Approaching Akaroa Harbor, South Island, NZ. Image © 2025 by Data Humanist.

On a two-week visit which included hiking, sea kayaking, and mountain biking, your author joined a group on the South Island for a multi-day bike tour, and had some interesting conversations there as well as elsewhere. Glimpses of change in this near-paradise. Some notes below, and one dystopian note to end this post with.

Stray Notes from Scattered Conversations

Like the USA, employers in New Zealand increasingly are not: even full-time workers are contractors, independents, Uber-ized, so to speak. Gig work seems the future.

This nation with once the most advanced hydroelectric power grid among the Five Eyes nations, and which experienced a boom in hydropower development from the 1950s to 1980s, now increasingly relies on imported fossil fuels — even though an Electric Vehicle push is underway. The grid cannot meet current demands, and further hydropower development is curtailed over environmental concerns real and speculative. So in the face of known increased energy demands, policymakers have apparently tied themselves in a Green No-Deal knot. With an emphasis on the NOT.

Likewise, since the 1980s, New Zealand’s Gini Coefficient — one standard measure of Wealth Inequality — has been rising.

When travelling through Arthur’s Pass, South Island, we were delayed because one small bridge has been undergoing construction for two years — this on the major highway which connects the East and West coasts. Even some fiercely nationalistic Kiwis in our group remarked that the Chinese would have had it done in two weeks. Rightly or wrongly, the blame went to bureaucracy, overly zealous regulations, and general lack of accountability for how such money was being spent.

What else? That grass-fed famous Westgold butter, a brand dating back to late Victorian era, now part of a larger Chinese agricultural products consortium. This part of a greater trend. Your author picked up a lovely but expensive Merino wool shirt — technical gear, for its anti-microbial and thermal properties. Wool from New Zealand. Design from New Zealand. Manufactured in China.

So increased costs for energy, no-growth development policies, infrastructure challenges, and greater economic insecurity and inequality — although this last concern most certainly NOT distributed evenly.

A Shift in the Imperial Center?

In truth, New Zealand still functions in some ways as a former colony, exporting raw materials and agricultural commodities while importing back the value-added products. The export commodities have remained largely similar over the past several decades: milk, beef, wood, sheep and goat meat, butter.

But the export partners have shifted. According to the CIA Factbook 2022 estimate, the five major export partners are China 28%, Australia 11%, US 11%, Japan 6%, South Korea 4%. And the five major import partners, for refined petroleum to personal electronics to cars to household goods to clothing: China 21%, Australia 14%, US 8%, South Korea 7%, Singapore 6%.

The pivot to China — and Asia more generally — unmistakable.

The growing presence of China in New Zealand was also manifested on this trip not just by Chinese tourists everywhere, but also the increased number of Chinese students at Auckland University and other campuses in New Zealand. But a more subtle demographic shift might be underway.

Indian Entrepreneurship and Diaspora Community

The Indian diaspora in New Zealand dates back practically to the national founding by British settlers. Laborers, tradesmen, merchants, and servants — just past of the larger imperial package. Although there exists a long-standing Indian community, it now includes more recent immigrants from Uber drivers to recruited medical and IT professionals.

On this trip, as opposed to a prior one, entrepreneurs of Indian descent were more prominent. Your author found his favorite Christchurch hotel under new ownership and management. The same for an established restaurant in Christchurch. More Indian Uber drivers as well than last time, for whatever reason. This was a small and unscientific sample, to be sure — but the effect was still noticeable. Young people with drive, energy, and ambition contributing to the economy. All good. So far.

A Generation Being Left Behind?

New Zealand officially breaks down its labor force statistics by gender, and by people of European, Māori, Asian, Pacific, and MELAA (Middle Eastern, Latin American and African) descent. Reinforcing the stereotype, perhaps, the Asian category has the highest rate of employment.

Your author had the chance to interact and chat with several younger New Zealanders. These young people were kayak guides, food truck owners/workers, and the like. Mostly of European and Māori descent (or mixed), and generally without STEM or other high-powered college degrees. They seemed invariably friendly, helpful, and engaging. Your author kept it light but did ask some conversational questions about how they thought things were going in New Zealand. Their take, as opposed to my tourist take.

These young men and women are living in paradise, to be sure, but for a good bit of this work force, wages are not keeping up with living expenses. Unlike their working-class or petite bourgeoisie parents and grandparents, for this generation owning a house no longer seems a given. Or in cities like Auckland and Wellington and yes, Christchurch, even a possibility. The jobs are there — but often seasonal or gig-work, with no certain career path upwards.

What data we have also suggests possible trouble on the horizon. The OECD average of Youth not in employment, education or training (NEET): 8.02. For New Zealand, a NEET of 12.4 (Men: 10.7; Women: 14.2). NOT a catastrophe. But over the past two decades, no real improvement either. Stagnation, at least. So now approaching two generations experiencing at least relative decline to the Kiwi Boomers.

But one has to search to find faults. The place so beautiful and friendly — if you have enough money.

Glamping the Apocalypse

At first glance, New Zealand seems highly self-sufficient. A Doomsday Prepper’s Paradise, even and especially if one plans on Glamping the Apocalypse. Plenty of clean, fresh water sources. Locally raised food of the highest quality. Undeveloped wilderness and under-developed rural areas. In the cities, modern and generally well-maintained infrastructure, a highly educated population reasonably free from civil unrest, a low crime rate, excellent medical facilities available, et cetera. The perfect retreat from the Decline of the West while still enjoying a high Western quality standard of living. Sell everything and go now — if you can afford it.

Heading back from the West Coast, South Island, NZ. Image © 2025 by Data Humanist.

Upon further review, New Zealand all but floats about on the whims of the global economy — with the strongest currents originating from China and Australia (itself heavily in the current of China). The local manufacturing base is highly limited. Hence although the service economy in New Zealand is strong, nearly everything — every good, every artifact, every product — required for a post-18th century lifestyle must be imported. Even if the thing is not imported, key components for it likely are.

Moreover, according to NZ government stats, international tourism employs directly or indirectly an estimated 1 / 9 of the workforce (or 11.1%), while contributing directly and indirectly an estimated 6.2% of GDP. Once again, the jobs to GDP ratio: 11.1 / 6.2. So international tourism creates jobs, but not necessarily well-paying ones. New Zealanders do welcome American tourists, but Kiwis also depend on the Chinese tourists to help pay the bills. The Chinese tourists pretty much everywhere.

Five Eyes Blind

An economically isolated New Zealand might well in short order be an impoverished New Zealand. The proposed Trump tariffs were a hot topic of discussion among the businesspeople your author had some brief opportunities to chat with. Moreover, the sort of sanctions which the USA imposes upon 34 other nations would prove troublesome — if not devastating in the short-term — to New Zealand.

For that reason alone, the USA can expect New Zealand to remain part of the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance — even as China has emerged as New Zealand’s dominant economic partner. But we and the UK are New Zealand’s past, not their future.

This brings your author to a discussion of chicken carcasses or soon-to-be carcasses, particularly but not exclusively egg-laying hens past their prime. In the food and agricultural industries, after you got the best parts out, the rest is known as “residual biomass.” Or, in a different context, what Yuval Harari has deemed the “useless class.”

Welcome to one possible permutation of our Neo-Feudalistic future.

Dissolving Dead Chickens

During a bike tour on the West Coast of South Island, your author had some conversations with a wealthy New Zealander involved with agricultural exports. He and his wife had met Barrack and Michelle Obama on one high-powered occasion, had spent time in Boca Raton, Florida, mixing business and vacation, and have a country mansion outside of Christchurch which looked worthy of Town & Country. But a damn decent fellow worth speaking with and listening to — based, as the young people now say. Don’t hate on the man for his success. Your author will call him Obadiah, not his real name, after one of the prophets.

The new venture that Obadiah’s globally connected American partners wanted him to look into — getting the most out of dead hens, and soon-to-be dead hens past their egg-laying prime. Upon such, fortunes are made or at least maintained.

So New Zealand chicken carcasses being maximized for profit in the global food and bio-products market. My bike ride companion Obadiah was at the raw resource end (or rather, start) of this particular supply chain.

How does it work? Why? Well, as a Sci-Fi classic once warned us, Soylent Green is People. But for now, Soylent Green is enzymatic chicken pulp (ECP). Let’s walk through the process.

A Hen Past Her Prime

Even a hen past her prime has (exclusive of the feathers) considerable protein. But if harvested by current methods, much of that protein is either unavailable or unpalatable — even downright inedible. Hence residual biomass. Same for the other birds chopped up in their prime for the breasts and wings and legs. How to get the rest? (This question and answer may apply to far more than poultry).

What if — after removing the feathers — you could just mince it all up? All of it, the skin, intestines, bones, and organs not worth the cost of removing. Throw it a grinder. Get your result.

A mince-sludge.

Then using the right enzymes, dissolve that mince-sludge into a protein-saturated solution (perhaps more formally, a suspension) of water, fat, and residue.

This is known as enzymatic protein hydrolysis. For a detailed breakdown, one team of three Chinese research scientists from the mainland and Singapore explain the general process in a published peer-reviewed paper (Xhang, et alia, 2023; DOI: 10.1016/j.psj.2023.102791).

Making ECP

Flowchart below from same (Xhang, et alia, 2023) — cited under Fair Use:

You could then salvage the protein and repackage it as fodder — as feed. (You can use the other by-products as well, but we’ll get to that in a bit). Maybe you mix the protein with a grain base. Your new and improved Chicken McNuggets, so to speak.

What’s that? Not for human consumption, you say. Just wait. But for now, for example, we could use it for Aquaculture — for feeding shrimp and fish.

Enjoy Those Buffet Shrimp

We have another peer-reviewed research paper (V. Hlordzi, et alia, 2022; PMID: 36005570) published by seven scientiests based in mainland China and associated with either major academic institutions or bio-technology firms: “Enzymatic Chicken Pulp Promotes Appetite, Digestive Enzyme Activity, and Growth in Litopenaeus vannamei.” For Litopenaeus vanname, substitute Pacific White Shrimp.

Our researchers compared Enzymatic Chicken Pulp (ECP) to the standard Fish Soluble Pulp (FSP) now in use. The winner, winner? Chicken dinner!

And it turns out shrimp farming is big business, indeed. According to the WWF, farmed shrimp accounts for 55% of the global supply with “China, followed by Thailand, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Brazil, Ecuador, and Bangladesh” as the main producers

The WWF also notes that “[i]nvestors seeking profits have intensified farming methods with industrialized processes, sometimes at significant cost to the environment” — but hey, “the annual per capita consumption of shrimp in the U.S. is now at four pounds” so the ocean will just have to deal, right?

You Down with ECP! (Yeah, You Know Me)

Dissolved chicken carcasses (ECP) for industrial aquaculture with hence increased shrimp production and profits. Progress and SCIENCE!

From their findings which focused on the Pacific White Shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei), the aforementioned research team of V. Hlordzi, et alia, did generalize that “Enzymatic chicken pulp (ECP) is an animal protein source that has been proven to be of excellent nutritional content and good quality for the majority of aquatic organisms” (2022; PMID: 36005570). Really? Sharks, squids, sea-monkeys — all down with that ECP?

As mentioned earlier, the ECP as a protein sludge could also be combined with a grain-base and then used as fodder. Think dog food or cat food kibbles. Still all good?

Soon enough, the shrimp you consume might have fed on what were once New Zealand (or elsewhere) chickens. The kibbles you feed your pet, likewise. Sounds reasonable — just a slight tweak to the status quo. But we can do better.

Added Value Products (From Fish Food to You Know Who)

We’re not done yet. We’ve minced the chicken into sludge, and added the enzymes to break it down, the hydrolysis: our solution is a solution or suspension. Three main components: the water-soluble part, the fat-soluble part (and oils), and any bone or collagen residue.

Each has market-value. To review quickly (cribbed from Nofima, a Norwegian food research institute and industry partner):

1. Our solution has a water product: rich in proteins, peptides, and other water-soluble compounds.

2. Our solution has a fat or oil-based product: depending upon the starting residual biomass, this might contain marketable fatty acids and fat-soluble vitamins.

3. And our solution has a residue which can be used to make bone meal, gelatin, and collagen.

Okay, so maybe plants don’t crave Brawndo for the electrolytes, but the protein in ECP still provides “excellent nutritional content and good quality for the majority of aquatic organisms” (PMID: 36005570). What can we do with this sludge besides feed shrimp and fish and perhaps cats and dogs?

Breaking the Pet Food Taboo

Nofima, our smarty-smart Norwegian institute, identifies the following “Valuable products” from enzymatic protein hydrolysis (13 Mar 2024):

• Feed and pet food

• Protein enhancers in mince products, dry soups, baby foods, bread and more

• Flavour enhancers

• Sports and recovery drinks

• Bioactive ingredients in health food products / medicines

• Cosmetics

• Functional ingredients (gelatin) in food and other products

• Growth media for cells, bacteria and moulds for the production of new products

Baby food. Sports and recovery drinks. Yes! ECP: The Thirst Mutilator! Make-up. Meds.

Why not also cheap protein meals for senior citizens on pensions? For incarcerated persons? For public school lunches? Once we get past the pet food taboo, which we kinda already did, the possibilities are near-endless.

It’s Going to Happen — It IS Happening

Soylent Green is enzymatic chicken pulp. Or, as Nofima points out, the base for Soylent Green could be potentially any residual biomass with enough protein to make it worthwhile: “In order to improve the utilization of the residual biomass and get a better price, new methods for processing, analyses and preparation of these raw materials are required” (13 Mar 2024).

Get that better price! Enzymatic protein hydrolysis is at the top of the new methods list.

In the old days, perhaps a farmer might have tossed the chicken carcass to the pigs, or into a compost heap to generate enriched fertilizer. Almost certainly, small scale local farms have their own means of dealing with chicken carcasses. But wait for the big numbers.

Count the Chicken Carcasses

In our era of industrial poultry farming, approximately 159 million to 178 million chickens are killed daily. Let’s do some simple math for a non-leap year. So that would be 58,035 million to 64,970 million per year — perhaps better expressed as 58 billion to 65 billion chicken carcasses per year.

That’s a lot of residual biomass. A problem, an opportunity. Hence enzymatic protein hydrolysis.

What could go wrong?

What could possibly go wrong?

The Global Homogenization of Bio-Protein Sources

The competing concerns between quality control and the profit motive, to start. The impossibility of inspecting and regulating such a globally distributed large-scale process.

Your dead chickens are coming from where, exactly? And other than butchering for parts or of old age, your chickens perhaps died of what?

Your sludge is being processed where? Who enforces sanitary and hygienic conditions and does testing. All of which costs time and money.

These are questions for which your author would want clear and demonstrable answers. Answers before your value-added products, for all practical purpose invisible to the consumer, are then shipped out to be combined with everything from baby food to cosmetics.

But this is the world we live in now. Not mystery meat, anymore, but a mystery protein bio-product optimized for efficiency and profit. Able take on nearly any shape or flavor, perhaps, but otherwise unrecognizable and perhaps even untraceable to its source.

Yet this will be presented as an advantage, a purity of sorts – a universalized protein solution. We now have the antithesis to the French terrior, itself a concept known since antiquity, that the climate, soil, and general ecological health of a region influence not only food production but food quality.

Wikipedia has denounced “globo-homo” as an alt-right conspiracy theory that “media and business elites seek to impose a homogeneous 'uniculture' on the world.” Too bad, because otherwise Enzymatic Chicken Pulp could serve as a paragon globo-homo food bio-product. Big Macs at least have a cultural identity. Warning: a two-paragraph digressive rant follows.

Start ranty-rant

Your author, a left-behind liberal, remembers when we on the Left were against the Californication of the world, and questioned the neoliberal economic shock policies that went hand in hand with this soft imperialism. Presently, the same Wikipedia article discussing “Globo-homo” also identifies “Cultural Marxism” as an alt-right conspiracy. While in graduate school sometime in the late 1980s to early 1990s, your author studied Frederic Jameson among other major Marxist intellectuals, and did so with professors who openly identified as Cultural Marxists. So they were all alt-right or far-right, wow, who knew? Thank you, Wikipedia.

Among the Wikipedian ideologues, it seems anyone who questions the imposition of Neo-Feudalism should be deemed alt-right, or far right, or a Neo-Nazi, or the like. Hello, Yanis Varoufakis. Hello, Shoshana Zuboff. Whatever, as the young people used to say. Your author once upon a time contributed articles and media to Wikipedia, and taught classes at a campus in West Africa where my students did the same on topics relating to their histories, cultures, and nations. Your author is so disgusted with current dogma that he will accept his status as “alt-right.” Now, back to issue at hand.

End above ranty-rant

The Problem is Real, the Solution Might be Corny

We have an estimated 58 billion to 65 billion chicken carcasses produced per year. That’s just chickens — one protein source among many. If done with appropriate oversight and concern for both human health and the general environment, enzymatic protein hydrolysis might well be a significant part of the solution. 60-some billion chicken carcasses annually — sorry, the time-honored methods of Farmer Brown or even Joel Salatin can’t deal with all of them. Industrial poultry farming, baby, is our reality.

But your author to date has found little to nothing in the literature about safeguards, transparency, and public dialogue. Your author has found much about how we can capture added value and cram this protein by-product into damn near everything which people might eat or even apply to their skin. From shrimp to mascara. Feed it to what we eat, and feed it to us. Then smear it on your face!

So what could go wrong?

Once upon a time and even still today, the USA was and is world’s larger producer of corn (Zea mays mays). Maintaining this dominance was deemed a matter of national security — both for food security and economic reasons. Intense lobbying helped. Through research and technology, we found ways to make multiple by-products from corn and then cram these by-products into a vast variety of food, household, and even some industrial products. Because what could go wrong?

For a list of 184 known corn products and derivatives: Corn, Corn, Everywhere Corn.

Metabolic Syndrome to Other Chronic Illnesses

In fact, according to one research estimate based on biochemistry, more than “50 percent of the typical American diet is derived from corn” (2007; 2020). Our epidemic of chronic diseases, the rise of Type II Diabetes, metabolic syndrome and more — all just coincidence? Guess again.

We know that fructose (typically derived from corn when a food additive) is processed differently than sucrose, and hence can contribute significantly to human metabolic syndrome. We know that for cattle, grass-fed beef has up to six times healthier Omega-3 fatty acids than corn-feed beef. And so on.

No matter anymore. Corn and corn by-products are now so integrated into the American food supply chain as to be inseparable from it. We live with — and some of us, almost certainly, die from — the consequences.

Hit Pause Before Profits, Please

Before enzymatic chicken pulp (ECP) and various other enzymatic carcass pulps (hey, also ECP) become irrevocably integrated into our global food supply chain, your author would like more research, testing, public discussion, and even some assurances about quality control and oversight.

The fresh food locally grown in New Zealand is beyond compare. The by-products, after they have been shipped to China for additional processing and then repackaged as base ingredients and then shipped and sold to various American and European food manufacturers — this your author cannot vouch for.

But New Zealand’s future is tied to China as well to the larger global trade in agricultural and bio-products, and so dead dissolved chickens are coming your way, my fellow Americans, if they are not already on your store shelves. Just think of it as protein-rich bouillon cubes — but crammed into nearly anything and everything without your knowledge or consent. So ultra-processed food as normal, right?

Don’t lose any sleep over it. Until you no longer have a choice as to what your grocery store provides. Or what is provided by the hospital, public-school, day-care center, or senior center, and so on. A solution worthy of Yuval Harari.

Good news: Soylent Green is not (yet) people. Soylent Green is enzymatic chicken pulp (ECP). For now.

But take a brief walk on the wild side.

The following content below comes from primarily from Sputnik and RT, news sources which many Westerners are protected from (US Department of State, 13 Sep 2024). Related content comes from an English language version of a Russian news and views Telegram channel. You are not yet protected from Telegram – but our elites are hard at work on this.

We will learn both the claimed features of the Russian hypersonic Oreshnik missile, and a possible target list of USA military bases (this list from Sputnik). The West currently has no defense against the Oreshnik missile after it has been launched.

Below, a mix of summary, quotation, and paraphrase from certain proscribed sources.

General Information

Presumed characteristics of the Oreshnik

• Type: Medium-range ballistic missile system with non-nuclear hypersonic capabilities.

• Missile speed: Up to 12,250 km/h (Mach 10, or 2.5–3 kilometers per second).

• Launch range: Up to 5,000 kilometers.

• Warhead power: 150 kt, with three to six warheads per missile.

Estimated flight times

• To the UK: 19 minutes.

• To Belgium: 14 minutes.

• To Germany: 11 minutes.

• To Poland: 8 minutes.

Now, for the fun stuff. As a non-nuclear (for now) weapon, the Oreshnik is being promoted as infrastructure destroyer — and primarily military infrastructure. The Russians, again, were good enough to provide a potential target list.

Base Go Boom-Boom

QUESTION: How Fast Can the Oreshink Missile Hit US [Military] Bases Across the World?

Middle East

Distance and flight time from southern Russia:

• US airbase in Kuwait: 2,100 km, 11 minutes;

• US 5th Fleet Headquarters in Bahrain: 2,500 km, 12 minutes.

• US Air Base in Qatar: 2,650 km, 13 minutes.

• US Air Base in Djibouti: 4,100 km, 20 minutes.

Pacific and Alaska

Distance and flight time from Kamchatka:

• Air Base in Alaska: 2,400 km, 12 minutes.

• US Air Force and Navy Base in Guam: 4,500 km, 22 minutes.

• US Air Force and Navy Bases in Pearl Harbor: 5,100 km, 25 minutes.

Minuteman III missile silos [in the “Lower 48,” USA]

Distance and flight time from Chukotka:

• Minuteman III missile silos in Montana: 4,700 km, 23 minutes;

• Minuteman III missile silos in Minot, North Dakota: 4,900 km, 24 minutes.

For the time being, official Russian sources have only designed military bases in Europe, the Middle East, and the USA as possible targets. Likewise, the Oreshnik is still designated as having a non-nuclear payload. Time will tell.

Those evil, UNPROVOKED Russians!

So evil Putin, right? Only the USA unilaterally withdrew from the medium-range missile treaty. To quote the Russian take:

Russia developed intermediate-range missiles in response to US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear (INF) Treaty and deployment of the previously banned weapons with a range of between 500 and 5,000 km in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted on November 21 after the launch of Russia's newest Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile.

Right. The Oreshnik is less a provocation than a response, at least as Russia understands it. Your author finds their argument stronger. Wait. There’s more.

Oops. Uncle Sammy Forget to Mention

QUESTION: Where are US medium-range missile installations planned or already located?

Europe

• Deveselu Military Base, Romania. The US Aegis Ashore Ballistic Missile Defense System, which is potentially capable of firing the Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles with a maximum striking range of 2,500 km.

• Redzikowo Military Base, Poland. The US Aegis Ashore Ballistic Missile Defense System potentially capable of launching Tomahawk cruise missiles.

• Wiesbaden Multi-Domain Task Force, Germany. Starting from 2026 will be capable of launching:

  • Tomahawk cruise missiles.

  • Raytheon Standard Missile 6 (SM6) missiles with a range of up to 460 km.

  • Lockheed Martin Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) or Dark Eagle (over 2,770 km).

Asia-Pacific

• Laoag, northern Philippines. The Lockheed Martin Mid-Range Capability (MRC) Typhon missile system capable of launching:

  • SM6 missiles.

  • Tomahawk cruise missiles.

• Japan

  • Japan is due to receive 400 US-made Tomahawk Block 4 and Block 5 cruise missiles with a range of up to 1,600 km between 2025 and 2027. Eight Japanese Aegis destroyers will be armed with Tomahawks.

  • In September 2024, the Pentagon showed interest in deploying the Typhon missile system to Japan, under the pretext of joint military exercises.

• Guam, a US territory. The US Aegis Ashore Ballistic Missile Defense System potentially capable of launching Tomahawk cruise missiles.

• Japan &/or Guam – to be determined.

  • In April 2024, the Pentagon announced plans to deploy Typhon land-based launchers for Tomahawks and SM-6s in the region, with the Asahi Shimbun newspaper naming Japan and Guam as potential sites.

Necessary disclaimers

We have no good idea how many Oreshnik missiles Russia has – likely, right now very few. We also have no good idea how quickly Russia can either produce new medium- and long-range hypersonic missiles, or retrofit current missiles (or at least their payloads). As it now stands, the Oreshnik is described as NOT nuclear capable.

