invent one because… you protect our interests like we protect yours,” Biden said in 2015, to an audience that included the Israeli ambassador, at the 67th Annual Israeli Independence Day Celebration in Washington D.C. During the same speech he said, “The truth of the matter is we need you. The world needs you. Imagine what it would say about humanity and the future of the 21st century if Israel were not sustained, vibrant and free.”

The year before Biden gave a gushing eulogy for Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister and general who was implicated in massacres of Palestinians, Lebanese and others in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon — as well as Egyptian prisoners of war — going back to the 1950s. He described Sharon as “part of one of the most remarkable founding generations in the history not of this nation, but of any nation.”

While repudiating Donald Trump and his administration, Biden has not reversed Trump’s abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama, or Trump’s sanctions against Iran. He has embraced Trump’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, including the rehabilitation of Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, following the assassination of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 in the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. He has not intervened to curb Israeli attacks on Palestinians and settlement expansion in the West Bank. He did not reverse Trump’s moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, although the embassy includes land Israel illegally colonized after invading the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.

As a seven-term senator of Delaware, Biden received more financial support from pro-Israel donors than any other senator, since 1990. Biden retains this record despite the fact that his senatorial career ended in 2009, when he became Obama’s vice president. Biden explains his commitment to Israel as “personal” and “political.”

He has parroted back Israeli propaganda — including fabrications about beheaded babies and widespread rape of Israeli women by Hamas fighters — and asked Congress to provide $14 billion in additional aid to Israel since the Oct. 7 attack. He has twice bypassed Congress to supply Israel with thousands of bombs and munitions, including at least 100 2,000-pound bombs, used in the scorched earth campaign in Gaza.

Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 90,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has destroyed or damaged over 60 percent of the housing. The “safe areas,” to which some 2 million Gazans were instructed to flee in southern Gaza, have been bombed, with thousands of casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the U.N. Every person in Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent. The 335,000 children under the age of five are at high risk of malnutrition. Some 50,000 pregnant women lack healthcare and adequate nutrition.

And it could all end if the U.S. chose to intervene.

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Blinken was Biden’s principal foreign policy adviser when Biden was the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. He, along with Biden, lobbied for the invasion of Iraq. When he was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, he advocated the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He opposed withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria. He worked on the disastrous Biden Plan to partition Iraq along ethnic lines.

“Within the Obama White House, Blinken played an influential role in the imposition of sanctions against Russia over the 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and subsequently led ultimately unsuccessful calls for the U.S. to arm Ukraine,” according to the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank.

Image: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Oct. 12, 2023. – Secretary Antony Blinken on X



When Blinken landed in Israel following the attacks by Hamas and other resistance groups on Oct. 7, he announced at a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

“I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.”

He attempted, on Israel’s behalf, to lobby Arab leaders to accept the 2.3 million Palestinian refugees Israel intends to ethnically cleanse from Gaza, a request that evoked outrage among Arab leaders.

Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, and McGurk, are consummate opportunists, Machiavellian bureaucrats who cater to the reigning centers of power, including the Israel lobby.

Sullivan was the chief architect of Hillary Clinton’s Asia pivot. He backed the corporate and investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was sold as helping the U.S. contain China. Trump ultimately killed the trade agreement in the face of mass opposition from the U.S. public. His focus is thwarting a rising China, including through the expansion of the U.S. military.

While not focused on the Middle East, Sullivan is a foreign policy hawk who has a knee jerk embrace of force to shape the world to U.S. demands. He embraces military Keynesianism, arguing that massive government spending on the weapons industry benefits the domestic economy.

In a 7,000-word essay for Foreign Affairs magazine published five days before the Oct. 7 attacks, which left some 1,200 Israelis dead, Sullivan exposed his lack of understanding of the dynamics of the Middle East.



Screenshot from The New York Times

“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges,” he writes in the original version of the essay, “the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” adding that in the face of “serious” frictions, “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.”

Sullivan ignores Palestinian aspirations and Washington’s rhetorical backing for a two-state solution in the article, hastily rewritten in the online version after the Oct. 7 attacks. He writes in his original piece:

At a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last year, the president set forth his policy for the Middle East in an address to the leaders of members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. His approach returns discipline to US policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

McGurk, the deputy assistant to President Biden and the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the White House National Security Council, was a chief architect of Bush’s “surge” in Iraq, which accelerated the bloodletting. He worked as a legal advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad. He then became Trump’s anti-ISIS czar.

He does not speak Arabic — none of the four men does — and came to Iraq with no knowledge of its history, peoples or culture. Nevertheless, he helped draft Iraq’s interim constitution and oversaw the legal transition from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Interim Iraqi Government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. McGurk was an early backer of Nouri al-Maliki, who was Iraq’s prime minister between 2006 and 2014. Al-Maliki built a Shi’ite-controlled sectarian state that deeply alienated Sunni Arabs and Kurds. In 2005, McGurk transferred to the National Security Council (NSC), where he served as director for Iraq, and later as special assistant to the president and senior director for Iraq and Afghanistan. He served on the NSC staff from 2005 to 2009. In 2015, he was appointed as Obama’s Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. He was retained by Trump until his resignation in Dec. 2018.

An article in April 2021 titled “Brett McGurk: A Hero of Our Times,” in New Lines Magazine by former BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood, paints a scathing portrait of McGurk. Wood writes:

A senior Western diplomat who served in Baghdad told me that McGurk had been an absolute disaster for Iraq. “He is a consummate operator in Washington, but I saw no sign that he was interested in Iraqis or Iraq as a place full of real people. It was simply a bureaucratic and political challenge for him.” One critic who was in Baghdad with McGurk called him Machiavelli reincarnated. “It’s intellect plus ambition plus the utter ruthlessness to rise no matter the cost.”

[….]

A U.S. diplomat who was in the embassy when McGurk arrived found his steady advance astonishing. “Brett only meets people who speak English. … There are like four people in the government who speak English. And somehow he’s now the person who should decide the fate of Iraq? How did this happen?”

Even those who didn’t like McGurk had to admit that he had a formidable intellect — and was a hard worker. He was also a gifted writer, no surprise as he had clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. His rise mirrored that of an Iraqi politician named Nouri al-Maliki, one careerist helping the other. That is McGurk’s tragedy — and Iraq’s.

[….]

McGurk’s critics say his lack of Arabic meant he missed the vicious, sectarian undertones of what al-Maliki was saying in meetings right from the start. Translators censored or failed to keep up. Like many Americans in Iraq, McGurk was deaf to what was happening around him.

Al-Maliki was the consequence of two mistakes by the U.S. How much McGurk had to do with them remains in dispute. The first mistake was the “80 Percent Solution” for ruling Iraq. The Sunni Arabs were mounting a bloody insurgency, but they were just 20% of the population. The theory was that you could run Iraq with the Kurds and the Shiites. The second error was to identify the Shiites with hardline, religious parties backed by Iran. Al-Maliki, a member of the religious Da’wa Party, was the beneficiary of this.

In a piece in HuffPost in May 2022 by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, titled “Biden’s Top Middle East Advisor ‘Torched the House and Showed Up With a Firehose,’” McGurk is described by a colleague, who asked not to be named, as “the most talented bureaucrat they’ve ever seen, with the worst foreign policy judgment they’ve ever seen.”

McGurk, like others in the Biden administration, is bizarrely focused on what comes after Israel’s genocidal campaign, rather than trying to halt it. McGurk proposed denying humanitarian aid and refusing to implement a pause in the fighting in Gaza until all the Israeli hostages were freed. Biden and his three closest policy advisors have called for the Palestinian Authority — an Israeli puppet regime that is reviled by most Palestinians — to take control of Gaza once Israel finishes leveling it. They have called on Israel — since Oct. 7 — to take steps towards a two-state solution, a plan rejected in an humiliating public rebuke to the the Biden White House by Netanyahu.

The Biden White House spends more time talking to the Israelis and Saudis, who are being lobbied to normalize relations with Israel and help rebuild Gaza, than the Palestinians, who are at best, an afterthought. It believes the key to ending Palestinian resistance is found in Riyadh, summed up in a top-secret document peddled by McGurk called the “Jerusalem-Jeddah Pact,” the HuffPost reported. It is unable or unwilling to curb Israel’s bloodlust, which included missile strikes in a residential neighborhood in Damascus, Syria, on Saturday that killed five military advisors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a drone attack in South Lebanon on Sunday, which killed two senior members of Hezbollah. These Israeli provocations will not go unanswered, evidenced by the ballistic missiles and rockets launched on Sunday by militants in western Iraq that targeted U.S. personnel stationed at the al-Assad Airbase.

