The Middle East's Next War After Iran (Video - 36mn)

    "Do not interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake!" is the very first axiom of Chinese strategy and sure enough Xi Jinping was masterful in the art this week. No major breakthroughs were made, but conversely the exercise of this visit was fraught with dangers and pitfalls which were avoided on both sides allowing a general sight of relief.    

   Trump as usual came to China for a, mostly, business trip and was welcome as such, allowing China the luxury to not engage in sensitive discussions, keeping mum on strategic issues which Trump interpreted as acceptation of his leadership role. How mistaken! 

   The fact that Trump has no patience for the intricacies of strategic thinking doesn't mean that the US "Deep State" doesn't have a strategy. Only that it is being implemented without much discussion with either partners or competitors. Contrary to what many people may be thinking, the war with Iran is not about Israel. The balkanization of most Middle East countries may be beneficial for Israel but it can only be a secondary goal, most certainly not comparable to the main objective which is to rebuild the post-war petro-dollar American hegemony on a new, stronger base of total control of all fossil resources (oil and gas) around the Globe. That is the clear and obvious strategy of the US which is being implemented whatever the current administration may be, by blowing the Nordstream pipeline (controlling the supply of gas to Europe), taking over Venezuelan oil, or closing down the Hormuz Strait. (Which in itself is only a plan B compared to the initial goal of controlling directly Iranian oil.)  

   But then, what about China? All this is of course crystal clear to the Chinese so why not confront directly the Americans and their blatant imperial run? Xi Jimping actually gave us a very strong hint when he casually commented that the US was a declining power and conversely implied that China was a rising one. Obviously, energy must be at the very core of any power, rising or declining, so why this quiet and almost nonchalant answer to the gauntlet thrown by Trump? Could it be because the Chinese now believe they are on their way to building a post-oil economy and consequently find it unnecessary to directly confront Trump on this subject?

   This to my opinion is a very shaky ground to base a strategy since it implies that not only China will be first to develop new technologies (very likely) but that these new technologies will actually be competitive with oil and gas. Definitively not a done deal at this stage. So what could be the source of this Chinese self confidence? 

   It must be a complex mix based on the combination of different factors which together must give a significant edge to China. First, even if oil and gas remain the most dense and economic energy sources available over the coming years, the Chinese have proved that with a judicious energy mix (Nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, gas and oil) they can effectively insulate an economy which from now on will become less energy dependent to generate output. Second, although the US as a major oil and gas producer is immune to an energy crisis, it is not immune to an economic crisis since the country cannot disconnect its economy from the world economy since this would immediately crash the petro-dollar. And finally, would such a global crisis take place, the damage would be greater for the US and its partners than for China which therefore would find itself in an even better strategic position to finally negotiate the reorganization of the post Bretton Woods financial ordering of the world.          

   This I believe is the context which allowed Trump to return home with a short term tactical victory (a status quo) while China was slowly moving its 'Go" pieces on the world checker board, ensuring a future positive outcome. 

   So what can we conclude from this analysis? In the short term, nothing has changed. The pressure will keep rising and the pain with or without war will grow, faster with a war, more slowly without. India which was especially dependent of Middle Eastern oil is already showing signs of acute stress. The rest of Asia will follow soon and Europe finally in June. By July, the signs of the coming recession will be obvious. Good luck for November, Mr Trump!

   But then, what about the Middle East? As discussed in the video below, the stakes for the Middle East could not be higher. An unlikely return to the previous balance could help the monarchies survive another day. Conversely, both the rise of Iran or anarchy in the Gulf could spell doom for them with the old prediction of Saudi Arabia King Faisal: "From camels to gold back to camels in a hundred years!" becoming a reality. The dices are rolling. The Chinese didn't throw them but are trying hard to be on the winning side wherever they land. Trump meanwhile is jumping from one tactical move to the next, making money for himself on the way, which is more or less what he has done his whole life! He is also running against the clock which is less and less his friend at this stage.    