Semantics? Or a polite voluntary constraint designed to not provoke the West into a disastrous-for-all pre-emptive strike?

Once again, Western intelligence services have failed gloriously here, and so our MSM is largely silent as our elites pay catch-up and hammer out their messaging strategy.

Our government can and is protecting you from facts and information concerning medium-range ballistic missiles and American policy and misadventures regarding the same. Please do not understand this as protection from the missiles themselves.

Thank you.

Excepting Hungary and Slovakia, your current political leadership still holds otherwise and so the money and weapons continue to flow, the bodies dead and crippled and mutilated continue to pile up, and the crisis of displaced Ukrainians escalates. Support them at the expense of your own citizens? Or send them home to die for BlackRock and NATO expansionism?

Outside of the fairly recent and now failed effort by Viktor Orbán, no direct EU talks with Moscow are happening. As for the USA, the focus is now on the upcoming Presidential election.

You do not — or perhaps cannot — care anymore. Perhaps Trump will sort it out, if he survives the campaign returns to the Presidency. Perhaps the Ukrainian military will collapse, and the rump nation of Ukraine will sue for peace. Perhaps whatever.

Your author understands. You do not want any more news or analysis on Ukraine, good or bad, even when your nation’s MSM tries to cram it down your digital throat. But our rulers, elected and otherwise, have not given up on promoting the NATO proxy war.

Nor has the Zelensky regime — the next generation, or perhaps next wave, of soldiers is being conscripted and ideologically prepared for endless war. Please view the brief video below. For actual as opposed to the wooden weapons shown in the video, these children will rely on Western generosity — your taxpayer dollars at work.

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Fighting Ukrainian War Fatigue to Save the Planet

To fight fatigue with Ukraine and answer their critics, our globalist elites would rally you back to the cause as it serves an even greater triad of purpose: fighting climate change, ensuring a prosperous European green energy future, and counterbalancing or even overturning Chinese dominance in the manufacturing of green technologies, including electric vehicles.

In brief, saving the planet.

How? Or, more truthfully, how not? Wealthy natural resources — essential for strategic energy development. Green energy. We will get to the claimed lithium and mineral reserves, and then the child soldiers, in just a bit. But first, please, a mini-history lesson: what we can learn from the establishment experts.

The War Will Pay for Itself

Once upon a time, the American government had to justify a war against a nation which contributed not a single jihadist to the 9-11 attack, and which was openly hostile to Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, but which would still bear the brunt of our nation’s fury and be deemed one of three axis of evil nations.

But wars can be expensive in blood and treasure. In this case, some of our American elites were more worried about treasure. Yet our experts had the solution. The war would pay for itself. How?

The nation in question, which would welcome us as liberators, had rich mineral and energy reserves. This would be an economic and global strategic win-win. The USA would not seize the natural wealth, of course — we would help further develop it and bring it to market, the right market.

Our Washington Consensus

The esteemed economist Lawrence Lindsey, then an Economic Advisor to the White House, stated on 16 September 2002:

The likely economic effects [of a war in Iraq] would be relatively small…. Under every plausible scenario, the negative effect will be quite small relative to the economic benefits.

Under every plausible scenario. Just a few months earlier on 11 July 2002, the eminent geo-political strategist Richard Perle, then serving as the Chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, had explained:

Iraq is a very wealthy country. Enormous oil reserves. They can finance, largely finance the reconstruction of their own country. And I have no doubt that they will.

No doubt they will. So rich in natural wealth. On 4 October 2002, the renowned economist Glenn Hubbard, then Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors (2001-2003) with prior experience as Deputy Assistant Secretary at the USA Department of the Treasury, stated unequivocally:

The costs of any intervention would be very small.

Very small. Hubbard had summarized our permitted expert consensus. Just a month earlier in September 2002, the former CIA intelligence analyst then working as the Director for Persian Gulf Affairs for the USA National Security Council (NSC), Kenneth Pollack, provided similar assurances to silence any skeptics:

It is unimaginable that the United States would have to contribute hundreds of billions of dollars and highly unlikely that we would have to contribute even tens of billions of dollars.

Unimaginable. A rough half-year later, testifying before Congress on 27 March 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then the USA Deputy Secretary of Defense, sealed the deal:

There is a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be US taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people. We are talking about a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.

Our best and brightest, in harmonious agreement. Under every plausible scenario, our costs quite small, very small. Other outcomes unimaginable. This other nation is wealthy with natural resources — it starts with their assets. Burden to the USA taxpayer? Non-issue, no worries.

Btw, the source for these Washington consensus quotes: Navasky and Cerf, "Who Said the War Would Pay for Itself? They Did!", The Nation (13 Mar 2008).

Any dissenting voices were ridiculed and silenced — but with such a stellar line-up committed to spreading democracy and ending terror, why waste time on unpatriotic skeptics? The MSM by and large did not.

Our Best and Brightest — So Told

So how did that turn out? Did the Iraq War — as promised — pay for itself?

The true cost of the Iraqi conflict to the USA taxpayers, according to research by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Laureate for Economics, and Linda Bilmes, a Harvard professor of Public Policy, will be three trillion dollars (2008). This does include projected future costs of caring for veterans from the conflict.

In 2020, while the USA was still on the ground in Iraq, the Military Times, not a progressive peacenik news source, following the research done by the Waston Institute at Brown University, estimated that the Iraq War will cost the USA roughly two trillion dollars (6 Feb 2020).

The Watson Institute, understanding the Syria conflict as an extension of the Iraqi conflict, estimated in 2023 that the total cost of both wars at 2.9 trillion dollars (17 Mar 2023). Their comprehensive report is available for free download.

Let’s go with lowest credible estimate for the cost of the Iraq War: two trillion US dollars and counting, as the debt is still being serviced.

“The more you fuck up, the higher you move up”

So to take just one example, what happened professionally to Kenneth Pollack, the then NSC Director for Persian Gulf Affairs, who proclaimed it “unimaginable that the United States would have to contribute hundreds of billions of dollars and highly unlikely that we would have to contribute even tens of billions of dollars”?

Pollack remains a distinguished Middle East expert in the establishment Foreign Policy community, and currently serves as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institution as well as a senior advisor for the Albright Stonebridge Group, a global business strategy consulting agency found by the late Madeline Albright.

There’s a saying about Permanent Washington, about our unelected ruling class: “the more you fuck up, the higher you move up.” Explains much. But back to Ukraine.

Ukraine and Europe’s Golden Green Energy Future

Just when you were giving up on Ukraine, suffering from fatigue and burnout, our newish Washington consensus experts need you to know that all not lost. Not at all.

In fact, Ukraine is the key to everything. Fight climate change. Mass-produce electric vehicles and green energy technologies. Jump-start the sagging economies of most EU states. Compete with and check the industrial and financial power of China. Achieve both low-cost energy and energy security while leaving behind evil Russia oil and gas and fossil fuel more generally (unless it comes from NATO-stalwart Norway in which case it is magically non-polluting).

What awaits us? A utopia which even Greta Thunberg would approve. If we stay the course. If we prevail against the evil Putin. And best of all, all this will pay for itself. Yes. The billions we poured in become loans, investments. Because Ukraine has trillions of dollars in natural resources. Especially in lithium, the white gold — the mystical alchemical metal of green energy technology. Which — as decreed by Senator Lindsey Graham — must NOT fall into Chinese hands (10 June 2024). Must not. (We will review Graham’s decree shortly below).

So the battle over Ukraine’s “sovereign territory” is really a battle over trillions of dollars in green energy resources, a battle for Europe’s energy and economic future, and vital part of the sacred struggle against climate change. We can’t pull out now. Unthinkable. Unimaginable.

Let’s hear from our experts, both actual and MSM-anointed. Your author will add some needed context (beyond the brief history lesson provided earlier in this post). We will start with some reality and then work our way to the various lithium and green energy fantasias.

Reality Check, then Delusional Bouncing About

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) publishes the Minerals Yearbook: Metals and Minerals which is considered an industry-standard — the benchmark for Open-Source intelligence on these concerns. The most recent report on Ukraine summarizes the data available for 2019 (pre-war), with details as follows:

In 2019, Ukraine was among the world’s leading producers of numerous minerals. The country was the 4th-ranked producer of rutile (14.4% of world output); the 5th-ranked producer of titanium sponge (4.0% of world output); the 6th-ranked producer of bromine (1.0% of world output), ilmenite (6.4% of world output), and magnesium metal (0.7% of world output); the 7th-ranked producer of graphite (1.8% of world output) and iron ore (2.6% of world output); the 8th-ranked producer of kaolin (4.2% of world output) and manganese ore (2.6% of world output); the 9th-ranked producer of pig iron (1.6% of world output); the 11th-ranked producer of peat (2.1% of world output); the 12th-ranked producer of bentonite (1.1% of world output) and silicon (0.7% of world output); the 13th-ranked producer of raw steel (1.1% of world output); and the 14th-ranked producer of lime (0.5% of world output).

Let’s put that in a table and see what is and what is not.

Impressive. And reasonably consistent over the previous decade or so. But look again, please. First, what is missing from this list? Second, what else is missing from the mining and development of these vast natural resources?

First, lithium. Ukraine has proven lithium reserves — as known for decades. But we have had NO lithium mining in Ukraine. None. Unlike — for example — all the other resources being exploited as shown above. Again, the year 2019 is NOT an anomaly —there has been no lithium mining taking place in Ukraine.

Why?

Hint: the answer is not Russian interference. Rather, think marketplace instead. It has not been cost-effective to mine the lithium in Ukraine, although the increased global demand is changing that. So specific consortiums from China and Australia — ones with the appropriate expertise — have floated proposals for development. The necessary investments, which start in the 100s of millions of dollars, are not simply a matter of financial capital. The parties involved must also have both the knowledge capital and the physical capital (heavy machinery, related technology, needed transport infrastructure, et cetera).

So BlackRock, for example, cannot simply print say 300 million in debt-financing and then have the metal magically rise out of the earth.

Second, what else is missing? The national wealth which all the current resources being exploited should have brought to Ukraine. Ukraine has been either the poorest nation in Europe or among them since 1991, since independence. As American Exile discussed previously (14 Apr 2024 & 1 Mar 2022), on Per Capita GDP basis adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity, Ukraine was doing better while in the USSR — in direct contrast to Poland, Hungary, and other former Soviet states.

The Resource Curse

Where has all the money gone from the exploitation of Ukraine’s vast natural wealth? Well, those of us familiar with Congo DR (Congo-Kinshasa) know this script well. For your convenience, American Exile has a previous post which in part describes the looting machine at work.

More than a few economists have called this the resource curse. A nation rich with natural resources is not doomed to pervasive corruption, brutal economic inequality, social unrest and civil violence — but both history and the present moment offer us numerous examples of nations which based on their natural wealth should be prosperous and peaceful but instead are the opposite. In contrast, for example, Luxembourg, which has jack-shit in the way of metal and mineral wealth, consistently ranks among the nations with the highest human development and highest GDP (PPP) Per Capita.

So even if and when the lithium mining begins, no golden age for Ukraine is certain. The safer prediction: more like the previous status quo but on steroids. Even more savage inequalities, grosser corruption.

Senator Lindsey Graham Dreams Green

We turn now to the lithium fantasias pervading the MSM and promoted by Senator Lindsey Graham and other Western authorities. We’ll get to the Ukrainian child soldiers a bit later, promise.

For his 10 June 2024 Face the Nation interview, Senator Graham strove for emphasis by repetition. The following is from the transcript, circa minutes 4:15 to 4:56:

They're [Ukraine is] sitting on 10 to 12 trillion dollar of critical minerals. Ukraine ... could be the richest country in all of Europe. I don't want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China. If we help Ukraine now they can become the best business partner we ever dreamed of.

That 10 to 12 trillion dollars of critical mineral assets could be used by Ukraine and the West not given to Putin and China. This is a very big deal how Ukraine ends. Let's help them win a war we can't afford to lose. Let's find a solution to this war.

But they're sitting on a goal mine: to give Putin 10 or 12 trillion dollars of critical minerals that he will share with China is ridiculous.

Note that Graham says Putin-China three times, like a spell or incantation. Where to begin? First, please do notice Graham’s false dilemma — either Ukraine wins the war with a military victory over Russia, or all the natural resources get handed over to Putin for China.

To start, excepting for lithium, the mining industry in Ukraine was alive and well — and most certainly has resulted in neither prosperity nor stability for the Ukrainian people. Moreover, we have NO credible evidence that Russia plans to conquer all of Ukraine — and we have considerable good cause to believe otherwise. No chance that the bulk of Ukraine’s yet exploited mineral wealth goes to China — unless China buys the development rights on the global market.

Finally, and as mentioned above, Ukraine will become the richest nation in Europe much the same way that Congo DR (Kinshasa) has become the richest nation in Africa. Hint: Congo DR is a perennially failing state, savaged by social conflict and political violence, but the GDP (PPP) per capita as of 2023 did crest to $1671 (rounding up). In fact, the parallels between Ukraine and Congo DR run deep. But no matter. Ukraine could be in Graham’s words “the best business partner we ever dreamed of.” (Reminds one of what President George HW Bush said about Zaire and Mobutu Sese Seko — but that is another post: #Congo DR, 25 Aug 2022).

Not Just One Sick Senator

Let’s move on from Graham, for now, to our media survey of what experts have claimed. Ben Norton, writing for Global Political Economy (13 Jun 2024), provides some essential context and analysis for Graham’s remarks, but does report the usual expert sources a bit uncritically. One must suspect the Washington Post 2022 estimate of the mineral wealth in Eastern Ukraine because the sources are blatantly partisan.

Hiroko Tabuchi, writing for the NYT (2 March 2022), does her own careful dance with counterfactuals and blame-shifting. Her first three paragraphs are a masterclass in journalistic bias of the highest refinement. Let’s take each in turn.

Paragraph one:

Deep below the ground in Ukraine, where Russia continues to mount an aggressive attack, lies vast, untapped mineral wealth that could hold the keys to a lucrative, clean-energy future for the Eastern European nation.

Yes, the “untapped mineral wealth” COULD “hold the keys to a lucrative, clean-energy future the Eastern European nation,” but almost certainly will not (as discussed above).

The first question to ask yourself (as also discussed above): why hasn’t the lithium been mined? The second question, which we will get to soon enough, does Russia either control or claim the territory with the major lithium deposits? Hint: NO.

Paragraph two:

Ukrainian researchers have speculated that the country’s eastern region holds close to 500,000 tons of lithium oxide, a source of lithium, which is critical to the production of the batteries that power electric vehicles. That preliminary assessment, if it holds, would make Ukraine’s lithium reserves one of the largest in the world.

The first sentence starts with a carefully nuanced claim and ends with an obvious truth. The second sentence, the same pattern. If you have studied rhetoric, you likely learned that on the cognitive level, the basic sentence pattern to the reader is topic + stress (stress: the primary claim or event concerning the topic). Ending on a strong, obvious truth or fact guides the reader to accepting the entire statement as the same.

Let’s reverse the emphasis. The researchers are Ukrainian and have SPECULATED. So no bias there, right? If you were an investor, you would insist on an independent survey. Their assessment is preliminary and may NOT hold. It does indicate a large reserve, which seems generally accurate. But wait for it.

In fact, lithium is not rare. The challenge is finding concentrations worth developing — that are cost-effective to mine. Well prior to the war, the industry was not gung-ho on developing Ukraine’s lithium deposits — although Ukraine was attracting more attention because of the globally increased demand and hence rising prices for lithium. But how does Tabuchi present this?

Paragraph three:

But the Russian invasion has come just as Ukraine, under President Volodymyr Zelensky, was trying to position itself as a major player in the clean energy transition.

Yes! The black-hearted Putin, and the white-knight Zelensky. Grisly old Putin cock-blocking the charismatic Zelensky who with the virgin lithium reserves was on his way to being “a major player in the clean energy transition.” Now, that is how you do propaganda. Particularly for college-educated liberals.

If a clear profit was to be made by mining lithium in Ukraine, no ruler or oligarch prior to Zelensky would have stood in the way. Just nonsense.

Why No Lithium Mining?

Olha Karpenko, for AIN Capital, has asked and gotten answers (30 Aug 2023) to the obvious question: “Ukraine has millions of tons of lithium. Why is it not being mined?” Her expert, Yevhen Naumenko, a researcher at the geological department of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, does NOT blame Putin. Rather, Naumenko calls attention to the geological features which present a challenge to existing mining practices. Again, we are back to what is cost-effective.

If the lithium reserves are worth say 5 trillion USD, but will cost 6 trillion USD to extract and process into a market-ready commodity, then the lithium stays in ground. The projected global demand for lithium is such that the Ukrainian reserves will likely be developed. But this requires not just investors but also expertise and equipment. Consortiums with this expertise and heavy industry technology also have the ability to line up investors — the Chinese foremost among them. If market economics matter at all, it may not be possible to keep the Chinese out.

Where is the Lithium?

But wait. We have more to learn from our Ukrainian geologist Naumenko. The two largest lithium reserves by far, Polokhivske and Dobra, are in the Kirovohrad oblast, in Right-bank (Western) Ukraine (30 Aug 2023).

Oopsie. Tabuchi, writing for the NYT, somehow failed to mention that. Not that the NYT would ever lie to or mislead us.

For the record, Russia has made NO territorial claims on the Kirovohrad oblast. None. The richest lithium deposits remain firmly within Zelensky’s grasp — or in the grasp of whoever his successor might be. If the lithium is really that important, sign a peace treaty and begin mining. Make Ukraine the wealthiest nation in Europe. Lead the global clean energy transition, fight climate change, and save the planet.

We’re getting child soldiers, instead; and likely years of ongoing conflict involving Ukraine and neighboring states. Ukraine as the European Congo DR.

Your author will get to the child soldiers — promise, again. But we are not yet done with the Ukrainian lithium fantasias which justify perpetuating the conflict and hence recruiting the child soldiers.

Globally Recognized Thought Leader!

To justify the bee buzzing around in his bonnet, Senator Graham can fall back on Foreign Policy, the preeminent voice of the American Foreign Policy establishment, and the “globally recognized thought leader” Robert Muggah, the lead author for “Russia’s Resource Grab in Ukraine” (28 April 2022).

Muggah, to his credit, observed that “the total value of [Ukrainian] deposits —including titanium, iron, neon, nickel, lithium, and other key resources — could reach between $3 trillion and as much as $11.5 trillion” (28 April 2022). Senator Graham and our other Putin alarmists run with the best-case scenario.

In Muggah’s understanding, Crimea belongs to Ukraine; any Black Sea hydrocarbons likewise largely do; and Ukraine rare earth minerals and other resources can help the West reduce its “reliance on China.” He claims that Russia has security “fears” but evidently not valid concerns, yet at the same time, holds that energy security was a major driving factor in Putin’s decision to invade. On this general topic, American Exile has several relevant posts — all of which largely rebut Muggah’s whitewashing of the West.

Please consider our

And these other related posts:

1. “The Second Great Falsehood about the NATO-Proxy War with Russia in Ukraine.” (4 Jun 2024)

2. “Why does Putin still have support in Russia?” (27 Aug 2023)

3. “Russia: Real Security Concerns, Real Weaknesses.” (5 Mar 2022)

4. “Russia, a convenient enemy; China, not yet.” (30 Apr 2022)

Muggah then speculates that “the far bigger prized eyed by Russia may be Ukraine’s extraordinary resource riches” — without noting that Russia itself has NO shortage of such resources. With the ball rolling, Muggah likewise notes that the angelic Ukraine Invest was busy considering “more than 100 proposals from companies across Europe and North America” and the EU had also recently signed “a new strategic partnership to extract raw materials” (28 April 2022). So no resource grabbing there.

White Hats vs. Black-hearted Villains

With the white hats clearly planted on the proper heads, Muggah turns back to Russia. His speculation about Russian motives quickly turns into factual-like assertions, sprinkled with some generally good production statistics for gravitas — but with few or more woefully out of context. He concludes with a banger (28 April 2022):

By destabilizing or occupying Ukraine’s key production areas, Russia is positioned to achieve a high degree of leverage and control over a significant share of global commodities, including food, energy, and the strategic minerals that the green energy transition relies on.

Got it. The most sanctioned nation on earth, itself resource-rich, is by grand and evil design sticking it to the West economically and interfering with our glorious green energy future.

Reality Contradicts the Narrative

In fact, in April 2022, right about the same time Muggah wrote the above analysis which accused Putin of being a real-life Professor James Moriarty with nuclear weapons, Russia had made Ukraine a sweetheart deal of a peace treaty. This was the Istanbul agreement which the MSM has briefly mentioned in preparation for shifting all the blame to Zelensky at some point.

We have what Putin’s actions show us versus what a “globally recognized thought leader” tells us. The choice is yours.

If Ukraine’s role in the green energy transition was so essential, one wonders why Zelensky was persuaded by Boris Johnson on behalf of the USA both to turn Putin down and to escalate the war.

If the lithium reserves meant so damn much to the future of Ukraine and Europe, and to the green energy transition and saving the planet, then mining could have begun full-tilt boogie starting May 2022. Bo-Jo the globalist Bozo on the behalf of the USA killed that possibility — because it was never much of one in the first place.

But the Narrative Continues

No matter. No doubt aspiring “globally recognized thought leader” Gabriela Garity, a student fellow at the Kleinman Century for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, makes a terse but generally sane contribution to the Putin blame-game. Her brief “Lithium: The Link Between the Ukraine War the Clean Energy Transition” (3 June 2022) merits reading, but at times uncritically accepts questionable albeit establishment sources and gives far too much weight to the conflict.

Please do remember that the USA could have been for the past few decades globally competing for green energy resources and rare earth elements. American Exile has covered our failure to do so. Blaming Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine for our lack of progress misses the big picture by a country mile.

On this general topic, please consider our

Along with the related posts:

1. “Buying the Copper Mountain was only the Beginning: China and South America.” (16 Jun 2022)

2. “Chinese International Investment: Energy and Metal Sectors.” (6 Jul 2022)

Back to Ukraine. Despite the alarmist morass, we do have a few dissenting voices of sanity and clarity among the establishment. Writing for the Council on Foreign Relations, Thomas Graham wisely asks “What Does Putin Really Want in Ukraine?” (16 May 2024). Although he grossly underestimates Russia’s achievements both domestically (economically) and on the battlefield, Graham does NOT trade in Muggah’s fashionable green energy conspiracy theory (28 April 2022).

We should understand Muggah as offering yet another an evil Putin manifesto, but one which quite frankly seems confession by projection, given the proclivities and actions of our own Western elite.

More Confession by Projection

In his “Ukraine: All Lithium Reserves and Mineral Resources in the War Zones” (1 April 2022), written shortly before Muggah’s FP analyis and Putin’s offer of a peace treaty, Simone Fant does offer general but weak support for the resource grab conspiracy theory. But he is good enough to document more nuanced expert opinions. Fant cites Rod Schoonover, a former USA National Intelligence Council member, who claims that Putin understands the lithium deposits as co-benefit but not a cause.

In Schoonover’s words:

[U]ndoubtedly Ukraine's mineral wealth is one of the reasons why this country is so important to Russia. … [But] since there are no developed deposits, I highly doubt that lithium resources are the motivation for attacks. (1 April 2022)

Schoonover has the second half of that correct. He goes on to add:

[The rest of the world] would not import lithium from a pariah state ... especially when there are better alternatives in geo-politically more favorable countries. (1 April 2022)

Correct again. No green energy future hangs in the balance over this. Moreover, Ukraine’s lithium deposits will likely take years to reach profitability — and likewise to reach production at scale. Nevertheless, overall Fant (1 April 2022) did share with us another set of experts kicking up a fuss about Russian resource grabbing. And again, this was published around the same time Putin was trying to return the lithium reserves and more to Ukraine for security guarantees. Who’s zoomin’ who, here?

The Nonsense (Expert) Consensus

So neither the numbers nor the facts add up, but the green energy conspiracy theory is the now the fashionable narrative being foisted on NATO citizens. You’ve already heard it. The crude Senator Lindsey Graham version, the polished Robert Muggah Foreign Policy version, and the MSM pundit variants in between. Let’s recap.