The Alice-in-Wonderland idea that once the slaughter in Gaza ends a diplomatic pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be the key to regional stability is stupefying. Israel’s genocide, and Washington’s complicity, is shredding U.S. credibility and influence, especially in the Global South and the Muslim world. It ensures another generation of enraged Palestinians — whose families have been obliterated and whose homes have been destroyed — seeking vengeance.

The policies embraced by the Biden administration not only blithely ignore the realities in the Arab world, but the realities of an extremist Israeli state that, with Congress bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, couldn’t care less what the Biden White House dreams up. Israel has no intention of creating a viable Palestinian state. Its goal is the ethnic cleansing of the 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of Gaza by Israel. And when Israel is done with Gaza, it will turn on the West Bank, where Israeli raids now occur on an almost nightly basis and where thousands have been arrested and detained without charge since Oct. 7.

Those running the show in the Biden White House are chasing after rainbows. The march of folly led by these four blind mice perpetuates the cataclysmic suffering of the Palestinians, stokes a regional war and presages another tragic and self-defeating chapter in the two decades of U.S. military fiascos in the Middle East.

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Featured image: Blood Brothers – by Mr. Fish via Chris Hedges

https://www.globalresearch.ca/four-horsemen-gaza-apocalypse/5847199

Israel's skin bank raises ethical concerns on organ consent
Jordan News last updated: Nov 17,2023
gaza
(Photo: Twitter/X)
GAZA – Israel possesses the world's largest skin bank, a medical facility that stores human skin for later use in treating burns and skin cancers. This bank was established in 1986 under the supervision of the military medical sector of the occupying army, which provides its services internationally, especially to requests from Western countries.

Israeli occupation authorities been stealing organs from the bodies of dead Palestinian, a heinous criminal practice that has been revealed in several reports and through testimonies of Israeli doctors who participated in this gruesome practice, violating professional ethics and constituting a crime against humanity, Al-Ghad reported.

In contrast, this Israeli bank differs from other banks worldwide in that its supply of these vital organs does not come solely from voluntary donors. Instead, documented cases of stealing skin from the bodies of Palestinians have been recorded, individuals whose organs are also stolen.

There is compelling evidence of Israelis engaging in trafficking these stolen organs, making the entity the largest market for organs in the Middle East.

Where did Israel get this inventory from?
Expert in Israeli affairs Anas Abu Arqoub says, "The Israeli skin bank is the largest in the world, surpassing the American skin bank that was established 40 years before it, noting that Israel's population is much smaller than the United States."

Arqoub emphasizes that the theft of organs from Palestinian bodies is not just suspicions, stating, "Even the Israeli media acknowledges that it is an extraction process without the knowledge of the dead's families."

The reserve of human skin held by the Israeli occupation state, equivalent to 170 square meters, stored within the Israeli skin bank, confirms Arqoub's account. The number is considered unreasonable since Israel ranks third in its population's refusal to donate organs, attributed to Jewish religious beliefs.

Handing over Palestinian bodies to their families without organs!
The details of the story date back to 2001 when Swedish investigative journalist Donald Boström published an investigation exposing the theft of organs from the bodies of Palestinian martyrs and their trafficking by Israeli entities. This was the first time this crime was revealed to the international public.

Boström did not stop at this point but published another investigation on the same subject in 2009 in the pages of the Swedish magazine "Aftonbladet." The investigation mentions that the Israeli Ministry of Health launched a national campaign to encourage organ donation in 1992. However, despite that, a significant gap persisted between the demand and the supply of donations.

Coinciding with that campaign, cases of the disappearance of several Palestinian youth began, only to return afterward in closed coffins. The Israeli authorities imposed on their families to bury them at night without funerals.

Boström says, "I was in the region at that time, and on several occasions, UN employees contacted me concerned about the developments. The individuals who contacted me said that organ theft certainly happened, but they were prevented from doing anything about it."

These contacts prompted the journalist to delve further into the issue, so he went to interview the families of the dead who confirmed the theft of their sons' organs before their killing. Among them was the son of the martyr Bilal Ahmed Ghannan, who was 19 years old when the Israeli army arrested him in the village of Um al-Tut in the West Bank in 1992. He returned with a body without internal organs, from the neck to below the abdomen.

The Israeli medical authorities did not deny the torture and theft of Bilal's organs. At that time, the director of the Israeli Institute of Forensic Medicine, Chen Kugel, said that Bilal's family could be right because they "took everything that could be taken from all the bodies that came to the Institute of Forensic Medicine," without the family's consent. His family did not receive any explanation, apology, or compensation for what happened.

Israeli confessions of organ theft from Palestinians
In a 2009 documentary on the issue, there are admissions from the former director of the Israeli Institute of Forensic Medicine, Yehuda Hiss, confirming the theft of organs from the bodies of Palestinian in the institute. Hiss stated, "We took corneas, skin, heart valves, and bones ... Almost everything was done unofficially to a large extent... and permission was not sought from the families."

In her study on dealing with the bodies of Palestinians at the Abu Kabir Forensic Medicine Center in Tel Aviv, published in a book titled "On Their Bodies," anthropologist Meirav Feis stated that she witnessed "how they take organs from the bodies of Palestinians. In return, they leave the bodies of soldiers intact."

The researcher added, "They take corneas, skin, and heart valves in a way that makes the absence of those organs unnoticed by non-specialists. They replace corneas with plastic bodies and remove the skin from the back so that the family does not see it. In addition, the bodies of the dead are used in medical schools in Israeli universities for research purposes."

Feis said, "In the first intifada, the army effectively allowed the institute to extract organs from Palestinians under a military procedure that required dissecting the bodies of Palestinian prisoners. The autopsy procedure was accompanied by the removal of organs used by the Israeli skin bank, established in 1985 to treat burns suffered by Israeli soldiers."

Trafficking in the organs of Palestinian casualties
Israel is one of the largest markets for trafficking in human organs in the world, and the largest in the Middle East. Media reports revealed that the Israeli entity is involved in killing Palestinians to steal their internal organs illegally and trade them within an illegal international network.

In 2009, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested an Israeli settler named Levy Izhak Rosenbaum. After investigating him, it was revealed that he played the role of a broker in organ-selling operations in the United States for the benefit of a criminal cell led by rabbis, politicians, and government officials in Israel.

Journalist Donald Boström, in his mentioned investigation, suggests a connection between this network and the theft of organs from Palestinian martyrs taking place in "Israel." Boström said, "Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century were illegally purchased. The Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this activity but do nothing to stop it."

In a report published by the Israeli newspaper "Haaretz" in 2016, Israel admitted to losing dozens of bodies of Palestinians. The newspaper quoted statements from sources in the Israeli judicial and security apparatuses about the loss of 121 bodies of Palestinians held by the occupation authorities since the 1990s.

Continued organ theft Following the explosion of the organ theft scandal in 2009, the Israeli government tried to evade the proven charges against it. The spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Health at that time, Einav Shimron Greenboim, issued a statement saying, "The practice mentioned in the investigation is an old story that ended years ago."

Doubts persist about the continuation of these unethical practices that violate human rights, as indicated by the Israeli authorities' continued detention of dozens of bodies of Palestinian dead, justifying it as a punitive measure.

According to Abdel Nasser Farwana, the head of the Studies and Documentation Unit at the Palestinian Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs Commission, Israel still holds more than 370 bodies of Palestinian and Arab bodies who died in different circumstances and years apart. He added, "The list of these detained martyrs includes individuals who died from the 1970s until around 2023."


Read more Region and World
Jordan News

https://www.jordannews.jo/Section-20/Middle-East/Israel-s-skin-bank-raises-ethical-concerns-on-organ-consent-32381

Rejecting the Bantustan ‘two-state solution’, Mandla Mandela calls for a single democratic state in Palestine
Tim Anderson
The popular but fallacious touchstone of a political resolution in Palestine has been a ‘two-state solution’. Washington constantly reverts to this and, more disturbingly, so too do many of Palestine’s international friends. Yet, faced with an apartheid regime, the idea is outdated and irrelevant, South African leader Mandla Mandela pointed out at the 5th Global Convention of Solidarity with Palestine, over 3-5 December in Johannesburg.

Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson, head of the Mandela Foundation, clan chief, and an ANC member of Parliament, called for a global anti-apartheid campaign aimed at dismantling the Israeli regime, rejecting the Bantustan-like 'two-state solution', and calling for a single democratic state in Palestine.

South Africans know about Bantustans: these were the so-called native ‘homelands’ – small enclaves set up to help enforce apartheid and prevent democracy in South Africa. The most recent ‘two-state’ proposal, put up by the Trump administration in 2020, shares many features with these Bantustans. But few outside South Africa remember this history in detail.

