In the shadow of the Russia-Ukraine war, and right next door, NATO has kicked off its massive annual military exercises in the Baltic Sea. “Baltic Operations 24” is about to be in full swing, kicking off formally on Friday, and involves over 9,000 personnel and more than 50 ships and 85 aircraft, comprising 20 countries.
Crucially, NATO’s newest admittee Sweden is part of the drills as a full member state. The Kremlin is watching closely given the obviously surging regional tensions which has increasingly seen all of Europe put on a war footing.
US military magazine Stripes states that it will feature “amphibious, gunnery, anti-submarine, air defense and mine clearance operations, according to a statement from U.S. 6th Fleet and Naval Striking and Support Forces NATO, or STRIKEFORNATO. Explosive ordnance disposal, unmanned underwater and surface vehicle exercises, and medical response scenarios also are planned.”
To be expected, the exercises are being led to by the country which has from the start dominated NATO’s course and strategy: the United States – with Naval Forces Europe-Africa/6th Fleet and commanded by STRIKEFORNATO, headquartered in Oeiras, Portugal – having charge over the operations. There have been a series of similar major drills since January, but this one comes as US-Russia tensions have reached a new height, given the Biden administration’s resent greenlight for Kiev to use American weapons to strike inside Russian territory.
In a fascinating report, Max Seddon and Chris Cook of the Financial Times reveal how Russia might use nuclear weapons to roll back Chinese aggression. Their story, built off of leaked secret documents, confirms Russia’s deep and longstanding concern that a revitalized China might try to annex Russia’s eastern territories.
Given that China and Russia declared a friendship “without limits,” a few years ago, the prospect of a nuclear exchange between the two neighbors may seem unlikely to a casual Western observer. But Russia is acutely aware that border friendships can change quickly. The last time China and the Soviet Union signed a friendship treaty, the two countries were, within twenty years, embroiled in a nasty border conflict.
China’s actions across Asia has shown the country has a long memory for past slights and long-standing territorial losses. Expansion-minded Chinese nationalists, coupled with China’s increasing contempt for Russian military weakness, are quite capable of harnessing China’s resentments over past defeats to turn on their diminished client state to the north.
Moscow knows this, and it is taking great pains to deter Chinese adventurism. Even with Russia’s Army overextending itself in Ukraine, Russia exercised nuclear-capable Iskander missiles twice last year in “regions bordering China.”
Yesterday at the official SPIEF (St. Petersburg International Economic Forum) Putin gave an extremely revealing 3-hour long open round table with foreign journalists. I will do a break down of some of the most interesting clips and soundbites, though you can see the entire important meeting here.
But first let’s cover the most interesting of the revelations:
The Russian MOD stopped listing official losses sometime around May of 2022, likely after it became obvious that the conflict would drag on and the losses would grow to an unsuitably painful degree.
Now at the SPIEF, Putin gave the first indication since that time of Russian losses when he stated that Russia loses 1 soldier for every 5 Ukrainian ones, as well as giving an exact figure for POWs, which he states as follows:
There are 1,348 #Russian soldiers and officers in captivity in #Ukraine, and 6,465 such #Ukrainian in #Russia, #Putin said.
There is a lot to digest and unpack here, so let’s do it one thing at a time.
Let’s first spell out exactly what he says:
Ukraine loses 50,000 men per month, bothirrecoverable and sanitary losses, i.e. total casualties included wounded, KIA, etc.
The ratio of their wounded to irrecoverable/KIA is 50/50, which means out of 50k, 25k of them are actually irrecoverable losses. (note: this is a high proportion to wounded because of Ukraine’s comparative lack of battlefield medicine which causes far more wounded to die, not to mention Russia’s usage of powerful airstrikes/bombs which proportionally simply kills far more soldiers outright)
Ukraine mobilizes 30,000 new men per month from the street.
The ratio between Russian and Ukrainian losses is 1:5 in favor of Russia.
The ratio of POWs is 1,348 to 6,465 in favor of Russia.
Panpsychism means “all mind” or mind in all things, with an emphasis on cognition being a fundamental aspect or part of nature.
Pansignaling means “all signaling” or signaling in all things, with an emphasis on signaling being a fundamental aspect or part of nature.
