The Ukrainian counter-offensive is clearly not moving anywhere, yet it's still 'full-steam ahead' for the Western imperialists' 'total war on Russia'. And they're winning, but only in their own minds. In the real world, the G20 summit in India this week confirms that the Global South/East is not following the West into its Grand Delusion. As the Ukraine/NATO-Russia War grinds on, omens mount of coming major turmoil, not least the rash of record rainfall bringing flash-flooding the world over in recent days...


Running Time: 01:19:46

Download: MP3 — 54.8 MB

As the West's proxy war in Ukraine slips inexorably towards utter failure, the neocons behind the debacle are faced with dwindling avenues of retreat.

Early confidence that Russia, in its current form, would collapse under the pressure of the harshest sanctions regime in history failed to materialize. Early Russian miscalculations on the battlefield were not followed by a military meltdown, but by a pragmatic display of strategic adaptability, which is begrudgingly admired in the military war rooms of the West. The Russian army, far from falling apart, has steeled itself into making bold decisions to retreat when prudent and advance when required, both of which have proven devastating for their Ukrainian opponents. It follows that, as the Western political elites that cultivated this conflict peer into another winter of political, military, and potentially economic discontent, it is now that we potentially face the most dangerous period in Europe since the outbreak of WWII.

The catalyst for a wider war in Europe isn't, in fact, a limited conflict in Ukraine in itself, one that started in 2014 and, notably, had been largely ignored by Western powers for almost a decade. The real issue is that NATO, which is currently engaged in a proxy War with Russia, is facing a 'damned if you do and damned if you don't' scenario regarding its growing military involvement in Ukraine. If the US-led bloc escalates further as defeat looms, it could likely lead to direct confrontation with Russia. If it doesn't, its proxy will collapse and leave Russia victorious, a fate once utterly unthinkable in Brussels, Washington, and London, but now becoming a nightmarish reality.

It's been well over a year now since the health scare dubbed the Covid-19 pandemic has had any widespread impact upon the lives of the vast majority of humanity. Since the "fog of war" has lifted, so to speak, there has been very little introspection regarding the knee-jerk authoritarianism imposed upon humanity in the liberal press or mainstream academia. Eerie parallels connect the panic stirred up during the health crisis with the reaction to 9/11. There is also plenty of circumstantial evidence of prior knowledge and pre-planning for both of these events. In their wake, mass hysteria, government propaganda, tyranny, censorship, and irrational belief systems spawned out of each, supported by ruling class interests and mass media mouthpieces.

Although many policies related to the global war on terror and the pandemic certainly have fascistic and totalitarian impulses, there are key differences. Whereas the fascist and totalitarian rely on a single despot, and the marginalization of minority groups, postmodern tyranny operates according to the flows of late capitalism: diversity and inclusion are encouraged; power is spread through a corporate oligarchy, as well as political, military, and now medical hierarchies; and devastating economic and social effects are engendered by "absent causes"; i.e., abstract engines of capital: stock fluctuations, algorithms, financial instruments and various Finance/Insurance/Real Estate (FIRE) sector bubbles and scams.

The public is predictably bewildered by a revolving cast of bureaucrats and elites with varying amounts of sociopathic and narcissistic traits; however, the personal attributes of the cast members are extraneous to capital accumulation, imperialism, and the liquidation of nature. It is fine to use phrases like fascist or totalitarian in response to government policies for rhetorical effect; however, most Americans do not feel that way or use that terminology, which harkens back to a simpler era of boot stamping. We are rather enmeshed in a dictatorship of capital.

The extraordinary sequence of military coups continues in West Africa, where the small but resource-rich country of Gabon last week overthrew its pro-French 'neo-colonialist' puppet regime of 55 years. What does this all mean? Are these coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Gabon all coordinated? If so, what might Russia or China have to do with them? Will this development affect mass migration to the West? Will NATO intervene to 'protect democracy' in the region? Joe and Niall bring some historical and geopolitical context for answering these questions...


Running Time: 01:33:21

Download: MP3 — 64.1 MB

An awakening

Whether religious or not, I think many readers here will relate to some of these experiences.

In 2014 I was working for a UK organization which adjudicates financial disputes. The work was interesting, but the organization was going through a structural change which made no sense. Our work began to be micro-managed and woke ideology started creeping into the office.

That same year, I collapsed and was very ill from a major bleed due to a duodenal ulcer. It wasn't really what is known as a near-death experience (NDA) but during my recovery I felt different spiritually and used the time to reflect on life. Before I hadn't embraced any one religion but was always open-minded.

In 2017, under a new tyrannical manager, for the first time I pushed back. I documented the bullying and told the organization to leave me alone to do my job. They agreed and, overnight, my stress disappeared and a confidence I'd never had helped me to become a trade union representative, join the organization's Christian Fellowship and even the Muslim Book Club.