Evil Putin is invading Ukraine as resource grab, intent on stealing the precious lithium and delaying the green energy transition, thus putting at risk the energy and economic futures of Europe, and furthermore accelerating climate change and destroying our earth in the process while aiding China, NATO’s new enemy, in global domination. (Think the Grinch, with minions).

Putin must be defeated at any cost (provided it is Ukrainians who are dying in this glorious and righteous struggle). The war must continue but will pay for itself once Ukraine partners itself exclusively with the West for natural resource development. (Because free trade no more — don’t ask). Just as Senator Graham said, Ukraine will become “the best business partner we ever dreamed of.” So keep fighting.

The Struggle Must Continue

This brings us to the child soldiers, the latest twist in fighting to the last Ukrainian. Call it total mobilization. (Women are being mobilized also).

The video presented earlier is from the Lviv oblast in Ukraine — heart of the Galician ideal homeland. It shows children at a National & Patriotic Education camp. Let’s start with a campfire and singing songs.

The song in question celebrates Stepan Bandera, whose crimes against humanity are documented beyond serious dispute.

The Bandera Cult — a Minority Imposition Supported by the USA

When this glorification of Bandera comes up in the Western MSM, it gets quietly dismissed with apologetics such like: Yes, unfortunate. In some ways, shameful. But the “founding fathers” of any nation are typically controversial and believed and did things that we today would not approve of. After Ukraine deals with the challenges it faces, and reaches stability by joining the EU and NATO, there will be a mature reappraisal, and all this Bandera nonsense will go into the dustbin of history where it belongs. But for now, the Ukrainians need their nationalist heroes — flawed as such figures might well be. Et cetera.

Got it. First, Bandera was born in 1909: about ten years after the birth of Ernest Hemingway and nineteen years after that of Dwight Eisenhower. So not as historically remote as his apologists seem to wish. Second, and more importantly, the majority of Ukrainians do NOT have a favorable opinion of Stepan Bandera. They do NOT consider him their founding father. How do we know this? Because the matter has been formally studied in surveys of Ukrainian public opinion.

Ivan Katchanovski, in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Communist and Post-Communist Studies, offered comparative and regression analyses of surveys conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in 2009 and 2013 (8 July 2015).

Your author here will simply cover two highlights. First, the big picture — the nation-wide results visualized. (This from Table 1 in the study). Second, the significant changes in attitudes towards Stepan Bandera as one progresses from Left-Bank Ukraine to Right-Bank Ukraine. (If a review is needed, your author discussed in detail the historical and ongoing differences between Left-Bank and Right-Bank Ukraine in a recent post, “The Second Great Falsehood about the NATO-Proxy War with Russia in Ukraine”).

On a national level, more Ukrainians have a negative than positive view of Bandera. If we count the Neutral and Unsure/No Opinion as non-supporters, we see the Bandera supporters are a distinct minority. This breaks down clearly and distinctly on a geographical basis as we move from West Ukraine to East Ukraine, with Kyiv city in the geographical center.

In the graph below, we see the stark contrast between the Donbass region of Right-Bank Ukraine (the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts), circa 2013, and the Galicia region of Left-Bank Ukraine, circa 2013.

As American Exile has covered previously, the former Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts are now claimed by Russia as part of the Federation. Moreover, this likely largely does reflect the will of the people who have been living there even though the international community has not recognized the referendums held in Donetsk and Luhansk.

The USA has consistently supported the Galician ideal nationalists, aka, the Banderites, who in turn have been waging civil war against the Eastern (Right-Bank) Ukrainians to purify the nation and consolidate power. Don’t take your author’s word for it. Listen again, please, to the then President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, after the 2014 Maidan coup.

This is a President who understood himself at war inside a clearly divided nation. Please, again, review the color graphs above showing the support or lack thereof for the Banderite cause.

Your take-away point, dear reader. There is nothing like a consensus in Ukraine for Stepan Bandera as the “father of Ukraine.” Only a minority have held this position. By supporting this minority at the expense of the majority, the USA for two decades now has been undermining internal Ukrainian efforts at social stability and the rule of law based upon representative government.

You know, like that democracy thing we always talk about. But back to the issue at hand. The indoctrination and mobilization of Ukrainian children.

Not the Boy Scouts, exactly

So some children in Western Ukraine are being indoctrinated under the guise of promoting healthy outdoor activities and have been recorded sing ultra-nationalist propaganda around campfires. Who cares? A majority of liberal Americans likely felt the same way about the Boy Scouts of America, prior to the organization’s reformation. Remember: George Washington was a slaveholder, et cetera. Just repeat that whenever you want to excuse the inexcusable actions of one of our allies.

But this cultivation — this grooming — of the younger generation does not stop at teaching them songs. The next generation — or perhaps even the next wave — of conscripts is being prepared. Child soldiers.

It’s like Sub-Saharan Africa with warlords recruiting children to help with the looting of natural resources. The tantalum-mining in Congo DR, the “blood” diamonds of Angola and Sierra Leone, and now lithium in Ukraine. Fight to the last Ukrainian foolish enough to stay in Ukraine, fight to the last man, woman, and child, so that the EU and USA can gain full access to Ukraine’s natural wealth in minerals and metals. For the green energy transition. We are saving the planet. Evil Putin, bad China. Grabbing resources. Not us. No, not us.

On a not-unrelated side note, The Intel Drop (21 July 2024) has reported that the Zelensky regime is directly involved with reselling not just NATO-supplied weapons but also human organs to known criminal syndicates. To cite just one revelation from their report (21 July 2024):

Human rights ombudsmen from the Fondazione lotta alla Repressione have managed to establish that the most shocking crime involving the Ukrainian consulate in Naples in collaboration with the Italian mafia is the illegal organ harvesting and human trafficking as organ donors.

Your author cannot verify this report but does note that several Ukrainian telegram accounts have made related claims. The general story goes as follows. A family member collects from the military the corpse of a fallen relative for burial. They find the body itself has been looted — select organs harvested without consent.

One is reminded of the gold fillings being pulled from teeth of the concentration camp victims. The exploitation of the Ukrainian people is reaching its perversely logical totality. Please see our earlier “The Demographic Destruction of Ukraine” (14 Apr 2024), the sources of which are verifiable.

End this Obscenity — Repudiate this “Green New Deal”

So many dead, so many more wavering between survival and destruction. This general obscenity — now marketed as part of a globalist “Green New Deal” — must end. Even when proposed by such luminaries as Senator Lindsey Graham or “globally recognized thought leader” Robert Muggah, the Greta Thunberg excuse for continuing the Russo-Ukraine conflict is more absurd, contrived, and vile than the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony. The sooner Russia’s security concerns are taken respectfully, the sooner we will have a Peace Treaty. Then the lithium mining can begin — and good luck with that.

Your author doubts the Ukrainian people will benefit from the land’s natural wealth. So far, the vast majority of Ukrainians have not. But at least the citizens of Ukraine will stop being rounded up and sent to the slaughter so that Western elites can claim the territory of Ukraine as a giant blank slate for their transition fantasias into green energy and rather more.

The second great falsehood blames Putin for Ukraine's internal conflicts prior to the invasion. More specifically, when mentioned by the Western media at all, our MSM-anointed experts hold Russia responsible for the on-again, off-again Ukrainian civil war which has plagued the nation since independence in 1991.

So why should we care?

Because the Western narrative denies or distorts hard social, cultural, and historical realities which any viable treaty, truce, or peace settlement must take into account. In so doing, the Western narrative makes impossible for Ukraine and Russia to compromise. If we hold to the Western narrative, we perpetuate a localized forever war which has the potential always to escalate both globally and into a nuclear holocaust. Let’s face some unpleasant truths instead, and then consider other options.

In regard to the first great falsehood, to summarize what the USA and allies have done to create the current crisis, Abelow lists the following eight (8) provocations1:

1. Expanded NATO over a thousand miles eastward, pressing it toward Russia’s borders, in disregard of assurances previously given to Moscow.

2. Withdrawn unilaterally from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and placed antiballistic launch systems in newly joined NATO countries. These launchers can also accommodate and fire offensive nuclear weapons at Russia, such as nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missiles.

3. Helped lay the groundwork for, and may have directly instigated, an armed, far-right coup in Ukraine. This coup replaced a democratically elected pro-Russian government with an unelected pro-Western one.

4. Conducted countless NATO military exercises near Russia’s border. These have included, for example, live-fire rocket exercises whose goal was to simulate attacks on air-defense systems inside Russia.

5. Asserted, without pressing strategic need, and in disregard of the threat such a move would pose for Russia, that Ukraine would become a NATO member. NATO then refused to renounce this policy even when doing so might have averted war.

6. Withdrawn unilaterally from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, increasing Russian vulnerability to a U.S. first strike.

7. Armed and trained the Ukrainian military through bilateral agreements and held regular joint military training exercises inside Ukraine. The goal has been to produce NATO-level military interoperability even before formally admitting Ukraine into NATO.

8. Led the Ukrainian leadership to adopt an uncompromising stance toward Russia, further exacerbating the threat to Russia and putting Ukraine in the path of Russian military blowback.

In brief, the war was not unprovoked. Moreover, Russia has valid security concerns which must be part of any peace treaty or settlement.

Ukrainian Nationalism: Conflicting Original Ideals

This post will largely concern the second falsehood — the on-again, off-again civil war in Ukraine, which has roots dating back to at least the late 18^th century. Blaming Ukraine’s domestic turmoil on Putin misses the mark by at least six generations — the conflict began well before Ukraine appeared as a state on the map of Europe in the early 20^th century. In fact, for centuries prior, the designation “Ukraine” (various possible spellings) on a map referred to a territory, region, or borderland — the boundaries of which were vaguely defined and frequently changing.

As we will discuss in more detail shortly, there was the short-lived West Ukrainian People’s Republic (November 1918 to July 1919) whose territory was disputed by and largely taken over by Poland. Likewise, there was the short-lived and unstable Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917-1921), which was soon after absorbed into the USSR as a founding member state, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialistic Republic (Ukrainian SSR). It is worth repeating: unlike Poland or Russia, Ukraine as a distinct nation-state makes no appearance on the map of Europe until the early 20^th century.

So as a matter of historical fact, Ukrainian SSR was the first Ukrainian nation-state recognized the by international community, and the first with any territorial stability. This because the Soviet Union guaranteed Ukraine’s boundaries.

Left-Bank versus Right-Bank Ukraine

The two national false starts of Ukraine, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic (1918-1919) and Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917-1921), in turn reveal a deeper and pre-Soviet history. The desire for a Ukrainian nation-state generated two competing visions of Ukrainian identity and hence nationalism. This because there was no shared Ukrainian experience — the Ukrainian nationalist movement emerged while ethnic Ukrainians were living in two different European empires.

We must necessarily simplify — but not overly so. During the nascent period of the Ukrainian nationalism movement, the territory in modern day Ukraine was politically divided by the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Russian empire. In terms of both practical control and spheres of influence, this political divide was fortified by one of Europe’s great natural trans-boundaries: the Dnieper River. The area west of Dnieper River, the “Left Bank.” borders Central Europe. The area east of Dnieper River, the “Right Bank,”bridges Europe and Asia and borders modern-day Russia.

Ukrainian Nationalism: the Galician and Malorossiyan ideals

Living respectively under Austro-Hungarian and Russian imperial spheres of influence, ethnic Ukrainians had significantly different experiences. This resulted in two competing versions of Ukrainian identity and hence later nationalism: the Galician and Malorossiyan ideals.

From nearly the start, as Professor Nicolai Petro has documented extensively in his masterful The Tragedy of Ukraine, the Galician ideal emphasized “total separation from Russia,” whereas the Malorossiyan ideal emphasized not only co-existence but “mutually beneficial ties” with Russia.2

Petro neatly summaries these competing ideals:3

For Galician Ukrainians, justice demands that all Ukrainians be united by a common language, culture, religion, and historical vision, or Ukraine is doomed. For Maloross Ukrainians, justice demands that the cultural, religious, and historical pluralism of Ukraine be recognized, or Ukraine is doomed.

This divide is stark and enduring — which is not the same as claiming it is magical or that Ukraine perfectly divides into Left-Bank and Right-Bank constituencies. But as we will shortly see, Ukraine does certain distinct oblasts (administrative districts) in which the majority of people are either Russophobes or Russophiles. As the history we just reviewed would suggest, this does map out West to East. The Russophobes or Galician idealists are to the West, or “Left-Bank”; the Russophiles or Malorossiyan idealists to the East, or “Right Bank.”

Mapping Ukraine’s Elections

As recognized by West, Ukraine is divided into “27 first-level administrative divisions, which consists of 24 oblasts, 1 autonomous republic and 2 cities with special status.”4 For election purposes, the oblasts are similar to what an American citizen would call a state; a city with special status similar to Washington, DC. The autonomous republic is Crimea; the two cities with special status, Kyiv and Sevastopol. (The montage below shows both the administrative divisions and major cities)

Your author is indebted here (as well as elsewhere in this post) to Professor Petro, who has astutely observed that the “starkly divided voting patterns in Left-Bank and Right-Bank Ukraine after independence” testify to enduring conflict between the Galician and Malorossiyan ideals.5

Moreover, and please do note, neither NATO nor Putin created this divide, even if either or both could be accused of exploiting it. Indeed, as Petro has observed, the “conflict within Ukraine, between its Russophile east (Malorossiya) and its Russophobe west (Galicia)” has been “going on for at least 150 years.”6 But before we dive deeper into the history, let’s review some election results first. Our discussion of the election which brought Zelensky to power will be saved until later in this post, however — what Zelenksy has done since coming to power requires more context.

The 1994 and 2004 Presidental Elections

The results below from the 1994 and 2004 Presidential Elections in Ukraine reveal the extreme differences between the far Western and Eastern oblasts, with Central Ukraine being generally more moderate — a political buffer zone.

The strongest contrast in results: the historical Galician homeland (particularly, the oblasts of Lviv, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsh) versus the Donbas region (the oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk) and Crimea. (In both maps, the darker orange versus the darker blue). Otherwise, in more general terms, we see a clear West-East distinction. This pattern holds for the regional elections also.

The 2006 and 2007 Regional and Parliamentary Elections

The two maps below show the 2006 election for the Oblast leadership by party affiliation, and the 2007 elections for Members of Parliament also by party affiliation.

Again, for the regional elections, the West-East divide persists, and the strongest contrasts are between the historical Galician homeland versus the Donbas region and Crimea. To understand this better, we need to know some more history.

Stepping Back to WWI: Divided Ukrainian Nationalism

As mentioned earlier, to simplify just a bit, in 1917 the territory of modern-day Ukraine was largely divided between the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Russian empire. WWI would be downfall of both empires. The Ukrainian peoples from both former empires and on both sides of Dnieper River aspired to national independence.

In the Eastern Galicia region of the now former Austro-Hungarian empire, an area also claimed by Poland, Ukrainian nationalists created the short-lived West Ukrainian People’s Republic (November 1918 to July 1919). By July 1919, Poland had asserted control over most of the territory — and many Galician nationalists shifted their attention and energies eastward where the Malorossiyan nationalists were making some progress. Both cooperation and violent conflict ensued.

Ukrainian nationalists from both main camps did succeed in creating the short-lived and unstable Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917-1921). But this state was soon after absorbed into the USSR as a founding member state, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialistic Republic (Ukraine SSR). The remainder of the territory once claimed by Ukrainian nationalists, particularly by the Western or “Left-Bank” or Galician nationalists, was now under control of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.

Two Different Failed Ukraines — and the Soviet Paradox

In this sense, both attempts at creating an independent Ukrainian state failed —Ukraine now existed on the map as an internationally recognized political entity because of the Soviet Union. The modern-day boundaries of Ukraine would not be established until after WWII, with Crimea added by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. (More on this soon enough).

Since the Galician ideal emphasized “total separation from Russia,” these Ukrainian nationalists generally understood the Soviet Union as a colonizing power which had usurped their new republic.7 Starting in the 1920s, the rhetoric against Russia, and hence also against the Russophile east (Malorossiya) region of Ukraine, became increasingly violent and extremist. This was not without cause.

The Holodomor and Other Horrors

During the greater Soviet famine of 1930-1933, Ukrainian SSR (the former Ukrainian People’s Republic, to which the former West Ukrainian People’s Republic had not yet been added) suffered immensely. The Holodomor, as the famine in Ukraine (1932-1933) is known, killed millions of citizens. This was perhaps the greatest catastrophe which Ukrainian people suffered under Soviet rule, but not the only time Kremlin policies wrought havoc on Ukrainian society, intentionally or otherwise.

The historian Andrea Graziosi has argued that the Holodomor was caused by Stalin’s industrialization efforts and attempt to collectivize agriculture, but then was then weaponized by the Kremlin against Ukrainian citizens to suppress dissent more generally, and the nationalist independence movement specifically.8 This weaponization of a famine caused by failed policy only hardened the resolve of the Galician idealists while further polarizing Ukrainian society. This and other Soviet mishaps set the stage for Ukrainian cooperation with Nazi Germany during the invasion of the Soviet Union in WWII.

The Galician Ideal and Nazi Ideology: Deep Affinities

The name of Stepan Bandera (1909-1959), who was born in Galicia, is mentioned now and then by some of our MSM-approved intelligentsia. Bandera’s crimes as a leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) remain well-documented. Even Wikipedia acknowledges that OUN-B (the Bandera wing of the OUN) “engaged in various atrocities, including murder of civilians, most of whom were ethnic Poles, Jews and Romani people.”9 We will return to a discussion of Bandera soon enough.

Less well known to our MSM-approved intelligentsia is Dmytro Ivanovych Dontsov (1883-1973). Donstov was not as hands-on as Bandera — not as directly involved in acts of violence. Instead, Donstov contributed to the Galician ideal ultra-nationalism as a writer, publisher, philosopher and propagandist. His influence was significant and enduring as noted by the scholars John A. Armstrong, Trevor Erlacher, and Myroslav Shkandrij among others.10 Petro likewise has argued that the writings of Donstov “continue to serve as an inspiration and model for many contemporary Ukrainian nationalists.”11

An intellectual modernist who combined a fashionable variant of Nietzschean ethos with an equally fashionable variant of Social Darwinism, and this pairing was not original, Dontsov argued that the nation is like “a species in nature” and so “in constant struggle with other nations for existence and space.” Hence healthy nations are conquering nations which make history by imposing their will upon the world and other weaker nations.12

Rejecting the concepts of co-existence and mutually beneficial relationships which were central to the  Malorossiyan ideal, Donstov held that Ukraine must overcome Russia — must purge the Russian elements from the Ukrainian nation and people. This was a matter of both right and necessity, with no sacrifice being too great to achieve Ukrainian nationalism. Establishing a purified Ukrainian nation-state was13

above the life of any given individual, above the blood and deaths of thousands, above the wellbeing of a given generation, above abstract mental calculations, above universal human ethics, above any imaginary concept of good and evil.

It also meant dealing harshly with the minority Jewish population, the residual Polish population, and so on, as Dontsov explicitly stated elsewhere.14

His most significant works published in the 1920s and 1930s, Dontsov, as they say, was a man of his time. He gave a Ukrainian gloss to various strands of ultra-nationalist ideologies and metahistorical fantasias then freely circulating in Europe — but perhaps advocated most eloquently and effectively by certain members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.15 Be that as it may, such was the new and improved Galician ideal nationalism — which indeed had shared roots and deep affinities with Nazi ideology. Hence it should not surprise us that when Germany invaded Ukraine during WWII, the Germans found a significant body of collaborators.

The Ukrainian Waffen-SS Division, 1^st Galicia

Since conquering Russia was the German end goal in this case, the German invasion of Ukraine seemed to the Galician ideal nationalists an opportunity for purging the Russian elements out of Ukraine, and establishing a purified ethno-linguistic nation-state. This would be a new Ukraine in alliance with another and stronger nation-state, Nazi Germany, which similarly professed aspirations of ethno-linguistic purity and claimed the right to dominate inferior peoples— Russians being on that list.

In fact, Nazi Germany had offered a similar deal to like-minded nationalists in Croatia, Yugoslavia — and this resulted in the short-lived Independent State of Croatia, which became infamous for their genocide campaigns against Serbian, Jewish, and Romani peoples.16

Unfortunately for the Galician ideal nationalists, however, Hitler viewed Ukraine more as resource colony than a junior partner. But even after Germany denied them a partnership similar to that of Croatian ethno-nationalists, the Galician ideal nationalists still claimed Russia as their primary enemy. In fact, Germany found enough Ukrainian collaborators to form an entire division: the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, also known as 1st Galicia or SS-Galicia. (Please see montage below).

Historians credit the SS-Galicia with participating in the Huta Pieniacka, Pidkamin, and Palikrowy massacres among other atrocities.17 Distinguishing itself through war crimes and not victories on the battlefield, the SS-Galicia proved better at killing civilians than Red Army (Soviet) soldiers.

From the SS-Galicia to the Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA)

In context, the actions of the SS-Galicia were part of a larger ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by Ukrainian Galician ideal nationalists — which brings us back to Stephan Bandera, and also brings us to the Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA).

During WWII, when the tide started turning against Germany, key OUN-B members under the direction of Bandera took control of UPA. The UPA had previously served as auxiliary police for the German occupation, and several members had been directly involved in “the mass killing of west Ukrainian Jews.”  But now these ultra-nationalists undertook a more general ethnic cleansing of Western Ukraine, murdering “tens of thousands of Poles, most of them women and children.”18 

The historian Alexander V. Prusin19 has summarized the ethnic cleansing campaign as follows:

On the surface, the OUN-UPA anti-Polish campaign in Western Ukraine seemed to have achieved its long-desired objectives. Mass murder and flight of Polish refugees irreversibly changed the ethnic composition in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in favor of ethnic Ukrainians. In reality, however, it was a Pyrrhic victory for the nationalists. Forced to deploy its forces against Poles, Germans, and in the spring of 1944 against the Red Army, the OUN-UPA was bound to crack under the enormous pressure of fighting simultaneously too many enemies. The major political beneficiaries of the ethnic cleansing were the Soviet authorities.  

Why? Because after WWII ended, the Soviet authorities used the chaos caused by the OUN-UPA as justification for restoring order, and for annexing Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, now predominately Ukrainian in population, as part of Ukrainian SRR.

Ukraine United?

Hence the former West Ukrainian People’s Republic (1918-1919) was now largely joined to the former Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917-1921) — Ukrainian unity at last, but only because of Soviet conquest and under Soviet rule.

For all its stated ideals and ambitions, the actual accomplishments of the OUN-UPA were largely limited to massacring civilians by the thousands — with Jewish communities particularly but not exclusively targeted.20

But why should we care about the past?

The Donstov-Bandera Legacy in Contemporary Ukraine

On 22 January 2010, Stephan Bandera was posthumously awarded the highest state honor, “Hero of Ukraine,” by the outgoing President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko. This was later rescinded, but the efforts to rehabilitate Bandera continue. That under his leadership thousands of civilians were murdered seems a point in his favor — as these murdered people were not ethno-linguistic Ukrainians.

Likewise, as Professor Per Ander Rudling has documented, in “Ukrainian ultra-nationalist mythology,” the SS-Galicia is “depicted as freedom fighters who fought for an independent Ukraine.” But what the same historical revisionists “omit or deny” about the SS-Galicia” are “its ideological foundations, its allegiance to Adolf Hitler, and the involvement of units associated with the division in atrocities against civilians.”21

Finally, although the Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA) did turn against Germany when it was clear that Germany was losing in Eastern Europe, the UPA was considerably less interested in helping the Red Army drive the German forces out of Ukraine, and considerably more interested continuing their ethnic cleansing campaign under the cover of the greater war. Unfortunately, this opportunistic sense also endures — as we know from the 2014 massacres in Odessa22 and the Donbas.23 Both of which likely remain unknown to vast majority of Americans supporting the NATO-proxy war.

Us and Them in Contemporary Ukrainian Political Life

Unlike the ideology professed by National Socialist German Workers' Party, the Galician ideal as transformed by Donstov, Bandera, et alia, was neither discredited nor discarded at the end of WWII: it remains powerfully influential. Knowing the history helps us understand the extraordinary speech on 15 November 2014 by Petro Poroshenko, then President of Ukraine, concerning Ukrainian citizens of the Donbas (part of the “Right-Bank” or historically Malorossiyan area of Ukraine):

This is a President who understood himself at war inside a nation clearly divided into “we” and “they” — we, the holders of the Galician ideal, and they, the holders of the Malorossiyan ideal. Our children will get an education; their children must hole up in basements as we call in the airstrikes.  

