At The Telegraph, support for Israel is now mandatory

"What 'Israel’s right to exist' means in practice

In practice, the phrase “Israel’s right to exist” has been repeatedly deployed by Israel’s cheerleaders across the West to justify Israel’s crimes - from occupation and colonisation to apartheid and, now, mass destruction in Gaza.

It is also telling what is not said. The Essentials do not prohibit racism in general, despite later rejecting 'all forms of discrimination'. There is no explicit rejection of Islamophobia, for example, or anti-Arab racism.

Instead, 'oppose all forms of antisemitism' is fused directly with 'support the right of Israel to exist.'

That conflation matters.

Because we know that defenders of Israel have repeatedly blurred the line between antisemitism and opposition to the actions of the Israeli state."

Link here.

Weaponizing Time – Part II: The Global Operating System of Western Power

"This characterization of the 'Gray Zone' is an expression of the civilizatory lens of supremacy. The underlying logic pathologizes any form of development or international engagement that is not subservient to the US-led order. It operates on the premise that the only legitimate state behavior is alignment with Western interests. This is the intellectual foundation that allows the entirety of geopolitics to be redefined as a "military problem." By framing multipolarity itself as a "gray zone" threat, the doctrine of Multi-Domain Operations receives its moral and strategic license: the entire world becomes a battlespace, and every independent actor a legitimate target."

Link here.

Weaponizing Time: Elite Anxiety and the Fight for a Closing Window

"When Trenin speaks of a war 'already here,' he describes a reality where development itself, technological leaps, infrastructure corridors, and resource sovereignty are seen as weapons by Western (elite) perception. The mist that grows out of these worldviews is obscuring the chessboard, and it is (partly) manufactured. This, then, is a dissection of that fog’s composition:

• Elite panic over narrowing resource access and fading ideological monopoly.
• Strategic ambiguity: a deliberate weaponization of time and uncertainty that forces rivals to hedge everywhere at once.
• Multi-Domain Operations (MDO): the doctrine that stitches finance, information, cyber, and kinetic force into one rolling, low-visibility offensive.

Washington and its closest allies (or vassals) are not even trying to out-develop BRICS on civilian terms; they aim to bleed them, to overextend them, to underpower them: economically, diplomatically, kinetically—before the technological gap flips irreversibly. What we are observing is a desperate game of chance based on the assumption that military attrition can (at least) stall a tectonic shift in the current global order. That choice, rooted in an older colonial logic which framed “non-Western development” as inherently threatening, explains why every Russian drone or Chinese port deal is read as casus belli.

The hourglass drains as Western elites weaponize time itself, turning uncertainty into their sharpest weapon through a fog deliberately engineered not to burn off; for in this manufactured mist, they seek to stall the very shift they cannot prevent."

Link here.

How Decades of Folly Led to War in Ukraine

Fantastic overview of how the U.S. drove Ukraine (and Georgia) into a war.

Gates was not alone in his misgivings about NATO expansion. The ambassador to Moscow at the time was William Burns, a highly regarded diplomat who was well qualified for his post with his knowledge of Russian and prior experience in the country. The plan to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO alarmed him too. As he famously warned his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in February 2008, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite” from “the knuckle-draggers” in the Kremlin to “Putin’s sharpest liberal critics.” If Washington insisted on pushing Georgian membership, the ambassador predicted, the “prospects of subsequent Russian-Georgian armed conflict” would be high.

Link here.

The Tao of Being Human

"Taking a focus of attention inward and regularly knowing the cosmic field-consciousness, the intelligent aliveness that seems to be in all space within and around us, helps us to dissolve our ego slightly and lessen our sense of separation from others.

This spatial intelligence seems to be the primary stuff of the Universe and everything visible is a continuously generated expression of it, a vibrational altering of itself that allows it to become visible and touchable as trees, flowers and human beings.

Like music made visible, each one of us is a visible materialisation of the streaming flows of vibrational information emerging out of cosmic intelligence."

Link here.

And here's a link to all his articles.

Consciousness is Everywhere
Throughout the universe

The Path of Silence
Realizing the universal

What Living-Cell Biochemistry reveals about the Physics of Consciousness
The puzzle of coherence

The Flow of the Universe
Finding a new language for consciousness

Consciousness is intrinsic in the Universe
Cosmic consciousness exists everywhere and inside all of us.

Tuning in to the Conscious Universe
Finding our own connection into the universal intelligence

Fundamental Change is Possible
Seeing the Universe differently

The Conscious Space
What is consciousness?