The Middle East's Next War After Iran

 

 

How South Africa Became 3rd World (Video - 43mn)

   A fascinating video explaining how South Africa has failed over the last 20 years thanks to grift and corruption to slowly walk back from a first world economy mostly benefiting the white population to a 3rd world economy equally pulling back on almost everybody. 

   We take economic growth for granted and the willingness of most political system to succeed economically as an axiom. South Africa proves this is not the case. The economic miracles of Europe first, North America later and finally Asia were truly miracles, getting almost everything right to generate growth consistently over decades. On other continents, under different climes, the landscape is more patchy. If your wealth ends up mostly in Dubai or on the bank accounts of a few individuals, then growth becomes meaningless and investment impossible.     

   As the energy crisis deepens in the months ahead, we will quickly see who was swimming naked and who failed to prepare for the future. Mismanaged countries who were surviving during the good times, will flounder during the storm. Energy, fertilizers and raw materials, food, water... The waves will get higher and our ability to cope weaker. The last 25 years were the end of the last century. We are now entering the new one.  

How South Africa Became 3rd World

Hantavirus: Stop The Spread Is Back

   The problem with the Corona Virus in the end is that it was just the flu and therefore a rather weak candidate for a pandemic. 

   Hantavirus is better but only slightly. The incubation time is much longer, up to a few weeks which is perfect. You can infect many people without being aware. But the transmission mechanism is pitifully inefficient since a direct contact is necessary.  

   Definitively a second rate candidate but as the article below reminds us, the purpose more than a scare is to remind us that we are on edge, and a deadly virus is most certainly just around the corner. This doesn't require insider knowledge, just the certainty of the fact that somewhere, in the dark corner of a lab, someone is quietly selecting the right attributes: Long latency (Hantavirus), easy airborne spread (Corona Virus), deadly outcome (HIV)... Now, how do you combine all this to get the most optimum outcome? Gain of function research is most certainly not dead, just in need of rebranding so that people finally understand how essential this work is for their future health. Once again, George Orwell would recognize the skillful manipulation of language and perception.    

Via the Brownstone Institute,

Hollywood loves a good sequel and so does politics and pharmaceutical development. 

Since Covid, there have been several attempted disease scares – Mpox, Swine flu, Bird flu, Chikungunya, Measles – but nothing has really caught the attention of audiences like the new Hantavirus frenzy. 

Today’s evidence comes from DRUDGE REPORT: global effort to stop the spread. Is “flatten the curve” next?

Let’s remember how this began last year, with of course, a hantavirus death in the family of one of America’s most beloved Hollywood actors. It was Betsy Arakawa, Gene Hackman’s wife, who died February 12, 2025, from apparent hantavirus infection from rodents in the home. Terrifying image. 

At that point, no regular person had ever heard of such a disease. There is a reason. It’s rare and human-to-human spread is nearly unknown. Strange that it would hit the wife of the appropriately named Gene Hackman (get it?), leading man of the prescient 1998 movie Enemy of the State. 

Next up we have a reprise of the Plague Ship motif. Like the Diamond Princess, it is a cruise ship, the MV Hondius operated by Oceanwide Expeditions with 147 passengers, departing from Argentina and now anchored off Cape Verde, West Africa. 

It was headed to the Canary Islands when three people died, two with lab-confirmed hantavirus. No port would allow the ship to dock. With the assistance of rescue boats, the dead have been carefully removed by workers in hazmats and masks.

A flight attendant who came in contact with a dead body is now hospitalized and in rough condition, suggesting that even coming close to a person with hantavirus is risky stuff. No one can figure out how this is even possible. So mysterious, so unusual, so terrifying, just like the movie Contagion. 

This fits with the theory of Drs. Fauci and Morens that we need not worry about lab-created pathogens when animal-to-human spillover is becoming more common. This is why, they wrote in August 2020, that we must commence to “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”

Ready to opine for the press is the World Health Organization’s Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, she of Stanford University pedigree, now widely quoted as the go-to authority. 

You might remember Dr. Kerkhove from the original cast of the Covid production. It was she who wrote the WHO’s report to the world following the February 2020 junket to Wuhan. (We know this from the metadata of the report, which she failed to cleanse in the rush to publication.) 