Given that in 2014 the Ukrainian government had dropped cluster munitions into urban civil areas in the Donbas, and likewise allowed right-wing militias to engage in politically motivated acts of vigilantism and terrorism,24 it is fair to say that Ukraine was in a state of civil war. The conflict had been simmering on and off since the collapse of the Soviet Union — since Ukrainian independence in 1991. It escalated after the Maidan coup in 2014.

The Path Forward — from a Galician Ideal Perspective

On 15 October 2019, the Ukrainian politician Oleh Tyahnybok explained the path forward (from the Galician perspective):25

After they [Donbas and Crimea] return to the bosom of Ukraine, they will have to undergo full de-separatization and re-passportization. Every person who wants to be in the Ukrainian state, and have the right to anything, will have to prove his loyalty to Ukraine … Only when it is really Ukraine, and not citizens who hate Ukraine, can you hold elections there … [Meanwhile] block the water, block electricity, no trade, don’t supply them anything. Let them howl to their own government, that is destroying them. We should not feed them! Don’t give them any pensions!

Starve and sanction your fellow citizens until they convert to your ideal of nationalism, of Ukrainian identity. Deny their right to vote unless and until they vote appropriately. Prosecute and persecute, purge and purify. This is what Victoria Nuland and Hillary Rodman Clinton supported as “Democracy Building” in Ukraine. What American taxpayer dollars also supported — and still do.

Crimea: Never Historically Ukrainian

Tyahnybok’s rant (2019) above explicitly mentions Crimea. Crimea, against the wishes of its people, was transferred to Ukrainian SSR in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev. Despite strong objections from within the Kremlin itself, Khrushchev had a number of political and practical reasons for doing so — as one contemporary source (1954) discussed in detail.26 But Khrushchev never anticipated a Ukraine fully independent of Russia: “the transfer had the intended effect of binding Ukraine inexorably to Russia, ‘Eternally Together’, as a poster commemorating the event proclaimed.”27

So if we follow the American logic that the whims and wishes of Nikita Khrushchev must be respected when it comes to the sovereign territory of Ukraine, then Crimea is part of Ukraine provided Ukraine is eternally joined to Russia. For this, we go to war?

Alternatively, we could simply respect the wishes of the Crimean people: as Petro has documented, “polls conducted by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Crimea between 2009 and 2011 also show a majority of Crimeans favoring reunification with Russia.”28 Crimea had wanted to rejoin the Russian Federation — the 2014 annexation was not a hostile takeover but a welcome homecoming.

The greater controversy here is not Crimea, but the people living in the Donbas and other Russophile areas of Right-Bank Ukraine. These are the Ukrainian citizens which Ukrainian politicians such as Petro Poroshenko and Oleh Tyahnybok have declared economic, cultural, and — at times — military war against.

Zelensky and Ukrainian Nationalism

This brings us to the election of 2019 which brought Volodymyr Zelensky to power as the President of Ukraine. We see the same general pattern as in the previous elections. In the map below, the darker the green the stronger the support of Zelensky. People unfamiliar with Zelensky’s campaign, however, might find the results surprising — Zelensky dominated Eastern Ukraine, particularly the Donbas.

This is because Zelensky ran on a platform of peace and neutrality. He was elected because he won the support of Russophile eastern (Malorossiyan) regions of Ukraine. He fared most poorly in Russophobe western (Galician) regions of Ukraine. Not coincidently, Zelensky’s first language is Russian — not Ukrainian.

Zelensky is Jewish: such matters because it seemed to many that Zelensky might remain non-partisan in matters of the Christian faith, had no axe to grind, and so would not support the Ultranationalist (Galician ideal) demands to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. (Which Zelensky subsequently did).

Moreover, Zelensky had received credible death threats by Galician ideal nationalists. Something to which people in the Donbas could relate. So here was a charming compromise candidate whom many people in Russophile eastern Ukraine believed they could trust. Yet in very short order, at the urging of the USA, Zelensky betrayed the people who voted for him and broke pretty much every promise he had made —every plank of his campaign platform.

History Zelenskified — Revisionism Through Destruction

As an update and side note, under Zelensky’s directive, as reported by Geopolitics Live on 17 May 2024 Ukraine recently demolished a centuries-old Ukrainian Orthodox chapel in Kyiv, the Desyatynny Monastery's Vladimir-Olginsky Chapel, which was built between 989-996 AD. This was the first stone Orthodox church in the Kievan Rus' — it was part of not just Slavic but Eurasian history.

So for over 1000 years the Vladimir-Olginsky Chapel stood, from 996 to 2024, but a combination of woke-ism and Galician nationalism did what and time itself could not. One wonders why the building simply could not have been repurposed given its historical importance – not even the Soviets were so destructive. But if like myself you are an American citizen, consider this an example of your tax-payer dollars at work. Below, a photo of the Vladimir-Olginsky Chapel shortly prior to its demolition.

Image courtesy Geopolitics Live, 17 May 2024.

Acts of violence against buildings are one concern; against people, quite another. American Exile covered in an earlier post how Ukraine is facing Demographic Destruction due to persistent policy failure, military conscription, and more.29

A 21st Century Winston Churchill — Really?

But to the West, Zelensky is a new Winston Churchill and fighting for democracy even as he has suspended elections, declared martial law, consolidated and took control of the media, imprisoned non-conforming journalists, supported the persecution of Ukrainian Orthodox Church members, refused an absurdly reasonable peace treaty, sold off (at least conditionally) national assets to Blackrock, and committed various other blatantly authoritarian acts.

Perhaps our elites were thinking of Churchill and India?

Otherwise, prior to his election as President of Ukraine as a peace and neutrality candidate, Zelensky was a professional entertainer whose most celebrated achievement was playing the piano with his penis. So the point of comparison is what: Churchill had his cigars, and Zelensky has his piano-playing penis? Your author can make no sense as to why Western elites and the MSM worship Zelensky for betraying the people who voted for him. One trusts that Zelensky got his thirty pieces of silver.

The Case for Letting Ukraine Formally Divide

We have two obvious late 20^th century precedents: Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

When Czechoslovakia, a former member state of the Soviet Union, peacefully divided into two new republics, the Czech and Slovak Republics respectively, neither Europe nor the world came to an end. Nor did the USA insist on the territorial sovereignty of Czechoslovakia, forcing the people of Slovakia to accept the demands of Prague.

When the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia fell into series of civil wars, from 1991 to 2001, the horrific violence finally ended with the creation of six new republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and North Macedonia.30 This brought a considerable measure of peace to Europe, and the world likewise did not end. Moreover, once again, the USA neither insisted on territorial sovereignty of Yugoslavia, nor forced the new republics to reunite under the authority of their preferred Yugoslavian leader.

This brings us to a meta-philosophical bedrock issue: from whence sovereignty?

Sovereignty from the Consent of the Governed

Does sovereignty come from the people — or by the whims of American foreign policy and a small number of Western elites?

In both cases, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the will of the peoples involved — “peoples” as a plural since we had historically distinct groups — was finally respected by international community. Indeed, in the Anglo-American tradition from John Locke to the Founding Fathers to John Stuart Mill and beyond, sovereignty ultimately derives from the people. There is no legitimate government without their consent.

Since your author is an American, to quote from the Declaration of Independence (emphasis mine):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” To quote from the Preamble to the Constitution (emphasis mine):

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The people in Eastern Ukraine have suffered greatly from Kyiv regimes. If we are concerned about the will and the welfare of the Eastern Ukrainians, we must acknowledge their right to separate from a deeply dysfunctional Ukrainian State which has been propped up by the West for the sole purpose of antagonizing and weakening the Russia Federation.

The Easy Call: Crimea

So what do the people of Crimea want?

The demand that Russia return Crimea to Ukraine is a non-starter. First, it is against the will of the people — people whose families have lived in Crimea for generations, and in some cases, centuries. Second, because of its Black Sea ports, Crimea holds far too much strategic value for Russia — more so now given the increased NATO encirclement of Russia, and the stated ambition to make the Baltic Sea a NATO lake.

Any credible negotiation of a peace treaty between Ukraine and Russia must acknowledge that Crimea is off the table. The people — who identify as Russian — do NOT wish to be part of Ukraine, and Russia likewise will not yield the territory.

The real dispute concerns what the West recognizes as the Ukrainian oblasts of Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson — the four oblasts that form the Eastern border of Ukraine stretching down to the Crimean Peninsula.  Lugansk and Donetsk together compromise what typically is referred to as the Donbas — where the Ukrainian civil war had been most active.

The Donbas and South

In 2014, separatist movements in both resulted in the Lugansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic — neither of which were internationally recognized and both of which claimed autonomy from Ukraine. After each republic held a referendum on joining the Russia Federation, which allegedly determined that doing so was the will of the people (the vast majority), Russia subsequently recognized both republics and annexed them into the Federation. Perhaps needless to add, neither the referendums nor the subsequent annexations have been internationally recognized as legitimate. Yet.

More recently, and seemingly a result from the failed peace treaty efforts of April 2022, Russia has claimed the oblasts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson (as shown in the map above). Whether this is for bargaining power or is the price the West must pay for attempting to weaken and even destroy Russia by continuing the proxy war in Ukraine, only the Russian leadership can truly say.

Next, Mykolaic and Odessa?

More than a few Western commentators have speculated that Russia will further annex the oblasts of Mykolaic and Odessa (both west of the Dnieper River), cutting off Ukraine entirely from the Black Sea.

Otherwise, failing the neutrality of a post-war Ukraine rump state, the Russian Navy in Sevastopol might be facing off against a NATO Navy in Odessa — the port-city founded by Catherine the Great (although the area nearby has been occupied since antiquity). Moreover, Odessa was where Sergei Eisenstein filmed the Battleship Potemkin (1925) — the great epic of Soviet and indeed modernist era cinema. For both strategic and cultural reasons, no doubt Russia would prefer that Odessa not fall into NATO hands.

But all such for now remains speculation: Russia has made no claims yet on the oblasts of Mykolaic and Odessa, nor on the port-city Odessa.

Lugansk and Donetsk

The international community has not accepted the validity of the referendums held in Lugansk and Donetsk, and hence does not recognize the Republic of Lugansk and the Republic of Donetsk as either autonomous entities or as republics within the Russian Federation.

Yet there are highly plausible grounds for believing that a majority of residents in the Donbas do wish to separate from Ukraine. So this seems a straight-forward matter. Repeat the referendums but this time with international observers to ensure that the voting is free and fair.

The flaw with this obvious solution?  The USA and the UK will insist that such rewards Putin and hence Russia military aggression. The NATO military aggression which helped destroy Yugoslavia and then let be divided it along lines acceptable to the West — well, that somehow is different. But again, our primary concern here should be what the peoples of Lugansk and Donetsk want for themselves. Not what American and British politicians think they should have.

Zaporizhzhia and Kherson

In realist terms, with disregard for human rights, the fate of these two oblasts may largely depend on whether or not Ukraine will renounce its ambitions to join NATO.

If Kherson falls into NATO hands, Crimea can never be safe. If Zaporizhzhia and Kherson fall into NATO hands, both the Donbass and Crimea are threatened. All the talk of Russia’s historical involvement with these two oblasts notwithstanding, Russia clearly wants control of both for strategic reasons — they provide a necessary buffer zone now since Ukraine has at the urging of the USA renounced neutrality and seeks to join NATO.

But what Russia wants might not be what the people of Kherson in particular want. Although their voting patterns indicate the oblast leans more towards the Malorossiyan than the Galician ideal, Kherson is among the least polarized oblasts in Eastern Ukraine. In fact, they are more centrist than Odessa, their neighbor to the West and South. So it is not all at clear that the residents of Kherson wish to join Russia as a republic; and the same largely holds for Zaporizhzhia.

Do the people of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia wish to remain in Ukraine? Wish to form autonomous republics? Or, wish to ally with Russia as largely autonomous republics, but still part of Russian Federation? Only free and fair referendums can decide this issue. But these referendums cannot be held while the war is ongoing as too many residents have been displaced, and those in territory now controlled by Russia could understandably feel coerced. We do not need a peace treaty per se, but must have an agreed-upon and prolonged cease-fire so that these free and fair referendums could take place.

Under the current terms set by Zelensky and endorsed by the USA and the UK, no such cease-fire is possible. More bluntly, Zelensky’s pre-conditions for any peace treaty are best described as delusional. Unless the true goal is to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian who can be conscripted with no regard whatsoever for the people of Ukraine.

Realistic Considerations for a Peace Treaty

This war could end in short order if Ukraine would commit to military neutrality and renounce its ambition to join NATO. Russia has expressed no issues with Ukraine joining the EU — that is a matter between the EU and Ukraine. NATO is the problem.

But although the war could end in short order, or drag on for years longer, it will not end with the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 boundaries — unless those boundaries are mere lines on a map demarcating a nuclear wasteland.

Crimea and the Donbas: Gone

The Republic of Crimea, formerly the oblast of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, is part of the Russian Federation. This reflects the will of the vast majority of the Crimean residents, and moreover for strategic reasons Russia will not return the Crimean Peninsula.

The Donbas is likely lost as well. The Ukrainian civil war was largely waged within the Donbas, and was waged against the vast majority of residents. These residents are Russian-speaking, and/or have some Russian ancestry, and/or have kinship affiliations inside the Russian Federation. Further still, many of them are dual passport holders: Ukraine and Russia. Nationalists in the Western Ukraine often see this as questionable loyalty; nationalists in Eastern Ukraine see it as normative, just part of Ukraine’s greater Slavic heritage.

Yet again, this conflict between West and East Ukraine has deep roots, existing well before Ukraine as a state appeared on the map of Europe. But starting in the early 20^th century, the West-Bank or Galician ideal of nationalism had become irredeemably Russophobic: as the situation stands in the early 21^st century, the West-Bank or Galician ideal cannot co-exist with the East-Bank or Malorossiyan ideal of nationalism, nor can it co-exist with the longstanding realities on the ground in Eastern Ukraine.

The Ukrainian ultra-nationalists — the West-Bank Galician idealists — will now always try to purge and purify Ukrainian citizens with any affiliations to Russia. Since over 40% of Ukrainian citizens have ties to Russia by language, kinship, or even commerce and trade, this is a recipe for endless on-again, off-again civil war: which in fact has been the history of post-Soviet Ukraine. Hence the Donbas will almost certainly not be returned to Ukraine — nor should it.

Zaporizhzhia and Kherson: Bargaining Chips or Security Buffer?

Zaporizhzhia and Kherson might be on the negotiating table for a peace treaty — to be returned to a neutral Ukraine. But every day that goes by, this possibility becomes less likely as Putin has discussed the need for a buffer zone in light of increased long-range drone strikes and missile attacks. Moreover, Russian troops are dying while Russia fights to maintain control of both oblasts — this results in an emotional and political investment.

Western Ukraine, a Rump State in Progress

Putin has repeated stated that Russia has no desire to conquer Western Ukraine, and particularly the oblasts historically associated with Galicia. This makes perfect sense since Russia does not want to share a large border with Poland and Hungary, two NATO nations. Nor would the current Western Ukrainians make for good citizens within the Russian Federation.

Southern Ukraine and the Global South

The possibility does remain that Russia will further annex the oblasts of Mykolaic and Odessa, cutting off the rump Ukrainian state entirely from the Black Sea. But this is high risk. Russia’s partners in the Global South want this war to end. Many nations now understand that Russia was provoked — and that Russia undertook the invasion as pre-emptive defense, even if illegal under international law and perhaps also an ill-conceived decision. Subsequent remarks by high-ranking American and European officials have confirmed Russia’s seeming paranoia: there does exist an ongoing campaign spanning decades to weaken and even destroy Russia.31

The Global South wants Russia to survive. But this support can corrode quickly if Russia appears as the great conqueror of a weaker nation, and not as the victim of a NATO-proxy war and endless Western economic sanctions.

Likewise, the more territory Russia conquers, the more difficult a peace treaty becomes. Yes, Russia might gain some bargaining leverage — but at a blood price which could make the homeland Russian citizens highly discontent. Did our troops die so you could give this land back to the enemy?

The West also is likely to become more intransigent: having failed at the proxy war, they need to win at the treaty table. All the meanwhile, Ukraine undergoes further destruction, and more Slavic peoples die to the amusement of Western Europe and the USA — a matter to which two NATO allies, Hungary and the Slovak Republic, have already registered their considerable disgust and discontent.

Accepting Reality, Moving Forward

Russia, by repeated statements from their leadership, is open to a peace settlement which accounts for their security concerns, and which respects the rights of Russian-speaking or Russian-ethnic people in Ukraine. But Crimea is not on the table; and your author believes that one way or another, the oblasts of Lugansk and Donetsk are likewise gone. The Republic of Lugansk and the Republic of Donetsk will exist as either autonomous entities or as republics within the Russian Federation.

It would be insanity for the West to insist that Crimea be returned to Ukraine, and it would be a large-scale humanitarian crime of the highest order to force the citizens of Lugansk and Donetsk back under Ukrainian rule. It would be beyond insanity for the West to fight a war over this: Ukraine with the 1991 borders, more truthfully Ukrainian SSR, was a Frankenstein-state from the start, created and held together with violence by the Soviet Union.

Indeed, Soviet domination was the only unity which Ukraine as a state ever knew. Efforts at Western domination under the false flag of Ukrainian unification have already produced a body count which matches the worst horrors of Soviet rule, and an economic devastation exceeding that of Stalin’s misadventures in Marxism.

The dissolution — the subdivision — of Ukraine should have been predictable as break-up of Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia. So let it happen — but now, peacefully as possible. Rather than sleepwalking into WWIII with the survivors waking up to a nuclear holocaust, we should allow history to run its necessary course — even if that course does not run in the direction preferred by a small number of Western elites.

In Part I, your author explained how the data reveals that Ukraine is facing demographic destruction. Even if the war were to end tomorrow, Ukraine would be in desperate straits to find the needed base of workers — of economically productive tax-paying citizens — to support the elderly, the disabled, the retired, and the unemployed. To simply keep the economy running, the nation functioning. Why?

Because Ukraine has been dealing with thirty years of economic stagnation, an aging population, an ongoing population loss due to brain drain and labor migration, a fertility rate well below replacement, and now more recently, a military conscription which is devasting key age ranges in the male population, and a massive exodus of war refugees. All these challenges and more.  

But the demographic destruction which Ukraine now faces was neither unexpected nor — most shockingly — unplanned. It was recognized by Western and particularly American elites as a real possibility and even a desired trade-off. Part II below will discuss the planned sacrifice of Ukraine.

Screenshot from the George Soros website (2024) cited under Fair Use.

In no uncertain terms, the current catastrophe in Ukraine had been at least twenty-nine (29) years in the making before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The ground-breaking work was done in part by George Soros in 1993, now over three decades ago. Please go to the George Soros website and search the two-word term “body bags.” As of 14 April 2024, when last tested, exactly two documents will turn up: one from 1993, and one from 2015. Both concern Ukraine and Russia.

Body Bags and a New Purpose for NATO: Soros 1993 & 2015

Let’s start with the first, “Towards a New World Order: The Future of NATO” (Soros, 1993).  Since the Soviet Union had collapsed, NATO had seemingly lost its reason for existence. Or, in the words of Soros (1993): “the original mission of NATO was to defend the free world against the Soviet Empire” but now “[t]here is no direct threat from the region [of the former Soviet Empire] to the NATO countries.”

The Cold War was over; the West, victorious. Was NATO obsolete? Or should NATO take on a new and grander mission? Many of our best and brightest argued against expanding NATO. As Professor Glenn Diesen (2024) reminds us:

In 1997, 50 prominent U.S. foreign policy experts, which included former senators, diplomats, military officers, and academics sent a letter to President Clinton, warning that NATO expansion “is a policy error of historic proportions.”

The original letter, “Opposition to NATO Expansion” (26 June 1997) is available from the Arms Control Association website. The fifty (50) signatories included Robert McNamara, Stansfield Turner, Richard T. McCormack, and Sam Nunn — all individuals of distinguished service at the highest levels in times of war and of peace.

NATO expansion, they argued, would be “a policy error of historic proportions.” But George Soros was one among many others who was advocating a new and greater mission for NATO. The “Future of NATO” is that it would become the military might behind a “New World Order” (1993) — these phrases directly quoted from Soros.

According to Soros (1993), NATO should now be concerned with “conditions within states as much as relationships between states.” NATO would now intervene in the internal domestic affairs of other (previously presumed) sovereign nations — even if those nations posed “no direct threat.”

NATO would no longer be a defensive alliance but an instrument of global hegemony. To directly quote Soros (1993) again:

If NATO has any mission at all, it is to project its power and influence into the region [of the former Soviet Empire].  

What does this have to do with Ukraine? Wait for it, please. Follow his logic.

Much like the Marxist-Leninist International which Soros had despised and dedicated much of his earlier life to contesting, Soros also had a progressive revolutionary vision which was to be imposed upon various peoples and nations with or without their consent. Also much like the Marxist-Leninist International, Soros understood that sacrifices needed to be made because the end justified the means.

But NATO had a critical weakness, according to Soros: the necessary military interventions might be politically (domestically) unpopular. Hence Soros offered a solution to “reduce the risk of body bags for NATO countries, which is the main constraint on their willingness to act” (1993). 

That solution? Find other people to fight and die for this glorious global transformative cause. Again, to quote Soros directly (1993):

the combination of manpower from Eastern Europe with the technical capabilities of NATO would greatly enhance the military potential of the Partnership because it would reduce the risk of body bags for NATO countries, which is the main constraint on their willingness to act.

How do we know Soros had Ukraine in mind?  The Eastern European nations of Russia and Belarus were then and still are now on the Soros hit list. Otherwise, Eastern Europe typically but not exclusively refers to Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine —with the Southeastern European nations of Georgia, Romania, and Moldova sometimes added. Ukraine was clearly the major population source for the “manpower” to wage war against Russia. The cost-effective solution, politically and presumably fiscally.

Moreover, in this same essay, Soros names the nations of Central Europe — not Eastern Europe — which he considers as good candidates for NATO and hence would also need their risk of body bags reduced:  Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Curiously, he excludes the Slovak Republic — perhaps they were too Slavic, too Eastern European. Moreover, two decades later, Soros returned to the motif of Eastern European body bags, Ukrainian and Russian, in his “A New Policy for Ukraine” (2015) — which added economic sanctions to a NATO-proxy war against Russia. (A matter we will discuss later in this post).

A Recipe for Forever War

Soros and the NATO expansionists would carry the day — and the mission of NATO would greatly expand. The most recent NATO statement of purpose (4 Jul 2023) clarifies that

NATO not only helps to defend the territory of its members, but also engages —where possible and when necessary — to project its values further afield, prevent and manage crises, stabilise post-conflict situations and support reconstruction.

The phrase “prevent and manage crises” is a blank check, open self-permission, to intervene anywhere in the world — and not in response to direct threats but for vaguely defined crises or even potential crises situations. As defined by NATO.

For more information, the NATO statement of purpose (4 Jul 2023) refers the reader to the NATO 2022 Strategic Concept (29 Jun 2022).

The NATO 2022 Strategic Concept (29 Jun 2022) claims cyberspace as NATO domain, specifically names the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China as existing nations which “run counter to our values and interests,” and offers a general recipe for Forever War against a “vast array of threats” — the majority of which have nothing to do with military action. NATO (29 Jun 2022) now exists to

prepare for, deter, and defend against the coercive use of political, economic, energy, information and other hybrid tactics by states and non-state actors.

Who defines “coercive use”? Hint: NATO. What does it mean to “deter” the “political, economic, energy, information” and related actions taken by nations, organizations, or even individuals? Hint: whatever NATO wants it to mean.

This seems a straight-up confession of totalitarian desires and designs, even as NATO denounces “Authoritarian actors” (29 Jun 2022).

What could be more authoritarian than demanding the entire world should require NATO approval in advance for any and potentially all activities related to politics, economics, energy, and information (including media and cyberspace)?