We’re Woven Through the Universe
A 21st century worldview

Intuition and the Tao
Bringing inspiration into our life

Discovering the New Reality
How a new cosmic spirituality, emerging from meditation practice, is becoming increasingly in sync with insights from…

Time For Change
Finding the way forward

Tuning in to Intelligence in the Universe
How taking a focus of attention inward helps us intuitively realize our connection into intelligence in the Universe.

Relationship with the Silence
Within each one of us is the whole conscious, cosmic space in all of us.

Knowing the Conscious Universe
And bringing it into our life

What is Reality?
And is there a universal human reality?

The Conscious Universe

And us

Hearing the Silence

Of the universe

Universal Consciousness

Is the fabric of reality

Now and Zen
Knowing the universal intelligence

Space is Conscious 2
A continuing series exploring consciousness and reality

Our Experiencing Universe
Knowing universal consciousness

Space is Conscious
Universal consciousness is in all space everywhere

A New Way of Seeing
As though every moment matters

Space is Conscious 3
A continuing series exploring consciousness and reality

Tuning In

To the universe

Finding the Conscious Universe

Inside us

Finding the Silence

And knowing cosmic intelligence

Knowing Cosmic Intelligence
If we inwardly focus our attention, we become conscious of a cosmic intelligence in all space everywhere.

Tuning in to the Cosmic Field
Many people seem to think that the world around us is just as it seems to be.

Knowing the Cosmic field-Self
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published “On the revolution of Heavenly Spheres” which introduced the idea that planet…

Bringing Cosmic Intelligence into our Life

Paying attention to the Conscious Space
Software engineers and others in the tech community like to speculate that the world we live in is somehow similar to…

Understanding Our Universe
Is a new worldview possible?

Consciousness is Cosmic
Consciousness, our capacity for conscious awareness, is cosmic not personal and it’s everywhere, inside and around all…

Is there a Spatial Intelligence throughout the Universe?
Our human body isn’t nearly as solid and material as it looks.

Living in Sync with Cosmic Intelligence
Conscious awareness isn’t somehow created by our brain, but exists as an immersive and synchronistic consciousness…

Knowing the Unseen Cosmic Organism
Cosmic intelligence is continuously transforming itself into the observable Universe.

We’re Waves in the Ocean
Tuning in to what joins us in 2020

Changing Our Worldview
Mindfulness, reality and climate change

The New Reality
Discovering our cosmic identity

Art of the Unseen
How visual fields, arrays, webs and networks created with digital tools can hint at the unseen, underlying…

Finding a New Normal
We belong here in the Universe

Knowing the Universe
Dissolving into the conscious space

Living in a Conscious Universe
There’s one conscious space in all of us

Experiencing the Cosmic Space
How tuning in to an inner conscious space helps dissolve our separation from other people and gives us access to…

Tuning in to field-Consciousness
In our everyday life, our attention is mostly focussed on the words and pictures on our screens or on the world around…

Seeing the World Differently
Finding new ways of being. And new ways of living

Consciousness in the Universe
Bringing mindfulness into our everyday life

Becoming Peaceful
Dissolving into now, finding peace

Being Present
Finding now

Getting Through This
The global crisis is bringing us closer to each other

Life Goes On
Living with the new normal

We’re Not Our Thoughts
We’re an unlimited consciousness in all of us

Finding the Space Inside Us
Allowing our thinking to dissolve away

Getting in Tune with Consciousness in the Universe
How using meditation to tune in to cosmic consciousness helps us find the intuitive wisdom we need to live well.

Tuning in to the Silence
Our thoughts are transient patterns

Realizing the Transpersonal Self
A spatial cosmic consciousness extends everywhere throughout the Universe.

The Tao of Being Human
Many people assume that our consciousness, our conscious awareness of being alive as a human being, is created by the…

Ill-Suited to Reality (on NATO)

"One of the ironies of Nato enlargement was that it was opposed most strongly by establishment intellectuals and military historians. George Kennan described the prospect as ‘a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions’, which could destabilise Eastern Europe and resurrect Cold War hostilities. In 1998, John Lewis Gaddis bemoaned that the decision to admit Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic was taken with almost no public debate and that ‘with remarkably few exceptions’ historians saw it as ‘ill-conceived, ill-timed and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world’. Enlargement violated the principle of magnanimity in victory, and risked driving Russia to forge an anti-hegemonic alliance with China. From the left, Peter Gowan argued in 1999 that rhetoric about spreading democracy was cover for a desire to eliminate Russian political influence from the region. That entailed significant risk of future conflict, since Russia wouldn’t always be weak. More than two decades before the event, Gowan predicted that the presence of Nato infrastructure on Poland’s borders could ‘very rapidly’ lead to crisis in Ukraine."

Link here.

How the West won . . .

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

― Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996)

Will the American Oligarchy Accept Limits or Choose World War Three?