I like the term pansignaling because it gets us to look at the signals, without which there is nothing.
Another word that is close to these two is panexperientialism, which connotes that “the fundamental elements of the universe are ‘occasions of experience’ which can together create something as complex as a human being.”
These ideas or similar can be found in the Huayan and Tiantai schools of Buddhism.
Highly recommend giving these ideas some thought and reading the links provided above.
I tend to favor thinking of this stuff from the signaling point of view. A signal can be found, defined, analyzed, and so on. A signal is a fairly objective thing. When we consider signals and consciousness, it is very natural to consider that signals are parts of networks and that networks can be parts of bigger networks.
As I understand it, panexperientialism holds the view that atoms have experience, and that molecules have experience as do the atoms that make them up… and so on till we get to cells, organs, brains, human consciousness. Human consciousness, which is fundamentally experiential, is what humans mainly think of as experience. At all levels, the “parts” of human consciousness also are conscious or cognizant and thus capable of experience. Thus, there is no mind-body problem. Cognition or awareness is part of nature from the very bottom up. For example, a single bacterium can know to move toward something or away from it.
Life is “anti-entropic signaling networks” that organize, self-organize, combine, cooperate, compete, eat, and change constantly. From this, we can see where impermanence and delusion as described in Buddhism come from.
When matter breaks down into waves and laws, it becomes information, but similar processes are still at work. In Buddhist terms we find again dependent origination, no intrinsic self separate from other information, impermanence, rational structure, karma (the work of this producing that), the primary consciousness found in deep samadhi.
This is the first mainstream news article I have seen that admits the rise in cancers coincides with the covid vax rollout. The ‘culprit doctors fear’ is, conveniently, covid itself. Readers of this site are well aware of the mounds of evidence pointing to the covid vaxxes shutting down natural immunity while also infusing the body with lipid nanoparticles and uncontrollable spike proteins. ABN
A new study, led by researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and funded in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), analyzed more than 220 mother-child pairs, collecting data on fluoride levels during pregnancy and child behavior at age three. The researchers found that a 0.68 milligram per liter increase in fluoride exposure was associated with nearly double the chance of a child showing neurobehavioral problems in a range considered close to or at a level to meet the criteria for clinical diagnosis.
The findings were published on May 20 in the medical journal JAMA Network Open.
“Women with higher fluoride exposure levels in their bodies during pregnancy tended to rate their 3-year-old children higher on overall neurobehavioral problems and internalizing symptoms, including emotional reactivity, anxiety, and somatic complaints,” said Tracy Bastain, PhD, an associate professor of clinical population and public health sciences and senior author of the study.
These population-level findings add to existing evidence from animal studies showing that fluoride can harm neurodevelopment, as well as data from studies conducted in Canada, Mexico, and other countries showing that prenatal exposure to fluoride is linked with a lower IQ in early childhood. The researchers hope the new findings help convey the risks of fluoride consumption during pregnancy to policymakers, healthcare providers, and the public.
If you’ve ever read a story in the news about elver fishing season, you’ve probably seen some variation of this line: “Maine’s the only state in the U.S. with a significant fishery for elvers.”
Maybe you thought that’s because elvers don’t exist in large numbers outside of Maine — that would be a reasonable assumption. But the real reason is somewhat more complicated.
Let’s start at the beginning, in the Sargasso Sea. Although it sounds romantic, the Sargasso Sea is actually just an area of the North Atlantic that’s full of Sargassum, a kind of seaweed that floats in the ocean rather than existing close to land.
It’s a unique marine environment, and the Sargasso Sea provides a cozy place for many species to spawn or start out life, including baby turtles and some types of fish.
It’s also where the life cycle of the American eel both begins and ends. They’re born there, and after a few decades — eels are incredibly long-lived animals — they swim back in, spawn and die.
Outside of that, eels’ life cycle isn’t that well understood, but we know they start out there as tiny leptocephali, or larvae, which look like nothing more than a transparent willow leaf.
For the first few months of their lives, they float about with the ocean currents and are eventually carried by the Gulf Stream north along the continental shelf of the eastern U.S. Then, somehow — scientists don’t know quite how — they find their way out of the Gulf Stream and into coastal and fresh waters.