The ‘two-state solution’ seems to have support in UNSC resolutions since 1967 (#242 and its successors), but the right “to sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries” was conditional on Israeli withdrawal “from territories occupied in the recent conflict." The Israeli regime never met that condition. The Oslo Accords of the 1990s saw the PLO recognizing an "Israeli state", on the basis that the colonization of the West Bank would end and a Palestinian state would emerge. Those conditions were never met.

Veteran analyst Rashid Khalidi, a leading US scholar on Palestine, says there was never a serious attempt by the Israelis or Washington to create an Arab state that would be “sovereign, contiguous and viable." Further, the entrenchment of second-class citizenship for Arab Israelis (in ‘1948 Palestine’), the emergence of an open apartheid regime on the West Bank, and the periodic massacres in Gaza have imposed a new reality.

Yet, the pretext of ‘two states’ and the myth of a “return to 1967 borders” (a fantasy destroyed by constant Israeli colonization of the occupied territories) is maintained to obscure the reality of a predatory apartheid Israeli regime that can never co-exist with an independent Palestine. Washington and the Israelis understand that the fig leaf of ‘two states’ hides apartheid and prevents the construction of a broad anti-apartheid movement.

That path is obscured by the ‘two states’ myth, as two former Israeli prime ministers have pointed out. In 2017, former PM Ehud Barak warned that the regime was “on a slippery slope” toward apartheid. Similarly, former PM Ehud Olmert (2007) said, “If the day comes when the [idea of a] two-state solution collapses and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights," then we will face an “apartheid-like struggle … [and] the State of Israel is finished."

The Trump ‘peace plan’ of 2020 is the most recent, detailed version of the deceptive 'two-state' idea. It supported the illegal West Bank, Syrian Golan, and eastern part of al-Quds annexations, trying to ‘normalize’ those breaches of earlier international agreements and offering some desert land in ‘compensation’. In recent years these ‘settlements’ have grown so that there are more than 700,000 Israeli colonists on the West Bank. Despite muted international protests, "Tel Aviv’s" backing for this process makes it unlikely that the ‘settlers’ might (as was done in Gaza) simply be persuaded to pack up and go home. Under the Trump ‘peace plan’, total Israeli control over borders, security, and even education would be maintained. That is a close parallel to the Bantustan policy of apartheid South Africa, as Mandla Mandela observed.

The Palestinian struggle can and should draw important lessons from South Africa’s anti-apartheid campaigns and draw on the political capital it built, including in international resolutions. First of all, in 1973, the United Nations declared apartheid a crime against humanity, punishable under the 1988 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Systematic racial discrimination is a crime that should not be aided and abetted, and the Israeli entity has been declared an apartheid regime by six independent reports. As jurists Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley (2017) point out, “States have a collective duty: (a) not to recognize an apartheid regime as lawful; (b) not to aid or assist a state in maintaining an apartheid regime; and (c) to cooperate with the United Nations and other States in bringing apartheid regimes to an end.” That duty militates against recognition of or support for the apartheid regime as a ‘state’.

Second, while the South African apartheid regime tried to present the Bantustan enclaves as some form of ‘self-determination’, this was rejected both by black South Africans and the United Nations. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said tribal enclaves had nothing to do with the South African reality, “we are thoroughly detribalized, it is the government of South Africa that has sought to exacerbate tribal feelings." The Bantustan policy and practice aimed at reinforcing apartheid by forcing the majority black African population into 13% of the country’s land, with few resources and basic services. Yet collaborating chiefs like Gatsha Buthelezi of KwaZulu were relied on to present a veneer of tribal ‘independence’. This Bantustan policy, including the third class ‘Bantu education’ system which began in the 1950s and catalyzed huge protests, was said to be “the logical territorial extension of apartheid as both a general policy and a way of life for whites as a single preferred tribe over blacks as an inferior collection of tribes."

In the 1970s, three UN resolutions were passed, which condemned the Bantustan policy. In 1971, General Assembly Resolution 2775 E (XXVI) on the Establishment of Bantustans condemned the practice as “in pursuance of apartheid," “violating the right to self-determination,” and “prejudicial to territorial integrity." In 1975, General Assembly Resolution 3411 D (XXX) on Apartheid again condemned the Bantustan policy, and in 1976, the General Assembly unanimously (with the USA abstaining) passed Resolution 31/6 which condemned the designation of an “independent” Transkei Bantustan as “sham independence”, calling on all governments to not recognize it and to prohibit dealings with the artificial entity. The UN, thus, authoritatively condemned the creation of small subordinate enclaves in place of national self-determination for black South Africans.

Just as Apartheid South Africa tried to force the majority Black population into 13% of the country’s land, so the Israelis have forced Palestinians into increasingly restricted enclaves, all of which are controlled by the Israeli regime.

While the Palestinian Arab population today, according to Israeli officials, is about the same as the Jewish, the Israeli population's control of land and resources is massively unequal. The so-called Palestinian Territories comprise about 22% of historic Palestine and, of that, more than half is zoned to be under exclusive Israeli control Anera.

Zionist apologists try to justify the steady land theft by saying, first of all, that the Israelis acquired that land by military conquest (in the post-colonial era, UNSC 242 declared such claims null and void) and second, that Palestinians somehow acquired control over land for “the first time” under the Oslo Accords. In fact, Palestinians lost even more land to Israeli "annexation" after the Oslo Accords.

The Israeli lobby has relentlessly abused Chief Mandla Mandela. Responding to his accusations that "Israel" had “committed genocide and crimes against humanity," Tali Feinberg claimed that Mandla’s “anti-Israel vitriol contrasts with his grandfather’s legacy.” Indeed, Nelson Mandela met Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Ezer Weizman and said, in 1999, “I cannot conceive of Israel withdrawing if Arab states do not recognise Israel within secure borders." Feinberg blames Mandla’s anti-"Israel" stance on his conversion to Islam.

However, Nelson Mandla was responding to the circumstances of the early 1990s, when his friend Yasser Arafat was engaged in the Oslo Accords, and no reports on the Apartheid character of the Israeli colonial regime had yet emerged. After the failure of the Oslo agreements to produce any benefit, and after six independent reports branding "Israel" as apartheid regime, Chief Mandla is justified in adjusting his response.

Support for the armed, as well as civil resistance in Palestine, has been a feature of Chief Mandla Mandela’s advocacy. It was his grandfather, after all, who created uMkhonto we Siswe (MK, the spear of the nation), the armed wing of the ANC, when all other avenues had failed. So, at a time when Western regimes try to brand all Palestinian Resistance as ‘terrorism’, Chief Mandela has urged the factions “to come together and have joint operations” to defend their land. He also backed the call for boycotts, divestment and sanctions on the Israeli regime.

After the December 2023 conference in Johannesburg, Mandla Mandela stood alongside leaders of various Palestinian Resistance factions at Government House in Pretoria. Recalling his grandfather’s famous quote, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians," Mandla Mandela recognized that Palestinians had the “absolute right” to the land of their forefathers using all available means, including armed resistance.

Chief Mandela made it very clear that the call for a true and meaningful liberation for Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea was one that means a one-state solution for indigenous Palestinians including the inalienable right of return for over seven million refugees and their descendants, displaced since 1948.

Mandla Mandela called on South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to abandon the “two-state delusion” in favor of a single democratic state for all indigenous peoples of Palestine, abandoning separate development, racism, and apartheid in occupied Palestine.

South African veterans and leaders have a unique experience and moral authority to denounce Bantustan-like proposals that divert the Palestinian struggle from its emancipatory goals.

https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/rejecting-the-bantustan--two-state-solution---mandla-mandela

Satanic Terrorist Cult Makes 2024 Endorsement: ‘Only Biden-Harris Can Bring About End of History’
by Jack Gist, The Western Journal Dec. 24, 2023 3:00 pm
Most individuals and organizations endorse presidential candidates because they think the country will improve in some way if the candidate is elected, right?

What happens when a group endorses a candidate because its members believe the candidate will herald in a new Dark Age filled with fear, trembling and gnashing of teeth?

The Order of Nine Angles, a Satanic cult founded in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, according to a BBC report from 2020, has endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket for the 2024 presidential election. Not surprisingly, when Satanists endorse political candidates, they do it for all the wrong reasons.



In what could be written off as a brazen attempt at gaining some cheap notoriety, O9A manages to paint itself as the kind of fools who utter a prophetic phrase or two before falling into the abyss of eternal fire.