You Now Exist by Permission Only

Obviously, the NATO 2022 Strategic Concept (29 Jun 2022) is a more sophisticated, robust, and grandiose version of what Soros (1993) called for roughly three decades earlier: NATO to establish a “New World Order” by projecting “power and influence” into Russia and other recalcitrant nations — even if these nations offered “no direct threat.” But this could get messy in a hurry. Expensive even.

Hence the Soros solution: combine the “technical capabilities of NATO” with “manpower from Eastern Europe” to “reduce the risk of body bags for NATO countries” (Soros, 1993). Politically expedient, cost-effective.

The Soros Solution Endorsed and Reiterated by American Politicians

We have heard versions of the Soros solution quite recently. Please consider the following statements by prominent USA political figures on why the USA should continue the NATO-proxy war in Ukraine.

• According to Congressperson Dan Crenshaw in May 2022: “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea” (The Hill, 11 May 2022).

• According to Senator Lindsey Graham in June 2022: “I like the structural path we’re on here.  As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person” (qtd. in The Grayzone, 27 Sep 2022).

• According to Senator Mitch McConnell in December 2022: “the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests” (McConnell,  21 Dec 2022).

• According to Senator Mitt Romney in August 2023: “it's [the USA support for the proxy war in Ukraine is] the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done. … And we’re losing no lives in Ukraine” (PM, 27 Aug 2023).  A few weeks later, Romney doubled down on the cost-effective sacrifice of Ukrainian lives in an exclusive interview with The Telegram (14 Sep 2023): “Damage caused to Russia makes Ukraine investment worth it.”

• According to Senator Richard Blumenthal in August 2023: “we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment. For less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half. ... All without a single American service woman or man injured or lost” (CT, 29 Aug 2023).

Numerous similar statements could be added to the above list. Professor Glenn Diesen, to whom your author is much indebted here, provides a thorough rundown in chapter 9 of his essential The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order (2024).

Damage caused to Russia makes Ukraine investment worth it

From Crenshaw to Graham to McConnell to Romney to Blumenthal, all of the above statements reiterate the Soros solution proposed three decades earlier. In a proxy war for NATO, exchange Ukrainian body bags for Russian body bags. Politically expedient, cost-effective. “Damage caused to Russia makes Ukraine investment worth it,” as Senator Mitt Romney did say (14 Sep 2023).

Since 1993, to use Senator Lindsey Graham’s fine phrase, Western elites been planning to “fight [Russia] to the last person.” Provided that person is Ukrainian. The weight for this by no means falls entirely or even mostly on George Soros. He generates ideas and funds their dissemination among policy-makers, but he has no executive authority.

Rand Corporation Joins the Chat

The Soros solution, although it has survived largely intact, underwent additional refinement and evaluation by the Rand Corporation, self-described as “a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis (Rand: About, 2024), but better known as the preeminent think tank for American foreign policy and military adventurism. As such, Rand functions as an extension of the USA Security State (the military-industrial complex and the seventeen alphabet agencies comprising the intelligence community).  

We turn now to the 2019 Rand report commissioned by the U.S. Army Quadrennial Defence Review Office: “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground” (2019). It retains but evaluates the Soros solution (1993) proposed over two decades earlier, and also shows possible influence from the perversely titled Soros tractate, “A New Policy to Rescue Ukraine” (8 Jan 2015) — which we will also discuss shortly. But the 325-page Rand report “Extending Russia” (2019) goes well beyond the brainstorming or trial balloon stage. It instead presents detailed and highly nuanced strategies and related cost-benefit analyses for among other concerns:

• using Ukraine to weaken Russia by providing lethal aid to Ukraine;

• promoting regime change in Belarus;

• reducing Russia’s natural gas exports and hindering pipeline expansion;

• imposing economic sanctions on Russia;

• providing support for Syrian rebels;

• et cetera.

One must wonder why promoting regime change, or imposing economic sanctions, or hindering Russia’s pipeline expansion and reducing their natural gas exports are concerns for the U.S. Army, the patron behind this report. 

But let’s move on to the report’s substantive content for three key recommendations:

1. Geopolitical Measures ~ Measure 1: Provide Lethal Aid to Ukraine

2. Economic Measures ~ Measure 3: Impose Sanctions

3. Economic Measures ~ Measure 2: Reduce Natural Gas Exports and Hinder Pipeline Expansions

The above are just three (3) of the twenty-one (21) numbered measures under the categories of Economic Measures, Geopolitical Measures, Air and Space Measures, Maritime Measures, and Land and Multidomain Measures. The recommendations under Ideological and Informational Measures remain unnumbered.

Given that our best and brightest are now and have been for decades openly planning to destroy Russia, this does have implications both for diplomacy and Russian trust in whatever American officials might propose. Moscow is not paranoid about American intentions — Moscow is merely paying attention.

Body Bags for Russia and Ukraine — or a Diplomatic Solution?

The Soros solution (1993) is both recapitulated and evaluated in “Geopolitical Measures ~ Measure 1: Provide Lethal Aid to Ukraine.” The Rand report provides a generally responsible assessment. It noted the strong support among key American politicians for escalating the conflict in Ukraine:

In a February 2, 2017, open letter to President Trump, Senator John McCain urged him “to provide defensive lethal assistance to Ukraine to defend its territory against further violations by Russia and its separatist proxies” in response to the uptick in violence in Eastern Ukraine.  McCain’s statement echoed a February 2015 letter from Democratic Assistant Minority Leader Senator Dick Durbin and Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman also calling for the United States to provide anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. (2019, p.98)

The report also discussed the possible benefits to escalating the conflict in Ukraine:

Expanding U.S. assistance to Ukraine, including lethal military assistance, would likely increase the costs to Russia, in both blood and treasure, of holding the Donbass region. More Russian aid to the separatists and an additional Russian troop presence would likely be required, leading to larger expenditures, equipment losses, and Russian casualties. The latter could become quite controversial at home [among the Russian public], as it did when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. (2019, p.99)

But after weighing both the risks and the benefits, the Rand team at this time did NOT recommend turning Ukraine into a new Afghanistan:

The option of expanding U.S. military aid to Ukraine has to be evaluated principally on whether doing so could help end the conflict in the Donbass on acceptable terms rather than simply on costs it imposes on Moscow. Boosting U.S. aid as part of a broader diplomatic strategy to advance a settlement might well make sense, but calibrating the level of assistance to produce the desired effect while avoiding a damaging counter-escalation would be challenging. (2019, p.103)

According to the Rand team, the conflict in the Donbass region required a diplomatic solution, not a military one — and implementing the military option risked a “damaging counter-escalation” and more.

Contra to US Gov and MSM Propaganda

This claim that a diplomatic solution was needed runs directly counter to the last two years of American propaganda which has declared that a Ukrainian victory is inevitable, nothing else is acceptable, and that success should also necessarily involve regime change in Russia.

Moreover, still in contrast to our current dogma, the Rand team specifically expressed concerns that increasing “U.S. military aid” might well “also increase the loss of Ukrainian lives and territory or result in a disadvantageous peace settlement” and such would be “generally be seen as a serious setback for U.S. policy” (2019, p.103). Correct. Yet here we are.

A Deliberately Weak Warning and thus Ignored — But You get to Say “I Told Them So”

That said, the Rand team did hold that more lethal aid could be provided to Ukraine: “but calibrating the level of assistance to produce the desired effect while avoiding a damaging counter-escalation would be challenging” (2019, p.103). A challenge. Given that we have several American elites who evidently suffer from either pathological narcissism or outright sociopathy, our leadership no doubt considered themselves up to this challenge.

Call this a win for Soros and the Russophobes, and a loss (at least partially) for the Rand team. When push came to shove, the Rand team were merely advisors. Those with executive authority decided that the possible benefits outweighed the risks despite the poor likelihood of success. Body bags, body bags: but Ukrainian and Russian, not American.

Economic Sanctions — as Approved by the Free Trader Soros

We turn now to “Economic Measures ~ Measure 3: Impose Sanctions” (2019) and rejoin the Soros solution as updated by Soros in 2015: “A New Policy to Rescue Ukraine” (8 Jan 2015). Since the “New Policy” concerns economic sanctions as well as body bags — “You say Eastern Europeans, George Soros says body bags” — and was published four years prior to the Rand report, let’s review it first and then Rand.

Soros had seriously misread both Putin and the situation in Ukraine. In other words, Soros “got high on his own supply,” so to speak, and believed his body bag solution was working. To quote the highlights of his misunderstanding (8 Jan 2015; boldface added):

• The financial crisis in Russia and the body bags from Ukraine have made President Putin politically vulnerable. The Ukrainian government has recently challenged him by renouncing its own obligations toward the separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine, under the Minsk cease-fire agreement.

• After Ukraine’s challenge, Putin immediately caved in and imposed the cease-fire on the troops under his direct command. It can be expected that the troops will be withdrawn from Ukrainian territory and the cease-fire will be fully implemented in the near future.

• It would be a pity to allow the sanctions to expire prematurely when they are so close to success.

Soros favored a two-prong assault. Ukrainian body bags make for Russian body bags — Ukraine becoming a second Afghanistan. Sanctions send the Russian economy into crisis. The cost of the conflict (human and financial), and Russia’s economic weakness because of the sanctions, create further political and economic vulnerabilities to be exploited. As proof, after Ukraine renounced the Minsk Agreements (at the urging of the USA, not mentioned by Soros) and resumed hostilities towards the “separatist enclaves,” Putin “immediately caved in” — showing Russia’s weakness (Soros, 2015). QED. Therefore, Ukraine needs to keep pressing Russia, and the USA-lead West needs to keep sanctioning Russia.

So Close to Success

Victory seemed just around the corner to Soros. Hence the bulk of his “New Policy” (2015) tractate was dedicated to urging, to demanding that USA and the EU continue to throw money at Ukraine (while insisting on reforms, of course, of course), so that Ukraine can both function as a state and as an antagonist to Russia. Eastern European body bags — Ukrainian and Russian — come cheap, but they don’t come for free.

We discussed in Part I how well — rather, how disastrously — Ukraine has been functioning as a state since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The poorest and most corrupt nation in Europe. Let’s update the expenditures.

The Real Cost of Propping Up a Corrupt State

To maintain Ukraine as a failed state and Russian antagonist, it is now estimated the USA and EU have spent more on this — after adjusting for inflation — than the USA did for the entire Marshall Plan which helped rebuild Western Europe after the devastation of WWII. The cost of the Marshall Plan (aka, the European Recovery Program) in 2023 dollars: $173 billion. Please do note the Ukraine Support Tracker at the Kiel Institute covers only the time period 24 January 2022 to 15 January 2024. Nevertheless, it estimates a total of 252.4 billion in euros or 271.2 billion in dollars of external support to Ukraine.

So thus far almost 100 billion dollars more than the Marshall Plan. What do we have to show for it?

What Soros Got Wrong

Soros made two fatal miscalculations. First, he greatly underestimated team Putin —Putin and his officials and experts. Where Soros saw cowardice, team Putin was exercising prudence, refusing to overcommit, and attempting to de-escalate a conflict which could only bring more suffering and misery to the Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine. Where Soros saw “caving in,” team Putin was engaged in the strategic allocation of resources, human and material. The conflict would not be fought on the terms or timetable dictated by the West.

Second, and even more grossly, Soros failed to understand that Russia was now part of a multi-polar world — with BRICS the most prominent manifestation of that multipolarity. Russia could turn away from the both the USA and the EU and still survive — indeed, perhaps even thrive. Why? Four key reasons.

First, Russia is rich in natural resources, including essential export commodities. Second, Russian (unlike the USA) has an excellent general education system, and hence a skilled and talented workforce. Third, Russia (unlike the West) has not undergone massive de-industrialization. It can still manufacture — produce — much of what it needs. Fourth and finally, Russia has trading partners other than the West.

BRICS Enters the Chat

Map of BRICS nations (Public Domain)

In fact, Russia has good relationships with India and China, the two most populous nations on earth — and home to a combined 2.8 billion consumers. Let that sink in. Since Russia and its ally Belarus also have consumers seeking goods and services, we might safely estimate that between these four nations alone Russia has access to roughly 36% of the global population.

These nations need the commodity exports which Russia has to offer. Russia is likewise on good terms with other nations in the Global South and also the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia. All these nations have good cause to be concerned about Western hegemony. All these nations have stark differences with the USA — and deep reservations if not outright objections to many aspects of our foreign policy agenda. All these nations also offer consumers for Russian exports and services.

The USA-led sanctions did NOT isolate and weaken Russia as expected. Rather, they helped turn Russia to Asia and the Global South and helped strengthen a growing alliance against Western hegemony.

The Soros solution updated (2015): sanction the hell out of Russia to isolate it and destroy it economically while propping up Ukraine to keep the body bags flowing. Soros is getting his dead Eastern Europeans, particularly dead Ukrainians. But it is deeply questionable if this remains a cost-effective solution, even if it remains politically acceptable to the West. Back to our best and brightest, the Rand team.

The Rand Team: Increase Sanctions, Weaponize the US Dollar

We turn now to what Rand team believed sanctions would achieve: “Measure 3: Impose Sanctions” (2019). Not surprisingly, their discussion is nuanced, thorough, and generally insightful with one glaring blind spot — but still strongly in favor of imposing deeper and more extensive sanctions.   

The Rand team (2019) realized that “U.S. and foreign interests regarding Russia might not align” which would make “instituting sanctions more difficult” (p.81). Although the “EU and the United States ended G-8 cooperation with Russia” and even “Australia, Canada, Japan, Norway, and Switzerland imposed sanctions as well,” many other nations did not. In fact, even after the sanctions started in 2014, Russia continued “to actively form a variety of partnerships with Middle Eastern and Asian countries” (p.74).

Moreover, the Rand team (2019) noted that even our NATO allies broke ranks when it served their national interests:

even though both economies [USA & EU] placed limits on cooperation regarding deepwater, Arctic offshore, and shale projects, the EU allowed partnerships in place at the time to continue, whereas the United States did not. So, while ExxonMobil has suspended a relevant partnership, Italy’s Eni and Norway’s Statoil have continued with projects that might have been banned by the United States. (p.73)

So as the Rand team (2019) understood it, the greatest challenge to imposing sanctions effectively is the lack of overall cohesion — of harmony among the sanctioning nations. Effective sanctions must be multi-lateral and coordinated, not unilateral —even when the sanctioning nation is as powerful as the USA.

But the USA could do more. The Rand team (2019) did recommend further weaponizing the US dollar since it serves as the default global currency:

The largest step the United States could take would be to institute deeper or even comprehensive financial sanctions on Russia. This would prohibit the use of the U.S. banking system by Russia or any Russian entity, as well the use of the U.S. banking system by any entity—such as European banks—that dealt with Russia or Russian entities. Such a move would effectively cut Russia and Russian businesses off from use of the U.S. dollar, which constitutes the largest medium of exchange for international trade and investment transaction. (p 79)

This is where the Rand team — like George Soros — shows their commitment to living in the unipolar past. Because as far as Rand team is concerned, the greatest risk sanctions impose is that they can damage American and EU business interests connected to Russia (2019, pp.82-83).

The MAD Pact Under Revision

Instead, the weaponization of the US dollar is driving not only Russia but also China, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and many other nations to seek or create alternatives to the international financial system built by the West and based on the US dollar.

Given our national debt, and the roughly 7.4 trillion dollars in USA treasury securities held internationally, the USA is engaged in a MAD pact — one of mutually assured destruction. If you do not continue to uphold the value of the US dollar, your own national treasuries will suffer. If you do continue to uphold the value of the US dollar, you both fund our wars and agree to our international financial system. As the saying goes, when Wall Street catches a cold, the world sneezes. But for the 2008 global financial crisis engendered by Wall Street hubris and greed, China did not suffer the woes shared by economies of the West and much of the then dependent Global South.

The world took notice. A plethora of nations are skillfully, slowly, and carefully decoupling themselves from the US dollar hegemony and the related international financial system. They are developing alternative institutions, working around the Petrodollar standard, and establishing new global trade arrangements which fall outside the purview of the USA. This general process has been accelerated by the American sanction regimens against Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Russia, et cetera. Below, a sanctions map with the USA in green, and our villains color-coded to the severity of their sanctions.

Image Public Domain — We’re running out of nations to sanction!

We continue to believe that other nations cannot survive — let alone thrive — without relying on the US dollar as the default global currency, and without full integration into the global financial system we have established. So how is Russia doing? According to a recent report by the Economist Magazine, no friend of Putin, “Russia’s economy once again defies the doomsayers” (10 March 2024).

The World is Getting Sick of Our Bullshit

For “Measure 3: Impose Sanctions,” what did the Rand team (2019) predict? High likelihood of success, and high impact (p. 91). If the USA were to put the screws to Russia, which the USA later did, then

deeper sanctions would likely cause meaningful harm to the Russian economy. They could also have a disproportionate negative  effect on ordinary Russian citizens while elites could maneuver to protect their assets. (p.84)

But China, India, Saudi Arabia, et alia, have NO interest in seeing Russia destroyed by sanctions. These nations know they could be next. Moreover, the world is increasingly disgusted with the American forever wars, the American sanction regimens, and the global financial crises occurring like periodical cicadas due to American greed, hubris, and recklessness. If or rather when the US dollar collapses, a plethora of nations are preparing not to go down with us. The MAD pact is undergoing revision.

Stopping the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline

Our discussion of sanctions and harming Russia economically brings us to “Economic Measures ~ Measure 2: Reduce Natural Gas Exports and Hinder Pipeline Expansions.” The Rand report (2019) specifically mentions the Nord Stream 2 pipeline a total of fourteen (14) times — it was then in the process of being built. This was the primary pipeline expansion which the Rand team recommended hindering: “A first step would involve stopping Nord Stream 2” to decrease both revenues headed towards Russia and “European dependence on Russia for gas” (p.62).

Rand deemed the Nord Stream 2 particularly troublesome because two other Russian gas pipelines, the Brotherhood and the Soyuz, were land-based and traverse across Ukraine: hence Ukraine received transit revenues, benefitting economically. Ukraine also had the de facto ability to stop the flow of gas — this could be used as leverage against Russia. Not so in the case of Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 (2019, pp.59-62).

German Interests vs. USA-NATO Interests

To their credit, the Rand team (2019) readily acknowledged that “Germany appears determined to complete Nord Stream 2,” and that when the USA attempted to sanction away the pipeline, the “German foreign minister and the Austrian chancellor argued that ‘Europe’s energy supply is a matter for Europe, not the United States of America’” (p.68).

           Link to the DW article cited above; link to the Ismay mandate, “the purpose of NATO.”

So respect for German sovereignty?  Well, as declared by the first Secretary General of NATO, Hastings Ismay, 1st Baron Ismay, the purpose of NATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” (qtd. in Maunders, 29 Oct 2016). The USA-led NATO protects Germany from itself, evidently. The Rand (2019) report provided no meaningful dissent from the Ismay mandate.

Well, They Didn’t Say “Blow It Up” — But …

The Rand team at this time did NOT sanction using espionage to destroy the Nord Stream 2 if it were successfully completed. They discussed and clearly favored economic and political solutions to stop the pipeline, even while recognizing these efforts might prove unsuccessful (2019, pp.68-69).

Nevertheless, Rand identified the Nord Stream 2 pipeline as a danger to Western hegemony — and this in direct contrast to the earlier Western doctrine that market freedom, interconnections through trade, and the resultant shared prosperity would contribute directly to stability and peace (2019, pp.59-69).

Moreover, the Rand team did position the USA as the international czar of economic development and energy policy — no international projects or agreements which do not both benefit us and have our explicit permission. A far cry from free trade — or even from fair trade (2019, pp.59-69).  

In brief, the Rand team (2019) did provide the intellectual and ideological justification for more extreme measures. This holds true even if the individual Rand team members might well astutely and vehemently oppose such extreme measures as both highly counterproductive and setting a ridiculously dangerous precedent for both nation-states and non-state actors.

The American Roll Call: Destroy Nord Stream 2

Now, with the Rand team (2019) contributions in mind, please consider the following statements made by major USA political figures — including the President of the United States, Joseph Biden — prior to the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline on 26 September 2022:

• In November 2019, Senator Ted Cruz produced a video for social media entitled “TIME IS RUNNING OUT, The U.S. Must Stop Nord Stream 2” (Cruz, 22 Nov 2019). Senator Cruz then followed up with repeated policy statements and legislative efforts dedicated to stopping the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

• In July 2020, then USA Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asserted: “We will do everything we can to make sure that that pipeline [Nord Stream 2] doesn't threaten Europe” (RFE/RL, 30 Jul 2022).  Such language might leave one to think the pipeline was an underground tunnel for terrorists smuggling weapons of mass destruction into unsuspecting European cities.

• In May 2021, Senator Tom Cotton declared: “Kill Russia’s Nord Stream 2, Let It Rust In The Baltic” (Cotton, 19 May 2021).

• In January 2022, still prior to Russia’s invasion in February, USA National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan stated during an interview with CNN: “We have made clear to the Russians that pipeline [Nord Stream 2] is at risk if they move further into Ukraine” (At this hour with Kate Bolduan, 14 Jan 2022).

• In February 2022, still prior to the Russian invasion, Senator Ted Cruz (again) implicitly sanctioned espionage against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline: “This pipeline must be stopped and the only way to prevent its completion is to use all the tools available to do that” (Cruz, 7 Feb 2022).

• On the same day in February 2022, the 7^th, still prior to the Russian invasion, President Joseph Biden claimed that if Russia invaded Ukraine “there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” As Biden was standing next to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at this time, a journalist challenged Biden as to how he would end this joint German-Russian project. Biden replied: “I promise you, we will be able to do that” (Video by Orf, 23 Oct 2022).

Other prominent USA officials made similar statements (Diesen, 2024: pp. 305-306). 

Only One Possible Conclusion

When the Nord Stream 2 pipeline (along with Nord Stream 1) was destroyed on 26 September 2022, the American mainstream media (MSM) could arrive at only one possible conclusion: Russia did it.

The above video by Matt Orfalea unflinchingly reveals both the journalistic integrity and the investigative competence of the American MSM.

The Proxy War, for Doubters

Benjamin Abelow has written an outstanding short book, more of a classic treatise, on How the West Brought War to Ukraine (2022). He provides a succinct but comprehensive review showing

[the] underlying cause of the war lies not in an unbridled expansionism of Mr. Putin, or in paranoid delusions of military planners in the Kremlin, but in a 30-year history of Western provocations, directed at Russia, that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the start of the war.

He treats this 30-year history of provocations in chronological order and documents exhaustively his sources. It is calm and measured scholarship, free of both rant and moralizing. (Your author in this post lapses into both).

The Big Eight Provocations

To summarize what the USA and allies have done to create the current crisis, Abelow (2022) lists the following eight (8) provocations:

1. Expanded NATO over a thousand miles eastward, pressing it toward Russia’s borders, in disregard of assurances previously given to Moscow.

2. Withdrawn unilaterally from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and placed antiballistic launch systems in newly joined NATO countries. These launchers can also accommodate and fire offensive nuclear weapons at Russia, such as nuclear-tipped Tomahawk cruise missiles.

3. Helped lay the groundwork for, and may have directly instigated, an armed, far-right coup in Ukraine. This coup replaced a democratically elected pro-Russian government with an unelected pro-Western one.

4. Conducted countless NATO military exercises near Russia’s border. These have included, for example, live-fire rocket exercises whose goal was to simulate attacks on air-defense systems inside Russia.

5. Asserted, without pressing strategic need, and in disregard of the threat such a move would pose for Russia, that Ukraine would become a NATO member. NATO then refused to renounce this policy even when doing so might have averted war .

6. Withdrawn unilaterally from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, increasing Russian vulnerability to a U.S. first strike.

7. Armed and trained the Ukrainian military through bilateral agreements and held regular joint military training exercises inside Ukraine. The goal has been to produce NATO-level military interoperability even before formally admitting Ukraine into NATO.

8. Led the Ukrainian leadership to adopt an uncompromising stance toward Russia, further exacerbating the threat to Russia and putting Ukraine in the path of Russian military blowback.

In this post, your author has highlighted the contributions of Geroge Soros and of the Rand Corporation. These are relatively minor to the major policy decisions and implementations discussed by Abelow, but important nonetheless.

The Structural Path We’re On Here

In 1993, George Soros was part of a larger movement within the Western elite committed to repurposing and expanding NATO — to using it to impose a New World Order (his exact phrase) upon peoples and nations with or without their consent. We know this because Soros openly said so (1993).