"The US is a market state that is dominated by and run for transnational capital. Its foreign policy and the military are a tool of the American oligarchy. Therefore, any serious policy discussion needs to deal with the fact that national interests as they’re expressed today are not in any real sense national but representative of the interests of a small cohort of the super wealthy."

Link here.

Sanctions on Moscow have hurt European economies while Russia's has GROWN

"Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, Dr. Ksenia Kirkham, a specialist in economic warfare at King's College London, said Europe is 'shooting itself in the foot' with its sanctions strategy and has pushed Russia to 'escape Western mechanisms of control' and become more self-reliant.

And Alan W. Cafruny, professor of international affairs at the US' Hamilton College, argued Europe's decision to cut off Russian oil and gas imports has done nothing but damage their own economies and line the pockets of US corporations - all while Russia continues to export its hydrocarbons out east unperturbed."

Link here.

Moshe Dayan: 'What cause have we to complain about their hatred of us?'

"Dayan recognized what had been done to create the state of Israel. He understood, therefore, what it would take to defend it.

An Undoable Act

This theft of land is, in Arab eyes, an act that cannot be undone. It should be seen that way in Israeli eyes as well, because of its consequences.

In many ways, this is like Henry VIII’s theft of the wealth of the Catholic Church in England. Once taken and distributed, the act could not be undone, much like a murdered man cannot be brought back. In the time of Shakespeare, England was as Catholic as France; only the government and its dependents were Protestant. It took war to settle the dispute, several in fact.

So with this. It seems to me there must a war, or barring that, a return to the status quo ante, in which people in the occupied land are continuously tortured until they die or decide to leave."

Link here.

Visualizing 60 Years of Stock Market Cycles

How Can Investors Prepare for a Bear Market?

No one knows when a bear market will begin, but there are strategies that investors can use to build a more resilient portfolio.

Diversifying across sectors is one approach. Consider how cyclical sectors, such as tech and real estate tend to rise when the market is on the upswing. By contrast, when the market takes a turn, traditionally more defensive sectors like consumer staples outperform.

Asset class diversification is another tactic. Including bonds in a portfolio typically reduces risk given their stable cash flows and historically low correlation to stocks. International stocks also have a lower correlation to U.S. equities which means that when U.S. stocks are down, these types of assets can help buffer the loss.

The good news is that the S&P 500 has seen +11.5% average historical returns since 1928. Overall, the majority of stock market cycles take place in bull territory both in terms of net return appreciation and length of time by a wide margin.

Link here.

The Credibility Mirage

Moreover, both Republican and Democratic administrations have helped turn Moscow hostile with an aggressive, expansionist military policy. Washington treated the Soviet Union and then Russia as defeated foes with the expansion of NATO, despite multiple assurances to the contrary. The U.S. also inverted the Monroe Doctrine, insisting that everything up to Russia’s border was in America’s sphere of interest, and promoted “color revolutions” and street uprisings within Moscow’s neighbors. Washington also invaded and dismantled Yugoslavia/Serbia with nary even a nod to Russia’s historic interests in the Balkans.

Unsurprisingly, members of the blob, as the foreign policy establishment has been called, insist that they are virginal public servants dedicated to all that is good and wonderful in the world. Most Washington policymakers deny the obvious: that their militaristic policies encouraged Putin to invade. Although he remains responsible for plunging Europe into war, he almost certainly would not have done so without the succession of U.S. and European decisions flouting Moscow’s security interests. After all, who imagines Washington policymakers accepting what they attempted to impose on Russia—expanding the Warsaw Pact northward through Latin America, promoting a street putsch against Mexico’s elected, pro-American government, and promising Mexico membership in the Soviet-dominated military alliance. The result in Washington would be wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments on a Biblical scale, and likely a modern Cuban Missile Crisis.

Link here.

War Budget Leaves Netanyahu Caught Between Markets and Politics

So the U.S. wants to give taxpayer money to Israel for a war, all while Israel continues to fund religious schools and land theft in the West Bank. Brilliant.

"Built into Israel’s expenditure program are so-called 'coalition funds,' or discretionary spending earmarked to the five parties comprising Netanyahu’s government, the most religious in Israel’s history. A record 14 billion shekels ($3.6 billion) in transfers approved last May will partly go toward religious schools — some exempt from teaching subjects like English and math. Other favored projects include the development of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

While the special allotments are a fraction of the total budget for 2023-2024, they have become a marker of competing priorities at a time when Israel confronts its worst armed conflict in half a century."

Link here.