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On Wednesday, O9A stated on its website that “democracy is failing; worldwide nations are going broke, preparing for war, inundated with refugees, beset by internal refugees, ruled by careerist psychopaths, and perhaps most ominously, electing leaders who are associated with foreign powers.”

There’s more than a little truth in O9A’s observation. The world does appear to be on the brink.

Any Americans in their right mind would presumably want a president who protected democracy, thwarted corruption, avoided war by a show of strength, and controlled the country’s orders. In other words, they would back a presidential ticket that put America first.

Are you surprised by the endorsement?
Not O9A.

“We want to rush into the abyss so that the ‘end of history‘ can come to its natural terminus and a new Dark Age will be visited upon the Earth.”

“In this new era,” the endorsement continued “might will make right, the claw and tooth will always be red, and blood will cross the land like an ever-flowing stream. The strong will oppress the weak, the weak will die, and natural selection will resume.”

“This can only happen through weak humanist leadership that will stumble its way into war, famine, recession, terrorism, corruption, and human misery. The suicides will leave before the battles commence …

“Only Biden-Harris can bring about this advancement of history, and therefore, we endorse the Biden-Harris campaign in 2024.”

The way things are going, there’s a chance the O9A could be right. The world is on edge, wars are brewing, the worldwide immigrant/refugee crisis is at a boiling point and it would appear we have a president in bed with foreign powers like China. Electing Biden to a second term would be like courting the mother of all disasters.

Electing a Republican president in 2024 might screw up O9A’s plan.

“The last thing we want right now is one of these Christian band-aid do-gooders like Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswarmy, Chris Christie, Donald Trump, and Ron DeSantis to take over and fix things.”

Ramaswamy’s not Christian. He’s Hindu. The fact that O9A fudged it makes the group look like comic book villains more at home on “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle” than on the world stage.

On the other hand, the group has surfaced in disturbing news reports involving pedophilia and terrorism. In 2020, a U.S. Army Pvt. Ethan Melzer was indicted by the Justice Department on charges of sending details about his unit’s movement to the group, which was planning to attack the American soldiers. Melzer was sentenced in March to 45 years in prison, ABC News reported.

Should O9A get its wish for the end of history, its members and all unhinged evil-doers will get free tickets on a fast train to hell.

In the meantime, Christians would like to go on living, preferably in a working representative republic with the traditional American values of God, family and country.

Trending: “Joe Biden vs. Cornpop” -BEST BIDEN MEME EVER! Joe Biden Quotes Set to Cowboy Western Theme

There are a lot more Christians than Satanists in America. There’s still hope if they vote Old Joe right out of office.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.


https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/12/satanic-terrorist-cult-makes-2024-endorsement-biden-harris/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=satanic-terrorist-cult-makes-2024-endorsement-biden-harris

Satanic Terrorist Cult Makes 2024 Endorsement: 'Only Biden-Harris Can Bring About End of History'
By Jack Gist December 24, 2023 at 6:49am
Most individuals and organizations endorse presidential candidates because they think the country will improve in some way if the candidate is elected, right?

What happens when a group endorses a candidate because its members believe the candidate will herald in a new Dark Age filled with fear, trembling and gnashing of teeth?

The Order of Nine Angles, a Satanic cult founded in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, according to a BBC report from 2020, has endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket for the 2024 presidential election. Not surprisingly, when Satanists endorse political candidates, they do it for all the wrong reasons.



In what could be written off as a brazen attempt at gaining some cheap notoriety, O9A manages to paint itself as the kind of fools who utter a prophetic phrase or two before falling into the abyss of eternal fire.

Trending:

Not a Joke: NPR Station Says Biden's 'Drama-Free White House' Is a 'Christmas Gift' to America
On Wednesday, O9A stated on its website that “democracy is failing; worldwide nations are going broke, preparing for war, inundated with refugees, beset by internal refugees, ruled by careerist psychopaths, and perhaps most ominously, electing leaders who are associated with foreign powers.”

There’s more than a little truth in O9A’s observation. The world does appear to be on the brink.

Any Americans in their right mind would presumably want a president who protected democracy, thwarted corruption, avoided war by a show of strength, and controlled the country’s orders. In other words, they would back a presidential ticket that put America first.

Not O9A.

Are you surprised by the endorsement?
“We want to rush into the abyss so that the ‘end of history‘ can come to its natural terminus and a new Dark Age will be visited upon the Earth.”

“In this new era,” the endorsement continued “might will make right, the claw and tooth will always be red, and blood will cross the land like an ever-flowing stream. The strong will oppress the weak, the weak will die, and natural selection will resume.”

“This can only happen through weak humanist leadership that will stumble its way into war, famine, recession, terrorism, corruption, and human misery. The suicides will leave before the battles commence …

“Only Biden-Harris can bring about this advancement of history, and therefore, we endorse the Biden-Harris campaign in 2024.”

The way things are going, there’s a chance the O9A could be right. The world is on edge, wars are brewing, the worldwide immigrant/refugee crisis is at a boiling point and it would appear we have a president in bed with foreign powers like China. Electing Biden to a second term would be like courting the mother of all disasters.

Related:

Mind-Bending Change to Navy F-35: What Can These Strange Additions Do?
Electing a Republican president in 2024 might screw up O9A’s plan.

“The last thing we want right now is one of these Christian band-aid do-gooders like Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswarmy, Chris Christie, Donald Trump, and Ron DeSantis to take over and fix things.”

Ramaswamy’s not Christian. He’s Hindu. The fact that O9A fudged it makes the group look like comic book villains more at home on “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle” than on the world stage.

On the other hand, the group has surfaced in disturbing news reports involving pedophilia and terrorism. In 2020, a U.S. Army Pvt. Ethan Melzer was indicted by the Justice Department on charges of sending details about his unit’s movement to the group, which was planning to attack the American soldiers. Melzer was sentenced in March to 45 years in prison, ABC News reported.

Should O9A get its wish for the end of history, its members and all unhinged evil-doers will get free tickets on a fast train to hell.

In the meantime, Christians would like to go on living, preferably in a working representative republic with the traditional American values of God, family and country.

There are a lot more Christians than Satanists in America. There’s still hope if they vote Old Joe right out of office.

This Christmas, we’re offering $10 off The Western Journal’s most popular membership options, no strings attached.

We’re doing this because we want to offer our readers a small gift during the Christmas season, and also because Big Tech’s death grip on conservative publishers is tightening daily.

At this point, roughly 90 percent of advertisers have blackballed conservative publishers. Facebook has obliterated entire conservative businesses by destroying their traffic.

Conservatives like you and publications like The Western Journal are being hunted to extinction by the Big Tech tyrants.

But together we can fight back and, believe it or not, we can win.

When you get a Western Journal membership, you’re not just getting a bunch of perks like access to ALL of our content — news, commentary and premium articles — and a radically reduced number of ads. You’re also directly, tangibly supporting journalists who actually do real journalism — they print the truth and they hold the elites accountable.

Can we count on you to join? Most membership options cost less than one cup of Starbucks coffee each month, and we’re also giving a great discount right now.

I hope you will team up with us. Together, we can defy the Big Tech tyrants and spread the truth that the elites in America desperately want silenced.

Whether you join or not, I wish you a very…

… Merry Christmas,

Josh Manning

Deputy Managing Editor

P.S. If you prefer, a simple direct donation can be made here. Again, thank you and Merry Christmas!

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2024 election, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Politics, Satanism, U.S. News

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Jack Gist has published books, short stories, poems, essays, and opinion pieces in outlets such as The Imaginative Conservative, Catholic World Report, Crisis Magazine, Galway Review, and others. His genre-bending novel The Yewberry Way: Prayer (2023) is the first installment of a trilogy that explores the relationship between faith and reason. He can be found at jackgistediting.com

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The Age of Megathreats
Nouriel RoubiniNov 4, 2022
op_roubini3_Getty Images_worlddisaster Getty Images
NEW YORK – Severe megathreats are imperiling our future – not just our jobs, incomes, wealth, and the global economy, but also the relative peace, prosperity, and progress achieved over the past 75 years. Many of these threats were not even on our radar during the prosperous post-World War II era. I grew up in the Middle East and Europe from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, and I never worried about climate change potentially destroying the planet. Most of us had barely even heard of the problem, and greenhouse-gas emissions were still relatively low, compared to where they would soon be.

Moreover, after the US-Soviet détente and US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in the early 1970s, I never really worried about another war among great powers, let alone a nuclear one. The term “pandemic” didn’t register in my consciousness, either, because the last major one had been in 1918. And I didn’t fathom that artificial intelligence might someday destroy most jobs and render Homo sapiens obsolete, because those were the years of the long “AI winter.”