From the start, however, Soros realized that the nations of NATO might lack “a willingness to act” if too many of their soldiers came home in body bags. For NATO was no longer a defensive alliance but the military might behind an emergent new globalist Open Society — but NATO necessarily for the time being still consisted of nation-states, protective of their interests. Hence the Soros solution to “reduce the risk of body bags” from NATO nations: “the combination of manpower from Eastern Europe with the technical capabilities of NATO” (1993). Set Ukraine against Russia.

The Soros solution was disseminated and discussed at the highest levels in the West, and particularly in the USA. It was greenlighted because it was congruent — deeply compatible — with what other but not all Western elites were thinking. The West and USA especially knew well that Ukraine was a nation at risk: that it suffered from deep and pervasive corruption, from brain drain and labor migration, from human trafficking, from a stagnant economy, and from an aging and declining population.

The West and particularly the USA knew this because their experts researched and published extensively on these concerns. Your author has referenced in Part I of this discussion only a small fraction of the available data and reports concerning Ukraine’s economic situation, pervasive corruption, human trafficking, population trends, and the like. Sources referenced included the USA Department of Labor, USAID, IOM, and more. (Please see Part I).

We Chose to Sacrifice Ukraine … Because Democracy

We knew the population was vulnerable. We knew that war with Russia might well prove catastrophic for Ukraine — might well result in the demographic destruction of Ukraine. We knowingly and willing took that risk because Ukrainian lives —Ukrainian society — mattered less than weakening Russia, than gaining tactical advantage over Russia. In recognizing American active complicity, your author cannot improve upon the words of Senator Lindsey Graham:

I like the structural path we’re on here.  As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person.  (qtd. in The Grayzone, 27 Sep 2022).

For the vast part, the oligarchs have already fled with their wealth. The remaining men are being conscripted to be killed, mutilated, or traumatized. The women —deprived of sons, brothers, fathers, husbands or partners — are being forced into poverty and some into the sex trade. What is happening to the children, unspeakable. The remaining national assets, in what amounts to nominally legalized looting, are being sold to Blackrock Capital, et alia by a President who has suspended elections and taken complete control of the Ukrainian media. Because Democracy.

But Senator Graham, like some many others in the American elite, “like[s] the structural path we’re on here.” We will fight Russia to last Ukrainian man, woman, and child. Because Democracy.

Body bags, body bags.

The Soros solution. The Nuland agenda. The Graham structural path. Vetted but not entirely endorsed by the Rand Corporation. Your author does not see how the Soros solution differs greatly from what one European leader deemed the Final solution. An inferior population, Eastern Europeans in this case, must be sacrificed in a cost-effective matter for the greater good. Heil Soros, Heil Nuland, Heil Graham.

The World is Watching — and Waiting

But do understand that the Global South is watching what is happening in Ukraine. The Global South is watching what is happening in Gaza.

Your author unapologetically takes the stance of an American nationalist, and so must ask how all this or any of this truly benefits the USA.

Since neither morality nor international law nor even basic regard for other people seem to matter much right now, let’s talk money. Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen has publicly declared that we can afford to pay for two more wars — even as we have failed to pay the debts of our two previous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the current national debt is over 34.6 trillion dollars, and our infrastructure is decaying, and our public education system and our public healthcare system are global disgraces.

We cannot afford the current “two more wars,” the genocide in Gaza and the NATO-proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. Nor can we afford the proposed upcoming wars with China and Iran. Our unipolar moment in history is over. We should engage in defensive war only out of survival necessity, not offensive war glibly for perceived tactical advantage. Denying this (that our unipolar moment is over) puts both us and the world at risk — and at risk for nuclear apocalypse.

Nevertheless, we are told by all the usual suspects and sources that if Russia is not defeated absolutely in Ukraine, it will mean the end of Western hegemony.

What comes after the end of Western hegemony, my fellow Americans? Quite possibly, a better world if we are willing to work for it.  

Ukraine is facing demographic destruction. Even prior to the war, Ukraine possessed a fertility rate below the population replacement rate, had an aging workforce, and was experiencing accelerated population loss due to outward migration. In fact, for nearly three decades now, Ukraine has been experiencing “brain drain” (aka, human capital flight) — the exodus of skilled and talented professionals to (primarily) other European nations. The human capital flight has been ongoing because — and in distinct contrast to the other post-Soviet states — Ukraine has flatlined economically since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Data below on all these concerns.

The war has accelerated the migration, adding a massive refugee population to the already considerable number of expatriated Ukrainians. Military conscription, moreover, has further devasted key age ranges in the male population, removing men who otherwise had potentially decades to contribute as economically productive taxpayers, husbands or relationship partners, and fathers. Large numbers of men in key age ranges have either fled Ukraine, or been killed or disabled as a result of their military service. Please see American Exile, “Into the Russian Meat Grinder: Conscripts and Mercenaries in Ukraine” (19 Mar 2024).

We will run the numbers shortly, examining and visualizing the data from various respectable mainstream sources such as the UN, the World Bank, Macrotrends, and the Gapminder Foundation. For context, we will compare Ukraine with two other European nations possessing roughly similar population sizes for time period under discussion: 1991 to 2023. Those two contrasting nations are Poland, a former Soviet state like Ukraine, and Spain, a Southern European NATO state.

After reviewing what the data reveals, we will turn to even darker territory. It is no accident that Ukrainian men are being fed to the Russian meat-grinder. This was proposed — was contingency-planned — by the West starting as early as 1993. In other words, it was first discussed twenty-one (21) years before 2014 Maidan coup in which the USA helped overturn a democratically elected Ukrainian government, and twenty-nine (29) years before the Russian 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The plan, which was first floated in 1993 and subsequently refined and restated: use Ukrainian (East European) troops instead of American or Western European (NATO member) troops against Russia. Why? Because doing so would be more cost-effective and politically acceptable. Your author can prove this allegation based on evidence from still publicly available official statements and documents — Open-Source Intelligence. You are encouraged to read the original sources and verify for yourself.

First, however, let us review the data to understand better the tragedy happening in Ukraine: the demographic destruction of a society, of a nation. More truthfully, the contignecy-planned demographic destruction — the intentional sacrifice of a people.  

Ukraine: Economic Stagnation and Decline

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in direct contrast to the other former Soviet States, Ukraine has experienced economic stagnation and a general decline in quality of life for the majority of Ukrainian citizens and residents. This has strongly encouraged the exodus of skilled and talented Ukrainians, further impacting Ukraine’s economic prospects. All this has occurred despite — or perhaps because of — Ukraine becoming a special project of the USA. 

To quote the then Assistant Secretary of State for Europe in December 2013, Victoria Nuland, speaking at the US-Ukraine Foundation Conference (US Gov, 13 Dec 2013):

Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they promote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations. We’ve invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.

For American efforts from 1991 to 2013, what were our results at the time of Nuland’s above speech? Ukraine was generally considered the poorest and most corrupt nation in Europe.

The data visualization below shows Ukraine’s progress or lack thereof under USA influence. Again, for comparative purposes, Ukraine will be benchmarked against two European nations roughly similar in population size for the time period under consideration: Poland, a former Soviet state like Ukraine, and Spain, a Southern European NATO state.

Take a moment with the displayed data, please. In terms of Real GDP per Capita, Ukraine has not improved since it was part of the USSR. Ukraine has in fact declined. Billions of US dollars in support prior to the start of the 2022 NATO-proxy war, nothing to show for it.

The Poland-Ukraine contrast shows us the truth. Our American efforts did NOT contribute to a peaceful and prosperous Ukraine. But we did cooperate with and protect deeply corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs. In return, Ukraine would serve as a staging ground for Western efforts to destabilize Russia and force regime change. The evidence for this claim is presented in Part II, after the demographic (population and economic) data review below which comprises Part I.

Ukraine: Brain Drain and Population Decline

To no surprise, and prior to the NATO-proxy war starting in 2022, Ukrainians who could find better prospects elsewhere were leaving Ukraine — the national population was suffering decline in large part due to voluntary migration. The war accelerated this trend, but obviously did not cause it. The population loss due to outward migration clearly started the early 1990s and persisted over the past three decades. Please review the graph below.

We cannot blame the Russian invasion of 2022 for this general trend. In contrast, the American efforts to “ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine,” efforts which focused on controlling political outcomes and hence entrenchin  a corrupt but compliant oligarchy, most certainly did contribute to the Ukrainian human capital flight over the past three decades.

So we have both (1) a stagnant or declining economy mismanaged by corrupt oligarchs supported by the West; and (2) the ongoing exodus of talented, ambitious and skilled professionals — “brain drain.”

This holds also for many nations in Sub-Saharan Africa (Ndulu, 2004; Usman, et alia, 2022). To quote from a recent scholarly article in the peer-reviewed journal Sustainability: “human capital flight and brain drain, poverty, corruption, and inequality negatively affect sustainable economic growth” (Usman, et alia, 2022). No surprises there.

Add Human Trafficking to the Mix

We also have a darker side to the Ukrainian migration — one also shared by many nations in Sub-Saharan Africa (Ndulu, 2004; UN Office on Drugs and Crime, 2023). That darker side: human trafficking.

In 2015, one year after the Maidan coup which installed an American-friendly government, the International Organization for Migration (20 Oct 2015) issued the following “warning of the growing vulnerability of Ukrainians to human trafficking,” noting that

every fifth potential labour migrant from Ukraine [20%] is now willing to cross the border illegally, work in locked premises, or give their passports to their employer. Four years ago, this vulnerable group that would have been inclined to take dubious job offers comprised only 14 per cent of potential labour migrants.

Likewise, the IOM (20 Oct 2015) reported that the number of Ukrainian migrants working abroad “irregularly” — less politely, illegally — increased from 28% in 2011 to 41% in 2015. The situation has worsen not improved. Since 1991, the year for which Nuland dates the USA-Ukraine partnership, millions of Ukrainian citizens — many desperately so — have fled Ukraine in search of better opportunities.

Although this outward migration has strong similarities with many nations in Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern European Ukraine differs significantly in two related vital regards: the age demographic (displayed earlier), and the fertility rate.

Ukraine: Declining Fertility Rate & No Economic Upside

In the nations of Sub-Saharan Africa, over half the population is under the age of 30; in Ukraine, the majority of the population is over the age of 30. In the nations of Sub-Saharan Africa, for the most part the fertility rates are at or above the replacement rate: roughly 2.1 children per woman. Ukraine, similar to many nations in Europe, is well below the replacement rate. So even prior to the war, Ukraine had an aging population and hence an aging workforce.

Typically, in developing nations, the fertility rate declines when the economy advances; as a concomitant, more women receive advanced education, enter the workforce, and thus have fewer children. The general quality of life improves, but family sizes typically get smaller since raising children becomes more expensive both in real dollars and in opportunity cost. Not so for Ukraine.

We may compare the fertility rates for Ukraine, Poland, and Spain — all track the same general trend. But when we compare the Real Capita per GDP for each nation, we see that Ukraine is clear outlier among these (and nearly all other) European nations: for Ukraine, the fertility rate has declined well below replacement (roughly, 2.1) but economic growth remains stagnant.

From Demographic Challenges to Demographic Destruction

In contrast to its European peers, Ukraine faces the worst of all possible outcomes. The economy is not advancing — again, Real GDP per Capita was higher when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union! The population is both aging and declining —with serious consequences for Ukraine’s economic future. The fertility rate is well below replacement. And even prior to the war, the nation was experiencing an ongoing exodus of talented, ambitious and skilled professionals.

To support the elderly, the disabled, the retired, and the unemployed, from where will Ukraine find the needed base of workers — of economically productive tax-paying citizens?  The age demographic chart and the fertility rate graph show a nation facing significant demographic challenges. The bad news gets worse. The NATO-proxy war has shifted Ukraine from a nation facing significant demographic challenges to a nation undergoing demographic destruction.

The Men Conscripted, the Women Sex-Trafficked, the Children — Who Knows?

American Exile covered in a recent post (19 Mar 2024) the best estimates available of Ukrainian men killed or disabled so far in the war, or missing, or otherwise unavailable for Ukraine’s new conscription campaign with the draft age now lowered at the urging of the USA. We now turn the predatory exploitation of the Ukrainian refugees, with a particular focus on the women and children.

Although Ukraine has had a steady population loss since 1993, it did experience a mass exodus in 2022-2023, which presumably continues in 2024. The UN Refugee Agency estimates roughly 6.5 million Ukrainian war refugees as of February 2024. The data visualization below shows population loss per year, covering the time period from 2004 (the year of the USA-supported Color Revolution) to 2023.

Where did the Ukrainian war refugees go? The chart below shows the nations in Eurasia with — according to the UN data— at least 5000 Ukrainian refugees.

None of these nations were prepared for such a flood of refugees. Ironic, since various Western European leaders have claimed that Ukraine signed off on the Minsk Agreements — the peace treaty which settled the 2014 crisis — solely to buy more time to prepare for war with Russia. We discussed above the economic stagnation of Ukraine since 1991 — despite or because of the billions of dollars the USA invested to control the political outcomes in Ukraine. No matter. Human trafficking was already problem for Ukraine: the millions of refugees has made it a catastrophic one, but a source of amusement and sensationalism for some Western observers.

Sexploitation as Comedy with a Short Memory: MSM on Putin’s War

On 7 March 2024, on the Swedish television show Invandrare för Svenskar, the comedian Elaf Ali joked that the Ukrainian refugees to Sweden were blending in well at least in terms of appearance: “it's maybe most obvious in, like, the brothels” (The Local, 19 Mar 2024). This drew a furious response from the Ukrainian Ambassador to Sweden, Andriy Plakhotnyuk, who demanded an apology (RT, 18 Mar 2024). But in truth, Ali’s joke was old news — and the problem started in Ukraine itself and well prior to the war.

In 2013, eleven (11) years before Ali’s controversial joke on Swedish TV, the Australian filmmaker Kitty Green produced and directed Ukraine is not a Brothel— a documentary focused on the activities of Фемен, a feminist activist group in Ukraine dedicated to protecting women’s rights and hence protesting against sex tourism among other concerns.

Screenshot from the documentary Ukraine Is Not A Brothel (2013; 2016). Cited under Fair Use.

The sex-trafficking of Ukrainian women and children, however, goes back much further. Even the American government acknowledges so — albeit without accepting any responsibility for the failure of the Nuland agenda. From the USAID fact sheet Ukraine: Trafficking in Persons (16 Dec 2022), please consider the two following highlights:

1. Ukraine has been a source, transit, and destination country for human trafficking since the early 1990s. Men, women, and children are trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and begging and sexual and other forms of exploitation.

2. Prior to Russia’s invasion in February 2022, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Mission in Ukraine estimated that more than 300,000 Ukrainians had suffered from human trafficking since 1991. An estimated 46,000 Ukrainians were trafficked during 2019-2021; 29,000 abroad and 17,000 in Ukraine. 

Again, as the USAID recognized in 2022, Ukraine has had a significant problem with human trafficking “since the early 1990s” (16 Dec 2022).  Your author cannot improve upon a summary quote from the same fact sheet: “The population is extremely vulnerable.” Indeed, but our leadership knew this well prior to the NATO-proxy war. As we will soon enough discuss, they considered this — the demographic destruction of Ukraine — a risk worth accepting. Now we have the needed context for Ali’s recent and insensitive jest about Ukrainian prostitutes in Sweden.  

Child Prostitution and More

But we are not done with the sex trafficking yet. Again, Ukraine was notorious for sex tourism — including child prostitution — well prior to the Russian invasion of 2022. In 2003, for example, nineteen (19) years earlier, the Ukrainian Institute of Social Research published a damning report: “The Situation of Children in Ukraine and Their Vulnerability to Commercial Sexual Exploitation” (EPCAT, 2003). In 2012, nine (9) years later, Natalia Antonova, writing for The Guardian, described some of the dehumanizing horrors of Ukraine’s “prospering sex industry” which she found was “unregulated and scary” and “due to widespread corruption” (24 Apr 2012). Due to widespread corruption in Russia? No. Widespread corruption in Ukraine.

Fast forward four (4) years, the USA’s own Department of Labor noted in their “2016 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor” (US Gov, 2016) that Ukraine was one of the nations which had made “Minimal Advancement” in protecting children. This includes protecting children from sex-trafficking.  Thirteen (13) years since the 2003 report on “Children in Ukraine and Their Vulnerability to Commercial Sexual Exploitation.” Minimal progress — just not part of the Nuland agenda. That same year, Vice Magazine weighed in with “Western Sex Tourists are Still Looking for Love in Ukraine” (10 Nov 2016).  

So just what did the USA under the guidance of Victoria Nuland spend those five billion dollars on? In Nuland’s own words from 2014, “to give Ukraine the future it deserves.”  A future which like the recent past includes the international sex trafficking of women and children. But starting in 2022, with the opportunity to blame Russia, the Western media took notice again. The common theme to all these news stories — the evilness of Russia’s brutal invasion. Not the long-existing and ongoing corruption of the Ukrainian government, aided and abetted by the USA, perpetuating a failed Ukrainian society and state. Let’s go through a selection of news stories.

But It All Began in 2022 — Blame Putin

The BBC reported on “How the sex trade preys on Ukraine’s refugees” (27 Mar 2022) because parts of Ukraine have become unlivable: “Five weeks into Russia’s brutal invasion… Bombs, bloodshed, trauma.”  But the truth is that the sex trade was preying on Ukrainian citizens and Ukrainian migrants well before the Russian invasion in 2022 — the invasion just greatly accelerated an existing dynamic. 

PBS NewsHour (16 Nov 2022) delivered a similar spin: “Human traffickers exploit desperation of Ukrainian refugees and their children.” This is not false. But the report makes it seem as if all this occurred after the Russian invasion. In truth, to repeat, human traffickers have been exploiting the desperation of Ukrainian citizens and Ukrainian migrants (including children) for decades now.

USA Today: Farcical Humanitarianism

Credible research from numerous established sources shows that the sex trafficking of Ukrainian women and children has been an ongoing problem. (For a start, please review the sources cited above). But trust USA Today (23 May 2022) to come up with the only proper conclusion: “Putin's war in Ukraine is driving a hidden horror: Sex trafficking of women and children.” Where to begin?

The USA Today (23 May 2022) coverage exists in service of the American elites seeking regime change in Russia at the cost of Ukraine. It does not concern the actual victims — it exonerates the West. How so?

First, the horror has not been hidden, but it has become appropriated for political purposes after the Western MSM decided to worship Zelensky. Second, the driving forces are the stagnation of the Ukrainian economy and corruption of the Ukrainian government: not the NATO-proxy war in Ukraine. Third, it is fair and just to deem the war an accelerating force — but at the same time, Western leaders had to know (based both on data and on commonsense) that such was a possible if not likely outcome.

Who Knew — and When?

In fact, our leaders did know. We now come to the ugly and unholy. Truth so unbelievable it seems a conspiracy theory by Alex Jones. The sacrifice of Ukraine was contingency-planned years in advance. We now come to George Soros, the Rand Corporation, and various worthies from the USA government. (Continued in Part II).

Qualified non-MSM commentators have expressed their concerns about a possible collapse of Ukrainian defensive lines — a general rout of the Ukrainian military in key strategic areas. Contrary to what my fellow Americans have heard repeatedly, Ukraine is not winning — and has no realistic prospects of taking back by military force the territories already lost to Russia. Instead, poorly trained conscripts are being rushed to the front lines and fed into the Russian meat grinder.

Conflicting Estimates of Dead, Wounded, and Missing

We have no reliable estimates for the number of military personnel who have died on behalf of Ukraine. On the two-year anniversary of the invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky put the number of KIA (killed in action) at 31,000 (Al Jazeera, 25 Feb 2024). The NYT (25 Feb 2024) reported the same figure from Zelensky, but immediately clarified that American military officials have estimated the KIA count at 70,000 — over twice that reported by Zelensky, with an additional estimate of 100,000 to 120,000 troops wounded in action.

The Russian news source RT (27 Feb 2024) has estimated the Ukrainian military has suffered over 440,000 casualties — an estimate which includes both the KIA and the wounded in action. Rajmund Andrzejczak, the former chief of the Polish General Staff, recently offered a far bleaker assessment (RT, 19 Mar 2024):

The bottom line according to Andrzejczak: Ukraine “is losing the war” and “there are no miracles in war” (RT, 19 Mar 2024).  

For the record, Andrzejczak is staunchly anti-Russian, and has been calling for Poland to prepare for war with Russia. His bleak assessment above obviously counts the Ukrainian diaspora among the people missing and lost, but Andrzejczak is correct to suggest that many Ukrainian expatriates will not be returning. This will have devastating consequences — at least in the short term — on Ukraine’s tax base, economic productivity, and hence efforts to rebuild the war-torn nation.

Presumed Hard Data on Ukraine’s Military Age Men & Foreign Mercenaries

If we lack an accurate death count, we do have two recent efforts describing the mobilization challenges faced by Zelensky regime. The first is by the Financial Times (14 Mar 2024; paywall-free version, NewKontinent), “Ukraine needs 500,000 military recruits. Can it raise them?”  The second by RT (14 Mar 2024), “Moscow estimates number of foreign mercenaries killed in Ukraine,” which also reports on the total number of alleged foreign mercenaries active in Ukraine. The quick and the dead, so to speak. FT versus RT for our official sources.

FT has estimated that Ukraine had a total recruitment pool of 11.1 million men between the ages of 25 and 60. Although in the USA, one can join the military at 18 years of age, in Ukraine the starting age is 27. The recent proposal to lower the age to 25 has “sparked a fierce backlash from politicians who argue it would be suicidal for the nation to send its youngest into the trenches” (14 Mar 2024), but FT has calculated their numbers assuming such is a done deal.

To their credit, FT has also noted that “Ukraine has a smaller pool of millennials and Gen Zers compared with other nations, given a drop in birth rates after the collapse of the Soviet Union” (14 Mar 2024), and hence many Ukrainian parents are not eager to see their children sent to the front lines.

In truth, in Ukraine support for the war is far from universal. In fact, of the potential 11.1 million military-age men, an estimated 7.4 million are unavailable: these men are already serving, or are disabled, or have fled the country, or are in Russian-occupied territory, or are considered critical workers. The breakdown of Unavailable Ukrainian Men for the Military as follows:

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The Tragicomedy Revealed

According to FT (14 Mar 2024), Ukraine has an estimated 1.2 million men currently serving in the military — twice the number of those men deemed critical workers, at 0.6 million. But Ukraine has an estimated 1.3 million men currently expatriated — living outside Ukraine, with most of them in neighboring European nations. So the army of draft dodgers, to use an old-fashioned term for men who leave their home nation to avoid military conscription, exceeds the total size of the Ukraine military.

The comedy or rather tragedy does not end here. The 1.5 million disabled men — some whom are veterans of the conflict — exceed in number the draft dodgers. But the number of Ukrainian men living in the Russian occupied territories is almost twice that of the disabled men, and 2.4 times that of the entire Ukraine military: 2.9 million to 1.5 million and 1.2 million, respectively.

The 2.9 Million “Army” of “Occupied” Men

So why don’t we have a massive insurgency by the 2.9 million Ukrainian men living in Russian occupied territories?  In other words, what about the men living in Crimea, and in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts?  Well, Crimea is overwhelmingly pro-Russian politically and culturally; and Donetsk and Luhansk voted to secede from Ukraine and become independent republics. 

Please do recall that Ukrainian government starting using cluster munitions against the Russian-speaking eastern areas of Ukraine as early as 2014, just months after the Maidan coup. Yet despite the consistent demonizing of Russian speakers and Russian culture, loyalties in eastern Ukraine are complicated. It is not a given that the majority of these men would rather fight for Russia than Ukraine. But the ultra-nationalist campaigns against the Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens have not convinced the majority of these men that the Banderite cause is worth dying for.

The Big Question: Would More Men Make a Difference?

So out of the original 11.1 million men, FT (14 Mar 2024) has estimated that Ukraine has a remaining pool of 3.7 million men, age 25 to 60, who could be mobilized for the war effort. This comes at the cost of destroying Ukraine’s tax base and general economic productivity. But given Ukraine’s lack of military equipment, and Russia’s fortifications across the front lines, one must ask if adding more Ukrainian citizens to Ukraine military would make a difference. According to one group of highly qualified but non-MSM experts (Diesen, et alia, 17 Mar 2024), the answer is “No”: Ukraine has no military victory going forward. (See also Andrzejczak 2024 cited earlier).