I was always interested in geopolitics and history and attended some outside work events discussing the war on Syria and the part played by the Western media in distorting the truth in successive wars. After my first event, I sensed a cloud lift and a feeling of vindication of my views. I felt destined to write about it all. I published many articles in independent media about Syria, religion, the mainstream media and mental health.

Meanwhile, at work the toxicity increased and while I was coping better, I was relieved to be offered voluntary redundancy to pursue my further research and writing.

After a year's 'honeymoon period' of feeling liberated from the control freaks, the 'pandemic' landed. I could see instantly the lockdowns and other measures made no sense, so I researched hard, particularly around the globalists, their secret societies and malign influence on world events. To my horror I realized the world was in the grip of a coup.

The latest 'indictment' against Donald Trump for what amounts to Crimes Against The Regime has produced a 'mugshot' that symbolizes the biggest political 'own goal' yet for the Democratic Party. Seriously, what the heck are they even thinking?! Trump's even popular in the hood now! Meanwhile, in Russia, Yevgeny Prigozhin is no more: he appears to have been shot/blown out of the sky outside Moscow, ending a half-year of bizarre and politically dangerous antics from the ex-owner of Wagner PMC.

Also on this NewsReal, Joe and Niall discuss the rash of highly-mediatized wildfires around the world throughout August: is it 'climate change'? Or is it people who want you to believe it's climate change? Either way, the media narrativizers are clearly capitalizing on them to attract clicks and drive home fear. Good news is, BRICS doubled in size last week as de-dollarization, multipolarity, and democratization gather pace. A process of global transformation is underway and there's nothing the imperialists in Washington and London can do to stop it...


Running Time: 01:44:56

Download: MP3 — 72.1 MB

Source

The Agenda of the Milesian School

In 1997, William Mullen, Professor of Classical Studies at Bard College, gave a conference talk entitled: Natural Catastrophes during Bronze Age Civilisation in which he outlined what he saw as the Agenda of the Milesian School.

Topics held in common by the first three pre-Socratic philosophers from Miletos in the Sixth Century B.C.E., Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, and by Xenophanes^[1] from neighbouring Colophon, taken together may be viewed as constituting the agenda of a "Milesian School".

The agenda included a survey of the known kosmos (the orderly arrangement of the inhabited world surrounded by regularly moving heavenly bodies); redefinitions of divinity; and theories of the natural processes, constantly in operation, by which both kosmos and divinity are to be understood. It also included explanations of phenomena most men deemed terrifying: thunder, lightning, earthquakes, eclipses, and periodic destruction of the kosmos itself. It set about to explain these phenomena in terms of the same elemental processes (transformations of water, rarefaction and condensation of air, separating out of fire, air, water and earth, periodic reabsorption of these elements into a state of dynamic equilibrium) as it invoked to explain the orderly arrangement of the earth and the heavenly bodies. In so doing, it implied the baselessness of the traditional Olympian religion which attributed lightning and earthquakes to whims of Zeus and Poseidon and world-destructions to battles of the sky-gods.

The ultimate Milesian agenda may therefore have been to liberate people from paralysing fear of the immediate recurrence of celestial disturbances in the recent past. By insisting that world-destructions occurred only in vast cycles of time (such as a "great year" whose winter solstice was Deluge and summer solstice Conflagration) the Milesian School was schematically distorting memories of recent disturbances, and its activity may be seen as part of a general pattern of oblivion and psychological distancing common to all cultures after the end of the Bronze Age catastrophes. But by insisting that these world-destructions occurred only as the result of unalterable elemental processes, it was also erecting a proto-scientific bulwark against apocalyptic thinking and behavior.^[2]

The tragic wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii, this week has killed around 100 people, spurring intensified discourse around 'climate change', land (mis)management and so-called 'directed-energy weapons'. What is most likely to have caused this fire? Its timing, so soon after the propaganda onslaught about 'global boiling', seems a mite coincidental.

But first up, Joe and Niall discuss the 'bombshell revelation' that Barack Obama once wrote to an ex-girlfriend about having homosexual proclivities. This salacious 'news' isn't, of course, the real news about the Obamas: it's merely a clue that potentially unmasks the carefully-crafted image of the Obamas - and potentially confirms some of the worst rumors about them.


Running Time: 01:56:24

Download: MP3 — 79.9 MB

Before getting onto Homer and Hesiod and then to the philosophers, I'm going to include a couple of interesting individuals, similar to Orpheus, who can't be dated because of the legendary accretions surrounding them. There really isn't much to go on so the short entries on Wikipedia will suffice.