Similarly, terms like “deglobalization” and “trade war” had no purchase during this period. Trade liberalization had been in full swing since the Great Depression, and it would soon lead to the hyper-globalization that began in the 1990s. Debt crises posed no threat, because private and public debt-to-GDP ratios were low in advanced economies and emerging markets, and growth was robust. No one had to worry about the massive build-up of implicit debt, in the form of unfunded liabilities from pay-as-you-go social security and health-care systems. The supply of young workers was rising, the share of the elderly was still low, and robust, mostly unrestricted immigration from the Global South to the North would continue to prop up the labor market in advanced economies.

Against this backdrop, economic cycles were contained, and recessions were short and shallow, except for during the stagflationary decade of the 1970s; but even then, there were no debt crises in advanced economies, because debt ratios were low. The kind of financial cycles that lead to crises were contained not just in advanced economies but even in emerging markets, owing to the low leverage, low risk-taking, solid financial regulation, capital controls, and various forms of financial repression that prevailed during this period. The advanced economies were strong liberal democracies that were free of extreme partisan polarization. Populism and authoritarianism were confined to a benighted cohort of poorer countries.

Goodbye to All That

Fast-forward from this relatively “golden” period between 1945 and 1985 to late 2022, and you will immediately notice that we are awash in new, extreme megathreats that were not previously on anyone’s mind. The world has entered what I call a geopolitical depression, with (at least) four dangerous revisionist powers – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – challenging the economic, financial, security, and geopolitical order that the United States and its allies created after WWII.

There is a sharply rising risk not only of war among great powers but of a nuclear conflict. In the coming year, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine could escalate into an unconventional conflict that directly involves NATO. And Israel – and perhaps the US – may decide to launch strikes against Iran, which is on its way to building a nuclear bomb.


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With Chinese President Xi Jinping further consolidating his authoritarian rule, and with the US tightening its trade restrictions against China, the new Sino-American cold war is getting colder by the day. Worse, it could all too easily turn hot over the status of Taiwan, which Xi is committed to reuniting with the mainland, and which US President Joe Biden is apparently committed to defending. Meanwhile, nuclear-armed North Korea has once again been seeking attention by firing rockets over Japan and South Korea.

Cyberwarfare occurs daily between these revisionist powers and the West, and many other countries have adopted a non-aligned posture toward Western-led sanctions regimes. From our contingent vantage point in the middle of all these events, we don’t yet know if World War III has already begun in Ukraine. That determination will be left to future historians – if there are any.

Even discounting the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the risk of an environmental Apocalypse is becoming increasingly serious, especially given that most of the talk about net-zero and ESG (environment, social, and governance) investing is just greenwashing – or greenwishing. The new greenflation is already in full swing, because it turns out that amassing the metals needed for the energy transition requires a lot of expensive energy.

There is also a growing risk of new pandemics that would be worse than biblical plagues, owing to the link between environmental destruction and zoonotic diseases. Wildlife, carrying dangerous pathogens, are coming into closer and more frequent contact with humans and livestock. That is why we have experienced more frequent and virulent pandemics and epidemics (HIV, SARS, MERS, swine flu, bird flu, Zika, Ebola, COVID-19) since the early 1980s. All the evidence suggests that this problem will become even worse in the future. Indeed, owing to the melting of Siberian permafrost, we may soon be confronting dangerous viruses and bacteria that have been locked away for millennia.

Moreover, geopolitical conflicts and national-security concerns are fueling trade, financial, and technology wars, and accelerating the deglobalization process. The return of protectionism and the Sino-American decoupling will leave the global economy, supply chains, and markets more balkanized and fragmented. The buzzwords “friend-shoring” and “secure and fair trade” have replaced “offshoring” and “free trade.”

But on the domestic front, advances in AI, robotics, and automation will destroy more and more jobs, even if policymakers build higher protectionist walls in an effort to fight the last war. By both restricting immigration and demanding more domestic production, aging advanced economies will create a stronger incentive for companies to adopt labor-saving technologies. While routine jobs are obviously at risk, so, too, are any cognitive jobs that can be unbundled into discrete tasks, and even many creative jobs. AI language models like GPT-3 can already write better than most humans and will almost certainly displace many jobs and sources of income. In due course, some scientists believe that Homo sapiens will be rendered entirely obsolete by the rise of artificial general intelligence or machine super-intelligence – though this is a highly contentious subject of debate.

Thus, over time, economic malaise will deepen, inequality will rise even further, and more white- and blue-collar workers will be left behind.

Hard Choices, Hard Landings

The macroeconomic situation is no better. For the first time since the 1970s, we are facing high inflation and the prospect of a recession – stagflation. The increased inflation in advanced economies wasn’t “transitory.” It is persistent, driven by a combination of bad policies – excessively loose monetary, fiscal, and credit policies that were kept in place for too long – and bad luck. No one could have anticipated how much the initial COVID-19 shock would curtail the supply of goods and labor and create bottlenecks in global supply chains. The same goes for Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, which caused a sharp spike in energy, food, fertilizers, industrial metals, and other commodities. Meanwhile, China has continued its “zero-COVID” policy, which is creating additional supply bottlenecks.

While both demand and supply factors were in the mix, it is now widely recognized that the supply factors have played an increasingly decisive role. This matters for the economic outlook, because supply-driven inflation is stagflationary and thus increases the risk that monetary-policy tightening will produce a hard landing (increased unemployment and potentially a recession).

What will follow from the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks’ current tightening? Until recently, most central banks and most of Wall Street belonged to “Team Soft Landing.” But the consensus has rapidly shifted, with even Fed Chair Jerome Powell recognizing that a recession is possible, that a soft landing will be “very challenging,” and that everyone should prepare for some “pain” ahead. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s model shows a high probability of a hard landing, and the Bank of England has expressed similar views about the United Kingdom. Several prominent Wall Street institutions have also now made a recession their baseline scenario (the most likely outcome if all other variables are held constant).

History, too, points to deeper problems ahead. For the past 60 years in the US, whenever inflation has been above 5% (it is above 8% today), and unemployment has been below 5% (it is now 3.5%), any attempt by the Fed to bring inflation down toward its 2% target has caused a recession. Thus, a hard landing is much more likely than a soft landing, both in the US and across most other advanced economies.

Sticky Stagflation

In addition to the short-term factors, negative supply shocks and demand factors in the medium term will cause inflation to persist. On the supply side, I count eleven negative supply shocks that will reduce potential growth and increase the costs of production. Among these is the backlash against hyper-globalization, which has been gaining momentum and creating opportunities for populist, nativist, and protectionist politicians, and growing public anger over stark income and wealth inequalities, which is leading to more policies to support workers and the “left behind.” However well-intentioned, such measures will contribute to a dangerous wage-price spiral.

Other sources of persistent inflation include rising protectionism (from both the left and the right), which has restricted trade, impeded the movement of capital, and heightened political resistance to immigration, which in turn has put additional upward pressure on wages. National-security and strategic considerations have further restricted flows of technology, data, and talent, and new labor and environmental standards, as important as they may be, are hampering both trade and new construction.

This balkanization of the global economy is deeply stagflationary, and it is coinciding with demographic aging, not just in developed countries but also in large emerging economies such as China. Because young people tend to produce and save more, whereas older people spend down their savings and require many more expensive services in health care and other sectors, this trend, too, will lead to higher prices and slower growth.

Today’s geopolitical turmoil further complicates matters. The disruptions to trade and the spike in commodity prices following Russia’s invasion were not just a one-off phenomenon. The same threats to harvests and food shipments that arose in 2022 may well persist in 2023. Moreover, if China does finally end its zero-COVID policy and begin to restart its economy, a surge in demand for many commodities will add to the global inflationary pressures. There is also no end in sight for Sino-Western decoupling, which is accelerating across all dimensions of trade (goods, services, capital, labor, technology, data, and information). And, of course, Iran, North Korea, and other strategic rivals to the West could soon contribute in their own ways to the global havoc.

Now that the US dollar has been fully weaponized for strategic and national-security purposes, its position as the main global reserve currency could eventually begin to decline, and a weaker dollar would of course add to inflationary pressures in the US. More broadly, a frictionless world trading system requires a frictionless financial system. But sweeping primary and secondary sanctions have thrown sand in what was once a well-oiled machine, massively increasing the transaction costs of trade.

On top of it all, climate change, too, will create persistent stagflationary pressures. Droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and other disasters are increasingly disrupting economic activity and threatening harvests (thus driving up food prices). At the same time, demands for decarbonization have led to underinvestment in fossil-fuel capacity before investment in renewables has reached the point where they can make up the difference. Today’s large energy-price spikes were inevitable.