“Achieving China’s exceptional coverage with and adherence to these containment measures,” she wrote of the CCP’s extreme lockdowns, “has only been possible due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat. At a community level this is reflected in the remarkable solidarity of provinces and cities in support of the most vulnerable populations and communities.”

Many close observers credit Kerkhove’s report with inspiring the worldwide lockdown of all nations but four in the following weeks. She still works at the WHO. Hardly anyone remembers any of this. There is no mechanism in place for her to be held to account for her role. 

There is no known cure but a vaccine is in development by Moderna based on the mRNA platform. 

As a result, Moderna’s stock, down dramatically from its highs, is now starting to recover. It is now up 100 percent year over year. The buy signal is strong with this one.

Looking back at the Covid prequel, there was always a flaw in the coronavirus caper, namely its short period of latency, roughly that of a cold or flu. You are infectious for a few days without symptoms while you pass it on. A genuine disease panic needs a longer period of latency. You need to be infected for weeks while spreading it far and wide. 

Why is this? Because every infectious disease confronts the logic of survival. A smart virus does not kill its hosts – it needs them to infect others – but a dumb one does, which is why dumb viruses are not good candidates for pandemics. 

This persistent trade-off between severity and prevalence can only be gamed by a long period of latency. That’s extremely rare and not even lab-created viruses manage this balancing act well. 

As it turns out, this hantavirus does have a very long period of latency, we are assured by the Harvard School of Public Health. It has issued a pronouncement: “The incubation period – the time between when a person is infected and when they begin to experience symptoms – is usually in the range of two to three weeks, but may be as long as eight weeks.”

Two months! Imagine that. Here we might finally have our candidate for the silent killer about which Deborah Birx fantasized during the last iteration of this story.

Keep in mind that no high institution in the US has repudiated lockdowns, even if two-thirds of the public believes they were pointlessly damaging. The call for Covid Justice has now 37,300 signatures but not enough to cause the Senate, House, or any other legislative body to speak clearly that this will never be tolerated again. 

To this day, the plan of the World Health Organization – which is already practicing for the next pandemic – is to push for lockdowns until vaccination in the event of a new disease scare. “Every country should apply non-pharmaceutical measures systematically and rigorously at the scale the epidemiological situation requires,” they say. 

Meanwhile, the Biden plan was for a 130-day lockdown in the event of a new pandemic. 

There are few mechanisms in place in any country to prevent this from happening. There are good people in government who would oppose this with strong conviction but will they even be asked their opinions? Or does this all occur with any obvious evidence of democratic volition? 

Who precisely is directing and producing this sequel? No one knows for sure. Will it be a box office hit like the last time or only have a limited release to test market interest? All the ingredients are here for an Academy Award: rodents, long latency, spread through casual contact with the dead, workers in hazmat suits, no known cure, a vaccine in rushed development. 

The real beauty of disease panic is that it has broad audience appeal and crosses partisan lines. National Review is all in already, as it was with Covid, and surely The Nation will join the effort in days. 

These are well-worn plot devices and sequels are rarely as compelling or profitable as the original. But when one is out of other ideas – and the public clamor to indict Fauci grows by the hour – it’s always worth a shot. 

UFO - What went wrong! (Joke)

   Clearly these people came with plenty of good intentions but just as we f*cked up in the Garden of Heaven, we did it again then. Will we ever learn? :-) 

    

 

Trump Administration Drops First Batch Of UAP/UFO Files

   Difficult not to see a pattern with the Trump Administration at this stage, trying to distract the medias and public with outlandish claims, disclosures and outright lies then walking us back, as unfortunately, when the time to deliver arrives, we get the usual nothing-burger. And sure enough, here we are once again with UAP. 

   Interesting? Certainly. But groundbreaking would require a galactic stretch of imagination. (Apollo 17 on the Moon below.)

 

   Oddly shaped lights in the sky, balls flying at low altitude with no means of propulsion are certainly interesting but absolutely not what people were expecting since hundreds of such videos are already floating on the Internet.