The American Origins of the Russo–Ukrainian War

"U.S. policymakers and foreign policy commentators routinely assert that NATO expansion has nothing to do with the Russo–Ukrainian war. This disregards the historical record, which establishes that NATO’s post–Cold War expansion, and specifically the prospect that it would incorporate Ukraine as a member, contributed importantly to the war’s outbreak. In a real sense, the Russo–Ukrainian war’s origins trace back to the 1990 negotiations on German unification and, even farther, to the origins of the Cold War itself.

NATO expansion was part of a flawed American approach to building a post–Cold War security order in Europe. Major wars, including cold ones, can end with either vindictive settlements or magnanimous and far-sighted ones. The classic example of the former is the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, which left Germany justly aggrieved and vengeful. On the other hand, there have been high-minded peace accords like the 1815 Congress of Vienna, which ended the Napoleonic wars, and America’s enlightened policies toward Germany and Japan after World War II.

The U.S. did not deal with Russia in the same spirit as it dealt with Japan and Germany. Instead, Washington drew a new dividing line in Europe that isolated Russia, ignored its legitimate security interests, and sowed the seeds of future conflict. As Stent writes, Russia felt doubly humiliated by the Cold War’s outcome. The Kremlin lost sway in places that historically had been part of Russia’s sphere of influence, and Moscow was expected to conform to an international order based on America’s unipolar power. Washington should have been more sensitive to the historical, political, and cultural dynamics that shape Russian foreign policy. Instead, the United States brushed aside Moscow’s concerns in what Samir Puri, a security affairs expert at King’s College London, has dubbed 'Operation Ignore Russia.' This was an avoidable policy blunder that predictably created a resentful 'Weimar Russia.'”

Link here.

George Orwell’s 1984 in Washington (on Syria)

"Yet Washington continues to waste American lives, materiel, and credibility for barely discernible objectives in the Middle East. Intervening in Lebanon’s bitter civil war cost hundreds of U.S. Marines their lives. Backing Israel’s colonization of Palestinian lands has made Americans a terrorist target. Invading Iraq resulted in the deaths of thousands and wounding of tens of thousands of U.S. and allied personnel—and turned the country into a charnel house with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

Deploying faux humanitarian claims to oust Libya’s Muammar Gadaffi left that land a wreck, violent and divided a decade later. Support for Saudi Arabia’s aggressive war against Yemen ravaged the region’s poorest nation, leaving hundreds of thousands of dead. And America’s botched attempt to oust Syria’s secular dictator led to a de facto alliance with brutal jihadists, including al-Qaeda’s local affiliate. The Syrian people ultimately faced rule by either the despotic Assad regime or terrible variants of bloody Islamists.

Although this civil war is largely over and the Islamic State, an outgrowth of Washington’s Iraq invasion, has been defeated, the U.S. continues to occupy Syria. The country serves no American security interest. Damascus was long allied with Moscow but is of minimal strategic value. Although Syria is no friend of Israel, the latter is a nuclear-armed power more than capable of defending itself."

Link here.

A Case for BlackRock’s New Defined-Maturity TIPS ETFs

"I highly approve of these new funds. They not only meet a need, being the first target-date TIPS funds, but at 10 basis points per year in expenses, the price is right. Plus, the launch is very timely, as TIPS now sell at their lowest price in more than a decade."

Link here.

How much money does the U.S. piss away on Israel every year?

The chart is informative.

Link here.

From December 2021, another warning - "Acting too aggressively on Ukraine may endanger it — and Taiwan"

"Get Ukraine horribly wrong, and a true strategic nightmare could result: two crises, and perhaps two wars, against two great powers at once. Ironically, the United States would have gotten there for fear of facing exactly the dual catastrophes it brought about."

Link here.

Value, Value Everywhere – Disparate Markets Magnify Opportunities

"Most of this spread in the capitalization weighted performance and excessive valuation this year can be attributed to the outperformance of the growth style, which is dominated by the information technology sector. Exhibit 2 shows the forward PE for the S&P 500 Index, the Russell 1000 Growth Index, the Russell 1000 Value Index, the Russell Midcap Value Index, and the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Index as compared to their respective PE averages over the last 10 years. As you can see, the value and dividend indices are trading at much more attractive valuations than the S&P 500 Index and the Russell 1000 Growth Index. In fact, the Russell 1000 Growth Index is trading more than one standard deviation above its own 10-year median PE. Said differently, the Growth Index has only been more expensive about 15% of the time over the last 10 years."

Link here.

When officials say the quiet part about Russia and NATO out loud

“President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement,” Stoltenberg told a joint committee meeting of the European Parliament on September 7. “That was what he sent us. And [that] was a pre-condition for not invade [sic] Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that.”

“He went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite,” Stoltenberg reiterated, referring to the accession of Sweden and Finland into the alliance in response to Putin’s invasion. Their entry, he later insisted, “demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he's getting the exact opposite.”

Link here.