It is worth recalling that as soon as the hyped Ukrainian counter-offensive of 2023 started going south, the NYT (18 Aug 2023) infamously reported: “American officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse” and that the Ukrainians were effectively wasting “formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers” by not following the NATO (American) doctrine and simply punching through the Russian defensive lines. Just shock and awe them.

The Obvious Failure of NATO Doctrine

Where to begin? For land warfare, NATO — more truthfully, American — military doctrine now requires and so presumes air supremacy. Not just air superiority, but air supremacy. (This doctrine known more formally as “Full Spectrum Dominance”:  for a start, see Mahajan, 2003; and Romaniuk & Burgers, 2017).

During the Gulf War (aka, the First Iraq War, 1990-1991), the USA-led coalition did NOT engage in epic El Alamein-like tank and troop battles with the army of Saddam Hussein. General Norman Schwarzkopf might have appeared as a modern-day Patton, but he had no Ernest Rommel to face off against. The USA-led coalition achieved air supremacy over Iraq, bombed the hell of the Iraqi forces, and then sent in the tanks and troops to mop up the remains. The Iraqi Highway of Death entered into modern military legend, becoming an exemplar for future conflicts. Provided the attacking force controls the skies.

   (Demolished vehicles on “Highway of Death” in Iraq, 18 Apr 1991. Public Domain).

Without air superiority, let alone air supremacy, the Ukrainian military counter-offense was fated to fail. Moreover, when attacking a defensive position, the rule of thumb is that the attackers should outnumber the defenders by at least 3 to 1. Instead, the ratio as even the NYT (18 Aug 2023) confessed was 1 to 3. The Ukrainian counter-offensive encouraged by NATO and endorsed by such luminaries as David “the Surge” Petraeus, former CIA Director and retired Army General, was both a collective suicide mission and a publicity stunt. Our leaders knew this.

A Suicide Mission to Keep the Money Flowing

Even if the Ukrainian military leadership at first foolishly committed to it, American military doctrine remained unworkable given the battlefield conditions. So we slandered the Ukrainians as “casualty averse” and wasting our “formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers” (NYT, 18 Aug 2023). The same “formidable Western fighting machines” which were blown apart by Russian airstrikes, drones, and artillery fire since Russia had air superiority from the start of the conflict and retains it even now.

But that the Ukrainians failed us, obviously, is the only acceptable talking point among the MSM experts and Beltway pundits — and NYT merely reported the consensus. The Ukrainian people are catching on to their Western advisors, and so are less willing to die for pointless talking points. Military recruitment in Ukraine understandably faces increasing challenges. This brings us neatly to the matter of foreign military advisors and foreign mercenaries in Ukraine.

A Body Count for Foreign Mercenaries

It would be a dereliction of duty NOT to send military observers to Ukraine. The USA should have highly qualified military experts on the ground reporting what is happening. We cannot rely on second-hand reports and signals intelligence. Moreover, this is a time-honored practice: governments sending qualified personnel to observe (what are nominally) other people’s wars.

It should go without saying that spooks and military observers from the USA and elsewhere are on the ground in Ukraine — but Russia is saying something else. Beyond foreign observers, there are foreign participant-combatants actively involved in the conflict. This is demonstrably true by even by American MSM accounts, with some of these men and women celebrated as heroes. But the sore point with Russia: under the guise of foreign mercenaries or freelancers or volunteers, NATO is sending personnel to maintain and direct the advance weapon systems supplied by West.

Mercenary vs Observer vs NATO Flunky vs Chaos Tourist

The recent leaked conversation between high-ranking members of the German Luftwaffe (AP, 5 Mar 2024) would seem to confirm this claim by Russia. But using Open Source Intelligence, your author has no good way of distinguishing who is an observer versus who is a participant-combatant. Although the Russian claim seems plausible, we must treat both this and their presented evidence with some degree of skepticism. Moreover, a gunslinger who originates from a NATO country cannot automatically be assumed a NATO operative, even if his actions may (or not) contribute to the overall NATO agenda. The world does not lack a shortage of desperate and dangerous men seeking cash, some of whom might be on poor terms with the authorities in their home nations.

This brings us to the recent RT (14 Mar 2024) expose, “Moscow estimates number of foreign mercenaries killed in Ukraine.” Yes, dear reader, Russia has also recruited foreign mercenaries to fight against Ukraine — but anyone who follows the MSM has heard these accounts already. So something new for you.

Based on the data made publicly available by the Russian Ministry of Defense (cited in RT and also released on Geopolitics Live, 15 Mar 2024), the choropleth map above shows all nations which Russia claims have sent mercenaries (participant-combatants) to Ukraine to fight against Russia. (American Exile releases this choropleth as CC0: Public Domain). Please note that Russia has identified mercenaries originating from the Global South as well as the West, from nations of BRICS as well as NATO. 

Top Five Nations Contributing Mercenaries

Poland is number one: as of 14 March 2024, an estimated 2960 mercenaries sent; 1497 killed; and 1463 alive or otherwise unaccounted for. Second place goes to the USA: an estimated 1113 sent; 491 killed; and 622 alive or etc. Third place, Georgia: an estimated 1042 sent; 561 killed; and 481 alive or etc. Fourth place, Canada: 1005 sent; 422 killed; and 583 alive or etc. And to finish up the Top 5, fifth place goes to the UK, home of BoJo, the slayer of peace treaties: 822 sent; 360 killed; and 462 alive or etc.

Top Twenty Nations Contributing Mercenaries

Although Europe dominates this list, the Americas are well-represented.

Globally, Russia claims that at least 13,387 foreign mercenaries have traveled to Ukraine to fight on behalf of Zelensky regime, and at least 5,962 of these mercenaries have been killed. We can break that down further via European and non-European nations. (Please note that the Russian data set puts Turkey in Asia, not Europe: otherwise, Turkey at 188 sent would tie with the Czech Republic at 188 sent for last place in the Top 12 European Nations).

Top Twelve European Nations Contributing Mercenaries

Again, this is based on data released by the Russian Ministry of Defense. So caution advised — treat it as if you would data “leaked” by the Pentagon.

The nations which emerged after the collapse of Yugoslavia are well-represented in this list. Otherwise, we have the usual suspects.

Top Twelve Non-European Nations Contributing Mercenaries

The Americas, Eurasia, Africa and the Middle East are all represented.

World War III has not officially started, but the Russia-Ukraine conflict has been unquestionably globalized from the start, given NATO’s expansionism, and the current effort to redefine NATO’s mission as a bulwark against China.

Polemic Conclusion

What does it all mean? Your author holds (and has held) the position well-articulated recently by Diesen, et alia (17 Mar 2024): Ukraine has no victory on the battlefield. We need a diplomatic solution which recognizes the security concerns of Russia as well as those of Ukraine, and which allows the peoples of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk to determine their own sovereignty as independent republics, or as largely autonomous regions within either Russia or Ukraine.

The borders of Ukraine which the West seems so eager to defend were created by the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in part to prevent the Ukrainian-speaking part of that region from becoming a majority. We need neither to respect the designs of Nikita Khrushchev, nor to keep alive at any cost his Frankenstein-state.

We should allow Ukraine to go the way of another former Soviet Republic, Czechoslovakia. When Czechoslovakia dissolved in 1992 to become the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, respectively, the West did not cry out that the world was ending. Europe cannot only survive but thrive after the dissolution of Ukraine into two or more republics.

Yes, this will embarrass NATO and USA. But that concern surely takes second place to a greater shared peace and prosperity in Europe, and the de-escalation of a conflict which still has the potential to result in a nuclear World War III.

When a government such as in Ukraine chooses to use cluster munitions against its own civilian population, outlaws the religion which many of them practice, and represses the language which many of them speak, the people of that nation have a right to rebel, to secede, and to establish a new nation that will protect their rights and liberties. As Americans, we should be supporting the independence movements in Ukraine — and not the tyrannical Kyiv regime.

Addendum:  The following data table as an image file was provided by Geopolitics Live, a Russian-backed Telegram channel, on 15 Mar 2024. Please treat it with the same caution as you would if the Pentagon had “leaked” it. Thank you.

Where to begin? The American MSM allows for no distinction — no breathing room — no possible difference between Likud Zionism and Global Judaism. In practice, in real life, if you criticize Israel at this time, you risk being labelled Anti-Semitic. If you do while a college student, your name might well go on a do-not-hire list. If you do so as a Jewish person (by ethnicity or faith), you are labelled a self-hating Jew — deemed pathological, and so not worthy of intellectual engagement.

Plus royaliste que le roi — more royalist than the king. Or more Zionist than an Israel citizen: this is the case for the American MSM, and it seems the case for much though not all of the American Jewish community.

Israel Discontent with Netanyahu

In Israel, criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu has flowed more freely. In a 26 January 2024 letter to Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, 43 prominent Israelis stated:

We believe that Netanyahu bears primary responsibility for creating the circumstances leading to the brutal massacre of over 1,200 Israelis and others, the injury of over 4,500, and the kidnapping of more than 230 individuals, of whom over 130 are still held in Hamas captivity. … The victim’s blood is on Netanyahu’s hands. [6; 7]

“The victim’s blood is on Netanyahu’s hands”: a quite different perspective from that of the American MSM, which lays all the blame on sub-human Palestinians, angry and hated-filled brown masses possessed by self-destructive fanaticism. This letter calling for Netanyahu’s removal does not exonerate Hamas — but it does show the crisis did not begin on 7 October 2023, and that the Israeli government was not entirely blameless. Who were the signatories to this letter?

As reported by MSM reliable sources — although the letter itself received scant MSM attention [6; 7]:

Among the 43 signatories are former IDF chiefs Moshe Ya’alon and Dan Halutz, Tamir Pardo and Danny Yatom, who ran the Mossad intelligence agency, and Nadav Argaman and Yaakov Peri, who were directors of the domestic security service, Shin Bet. The letter also bears the names of former CEOs, ambassadors, government officials, and three Nobel laureates for chemistry — Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Hershko, and Dan Shechtman.

The discontent with the Netanyahu government is not limited to these 43 signatories, nor did it start after 7 October 2023. As Simson Tisdall (Feb 4, 2024) has reported for The Observer:

For months before 7 October, Israel was rocked by unprecedented popular protests against Netanyahu’s bid to “reform” the judicial system and other controversies. He was accused of mounting a “constitutional coup” and flouting basic democratic principles. President Isaac Herzog warned repeatedly of civil war.

Protestors in Tel Aviv, Israel, June 2023, demonstrating against the Netanyahu government. Credit: Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images. Cited under Fair Use.

We had protestors engaged in weekly rallies against a Prime Minister they deemed an aspiring tyrant — the same political leader the USA has backed without question.

Has Likud Zionism Failed Israel — and Jewish People Elsewhere?

Are the actions and reactions of the Israeli Likud government, of Netanyahu’s coalition, endangering the lives of Jewish people in Israeli — and Jewish people elsewhere? We need at least consider this — intellectual honesty requires so. Moreover, blind, unquestionable, and unassailable support for Likud Zionism might not be the best or only American option. Further still, Israel is not all the Jewish world.

Your author is not taking upon himself to decide who is or who is not Jewish: the standard estimates range from a global population of roughly 16 million [8] to roughly 26 million [9], depending on if one uses conventional criteria or adopts the much looser Israeli “Law of Return” criteria. If indeed we have a global rise in Anti-Semitism, this potentially affects more than Jewish people in Israel or the USA, even if both countries together account for the majority of the world’s Jewish population.

Dissenting American Voices

If Israel has some dissenting voices to Netanyahu government, the USA also has some dissenting voices to both the Biden Administration and the Foreign Policy Establishment for their blind and unwavering support for Likud Zionism.

Four of the most prominent dissenting voices among many are Professor Jeffery Sachs, journalist Glenn Greenwald, journalist Max Blumenthal, and Professor John Mearsheimer. Each can speak better for themselves, and appropriate links will soon enough be provided, but to summarize a consensus:

1. What is happening in Gaza is ethnic cleansing, at the least — if not open and outright genocide.

2. Even if only a minority of Americans might think so, perhaps due largely to MSM coverage, it seems the majority of the world does concur with point #1.

3. The blind and unwavering commitment the USA has to the Netanyahu government works against USA global interests.

4. The condemnation of Israeli actions on the basis of human rights culture is not the same as Anti-Semitism, and Israel should be held to same standards as any other highly developed nation.

Globally, Sachs, et alia do not stand alone. We have across the world a growing condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza and against the Palestinian people. Please review the fairly recent statements by numerous African leaders, by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, to start.

More tragically, we have the more recent incident (29 February 2023) known as the Flour Massacre, resulting in an estimated 112 civilian Palestinian deaths and 750 wounded [10]. Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate, for The Grayzone, provide an update and breakdown:

The list of disturbing actions committed by Israel Forces in Gaza against civilians goes on and on. The world is paying attention.

The Harm to USA Internationally

Right now, in your author’s opinion based on his informal surveys, Israel and the USA, not China nor Russia nor North Korea, are competing for the most-hated nation status. You cannot turn the majority against you and still thrive.

Niccolò Machiavelli understood this well. From chapter XIX of The Prince (1532), “That a Prince Should Seek to Escape Contempt and Hatred”:

To be brief, a Prince has little to fear from conspiracies when his subjects are well disposed towards him; but when they are hostile and hold him in detestation, he has then reason to fear everything and everyone.

Living a state of constant paranoia, ever fearing potential attacks from any and all quarters: although such might be the realized wet dream of our Alphabet Agencies and the Security State, such is a dystopian nightmare for the citizens. Internationally, the USA faces growing distrust if not animosity.

Our Failing Reputation

In fact, back in 2017, the Pew Research Center reported “Globally, more people see U.S. power and influence as a major threat” (Aug 1, 2017). If, dear reader, you believe our unassailable support for Israel and our proxy war in Ukraine have improved our standing in the eyes of the world, please get a passport and travel about and listen to people. Ordinary people — not the MSM talking heads.

Real Problems, Bogus Solutions

Let’s start to wrap this up. The problem is not on American college campuses. Globally, we have a growing criticism of Israeli’s one-sided war against not Hamas, but against the Palestinian people. Please do recall, as The Times of Israel (Oct 8, 2023) has argued (verifiable by numerous primary sources):

For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces. …  The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from.

Screenshot of The Times of Israel new story. Cited under Fair Use.

Bottom line: NO to Palestinian statehood. NO to a two-state solution. YES to Hamas. YES, now, to ethnic cleansing — if not open and outright genocide.

Anyone who criticizes this, or otherwise objects to this, is labelled Anti-Semitic — or, in the case of Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey Sachs, or Max Blumenthal, a pathologically self-hating Jew. So now the problem comes into focus.

Far too many people across the globe are not down with ethnic cleansing, or with outright genocide. The joint solution by our Foreign Policy Establishment, the American MSM, and our donor class: designate these people as Anti-Semitic, and censor them and wage lawfare against them.

Human Rights are Anti-Semitic

Two obvious problems with this solution. First, it renders the charge of Anti-Semitic almost meaningless, trivial. If being against ethnic cleansing and genocide makes one “Anti-Semitic,” we should adopt the label as a badge of honor. The yellow star in reverse. Wear it proudly.

The Donor Class Stereotypes Global Judaism

Second, because of the refusal of the USA donor class to allow any distinction — any breathing space — between Likud Zionism and Global Judaism, anti-Jewish sentiments are on the rise. Your author cannot prove this. But your author tracks various non-USA sources: media, chat and discussion forums as well as talkative expats and locals. Your author has witnessed more comments about ZOGs — Zionist Occupied Governments — in the past few months than in the past two decades.

If the haters think that world-wide Jewish community can be reduced to the worst of Israel government in action as supported by the USA government, the haters think this in no small part because the American MSM insists upon it. Only one rabid, paranoid version of Judaism is allowed — and must be unwaveringly endorsed and supported. Or else. That part is not a conspiracy theory, but standard practice.

The Blowback is Predictable and Happening

If indeed we have a rising tide of Anti-Semitism, such naturally follows because of the actions undertaken not just by leaders in Israel but also by leaders in the USA.

We have criminalized any open and honest discussion of the Netanyahu government, or of Likud Zionism, or even now of USA foreign policy. In enforcing the current orthodoxy, we resort to name-calling and slander, shadow-banning and censorship, and other forms of intimidation and coercion which include do-not-hire lists targeting vulnerable college students. This may or may not win short-term compliance. It does not win friends. At home or abroad. It does fuel distrust and even hatred.

End the Unqualified Support for Israel

Your author is “America First,” with some qualifications but no apologies. Israel does not come before the USA. Our international engagements must serve our national interests, and not just the particular interests of the donor class. Our special relationship with Israel must end. If and insofar as Israel wishes to participate in the larger global community, Israel must find its own way without Uncle Sam enabling the worst of its behavior. Israel must learn to live with its neighbors.

Above your author mentioned four prominent dissenting American voices. For each, a link to source which provides an introduction to their views on the ongoing Israeli response to the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023.

1. Jeffrey Sachs: “Saving Israel by Saving Gaza” (Jan 3, 2024).

2. Glenn Greenwald: “Coward & Fraud Bernie [Sanders] Confronted on Israel Support” (Feb 22, 2024)

3. Max Blumenthal: “Biden bombs three nations in defense of Israel” (Feb 7, 2024)

4. John Mearsheimer: “Accusations of Genocide Against Israel: A Historical and Legal Analysis” (Jan 6, 2024).

As always, the citation or use of any source does NOT imply that source endorses American Exile or the views of your author, Data Humanist. Sources are cited for scholarly reasons — not to pretend an affiliation or affirmation. Thank you.

This post does. For each of the ten points, following the list, your author will provide more details and appropriate source citations via link. Your author apologies for the summary format rather than a proper essay, but better done than not at all.

Thank you for your consideration.

1. The Ukrainian Biolabs are real and contained (as of 2022) pathogen collections directly derived from the former USSR Bioweapons program.

2. The USA supported the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine. The new government that same year used cluster-muntions on Ukrainian civilians of Russian ethnicity in Eastern Ukraine.

3. Ethnic Russians have lived in what is presently Eastern Ukraine for generations — indeed, centuries. The current state boundaries are a relic of the Soviet Union.

4. The promise of “Not One Inch More” — no more NATO expansion — was made by our leadership to the Kremlin leadership.

5. The USA also subsequently REFUSED Russia’s pleas to join NATO.

6. The current Russian-Ukrainian conflict was not only predictable — it was forecasted with great accuracy in 2014 by John J. Mearsheimer in Foreign Policy — among many others. Our elites knew this was a highly likely outcome of their actions.

7. History shows that Russia’s security concerns about their Western front (their shared border with Ukraine) are well-founded. Not Putin paranoia. 

8. Despite repeated MSM claims to the contrary, we have NO evidence that the Russia plans to invade NATO Europe —Poland, Germany, the Baltic states, Finland, et cetera.  Nor does Russia have the military and economic power to do so.

9. Boris Yeltsin, not Vladimir Putin, destroyed Russia’s post-Cold War efforts at democracy and let corruption among the oligarchs run wild. Moreover, the Clinton Administration helped Yeltsin win an election which qualified observers deemed neither free nor fair.

10. While Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) was Secretary of State during the Obama Administration, the Clinton Foundation raised large sums of money from Ukrainian elites. Qualified observers expressed their concerns about HRC engaged in influence peddling.

(1) The Ukrainian Biolabs are real and contained (as of 2022) pathogen collections directly derived from the former USSR Bioweapons program.

American Exile has covered this with way-too-much verbosity and detail.

On 11 March 2022, the Pentagon issued a FACT SHEET which confirmed both the biolabs and the existence of the pathogen collections.  (For an analysis of the Pentagon Fact Sheet).

The labs did — and this verified true as of early 2022, with no further information publicly available after the invasion — contain pathogen collections directly derived from the former Soviet Union bioweapons program. (The Soviet Union ended in 1991).

In the words of Robert Pope, PhD, director of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program under the USA Defense Threat Reduction Agency, reported on 25 February 2022:

“they [the Ukrainian government] have more pathogens in in more places than we recommend.” 

The USA has been involved with the Ukranian Biolabs for two decades, at first for the best possible reasons — to prevent the proliferation of WMDs. Below, from 2005, Barrack Obama, then a Senator from Illinois, meeting in Kyiv, Ukraine, in a Biolab, with Andrew C. Weber, a Foreign Service Officer engaged in reducing the threat of WMD proliferation, who is showing Obama some vials of anthrax (Bacillus anthracis). This was not naturally occurring anthrax, but a source directly derived from the former USSR bioweapons program: hence a CDC Category A Bioterrorism Agent.

Yet in 2022 for certain, seventeen years after this image was captured, the pathogen collections were still there. For such pathogen collections, Ukraine lacks the secure facilities required by internationally recognized standards.

Ukraine also lacks any clear rationale for retaining — as opposed to destroying — these “research materials” directly derived from the former USSR bioweapons program. Based on Open-Source Intelligence, your author identified the Ukranian holdings at a minimum to include:

• Anthrax (Bacillus anthracis): CDC Category A Bioterrorism Agent/Disease

• Plague (Yersinia pestis): CDC Category A Bioterrorism Agent/Disease

• Tularemia (Francisella tularensis): CDC Category A Bioterrorism Agent/Disease

• Cholera (Vibrio cholerae): CDC Category B Bioterrorism Agent/Disease

Our leadership was particularly sensitive about this topic because we used false claims of Iraqi bioweapons to justify the Second Iraq War and overthrowing Saddam Hussien. Remember Colin Powel’s testimony before the UN Security Council?

The Scholarship on Powell’s Testimony
In her excellent analysis of the same, Kathleen Vogel, PhD, at the School of Public Policy, Center for International Security Studies, University of Maryland, noted (2014):

Within a year’s time, a diverse collection of government and nongovernment analysts had discredited the purpose of the captured trailers and all of the intelligence evidence about the mobile biological labs presented in Powell’s UN speech. We now know that Iraq’s bioweapons program ended back in 1996 and that it is unlikely that Iraq ever had a mobile bioweapons capability. (p 133).

By 2004, proven false. But let us rewind back to the moment.

As Gregory D. Koblentz, PhD, Associate Professor and Director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University, Schar School of Policy and Government, has reported the scene (2009):

With George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, seated directly behind him, Powell reassured his colleagues on the Security Council that “every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

What we as citizens hope for in a government report or briefing.  What our elected officials require to make informed decisions. What our allies require likewise. Facts and solid intelligence.

But as Koblentz (2009) has reminded us, things are not always what they seem (boldface mine):

As we know now, these conclusions were not based on solid intelligence. In fact, after the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, investigation of Iraq’s WMD programs has shown that every single U.S. allegation regarding Iraqi biological weapon (BW) activities was wrong. According to the bipartisan Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (also known as the Silberman-Robb Commission), this failure to properly assess Iraq’s BW capabilities and intentions was “one of the most painful errors” committed by the intelligence community before the war.

To quote that highlight: “every single U.S. allegation regarding Iraqi biological weapon (BW) activities was wrong.” Every single one. But these were not presented as allegations — they were presented as truths.

Unfortunately, we are now living the reverse. The allegations about Ukranian biolabs made by the Russian government which were denounced as lies and propaganda — these have largely been proven true.

(2) The USA supported the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine. The new government that same year used cluster-muntions on Ukrainian civilians of Russian ethnicity in Eastern Ukraine.

For the first part, they got Victoria Nuland, then Assistant Secretary of the State for Europe, on the wire. BUSTED! As reported on by the BBC (7 February 2014) and the Washington Post (6 February 2014) among other MSM outlets, we have both the recording and transcript from a phone call Nuland made on 28 January 2014.

According to the Washington Post (6 February 2014), Nuland’s conversation exposed a “deep degree of U.S. involvement in affairs that Washington officially says are Ukraine’s to resolve.”  Her “Fuck the EU” clarification in that phone call merited considerable attention.