The increased likelihood of future pandemics also represents a persistent source of stagflation, especially considering how little has been done to prevent or prepare for the next one. The next contagious outbreak will lend further momentum to protectionist policies as countries rush to close borders and hoard critical supplies of food, medicines, and other essential goods.

Finally, cyberwarfare remains an underappreciated threat to economic activity and even public safety. Firms and governments will either face more stagflationary disruptions to production, or they will have to spend a fortune on cybersecurity. Either way, costs will rise.

The Worst of All Possible Economies

When the recession comes, it will not be short and shallow but long and severe. Not only are we facing persistent short- and medium-term negative supply shocks, but we are also heading into the mother of all debt crises, owing to soaring private and public debt ratios over the last few decades. Low debt ratios spared us from that outcome in the 1970s. And though we certainly had debt crises following the 2008 crash – the result of excessive household, bank, and government debt – we also had deflation. It was a demand shock and a credit crunch that could be met with massive monetary, fiscal, and credit easing.

Today, we are experiencing the worst elements of both the 1970s and 2008. Multiple, persistent negative supply shocks have coincided with debt ratios that are even higher than they were during the global financial crisis. These inflationary pressures are forcing central banks to tighten monetary policy even though we are heading into a recession. That makes the current situation fundamentally different from both the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. Everyone should be preparing for what may come to be remembered as the Great Stagflationary Debt Crisis.

While central banks have been at pains to sound more hawkish, we should be skeptical of their professed willingness to fight inflation at any cost. Once they find themselves in a debt trap, they will have to blink. With debt ratios so high, fighting inflation will cause an economic and financial crash that will be deemed politically unacceptable. Major central banks will feel as though they have no choice but to backpedal, and inflation, the debasement of fiat currencies, boom-bust cycles, and financial crises will become even more severe and frequent.

The inevitability of central banks wimping out was recently on display in the United Kingdom. Faced with the market reaction to the Truss government’s reckless fiscal stimulus, the BOE had to launch an emergency quantitative-easing (QE) program to buy up government bonds. That sad episode confirmed that in the UK, as in many other countries, monetary policy is increasingly subject to fiscal capture.

Recall that a similar turnaround occurred in 2019, when the Fed, after previously signaling continued rate hikes and quantitative-tightening, stopped its QT program and started pursuing a mix of backdoor QE and policy-rate cuts at the first sign of mild financial pressures and a growth slowdown. Central banks will talk tough; but, in a world of excessive debt and risks of an economic and financial crash, there is good reason to doubt their willingness to do “whatever it takes” to return inflation to its target rate.

With governments unable to reduce high debts and deficits by spending less or raising revenues, those that can borrow in their own currency will increasingly resort to the “inflation tax”: relying on unexpected price growth to wipe out long-term nominal liabilities at fixed interest rates.

How will financial markets and prices of equities and bonds perform in the face of rising inflation and the return of stagflation? It is likely that, as in the stagflation of the 1970s, both components of any traditional asset portfolio will suffer, potentially incurring massive losses. Inflation is bad for bond portfolios, which will take losses as yields increase and prices fall, as well as for equities, whose valuations are hurt by rising interest rates.

For the first time in decades, a 60/40 portfolio of equities and bonds suffered massive losses in 2022, because bond yields have surged while equities have gone into a bear market. By 1982, at the peak of the stagflation decade, the average S&P 500 firm’s price-to-earnings ratio was down to eight; today, it is closer to 20, which suggests that the bear market could end up being even more protracted and severe. Investors will need to find assets to hedge against inflation, political and geopolitical risks, and environmental damage: these include short-term government bonds and inflation-indexed bonds, gold and other precious metals, and real estate that is resilient to environmental damage.

The Moment of Truth

In any case, these megathreats will further contribute to rising income and wealth inequality, which has already been putting severe pressure on liberal democracies (as those left behind revolt against elites), and fueling the rise of radical and aggressive populist regimes. One can find right-wing manifestations of this trend in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, the US (under Donald Trump), post-Brexit Britain, and many other countries; and left-wing manifestations in Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and now Brazil (which has just replaced a right-wing populist with a left-wing one).

And, of course, Xi’s authoritarian stranglehold has given the lie to the old idea that Western engagement with a fast-growing China would ineluctably lead that country to open itself up even more to markets and, eventually, to democratic processes. Under Xi, China shows every sign of becoming more closed off, and more aggressive on geopolitical, security, and economic matters.

How did it come to this? Part of the problem is that we have long had our heads stuck in the sand. Now, we need to make up for lost time. Without decisive action, we will be heading into a period that is less like the four decades after WWII than like the three decades between 1914 and 1945. That period gave us World War I; the Spanish flu pandemic; the 1929 Wall Street crash; the Great Depression; massive trade and currency wars; inflation, hyperinflation, and deflation; financial and debt crises, leading to massive meltdowns and defaults; and the rise of authoritarian militarist regimes in Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, and elsewhere, culminating in WWII and the Holocaust.

In this new world, the relative peace, prosperity, and rising global welfare that we have taken for granted will be gone; most of it already is. If we don’t stop the multi-track slow-motion train wreck that is threatening the global economy and our planet at large, we will be lucky to have only a repeat of the stagflationary 1970s. Far more likely is an echo of the 1930s and the 1940s, only now with all the massive disruptions from climate change added to the mix.

Avoiding a dystopian scenario will not be easy. While there are potential solutions to each megathreat, most are costly in the short run and will deliver benefits only over the long run. Many also require technological innovations that are not yet available or in place, starting with those needed to halt or reverse climate change. Complicating matters further, today’s megathreats are interconnected, and therefore best addressed in a systematic and coherent fashion. Domestic leadership, in both the private and public sector, and international cooperation among great powers is necessary to prevent the coming Apocalypse.

Yet there are many domestic and international obstacles standing in the way of policies that would allow for a less dystopian (though still contested and conflictual) future. Thus, while a less bleak scenario is obviously desirable, a clear-headed analysis indicates that dystopia is much more likely than a happier outcome. The years and decades ahead will be marked by a stagflationary debt crisis and related megathreats – war, pandemics, climate change, disruptive AI, and deglobalization – all of which will be bad for jobs, economies, markets, peace, and prosperity.

The Age of Megathreats
Nouriel RoubiniNov 4, 2022
op_roubini3_Getty Images_worlddisaster Getty Images
NEW YORK – Severe megathreats are imperiling our future – not just our jobs, incomes, wealth, and the global economy, but also the relative peace, prosperity, and progress achieved over the past 75 years. Many of these threats were not even on our radar during the prosperous post-World War II era. I grew up in the Middle East and Europe from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, and I never worried about climate change potentially destroying the planet. Most of us had barely even heard of the problem, and greenhouse-gas emissions were still relatively low, compared to where they would soon be.

Moreover, after the US-Soviet détente and US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in the early 1970s, I never really worried about another war among great powers, let alone a nuclear one. The term “pandemic” didn’t register in my consciousness, either, because the last major one had been in 1918. And I didn’t fathom that artificial intelligence might someday destroy most jobs and render Homo sapiens obsolete, because those were the years of the long “AI winter.”

Similarly, terms like “deglobalization” and “trade war” had no purchase during this period. Trade liberalization had been in full swing since the Great Depression, and it would soon lead to the hyper-globalization that began in the 1990s. Debt crises posed no threat, because private and public debt-to-GDP ratios were low in advanced economies and emerging markets, and growth was robust. No one had to worry about the massive build-up of implicit debt, in the form of unfunded liabilities from pay-as-you-go social security and health-care systems. The supply of young workers was rising, the share of the elderly was still low, and robust, mostly unrestricted immigration from the Global South to the North would continue to prop up the labor market in advanced economies.

Against this backdrop, economic cycles were contained, and recessions were short and shallow, except for during the stagflationary decade of the 1970s; but even then, there were no debt crises in advanced economies, because debt ratios were low. The kind of financial cycles that lead to crises were contained not just in advanced economies but even in emerging markets, owing to the low leverage, low risk-taking, solid financial regulation, capital controls, and various forms of financial repression that prevailed during this period. The advanced economies were strong liberal democracies that were free of extreme partisan polarization. Populism and authoritarianism were confined to a benighted cohort of poorer countries.

Goodbye to All That

Fast-forward from this relatively “golden” period between 1945 and 1985 to late 2022, and you will immediately notice that we are awash in new, extreme megathreats that were not previously on anyone’s mind. The world has entered what I call a geopolitical depression, with (at least) four dangerous revisionist powers – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – challenging the economic, financial, security, and geopolitical order that the United States and its allies created after WWII.

