Washington has been very active in Mongolia lately, trying to pit it against Russia and China, a top Russian lawmaker has warned
Washington is apparently preparing a Ukraine-style scenario for Mongolia, seeking to turn it against its immediate neighbors, Russia and China, the vice-speaker of the State Duma, the lower chamber of the country's parliament, Sholban Kara-ool, has warned.

The US embassy and other non-government organizations have been very active in the country, the MP wrote on his Telegram channel on Wednesday, sharing observations made during his recent visit to Mongolia.

Like dropping a hot Polish potato, when political interests change and self-preservation at the voting polls becomes a priority, we see the rationale for "defending" Ukraine being dumped.

A sordid spat burst open this week revealing the absolute lack of principles among the NATO alliance supposedly defending Ukraine against purported Russian aggression. The chief antagonists in the latest row are Poland and the Kiev regime but the angry sparks are liable to explode the whole shaky facade of NATO and European Union support for the Ukrainian regime.

Poland this week said it would halt the supply of weapons to Ukraine. Warsaw declared that its priority was to modernize its armed forces. This is an astounding U-turn by the Polish authorities who up to now have been one of the most gung-ho supporters of the Kiev regime against alleged "Russian aggression".

The subsequent panic is palpable. Germany has accused Poland of "playing politics" in its solidarity towards Ukraine, while Lithuania and the other Baltic states are clamouring for drastic mediation.

The India-Middle East-Europe transportation corridor may be the talk of the town, but it will likely go the way of the last three Asia-to-Europe connectivity projects touted by the west - to the dustbin. Here's why:

The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) is a massive public diplomacy op launched at the recent G20 summit in New Delhi, complete with a memorandum of understanding signed on 9 September. Players include the US, India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the EU, with a special role for the latter's top three powers Germany, France, and Italy. It's a multimodal railway project, coupled with trans-shipments and with ancillary digital and electricity roads extending to Jordan and Israel.

If this walks and talks like the collective west's very late response to China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched 10 years ago and celebrating a Belt and Road Forum in Beijing next month, that's because it is. And yes, it is, above all, yet another American project to bypass China, to be claimed for crude electoral purposes as a meager foreign policy "success."

No one among the Global Majority remembers that the Americans came up with their own Silk Road plan way back in 2010. The concept came from the State Department's Kurt Campbell and was sold by then-Secretary Hillary Clinton as her idea. History is implacable, it came down to nought.

And no one among the Global Majority remembers the New Silk Road plan peddled by Poland, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Georgia in the early 2010s, complete with four troublesome trans-shipments in the Black Sea and the Caspian. History is implacable, this too came down to nought.

In fact, very few among the Global Majority remember the $40 trillion US-sponsored Build Back Better World (BBBW, or B3W) global plan rolled out with great fanfare just two summers ago, focusing on "climate, health and health security, digital technology, and gender equity and equality." A year later, at a G7 meeting, B3W had already shrunk to a $600 billion infrastructure-and-investment project. Of course, nothing was built. History really is implacable, it came down to nought.

The same fate awaits IMEC, for a number of very specific reasons.

US-supplied Abrams tanks should only be deployed by Kiev in specific breakthrough operations, or they will be quickly destroyed by Russian forces, Kirill Budanov, head of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) of the Ukrainian military, has said.

Ukraine is "looking forward" to receiving the 31 Abrams M1 main battle tanks that Washington promised to provide in January, according to Budanov in an interview with the War Zone website on Friday.

During their meeting at the White House on Thursday, US President Joe Biden told his Ukrainian counterpart Vladimir Zelensky that the first Abrams M1s will be arriving in Ukraine "next week."

However, the spy chief warned:

"If the American armor is deployed on the front line and just in a combined arms fight, they will not live very long on the battlefield with Russia. In order to make the best use of the tanks, Kiev should only engage them in very specific, well-crafted breakthrough operations."

Budanov explained:

"The wide use of artillery and mines by both Russian and Ukrainian forces has reduced the possibility of using armored equipment in practically all of the main directions to the minimum. If we just deploy some battalion tank group into the battlefield somewhere, just as soon as it gets under the range of artillery it will get hit. Currently, all main instances of fighting are done on foot without using any materiel."

On May 15, 1970, the New York Times published an article by esteemed Russia scholar Albert Parry detailing how Soviet dissident intellectuals were covertly passing forbidden ideas around to each other on handcrafted, typewritten documents called samizdat. Here is the beginning of that seminal story:

Censorship existed even before literature, say the Russians. And, we may add, censorship being older, literature has to be craftier. Hence, the new and remarkably viable underground press in the Soviet Union called samizdat.

Samizdat - translates as: "We publish ourselves" - that is, not the state, but we, the people.

Unlike the underground of Czarist times, today's samizdat has no printing presses (with rare exceptions): The K.G.B., the secret police, is too efficient. It is the typewriter, each page produced with four to eight carbon copies, that does the job. By the thousands and tens of thousands of frail, smudged onionskin sheets, samizdat spreads across the land a mass of protests and petitions, secret court minutes, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's banned novels, George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, Nicholas Berdyayev's philosophical essays, all sorts of sharp political discourses and angry poetry.

Though it is hard to hear, the sad fact is that we are living in a time and in a society where there is once again a need for scientists to pass around their ideas secretly to one another so as to avoid censorship, smearing, and defamation by government authorities in the name of science.