   Thankfully what the Trump administration lacks in information, they compensate skillfully with communication. This is of course the first batch and far more interesting disclosures will soon follow. Same protocol as the Epstein files? 

   Here too people have died or disappeared. Obvious fakes and suicide notes of people rather ominously telling us they are not suicidal just before committing suicide. (NASA scientists are well known to be unstable, aren't they?).     

   If there is one ray of light in all this, it may be that such official disclosure will encourage more people to speak. Unless of course too many witness die in which case those who didn't will take the hint and keep the information for themselves. 

   To be continued...  

Trump Administration Drops First Batch Of UAP/UFO Files

On Friday, the Trump administration released the first official tranche of declassified UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) and UFO files through the new Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) - which of course was the alternative to the real incriminating Elite Presidential Shielding Taskforce Ensuring Impunity Now (EPSTEIN) files.

The files are hosted at the official government site: https://www.war.gov/UFO/. This marks the start of a rolling release schedule (new materials every few weeks) covering decades of unresolved cases across multiple agencies, with a strong emphasis on unprecedented transparency.

What’s Included in Release 01 (162 Files + Supporting Materials)

The initial drop focuses on 162 FBI documents, all in PDF format. These are unresolved cases where the government states it cannot make a definitive determination on the nature of the phenomena - often due to insufficient data - and explicitly invites public and private-sector analysis.

Mainstream reporting (Fox News, New York Post, and others) highlights additional materials in the broader release:

• Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 mission photos showing strangely shaped objects and clusters of dots in the lunar sky.

• A transcript from Apollo 17 operators describing “very bright particles or fragments” drifting by the spacecraft, “big ones on my window,” and “jagged, angular fragments that are tumbling” - likened to “the Fourth of July.”

• FBI photos from New Year’s Eve 1999 showing two black-dot UAPs flying near U.S. aircraft.
• References to “the latest UAP videos” and other original source documents/photos (including a colored illustration of a UFO over a field).

Specific recent military sightings mentioned across coverage and X discussions include:

• An inverted teardrop-shaped object with a vertically linear trailing mask over the United Arab Emirates (June 2024).
• A “strange contrast” or unexplained area in the skies over Iraq (December 2022, per CENTCOM).

• A small circular UAP flying low near the ocean surface toward land near Greece’s coast.

The Department of War (in coordination with ODNI and other agencies) described the effort as historic and government-wide, involving the review of tens of millions of records (many still on paper). Releases will continue on a rolling basis.

President Trump announced the release on Truth Social: “Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”

In a subsequent 'truth,' Trump said: "As for my promise to you, the Department of War has released the first tranche of the UFO/UAP files to the Public for their review and study. In an effort for Complete and Maximum Transparency, it was my Honor to direct my Administration to identify and provide Government files related to Alien and Extraterrestrial Life, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and Unidentified Flying Objects. Whereas previous Administrations have failed to be transparent on this subject, with these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” Have Fun and Enjoy! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

“The Department of War is in lockstep with President Trump to bring unprecedented transparency regarding our government’s understanding of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation - and it’s time the American people see it for themselves. This release of declassified documents demonstrates the Trump Administration’s earnest commitment to unprecedented transparency," reads a statement from Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.

And of course Russia is mocking the release:

Guess Epstein wasn't (isn't?) an alien?

Professor Jiang: We Are Already in World War 3 (Video - 2h10)

   It is easy to understand or rather feel like you understand the world in TikTok long videos focusing on one specific subject at a time usually approached in a Manichean, good/bad fashion and far more difficult and time consuming to try to grasp how the different actors relate to each others.    

   In this long video of over 2 hours, Professor Jiang displays a masterful global overview of all the players... except surprisingly China. 

   Agree or not with his analysis, his work is excellent food for thoughts and will help build your own understanding of what is currently going on bringing context to disparate and seemingly unrelated events.  

   The conclusion is unfortunately unmistakable: We are already in World War three, even if quite unlike past conflicts, and every truce in this respect can only be but a short respite before the resumption of belligerence. 

Professor Jiang: We Are Already in World War 3