There is a sharply rising risk not only of war among great powers but of a nuclear conflict. In the coming year, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine could escalate into an unconventional conflict that directly involves NATO. And Israel – and perhaps the US – may decide to launch strikes against Iran, which is on its way to building a nuclear bomb.


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With Chinese President Xi Jinping further consolidating his authoritarian rule, and with the US tightening its trade restrictions against China, the new Sino-American cold war is getting colder by the day. Worse, it could all too easily turn hot over the status of Taiwan, which Xi is committed to reuniting with the mainland, and which US President Joe Biden is apparently committed to defending. Meanwhile, nuclear-armed North Korea has once again been seeking attention by firing rockets over Japan and South Korea.

Cyberwarfare occurs daily between these revisionist powers and the West, and many other countries have adopted a non-aligned posture toward Western-led sanctions regimes. From our contingent vantage point in the middle of all these events, we don’t yet know if World War III has already begun in Ukraine. That determination will be left to future historians – if there are any.

Even discounting the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the risk of an environmental Apocalypse is becoming increasingly serious, especially given that most of the talk about net-zero and ESG (environment, social, and governance) investing is just greenwashing – or greenwishing. The new greenflation is already in full swing, because it turns out that amassing the metals needed for the energy transition requires a lot of expensive energy.

There is also a growing risk of new pandemics that would be worse than biblical plagues, owing to the link between environmental destruction and zoonotic diseases. Wildlife, carrying dangerous pathogens, are coming into closer and more frequent contact with humans and livestock. That is why we have experienced more frequent and virulent pandemics and epidemics (HIV, SARS, MERS, swine flu, bird flu, Zika, Ebola, COVID-19) since the early 1980s. All the evidence suggests that this problem will become even worse in the future. Indeed, owing to the melting of Siberian permafrost, we may soon be confronting dangerous viruses and bacteria that have been locked away for millennia.

Moreover, geopolitical conflicts and national-security concerns are fueling trade, financial, and technology wars, and accelerating the deglobalization process. The return of protectionism and the Sino-American decoupling will leave the global economy, supply chains, and markets more balkanized and fragmented. The buzzwords “friend-shoring” and “secure and fair trade” have replaced “offshoring” and “free trade.”

But on the domestic front, advances in AI, robotics, and automation will destroy more and more jobs, even if policymakers build higher protectionist walls in an effort to fight the last war. By both restricting immigration and demanding more domestic production, aging advanced economies will create a stronger incentive for companies to adopt labor-saving technologies. While routine jobs are obviously at risk, so, too, are any cognitive jobs that can be unbundled into discrete tasks, and even many creative jobs. AI language models like GPT-3 can already write better than most humans and will almost certainly displace many jobs and sources of income. In due course, some scientists believe that Homo sapiens will be rendered entirely obsolete by the rise of artificial general intelligence or machine super-intelligence – though this is a highly contentious subject of debate.

Thus, over time, economic malaise will deepen, inequality will rise even further, and more white- and blue-collar workers will be left behind.

Hard Choices, Hard Landings

The macroeconomic situation is no better. For the first time since the 1970s, we are facing high inflation and the prospect of a recession – stagflation. The increased inflation in advanced economies wasn’t “transitory.” It is persistent, driven by a combination of bad policies – excessively loose monetary, fiscal, and credit policies that were kept in place for too long – and bad luck. No one could have anticipated how much the initial COVID-19 shock would curtail the supply of goods and labor and create bottlenecks in global supply chains. The same goes for Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, which caused a sharp spike in energy, food, fertilizers, industrial metals, and other commodities. Meanwhile, China has continued its “zero-COVID” policy, which is creating additional supply bottlenecks.

While both demand and supply factors were in the mix, it is now widely recognized that the supply factors have played an increasingly decisive role. This matters for the economic outlook, because supply-driven inflation is stagflationary and thus increases the risk that monetary-policy tightening will produce a hard landing (increased unemployment and potentially a recession).

What will follow from the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks’ current tightening? Until recently, most central banks and most of Wall Street belonged to “Team Soft Landing.” But the consensus has rapidly shifted, with even Fed Chair Jerome Powell recognizing that a recession is possible, that a soft landing will be “very challenging,” and that everyone should prepare for some “pain” ahead. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s model shows a high probability of a hard landing, and the Bank of England has expressed similar views about the United Kingdom. Several prominent Wall Street institutions have also now made a recession their baseline scenario (the most likely outcome if all other variables are held constant).

History, too, points to deeper problems ahead. For the past 60 years in the US, whenever inflation has been above 5% (it is above 8% today), and unemployment has been below 5% (it is now 3.5%), any attempt by the Fed to bring inflation down toward its 2% target has caused a recession. Thus, a hard landing is much more likely than a soft landing, both in the US and across most other advanced economies.

Sticky Stagflation

In addition to the short-term factors, negative supply shocks and demand factors in the medium term will cause inflation to persist. On the supply side, I count eleven negative supply shocks that will reduce potential growth and increase the costs of production. Among these is the backlash against hyper-globalization, which has been gaining momentum and creating opportunities for populist, nativist, and protectionist politicians, and growing public anger over stark income and wealth inequalities, which is leading to more policies to support workers and the “left behind.” However well-intentioned, such measures will contribute to a dangerous wage-price spiral.

Other sources of persistent inflation include rising protectionism (from both the left and the right), which has restricted trade, impeded the movement of capital, and heightened political resistance to immigration, which in turn has put additional upward pressure on wages. National-security and strategic considerations have further restricted flows of technology, data, and talent, and new labor and environmental standards, as important as they may be, are hampering both trade and new construction.

This balkanization of the global economy is deeply stagflationary, and it is coinciding with demographic aging, not just in developed countries but also in large emerging economies such as China. Because young people tend to produce and save more, whereas older people spend down their savings and require many more expensive services in health care and other sectors, this trend, too, will lead to higher prices and slower growth.

Today’s geopolitical turmoil further complicates matters. The disruptions to trade and the spike in commodity prices following Russia’s invasion were not just a one-off phenomenon. The same threats to harvests and food shipments that arose in 2022 may well persist in 2023. Moreover, if China does finally end its zero-COVID policy and begin to restart its economy, a surge in demand for many commodities will add to the global inflationary pressures. There is also no end in sight for Sino-Western decoupling, which is accelerating across all dimensions of trade (goods, services, capital, labor, technology, data, and information). And, of course, Iran, North Korea, and other strategic rivals to the West could soon contribute in their own ways to the global havoc.

Now that the US dollar has been fully weaponized for strategic and national-security purposes, its position as the main global reserve currency could eventually begin to decline, and a weaker dollar would of course add to inflationary pressures in the US. More broadly, a frictionless world trading system requires a frictionless financial system. But sweeping primary and secondary sanctions have thrown sand in what was once a well-oiled machine, massively increasing the transaction costs of trade.

On top of it all, climate change, too, will create persistent stagflationary pressures. Droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and other disasters are increasingly disrupting economic activity and threatening harvests (thus driving up food prices). At the same time, demands for decarbonization have led to underinvestment in fossil-fuel capacity before investment in renewables has reached the point where they can make up the difference. Today’s large energy-price spikes were inevitable.

The increased likelihood of future pandemics also represents a persistent source of stagflation, especially considering how little has been done to prevent or prepare for the next one. The next contagious outbreak will lend further momentum to protectionist policies as countries rush to close borders and hoard critical supplies of food, medicines, and other essential goods.

Finally, cyberwarfare remains an underappreciated threat to economic activity and even public safety. Firms and governments will either face more stagflationary disruptions to production, or they will have to spend a fortune on cybersecurity. Either way, costs will rise.

The Worst of All Possible Economies

When the recession comes, it will not be short and shallow but long and severe. Not only are we facing persistent short- and medium-term negative supply shocks, but we are also heading into the mother of all debt crises, owing to soaring private and public debt ratios over the last few decades. Low debt ratios spared us from that outcome in the 1970s. And though we certainly had debt crises following the 2008 crash – the result of excessive household, bank, and government debt – we also had deflation. It was a demand shock and a credit crunch that could be met with massive monetary, fiscal, and credit easing.

Today, we are experiencing the worst elements of both the 1970s and 2008. Multiple, persistent negative supply shocks have coincided with debt ratios that are even higher than they were during the global financial crisis. These inflationary pressures are forcing central banks to tighten monetary policy even though we are heading into a recession. That makes the current situation fundamentally different from both the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. Everyone should be preparing for what may come to be remembered as the Great Stagflationary Debt Crisis.