I say this from first-hand experience. During the pandemic, the U.S. government violated my free speech rights and those of my scientist colleagues for questioning the federal government's COVID policies.

While Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) campaigns for a Senate seat on a platform of earmarks for local causes, the 12-term Congressman has been busted steering millions in taxpayer dollars to for-profit defense contractors, many of whom have been political donors to his campaigns.

According to an investigation by Politico, Schiff "has offered an incomplete and potentially misleading account of his record on earmarks."

A POLITICO review of congressional earmarks and political contributions found that in addition to the money for homelessness and drug treatment, Schiff also steered millions to for-profit companies and raised tens of thousands for his House reelection campaigns from corporate executives and people connected to them. The review was mostly limited to publicly available data from the brief three-year window when corporate earmarks were disclosed.

In two particularly egregious cases, Schiff channeled millions in funding to Smiths Detection and Phasebridge, Inc., two defense companies within his district - with $6 million steered to Smiths Detection and $3 million to Phasebridge. Both moves would have been barred under reforms adopted in 2010. This financial maneuvering coincided with Schiff receiving $8,500 in contributions from PMA Group PAC and two family members of Paul Magliocchetti, founder and owner of the lobbying firm retained by both defense companies.

The pro-multipolarity group will soon include most of the world's major oil producers and consumers, FM Yvan Gil Pinto has said...

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil Pinto foresees that BRICS expansion will unite major energy producers and consumers, offering a pathway toward reducing the dependence on the US dollar in global trade.

In a recent interview with RIA Novosti, the senior diplomat highlighted the inclusion of Saudi Arabia and Iran in this group of emerging economic powers. Additionally, Venezuela aspires to join BRICS in the future. This expansion would encompass over 80% of the world's crude reserves and production, as emphasized by Minister Pinto during the interview, which was published on Monday.

"With China and India included, BRICS will also be the biggest energy consumer. In other words, it will become an ideal alliance, ideal complementary."

Starting next year, Saudi Arabia and Iran will officially become full members of BRICS, following the approval of their candidacies, along with four others, during last month's leaders' summit in South Africa. The group aims to shift the global landscape away from institutions predominantly controlled by Western powers, which member states argue are subject to misuse by the United States and its allies.

Kiev has lost more than 17,000 servicemen this month alone, according to the Russian Defense Ministry

Facing pressure from its Western backers to demonstrate tangible battleground results, Kiev continues to throw untrained soldiers into the meat grinder, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said at a meeting of ministry officials on Tuesday.

"Despite the absence of any significant results of the so-called counteroffensive, Ukraine's Western handlers are not backing down from their inhuman principle of 'arms as a path to peace,'" Shoigu said at a regular briefing of senior military officials.

Kiev does not disclose statistics about its military losses, but according to Moscow's estimates, the number of Ukrainian servicemen killed since the counteroffensive began has now surpassed 83,000, with at least 17,000 killed in September alone.

Imperial wars are primarily directed at the empire's domestic populations. Foreign enemies are only interesting if there's booty to plunder.

James Madison wrote that, "If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will come in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." Today this statement no longer seems like a remote risk for the "free world." Indeed, we are witnessing an escalation of attacks against the foundational values which, not so long ago, we were taking for granted: freedom to travel, free speech, the right to bear arms, etc. Of course, the popular resistance to these infringements is also escalating.

A class war is afoot and it's getting worse

The American people, one of the last nations that still defends their right to bear arms, are clearly responding to the attacks on their Second Amendment with more gun purchases; the defense of free speech has spilled into the social media like a tsunami; and the authorities' attempts to restrict the freedom of movement have also run into a revolt of volunteer vigilantes in the UK who are simply taking down the surveillance infrastructure. Essentially, this is the clash between the people and the ruling oligarchy. If this clash continues to escalate, it could lead to revolutionary disruptions in which the oligarchy risks losing the hold on levers of political control.

Throughout history, such circumstances tended to precipitate wars. The "enemies at the gate" emergency has been effective at inducing fear in the population, redirecting people's grievances towards an external enemy and drawing the able-bodied, fighting age men - precisely the group that constitutes the greatest danger to the oligarchy - into the military units where they can be sacrificed in large numbers, while the loyal ones can be rewarded, promoted and recruited into Praetorian guard units tasked with defending the established order.

In a wide-ranging interview last weekend that aired as much of France was conveniently glued to the Paris Saint Germain vs. Olympique Marseille football match, President Emmanuel Macron was asked about his recent bad breakup. He was only too happy to spill all his feelings about the relationship, like he was talking with Oprah Winfrey rather than TV news anchors.

He said that France was ending its military cooperation with Niger and repatriating France's ambassador to Niamey and around 1,500 troops. It's about time, since he was already dumped a month ago and Niger has been threatening to get France's tent off its lawn.

France's military presence in some of its former African colonies, including Niger, was to combat terrorism, he said, adding that without France's presence, "most of these countries would have already fallen prey to territorial caliphates and jihadists."

Indeed, thank goodness for France, whose anti-terrorist mission was such a resounding success that the UN's own peace operations advised the Security Council in May 2023 that "insecurity in the tri-border area of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger continues to grow." 'Rampant jihadists are spreading chaos and misery in the Sahel', a headline in The Economist read in April, while the Wilson Center reported that same month that "The Sahel Now Accounts for 43% of Global Terrorism Deaths." All of that was going on right under France's nose.