Melampus^[1]

A legendary soothsayer and healer, originally of Pylos, who ruled at Argos. He introduced the worship of Dionysus, according to Herodotus, who asserted that his powers as a seer were derived from the Egyptians^[2] and that he could understand the language of animals. A number of pseudepigraphal works of divination were circulated in Classical and Hellenistic times under the name Melampus. According to Herodotus and Pausanias (vi.17.6), on the authority of Hesiod, his father was Amythaon, whose name implies the "ineffable" or "unspeakably great";^[3] thus Melampus and his heirs were Amythaides of the "House of Amythaon".

In Homer's Odyssey,^[4] a digression concerning the lineage of Theoclymenus, "a prophet, sprung from Melampus' line of seers",^[5] sketches the epic narrative concerning Melampus with such brevity that its details must have been familiar to Homer's audience. With brief hints, a sequence of episodes is alluded to, in which we discern strife in Pylos between Melampus and Neleus, who usurps Melampus's "great high house", forcing him into heroic exile. Melampus spends a year as bondsman in the house of Phylacus, "all for Neleus' daughter Pero". At his extremity, Melampus is visited by "the mad spell a Fury, murderous spirit, cast upon his mind. But the seer worked free of death" and succeeded at last in rustling Phylacus's cattle back to Pylos, where he avenged himself on Neleus and gave Pero in marriage to his brother Bias. But Melampus's own destiny lay in Argos, where he lived and ruled, married and sired a long line, also briefly sketched in Homer's excursus.

A work attributed in antiquity to Hesiod exists (Melampodia) in such fragmentary quotations and chance remarks that its reconstruction, according to Walter Burkert,^[6] is "most uncertain." (Wikipedia)

Again, there isn't much of a factual nature about Orpheus though there is a lot of speculation about Orphism. So, Wikipedia again:

Despite hysterical disinformation from the mainstream media, average July temperatures around the world were in line with previous years and were actually lower in some countries in the northern hemisphere.

It's worth noting that global warming alarmists blame hot temperatures for the raging wildfires around the world, but even if there has been a slight increase, some have been reported as arson (almost all of them in Greece for example), and others could have been caused by the increase in thunderstorms and isolated lightning strikes. In lesser cases, meteorites and overhead explosions can cause forest fires, in addition to outgassing.

Increased accumulation of conductive dust (volcanoes, comets, etc.) or rain promotes electrical discharges between higher layers of the atmosphere and the ground, which can manifest as lightning, intense tornadoes, waterspouts, more severe storms, or hurricanes. Something we can see quite clearly this month.

Here are some of the most remarkable precipitation and flooding events around the world for July 2023:

• Bacolod and Manila, Philippines - 3 floods in 11 days triggered by Super Typhoon Doksuri.
• Beijing, China - Heaviest rainfall in 140 years triggered by Super Typhoon Doksuri.
• Sichuan Province, China - 11.8 inches of rain in 14 hours - 40,000 evacuated.
• Sochi, Russia - 2 months of rain in 24 hours.
• Milan - Italy - 2 weeks of rain in just 3 hours.
• Netherlands and Germany - Storm Poly became the strongest summer storm on record.
• Southwest Japan - Biggest rainfall on record - 16 inches of rain in 24 hours.
• Lahore, Pakistan - Biggest rainfall in 30 years - 11.4 inches of rain in 10 hours
• Kentucky - 11.2 inches of rain in 24 hours - Historic rainfall.
• Vermont - 9 inches of rain in 24 hours - Historic flooding.
• New York - 7 inches of summer rain in 24 hours - Severe flooding.
• Chicago - 6 inches of rainfall - Historic summer flooding.
• Valencia and Castellon, Spain - Hailstorm destroys more than 20,000 hectares of crops.

In recent years, a larger percentage of precipitation has come in the form of intense single-day events. Nine of the top 10 years for extreme one-day precipitation events have occurred since 1996

And some unseasonable snow events:

• Europe's Dolomites and Alps - Rare summer snow.
• Skardu, Pakistan - Unexpected summer snowfall breaks 18-year record.
• Himachal Pradesh, India - 4 feet of summer snow.
• Sierra Nevada - California - Snowpack at a staggering 1,000% of normal

It should be noted that increased precipitation along with colder-than-usual temperatures is the perfect mix for an intense winter. The Farmers' Almanac is already forecasting it:

With El Niño conditions brewing for later in 2023, cold temperatures will bring ice, sleet, and snow in January and February to those living on the I-95 corridor, between Washington D.C. and Boston.

Again, are we witnessing the first stages of an ice age?

The Sun has entered into the modern Grand Solar Minimum (2020-2053) that will lead to a significant reduction of solar magnetic field and activity like during Maunder minimum leading to noticeable reduction of terrestrial temperature. - Zharkova, 2020

Time will tell. Just remember that natural climate changes are not linear and periods of calm can be followed by sudden and rapid changes. Look for the signs and prepare accordingly.