While central banks have been at pains to sound more hawkish, we should be skeptical of their professed willingness to fight inflation at any cost. Once they find themselves in a debt trap, they will have to blink. With debt ratios so high, fighting inflation will cause an economic and financial crash that will be deemed politically unacceptable. Major central banks will feel as though they have no choice but to backpedal, and inflation, the debasement of fiat currencies, boom-bust cycles, and financial crises will become even more severe and frequent.

The inevitability of central banks wimping out was recently on display in the United Kingdom. Faced with the market reaction to the Truss government’s reckless fiscal stimulus, the BOE had to launch an emergency quantitative-easing (QE) program to buy up government bonds. That sad episode confirmed that in the UK, as in many other countries, monetary policy is increasingly subject to fiscal capture.

Recall that a similar turnaround occurred in 2019, when the Fed, after previously signaling continued rate hikes and quantitative-tightening, stopped its QT program and started pursuing a mix of backdoor QE and policy-rate cuts at the first sign of mild financial pressures and a growth slowdown. Central banks will talk tough; but, in a world of excessive debt and risks of an economic and financial crash, there is good reason to doubt their willingness to do “whatever it takes” to return inflation to its target rate.

With governments unable to reduce high debts and deficits by spending less or raising revenues, those that can borrow in their own currency will increasingly resort to the “inflation tax”: relying on unexpected price growth to wipe out long-term nominal liabilities at fixed interest rates.

How will financial markets and prices of equities and bonds perform in the face of rising inflation and the return of stagflation? It is likely that, as in the stagflation of the 1970s, both components of any traditional asset portfolio will suffer, potentially incurring massive losses. Inflation is bad for bond portfolios, which will take losses as yields increase and prices fall, as well as for equities, whose valuations are hurt by rising interest rates.

For the first time in decades, a 60/40 portfolio of equities and bonds suffered massive losses in 2022, because bond yields have surged while equities have gone into a bear market. By 1982, at the peak of the stagflation decade, the average S&P 500 firm’s price-to-earnings ratio was down to eight; today, it is closer to 20, which suggests that the bear market could end up being even more protracted and severe. Investors will need to find assets to hedge against inflation, political and geopolitical risks, and environmental damage: these include short-term government bonds and inflation-indexed bonds, gold and other precious metals, and real estate that is resilient to environmental damage.

The Moment of Truth

In any case, these megathreats will further contribute to rising income and wealth inequality, which has already been putting severe pressure on liberal democracies (as those left behind revolt against elites), and fueling the rise of radical and aggressive populist regimes. One can find right-wing manifestations of this trend in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, the US (under Donald Trump), post-Brexit Britain, and many other countries; and left-wing manifestations in Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and now Brazil (which has just replaced a right-wing populist with a left-wing one).

And, of course, Xi’s authoritarian stranglehold has given the lie to the old idea that Western engagement with a fast-growing China would ineluctably lead that country to open itself up even more to markets and, eventually, to democratic processes. Under Xi, China shows every sign of becoming more closed off, and more aggressive on geopolitical, security, and economic matters.

How did it come to this? Part of the problem is that we have long had our heads stuck in the sand. Now, we need to make up for lost time. Without decisive action, we will be heading into a period that is less like the four decades after WWII than like the three decades between 1914 and 1945. That period gave us World War I; the Spanish flu pandemic; the 1929 Wall Street crash; the Great Depression; massive trade and currency wars; inflation, hyperinflation, and deflation; financial and debt crises, leading to massive meltdowns and defaults; and the rise of authoritarian militarist regimes in Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, and elsewhere, culminating in WWII and the Holocaust.

In this new world, the relative peace, prosperity, and rising global welfare that we have taken for granted will be gone; most of it already is. If we don’t stop the multi-track slow-motion train wreck that is threatening the global economy and our planet at large, we will be lucky to have only a repeat of the stagflationary 1970s. Far more likely is an echo of the 1930s and the 1940s, only now with all the massive disruptions from climate change added to the mix.

Avoiding a dystopian scenario will not be easy. While there are potential solutions to each megathreat, most are costly in the short run and will deliver benefits only over the long run. Many also require technological innovations that are not yet available or in place, starting with those needed to halt or reverse climate change. Complicating matters further, today’s megathreats are interconnected, and therefore best addressed in a systematic and coherent fashion. Domestic leadership, in both the private and public sector, and international cooperation among great powers is necessary to prevent the coming Apocalypse.

Yet there are many domestic and international obstacles standing in the way of policies that would allow for a less dystopian (though still contested and conflictual) future. Thus, while a less bleak scenario is obviously desirable, a clear-headed analysis indicates that dystopia is much more likely than a happier outcome. The years and decades ahead will be marked by a stagflationary debt crisis and related megathreats – war, pandemics, climate change, disruptive AI, and deglobalization – all of which will be bad for jobs, economies, markets, peace, and prosperity.

The US Army War College’s recent journal includes a disturbing essay, which states that “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”

The insect-drone concept is thought to have originated as far back as at least the 1970s with the CIA pursuing a dragonfly #drone. Since then, we have seen an increasingly rapid development in drone technology.

I feel more stressed out now in my current job compared to my four years of working hard in South Korea. Primarily, this is because our tasks are not well-defined and it seems more are being added as days pass.
Expectations are not clear. Institutional communication is a constant struggle. It appears that people are not used to following protocol. This creates a lot of confusion.
This situation prevents me from creating content on Hive during my spare time. I find it difficult to concentrate on my thoughts. Despite giving my best, I still find many things left undone. In times like that, I tend to look for diversion. I don’t want to shorten my life in this kind of institutional culture that has been built up for years.
This morning, reading one of @taskmaster4450’s articles about the idea of Hive as a digital real estate and combining it with the question about how can I earn a curation reward of 1 HP per day, this somehow triggers my mind to write.
I think these two thoughts are connected. Since curation rewards play a significant role in the growth of one’s HIVE Power and in growing one’s “digital real estate,” it is proper to ask this question:

If Hive offers us access to digital real estate ownership, what should be our proper response?


[Photo Credit](https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-and-red-house-surrounded-by-trees-at-night-1612351/)
Finding an answer to the above question can provide me a guide in growing my HIVE Power (HP) particularly if I can break down the answer into specific steps. It could serve as a HIVE Power Personal Plan (HPPP).
Not only me, I think many in developing nations will find such a question very relevant. Most of us don’t have the privilege of owning a real piece of land. Even owning our own house is a dream that for many of us is beyond our reach.
Of course, I don’t have the numbers to back up this claim. This is simply my common observation among my acquaintances. Very few of us own our houses.
I imagine my father in the 1970s who is just a security guard but he can support a family of five. Unlike today, even though both my wife and I are working, we still struggle to own a house. Except for buying books in the past, I don’t have any vices and I live a very frugal life. And yet after working for almost close to a four-decade and in four-year time, I will be reaching my senior years, and yet until now, I still struggle financially to provide for my family.
Of course, I have no one to blame. And other unavoidable circumstances in life prevent me to achieve such a dream in my 40s. One of them is marital trouble. Another is a lack of financial IQ. All I know for the first 23 years of my working life is to earn and spend.
Saving and investing are not part of my financial discipline. Even after learning financial literacy in 2009, that’s 14 years ago, still, the dream of financial freedom seems so far away.
I consider stumbling upon Hive at the height of the pandemic and the lockdown in August 2021 providential. Though it took me more or less seven months to wonder what Hive is all about, in March of 2022, thanks again to taskmaster that after reading his article about Hive as a compounding machine via layer two tokens, things started to make sense.
I love analogies. It makes the human mind think in concrete terms by relating abstract ideas to things we are familiar with. Describing Hive as a digital real estate is one of them. It challenges me to think of specific steps to grow such a digital asset.
Grace and peace!
What is LeoFinance?
What is Hive?

C-GPT, explain the petrol-dollar

The petrodollar is a term that refers to the relationship between oil and the United States dollar. It refers to the practice of countries around the world using the US dollar as the currency in which they trade oil, rather than using their own national currencies. This practice has been in place since the 1970s, when a number of oil-producing countries agreed to price their oil exports exclusively in US dollars in exchange for US military and economic support.

As a result of this arrangement, the US dollar became the dominant currency in global oil markets, and countries around the world had to hold large stockpiles of US dollars in order to pay for their oil imports. This, in turn, helped to increase demand for the US dollar, making it the world's primary reserve currency and strengthening the US's economic and political influence.

The petrodollar system has been a major factor in the global economy for many decades and continues to shape international relations and financial markets to this day. However, it has also faced criticism, with some arguing that it has contributed to US dollar hegemony and allowed the US to dominate the global economy, while others see it as a way to ensure a stable and predictable global oil market.

1970s i still remember watching bayanihan.