Semantic search

“Overpopulation and the overreliance on irrigation was a major factor in making the Maya vulnerable to failure: the trigger event of their collapse appears to have been a long drought beginning about 840 A.D. (communication of V. Scarborough, an archaelogist (sic!) from the University of Cincinnati [90]). Among many factors, such as war and plagues, that contributed to many of the collapses of ancient societies, there seem to be two main causes: too many people and too little fresh water. As a consequence, the civilization became vulnerable to environmental stress, for instance, a prolonged drought or a change in climate [90].

The societies themselves appear to have contributed to their own demise by encouraging growth of their population to levels that carried the seeds of their own decline through overexploitation of the land (communication of C. Scarre, an archaelogist (sic!) from the Cambridge University in England [90]). Similarly, the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the Indus Valley civilization in India, and early societies in Palestine, Greece, and Crete all collapsed in a catastrophic drought and cooling of the atmosphere between 2300 and 2200 B.C.”

“A smart city program aims to create “an effective urban management system, creating safe and comfortable living conditions for citizens.”

Sobyanin’s “Smart City – 2030” project for Moscow provides an extreme example of what this initiative hopes to accomplish. The ambitious reimagining of the Russian capital is already being carried out by the city’s Department of Information Technologies.

Among other perks, Moscow residents will be issued “genetic passports” that can be used to administer gene therapies. “Wearable and implanted medical digital devices” will collect information about an individual’s lifestyle and calculate payments to health insurance companies.

By the end of the decade, Russia's capital will harness “digital technologies” to ensure “sustainable growth in the quality of life of Muscovites,” according to the project’s official website.”

“"A controversial bid to stop people travelling between neighbourhoods has been branded "a draconian ban on free movement" as the plan goes out to consultation.

Canterbury City Council unveiled its radical vision for the district last week, with it proposing to divide the city up into five areas"”

“Terrorism is not really an '-ism'. There's no connection between the Sandinistas who fought the Contras and Al Qaida or Colombia's FARC and fisherman turned pirates in Africa and Asia, yet they are all called "terrorists". That's just a convenient way for your government to convince the world that there is another enemy '-ism' out there, like communism used to be. It diverts attention from the very real problems.

Our narrow-minded attitudes and the resultant policies foment violence, rebellion and wars. In the long run, almost noone benefits from attacking the people we label as "terrorists", with one, glaring exception:- the corporatocracy. Those who own and run the companies that build the ships, missiles and armoured vehicles, make guns, uniforms and bulletproof vests, distribute food, soft drinks and ammunition, provide insurance, medicines and toilet paper, constructions ports, airstrips and housing and reconstruct devastated villages, schools, factories and hospitals. They, and only they, are the big winners. The rest of us are hoodwinked by that one, loaded word "terrorist".

The current economic collapse has awakened us to the importance of regulating and reining in the people who control the businesses that benefit from the misuse of words like "terrorism" and who perpetrate other scams. We recognize today that white collar executives are not a special, incorruptible breed.”

“Procuraduria General de la Republica de Mexico
México, D.F., a 12 de octubre de 2001
Boletín No. 697/01

“I suspect this entire Ukraine Crisis had been war-gamed and war planned quite some time ago at the highest levels of US/NATO. Notice DOD slipped 2 US warships into the Black Sea just before the Olympics under a patently absurd pretext. In other words, what we are seeing unfold here is a US/NATO War Plan. They instigated the fascist coup against Yanukovich. They anticipated that Putin would then respond by taking over Crimea.

I suspect the US/NATO/EU response will be to introduce military forces into Western Ukraine and Kiev and thus make Ukraine a de facto member of NATO, which has been their objective all along. They have already anticipated what Putin’s next move after that will be. Notice also the massive anti-Russian campaign by the Western News Media working in lock-step with each other. Another sign that all this has been planned well in advance.

I suspect that US/NATO/EU figure that Putin knows they have this offensive, first-strike strategic nuclear capability with a rudimentary ABM/BMD capability so that at the end of the day he will be forced to stand down—or else. Compellence as opposed to Deterrence. Just like during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That is where this US/NATO/EU War Plan is heading on the assumptions that they can keep their deliberate Escalation Dominance under their control and that at the end of the day Putin will be forced to stand down just like Khrushchev did and for the same reasons. That would leave US/NATO/EU in control of at least half of Ukraine as a de facto NATO member state.”

“After his visit to Washington, TIME followed the President and his team back to Kyiv, hoping to understand how they would react to the signals they had received, especially the insistent calls for Zelensky to fight corruption inside his own government, and the fading enthusiasm for a war with no end in sight. On my first day in Kyiv, I asked one member of his circle how the President was feeling. The response came without a second’s hesitation: “Angry.”

The usual sparkle of his optimism, his sense of humor, his tendency to liven up a meeting in the war room with a bit of banter or a bawdy joke, none of that has survived into the second year of all-out war. “Now he walks in, gets the updates, gives the orders, and walks out,” says one longtime member of his team. Another tells me that, most of all, Zelensky feels betrayed by his Western allies. They have left him without the means to win the war, only the means to survive it. But his convictions haven’t changed. Despite the recent setbacks on the battlefield, he does not intend to give up fighting or to sue for any kind of peace. On the contrary, his belief in Ukraine’s ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisers. It is immovable, verging on the messianic. “He deludes himself,” one of his closest aides tells me in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”

Zelensky’s stubbornness, some of his aides say, has hurt their team’s efforts to come up with a new strategy, a new message. As they have debated the future of the war, one issue has remained taboo: the possibility of negotiating a peace deal with the Russians”

“I asked them – are you with us?” Zelensky said. “They answered that they are with us, but they don’t want to take us into the alliance. I’ve asked 27 leaders of Europe, if Ukraine will be in NATO, I’ve asked them directly — all are afraid and did not respond

We were left by ourselves. Who is ready to go to war for us? Honestly, I don’t see anybody. Who is ready to give Ukraine guarantees of NATO membership? Honestly, everybody is afraid”

“Russia behind the Headlines has published an interview with Gorbachev, who was Soviet president during the discussions and treaty negotiations concerning German reunification. The interviewer asked why Gorbachev did not “insist that the promises made to you [Gorbachev]—particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East—be legally encoded?” Gorbachev replied: “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. … Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement was made in that context… Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.”