At this point, they’re about a year old and looking more eel-like, but still transparent. They’re now in the elver, or “glass eel,” stage, and as University of Maine marine biologist James McCleave puts it, they get “spit out everywhere” along the Atlantic Coast. Then they more or less stay put in estuaries, rivers and lakes near the coast for decades, getting bigger, fatter and more silvery.
This is a well-written article which explains why the price of Maine’s glass eels is typically over $1,000 per pound. The basic reason is Maine provides hard to get breed eels to Japan where eels are a popular dish. Be sure to read the whole story because it is interesting and much more complicated than that. ABN
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has allegedly been using US funds sent to the country for luxury acquisitions, including hundreds of millions spent in purchasing a hotel and casino worth over $191 million.
According to Turkish website OdaTV, Zelensky is rumored to have purchased the Vuni Palace hotel and casino in Northern Cyprus.
President of Cyprus Nikos Christodoulides states an investigation is underway.
According to reports, Belize-registered Film Heritage Inc. acquired the hotel for £150 million ($191 million), although this report has since been deleted.
Film Heritage Inc. which was originally owned by Zelensky, as revealed in an October 2021 investigation by OCCRP.
Olena Zelenskaya became the sole owner of the company around the time of Zelensky’s election in 2019.
The appearance of “Film Heritage Inc” in the Turkish press has been explained by the Oscar Group’s spokesperson as the company having developed the casino’s website.
Previous investigations revealed a network of firms based in the British Virgin Islands, Belize, and Cyprus linked to Zelensky and his partners, suggesting efforts to conceal offshore assets.
Reports also allege that Zelensky has made luxury purchases, including a $35 million house in Florida, two luxury yachts, and a UK mansion previously owned by King Charles III.
US and EU politicians have expressed concerns on the transparency of Kiev’s use of multi-billion-dollar funding.
In a shocking development, a juror was dismissed Monday morning after a woman showed up at her house on Sunday, offering a bag containing $120,000 in cash and promising a second bag if the juror voted to acquit the Islamic defendants involved in the largest U.S. pandemic-era fraud scheme.
In a dramatic and alarming development, a juror in the Feeding Our Future federal fraud trial was abruptly dismissed. This case, being actively suppressed by mainstream media, took a shocking turn when a woman arrived at the juror’s home on Sunday. The woman offered a bag containing $120,000 in cash and promised a second bag if the juror voted to acquit the defendants.
A reclusive tribe in the Amazon finally got hooked up to the internet, thanks to Elon Musk — only to be torn apart by social media and pornography addiction, elders complain.
Brazil’s 2,000-member Marubo tribe has been left bitterly divided by the arrival of the Tesla founder’s Starlink service nine months ago, which connected the remote rainforest community along the Ituí River to the web for the first time.
The Marubo are a chaste tribe, who even frown upon kissing in public — but Alfredo Marubo (all Marubo use the same last name) said he is anxious that the arrival of the service, which delivers super-fast internet to far-flung corners of the planet and has been billed as a game-changer by Musk, could upend standards of decorum.
Alfredo said many young Marubo men have been sharing porn videos in group chats and he has already observed more “aggressive sexual behavior” in some of them.
So a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on all thirty-four charges of having falsified business records in 2017 with the intent to cover up another crime. What was that other crime? I don’t know. Does anybody?
Forty counts in Florida for alleged mis-handling of government documents, trial date indefinitely postponed.
Four counts in Washington, D.C. of plotting to subvert the transfer of power following the 2020 election, trial currently held up by appeals.
Ten state felony counts in Georgia for plotting to overturn the 2020 election result in that state, trial date not yet set.
That’s fifty-four charges to add to the 34 Trump was found guilty of on Thursday. So not yet a hundred counts in total, but you can be sure we’ll get there. The Trump-hunters will never quit.
There are plenty of other jurisdictions where the D.A. and his prosecutors are plump from feeding at George Soros’ trough and the jury poo l is reliably Woke. The wound will never heal, the hunt will never end.
I wasn’t surprised by the result and I doubt it will much affect what will happen in November’s Presidential election. What will happen, in my opinion, is that the Ruling Class will rig the vote counts just as they did in 2020, and the Democratic Party’s candidate will win.
American Buddhist Net 