Gorbachev continued that “The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been obeyed all these years.” To be sure, the former Soviet president criticized NATO enlargement and called it a violation of the spirit of the assurances given Moscow in 1990, but he made clear there was no promise regarding broader enlargement.”

“Western countries have been saying for centuries that they bring freedom and democracy to other nations. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of bringing democracy they suppressed and exploited, and instead of giving freedom they enslaved and oppressed. The unipolar world is inherently anti-democratic and unfree; it is false and hypocritical through and through. The United States is the only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons twice, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. And they created a precedent. Recall that during WWII the United States and Britain reduced Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne and many other German cities to rubble, without the least military necessity. It was done ostentatiously and, to repeat, without any military necessity. They had only one goal, as with the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities: to intimidate our country and the rest of the world.

The United States left a deep scar in the memory of the people of Korea and Vietnam with their carpet bombings and use of napalm and chemical weapons. It actually continues to occupy Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea and other countries, which they cynically refer to as equals and allies. Look now, what kind of alliance is that? The whole world knows that the top officials in these countries are being spied on and that their offices and homes are bugged. It is a disgrace, a disgrace for those who do this and for those who, like slaves, silently and meekly swallow this arrogant behaviour.

They call the orders and threats they make to their vassals Euro-Atlantic solidarity, and the creation of biological weapons and the use of human test subjects, including in Ukraine, noble medical research. It is their destructive policies, wars and plunder that have unleashed today’s massive wave of migrants. Millions of people endure hardships and humiliation or die by the thousands trying to reach Europe.”

“Last week’s indictment of McGonigal is a classic case of raising more questions than were answered. The evidence presented by prosecutors suggests the FBI counterintelligence expert wasn’t introduced to Deripaska until his waning days with the bureau in 2018, aided by a pair of Russian diplomats. In 2019, after he’d retired, the indictment says McGonigal went to work for the oligarch to help him evade U.S. sanctions and to investigate a rival. But the Times also reported that U.S. counterintelligence — in which McGonigal had been a key player — had tried unsuccessfully to recruit Deripaska as an asset in the years around the 2016 election.

Like the Woody Allen character Zelig, Deripaska — a 55-year-old aluminum magnate who at one time was the richest man in Putin’s Russia — is turning up in the background everywhere in the ongoing corruption of American democracy. The oligarch’s history of multimillion-dollar business dealings with Paul Manafort — Trump’s campaign manager in the summer of 2016 — is central to the theory of Russian interference, after it was confirmed that Manafort shared key campaign data with a suspected Russian intelligence agent also connected to Deripaska.

In 2019, Deripaska did manage to get those U.S. sanctions lifted, in a controversial deal backed not only by Team Trump but critically by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. That same year, a Deripaska-linked aluminium company announced it would build a large plant in Kentucky, where McConnell was running for re-election. (It eventually wasn’t built.) This is the same McConnell who, during that critical fall period in 2016, refused to sign a bipartisan statement warning about Russian election interference.”

“Former V.I. Attorney General Denise George, who successfully sued the estate of Jeffrey Epstein and then was summarily fired by Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. in December, has broken her silence in an interview with Britain’s Sunday Times Magazine. In it, she hints that a run for governor may be in her future. The interview — published Saturday by the Sunday Times, a 600,000-plus circulation newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — is the first time George has spoken of her efforts to bring Epstein and his alleged accomplices to account, and the fallout from that endeavor. George, who was widely lauded when she won a $105 million lawsuit against the Epstein estate in November — believed to be the largest monetary settlement in the history of the territory — subsequently filed suit for $190 million against his onetime bank, JPMorgan Chase, on Dec. 27 in Manhattan federal court, alleging violations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

Bryan fired George four days later, on New Year’s Eve, saying nothing at first but later admitting that he was “blindsided” by the lawsuit that has opened V.I. officials to scrutiny for their dealings with Epstein. That includes Bryan himself, who approved Epstein’s lucrative Economic Development Authority benefits when he was head of the EDA board and has been deposed by JPMorgan’s attorneys, along with a host of other territory officials.”

“Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan. Hamas had "decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope," analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division. But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet. On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing.

The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times. The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out. The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off. “In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.”

“According to mainstream information, QRA intercepts happened at a rate of almost 400 times per year in the early 1990s. After the reduction to 7 sites, each with two jets, in the late 1990s, they still occurred roughly twice per week right up to 9/11. What are the details of these intercepts with regard to protocol/chain of command and reaction time?

Who exactly was responsible for the failure to redirect QRA jets, normally aimed at planes coming in from overseas, toward threats emerging from over the mainland?

Why were no QRA jets available at Andrews Air Force Base, right next to the nation's capital, a primary target for every terrorist in the world? Terrorists of various convictions have tried to target the White House and other buildings with airliners and small airplanes since at least 1974. What message does it send to world when the world's greatest superpower leaves its capital without air cover?

NORAD's Langley interceptors accidentally flew east over the ocean while they should have been heading to the north-west, towards Washington, D.C. This was standard operating procedure when pilots were scrambled but not provided with a target. How could this mistake happen, as any commander at any level should be aware of this basic procedure? Who is responsible?

Why weren't the pilots of the Langley jets provided with information on their target? Who is responsible for that?”