To state the case less politely than WaPo, Nuland was running through a preferred list of candidates for regime change — she did not want EU interference, she wanted Arseniy Yatsenyuk as Prime Minister. By 22 February 2014, less than one month after Nuland’s “Fuck the EU” call, the US-supported uprising would lead to a coup against the democratically elected, but unarguably pro-Russian, President Viktor Yanukovych. Success! And Nuland got her man Yatsenyuk installed as Prime Minister. Putin responded shortly afterwards by taking Crimea. Win-win?

Writing for The Guardian back in the day when we had a free press in the West, Seumas Milne (Apr 30, 2014) pulled no punches in declaring that the “Ukrainian president was replaced by a US-selected administration” and so

Putin's absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive, and the red line now drawn: the east of Ukraine, at least, is not going to be swallowed up by Nato or the EU.

Back to the phone call. The BBC analysis of the transcript (7 February 2014) largely confirmed the Washington Post remarks, but also called particular attention to role then Vice President Joseph Biden was being positioned to play. In Nuland’s own words:

… when I wrote the note [US vice-president's national security adviser Jake] Sullivan's come back to me VFR [direct to me], saying you need [US Vice-President Joe] Biden and I said probably tomorrow for an atta-boy and to get the deets [details] to stick. So Biden's willing.

Atta-boy! Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, and Joe Biden: the band is back together, or rather, they never stopped touring. For more information, please start with Richard Sakwa (2014), Frontline Ukraine, chapters 1-4; and John J. Mearsheimer (2018), The Great Delusion, page 175.

Now we come to the second part, the use of cluster-muntions on Ukrainian civilians of Russian ethnicity in Eastern Ukraine. As Milne (Apr 30, 2014) stated, Putin backed the separatist movement in the Donbass, which was now in rebellion and seeking autonomy. The new pro-American Ukrainian government hit back hard.

Let’s share what the New York Times (Oct 20, 2014), once-upon-a-time our newspaper of record, had to say:

The Ukrainian Army appears to have fired cluster munitions on several occasions into the heart of Donetsk, unleashing a weapon banned in much of the world into a rebel-held city with a peacetime population of more than one million, according to physical evidence and interviews with witnesses and victims.

But never rely on just one source. After conducting their investigation, Human Rights Watch (Oct 24, 2014) concluded:

Ukrainian government forces used cluster munitions in populated areas in Donetsk city in early October 2014.

Yes, the pro-American Ukrainian government in 2014 used cluster munitions on Ukrainian civilians of Russian ethnicity.

Quick geography note: Donetsk is the major city in the Donetsk Oblast, in the Donbass region of Ukraine. Image below courtesy of Goran_tek-en, CC BY-SA 4.0.

(3) Ethnic Russians have lived in what is presently Eastern Ukraine for generations — indeed, centuries. The current state boundaries are a relic of the Soviet Union.

Travel back in time to Imperial Russia — think pre-Rasputin, not just pre-Lenin. The understanding was that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians all comprised one greater Slavic people — all descended from the Kyivan Rus’, circa 900AD to 1300AD. The Kyivan Rus’ itself, although it refers an amalgam of principalities, is more truthfully what some historians refer to as a “useable past” — a part factual, part mythical reconstruction. [ref 1]

Our current strong desire to separate Russians from Ukrainians has more basis in politics than history. But we do have some data on migration patterns. Russians began settling in relatively sparse areas of what is now Ukraine in the late 16th century. After the Cossack rebellion against Poland in the late 17th century, more Russian speakers inhabited lands in what is now Ukraine. [ref 2; ref 3]

Large-scale Russian settlement in the Crimea began in earnest after their victory over the Ottoman Empire in 1774. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more Russians immigrated to what is now Ukraine, particularly the Eastern regions, largely due to industrialization and economic development. Finally, there was a smaller post-WWII influx of Russians tracking the region’s economic recovery. [ref 2; ref 3]

It's hard to get good recent data because of the conflict and the politics, but the following data from a 2004 survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology is worth a look [ref 3]:

Russian is used at home by 43–46% of the population of the country (in other words a similar proportion to Ukrainian) and Russophones made a majority of the population in Eastern and Southern regions of Ukraine. [A breakdown of the Eastern and Southern regions by oblast (by province)]:

• Autonomous Republic of Crimea — 77% of the population

• Dnipropetrovsk Oblast — 32%

• Donetsk Oblast — 74.9%

• Luhansk Oblast — 68.8%

• Zaporizhzhia Oblast — 48.2%

• Odesa Oblast — 41.9%

• Kharkiv Oblast — 44.3%

• Mykolaiv Oblast — 29.3%

This holds with other more recent sources which claim that Russian is the most common first language in the Donbass and Crimea regions of Ukraine. [ref 2]

Finally, and again sources are suspect to political bias, but the map collage below [left; right] shows the location and percentages of the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine based on the 2001 census:

The MSM wants us to view Russia and Ukraine as two diametrically opposed entities, one evil and the other good. Their peoples and histories are deeply entangled.

(4) The promise of “Not One Inch More” — no more NATO expansion — was made by our leadership to the Kremlin leadership.

Mary Elise Sarotte, the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Distinguished Professor of Historical Studies at John Hopkins University, has worked the archives, done the interviews, and established a major chunk of the historical record in her masterwork Not One Inch More: America, Russia, and the Making of a Post-Coldwar Stalemate (Yale UP, 2021).

Not inch more as in “not one inch eastward” — the end of NATO expansion. These words were spoken by USA Secretary of State, James Baker, to the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, on 9 February 1990. The Cold War was ending.

The Berlin Wall had collapsed on 9 November 1989. German re-unification was underway. But as Sarotte (2021) explains: “thanks to the Soviet victory over the Nazis in World War II, decades later Moscow still had hundreds of thousands of troops in East Germany and the legal right to keep them there.”

How to persuade Moscow to remove those troops?

Moscow was not the only problem. In fact, Baker repeated largely the same words in a letter to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl one day later, on 10 February 1990, in an effort to keep Germany in NATO. From the German Government archives, an excerpt of Baker’s letter (boldface added):

Would you prefer to see a unified Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no US forces or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position? (Deutsche Einheit Sonderedition, 794)

Some context, please. Baker needed to persuade Kohl as well as Gorbachev that the USA was ending the Cold War, was de-escalating the threat of nuclear holocaust, and would be generous in victory. The West Germans had soured on all the USA troops and weapons stationed near their homes. As Sarotte (2021) reports:

Particularly unpopular with West Germans were short-range nuclear missiles. ... The shared, bitter joke in divided Germany was that the shorter the missile range, the “deader” the Germans.

How bad was it? This bad:

Polling showed that 84 percent of West Germans wanted to denuclearize their country entirely — not least because all of the nuclear weapons in the country were controlled by foreigners — so a majority would be not only willing but happy to trade those weapons for unity. (Sarotte, 2021)

So Baker faced a dilemma.

Both Germany and USA wanted those “hundreds of thousands of [Russian] troops” out of East Germany. But the USA and NATO had a considerable military presence in West Germany: over 900,000 troops along with the weapons needed for an apocalypse. If Gorbachev undertook an unconditional withdraw, other leaders in the Kremlin would have removed him from power in short order — and the recently ended Cold War might turn well turn hot.

Gorbachev needed something to appease Moscow. In turn, Kohl was ready to leave NATO if such were the price of German unification. But Kohl did not want to Germany defenseless either. If NATO stayed true to its defensive commitment, if NATO did not appear the threating aggressor, if NATO did not expand to take advantage of Moscow’s weakness and likely retriggering hostilities — yes, Germany would stay in NATO. Kohl could sell that to his anxious people.

Likewise, Gorbachev in his memoirs (1996, page 529) claimed that Baker’s promise on 9 February 1990 to halt NATO expansion had “cleared the way for a compromise” on the reunification of Germany and the withdraw of Soviet troops.

What happened next as they say is history. After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, NATO expanded against the repeated protests, warnings, and fears of Moscow.

(5) The USA also subsequently REFUSED Russia’s pleas to join NATO.

Gorbachev raised the possibility on 25 May 1990 (Sarotte, 2021). The issue took on more urgency after the USSR collapsed and it became apparent that many former Warsaw Pact states, Eastern European nations such as Poland, Hungary, and (then) Czechoslovakia were seeking to join NATO.

Gorbachev’s successor, Boris Yeltsin pushed for NATO membership more forcefully and vocally — to the point where the New York Times (Dec 21, 1991) took notice: “Yeltsin Says Russia Seeks to Join NATO.”

Otherwise, Moscow made clear it was threatened by NATO expansion. The Soviet Union was history. The Cold War won by the West and allegedly over. To rebuild their economy and improve deteriorating standards of living, Russia was seeking greater integration with Europe. Yet the West tightened the military encirclement of Russia.

In July 1994, with Yeltsin still making NATO membership noises, the Clinton Whitehouse in response closed ranks on policy and agreed that “Russia was never going to join NATO” (Sarotte, 2021). There it ended.

For an internal Whitehouse document directly concerned with Russia as a NATO candidate, please consult Madeleine Albright, “Memorandum for the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor, Subject: PfP and Central and Eastern Europe,” January 26, 1994, Department of State, Office of Information Programs and Services.

(6) The current Russian-Ukrainian conflict was not only predictable — it was forecasted with great accuracy in 2014 by John J. Mearsheimer in Foreign Policy — among many others. Our elites knew this was a highly likely outcome of their actions.

Around minute 44 in his 2015 lecture “The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis,” Mearsheimer bluntly concluded “the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path — and the end result is, Ukraine is going to be wrecked.” The lecture was a re-cap and slight updating of Mearsheimer’s 2014 Foreign Policy essay “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin.”

Now that Ukraine is in the process of being thoroughly wrecked, as predicted, it is worth returning to Mearsheimer’s original analysis. Ukraine, he held, must stay neutral (Mearsheimer, 2014; emphasis added):

• This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory. After all, the United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it.

• Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts on many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn those countries against Russia — a message that the 2008 Russian-Georgian war also made crystal clear.

The verdict by Mearsheimer (2014):

The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West.

We had two clear paths. One, business as usual. The other, shared peace and prosperity — at the expense, unfortunately, of the American neocons and at the temporary expense of our Military-Industrial complex. As Mearsheimer clarified the future outcomes (2014):

The United States and its European allies now face a choice on Ukraine. They can continue their current policy, which will exacerbate hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in the process — a scenario in which everyone would come out a loser. Or they can switch gears and work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten Russia and allows the West to repair its relations with Moscow. With that approach, all sides would win.

Lose, Lose — but business as usual, so no disruption to the Uni-Party and the Deep State. Or Win, Win. But then a world perhaps less slightly dependent on American military might and hence perhaps slightly less responsive to dictates of Washington. This prospect was more terrifying to our leadership than a nuclear WWIII.

So here we are — business as usual and possible nuclear WWIII. Seumas Milne (Apr 30, 2014), among many others, also saw this coming in no uncertain terms:

The reality is that, after two decades of eastward Nato expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west's attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure, via an explicitly anti-Moscow EU association agreement. ...

No Russian government could have acquiesced in such a threat from territory that was at the heart of both Russia and the Soviet Union. Putin's absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive, and the red line now drawn: the east of Ukraine, at least, is not going to be swallowed up by Nato or the EU.

The reality is that our leadership simply does not care because we — not they — have always paid for the consequences of their hubristic decision-making.

(7) History shows that Russia’s security concerns about their Western front (their shared border with Ukraine) are well-founded. Not Putin paranoia. 

Start with the obvious analogies. The USA would not tolerate China or Russia having large troop concentrations, military and missile bases, et cetera in Mexico and Canada. “This is Geopolitics 101,” Mearsheimer (2014) reminds us, because “great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory.”

Beyond theory or commonsense, geography and history make a conclusive case.

Geography and Military Logistics

Geography still matters because large armies whether on foot, horseback, or in armored personnel carriers must travel over land and be resupplied. (Large armies: so special operation units, and strike-force units which would work in advance of the main military, are not our concern here).

Russia’s great vulnerability to conventional military operations:  the western border it shares with Ukraine and partially with Belarus (a staunch Russian ally).

Below is a physical map of Europe, stopping at the border with Russia — Russia’s western border. A political map of western Russia has been placed next to it like a missing puzzle piece. The scale (fit) is not absolutely perfect — but you’ll get the idea. (Image below courtesy of GIS Geography, (c) 2022. Cited under Fair Use for Educational Purposes).

The Great Northern Plain to the Russian Heartland

To invade Russia from the West — from Europe, armies travel across the relatively flat expanse — the Northern European plain — which starts in Poland but expands greatly as one enters Ukraine (and to a lesser extent, Belarus).  Invading Russia across the mountainous territories to the south, or across the mountainous area of fjords to the north, has never been practical for large military formations.

History of the Military Invasions of Russia

So why should Russia fear an invasion from the West — from Europe?  Tim Marshall (2015) answers that for us:

The Poles came across the North European Plain in 1605, followed by the Swedes under Charles XII in 1708, the French under Napoleon in 1812, and the Germans—twice, in both world wars, in 1914 and 1941. Looking at it another way, if you count from Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, but this time include the Crimean War of 1853–56 and the two world wars up to 1945, then the Russians were fighting on average in or around the North European Plain once every thirty-three years.

Since 1812, the Russians have been defending their western borders against foreigner invaders roughly three times per century. But with a history going back far longer. The Kremlin knows this for certain: the roads to the Russian heartland, including Moscow, are through the wide part of the Great Northern Plain — Ukraine.

Imperial Russia did fight a war with Imperial Japan — the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905. This over colonies in Korea and Manchuria. But the heartland of Russia, safely behind the Ural Mountains and vast areas of bogland and permafrost tundra, has never been invaded by Japan or China. The threat comes from Europe not Asia.

(Intellectual debt acknowledged here to Marshall, 2015: Prisoners of Geography). 

(8) Despite repeated MSM claims to the contrary, we have NO evidence that the Russia plans to invade NATO Europe —Poland, Germany, the Baltic states, Finland, et cetera.  Nor does Russia have the military and economic power to do so.

Intensive propaganda by the MSM has repeatedly assured the public that Putin seeks to establish a Russian empire by retaking all the territory formerly controlled by Soviet Union and then some more. No evidence — none — has been offered. Just alleged or acknowledged experts repeating other MSM-anointed experts who also provide no evidence. Not like the MSM experts have ever lied in unison before.

Mearsheimer, the late Stephen Cohen, and others have offered their rebuttals / debunking of this propaganda. Your author will take a slightly different approach: even if Putin wanted to, Putin could not do this — successfully invade NATO Europe. We can take the USA out of the equation, please. The alliance in Europe, with no USA support whatsoever, is far stronger than Russia and Belarus combined.

As proxies for military strength, since valid and exact numbers are hard to come by, let’s crunch the population data and economic data, On one side, Russia and Belarus; on the other side, just six of the larger NATO nations — Germany, Poland, France, Spain, Italy, and the UK. If Russia were to invade the small Baltic nation of Latvia, these six nations (and more) by NATO charter would go to war against Russia.

Our data source is the CIA World Factbook for 2024. Some population counts date back a year so, but the differences are not enough to make a difference. For economic data, we are using the CIA’s Real GDP Per Capita figures — for a quick and dirty definition:

Real GDP per capita is a measurement of the total economic output of a country divided by the number of people and adjusted for inflation. It's used to compare the standard of living between countries and over time. (The Balance, 2020)

Population Comparison

Even if we include Belarus, team Red has roughly 41% the population size of team Blue — and that’s just six (6) of the twenty-nine (29) team Blue nation members. Yes, NATO currently has twenty-nine (29) European nations as members.

Who’s zoomin’ who here? European NATO has the overwhelming advantage in military personnel, actual and potential. But, but … Yes. But wars also count money.

Economic Comparison based on Real GDP Per Capita

Again, we will compare Russia and Belarus to the same just six (6) EU NATO nations. Please keep in also that Russia is paying for its share of the Ukraine war, so it has diminished resources to fund a greater war. The Treasury Department of Russia cannot print money and then sell debt like the USA. Now, let’s see the numbers.

It’s not even close. It is a brutal beat-down across the board by team Blue, by just six (6) of the twenty-nine (29) European NATO members. Russia knows it can neither invade NATO Europe nor win a conventional war against NATO Europe. Hence for Russian self-defense, nuclear options must remain on the table.

But We have Numbers!

Okay, let’s crunch the military strength estimates publicly available. [ref red; ref blue] These totals include Active Duty, Military Reserves, and Paramilitary (including Milita) — the whole shebang. Russia and Belarus combined have a total force across the board of 4,318,850 personnel — impressive! In contrast, NATO Europe, with the USA and Canada excluded, 6,011,246 personnel.

Simple math: NATO Europe has a military strength estimate roughly 1.4 times greater, and with the population potential to raise a vastly superior military force. Given that NATO Europe would be defending their territory under this MSM scenario, the defeat of Russia an aggressor seems assured — even without USA intervention.

But Geo-Political Logic does not Apply!

The final gasp on this MSM false narrative is that Putin is an evil madman who does not think rationally. So he will lead Russia into an invasion against NATO Europe because he is an evil madman, and that is what evil madmen do. (Please repeat the above with teary-eyed conviction in your best Kamala Harris voice).

This is not worth your author’s time. Based upon Putin’s extensive political career, Putin could be fairly described as Machiavellian, if one also acknowledges he is calculating as well as manipulative, and invariably deeply informed as well as ambitious. In his service for Russia, Putin has often been harshly pragmatic — not delusional. True, he does not serve the USA — Putin is not our bitch, irrational as that might seem to all the bitches yapping at him. The yapping won’t change the facts.

(9) Boris Yeltsin, not Vladimir Putin, destroyed Russia’s post-Cold War efforts at democracy and let corruption among the oligarchs run wild. Moreover, the Clinton Administration helped Yeltsin win an election that qualified observers deemed neither free nor fair.

Your author covered this in extensive detail with a glorious array of sources and citations. Please see “Why does Putin still have support in Russia?” (Aug 28, 2023). Below, an abbreviated version — although still TLDR for many.

Yeltsin Attacking Democracy

Yeltsin dissolved Parliament by force and diktat. He ordered tanks to fire on the Russian White House (the equivalent of the US Capitol Building), sent in paratroopers, and performed what some political scientists deemed a “self-coup.” He would rule by decree, not by consent — supported by the corrupt oligarchs and the West, not by the Russian people.

Even the Wall Street Journal, albeit again 25 years later, took notice in an op-ed by David Satter, “When Russian Democracy Died” (Sept 20, 2018):

Dramatically violating the constitution he swore to uphold, President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree abolishing the Russian Parliament, the Supreme Soviet, on Sept. 21, 1993. That set the stage for a two-day civil war in October, which cost at least 123 lives, and led to the rise of a dictatorship. By December a new constitution had come into force creating a super presidency and a pocket Parliament, the State Duma, which does not have the ability to contest executive power.  

Got it? By abolishing and then attacking Parliament in order to rule by diktat, Yeltsin was NOT engaged in democracy promotion.

A decade earlier than Satter but well into the Putin era, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty in 2008 published an op-ed by a member of that Parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov, who both witnessed the attack and was arrested shortly thereafter. In “Yeltsin Destroyed Parliamentary Democracy In Russia,” Khasbulatov (Sept 29, 2008) identified (at least) three major consequences:

1. Yeltsin “concentrated unlimited dictatorial powers in his own hands” as he “imposed on the country a constitution that does not even provide any longer for a parliament.”

2. In this new Russian Federation under his sham constitution, Yeltsin was thus left unhindered to conduct the "endless Chechen wars, Caucasian wars" which resulted in "a society with militaristic tendencies, a society rent by enmity, a society in which people distrust each other.”

3. And this “war psychology” in turn “has left an indelible mark on the individual and collective consciousness; it is the source of mutual ill-will and the massive increase in corruption.”

Perhaps you think Khasbulatov (Sept 29, 2008) has exaggerated, a woulda coulda shoulda lament, but there is more. We come now to operation re-elect Yeltsin, our naughty boy, our big man in Moscow.

Yeltsin Winning an Unfair and Unfree Election with American Assistance

The Clinton administration, as Cohen (2018) has explained, “arranged for American election operatives to encamp in Moscow to help manage his [Yeltsin’s] campaign.”

Interference in a foreign election? Well, as Cohen (2018) again has recorded:

So large was the role of the American “advisers” in Yeltsin’s (purported) victory that Time magazine bannered it, “Yanks to The Rescue,” on its July 15, 1996 cover and ShowTime made a feature film, “Spinning Boris,” about their heroic exploits as late as 2003. No one asked, as we should, whether any Americans should be so intimately involved in any foreign elections.

All this does — or should — add comedic context to vastly overblown claims of “Russiagate”: the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election. But “Spinning Boris” was not enough. We will skip the oligarch participation for now and cut to the voter fraud. Bear with the history lesson, please.

The fall of the Soviet Union followed by the comedically tragic dysfunctional government of Yeltsin resulted in hardships for the people of Chechnya, then (and now again) a republic within Russia. To simplify a complex history, the Russian citizens of the Chechen Republic gave up on reforms and sought independence instead. The Chechen peoples are generally ethnically and culturally distinguishable from Slavic Russians, and Islam is the dominant religion in the republic.

Although the Chechens initially succeeded with their independence movement and did establish a de facto state, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Yeltsin responded with a brutal, multi-year crackdown. Our concern here is the First Chechen War, from December 1994 to August 1996, as it impacted the election in a strange and wonderous way. The brief summary below derived largely from Sarotte (2021).

The First Chechen War resulted in a crisis of Chechen refugees (people who fled Russia entirely) and IDPs (internally displaced persons). When election time rolled around, international observers estimated that fewer than 500 thousand (1/2 million) adults remained in Chechnya.

Your turn. Please estimate the number of Chechens who voted in the 1996 Russian presidential election.

Now, please estimate the number of Chechen votes counted by Russian election officials. If for this second estimate, you guessed over 1 million votes, you are correct!

Now, please guess which candidate received about 70% of these 1 million plus Chechen votes. Boris Yeltsin, the incumbent, who was waging war against Chechnya? Or his opposition?

The correct answer is “Yeltsin.” The Democratic reformer. Below, selected scenes from his “get-out-the-vote” campaign.

As Sarotte (2021) has reported:

Later, a member of the OSCE election-observation team claimed that he was pressured not to reveal the “widespread voter fraud” he had witnessed. A US diplomat serving in the Moscow embassy at the time of the election, Thomas Graham, asserted that the Clinton administration knew the election was not truly fair, but it was a case of “the ends justifying the means.”

The election was neither free nor fair; moreover, it was subjected to massive foreign interference. But permanent Washington, the Clinton administration, and most of our Foreign Policy intelligentsia celebrated both the tactics and the outcome because we got our man in Moscow re-elected. When Yeltsin was unable to finish out his term, he appointed Vladmir Putin. Credit Spinning Boris, credit operation re-elect Yeltsin, for ensuring Putin’s rise to the top. Please see American Exile (Aug 28, 2023) for more info.

(10) While Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) was Secretary of State during the Obama Administration, the Clinton Foundation raised large sums of money from Ukrainian elites. Qualified observers expressed their concerns about HRC engaged in influence peddling.

This was allegedly debunked by one or more of the fact-checking entities which sprung-up during the Covid lockdowns in the USA. Some poor right-winger claimed on Twitter (now X) that Hillary Rodham Clinton accepted money from Ukrainian government officials. Nope, and that was NEVER the actual news story, but the thought-police had a dance-orgy on the digital grave of a presumed Alex Jones wannabe.

Let’s walk it back. As the Wall Street Journal (19 March 2015) — that Wall Street Journal — reported in “Clinton Charity Tapped Foreign Friends,” we had high-ranking Ukrainian nationals who were very interested in making contacts and friends with high-raking American nationals. These Ukrainians were not government officials — although they certainly had strong ties to various members of the Ukrainian government and certain wannabe members, these donors were generally counted among the wealthy and powerful oligarchs. That part NOT debunked.

Between 1999 and 2014 — the year of Ukrainian coup, these Ukrainian nationals made donations totaling $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In fact, grouping the donors by nationality, Ukraine led all other nations — with the much wealthier Saudi Arabia, for comparison, behind at $7.3 million. That part NOT debunked.

Given that Hillary Clinton was a USA Senator from 2001 to 2009, and then USA Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, this raised some obvious concerns about possible conflicts of interest. Even the hard-left VOX took notice, albeit over a year after the WSJ: “4 experts make the case that the Clinton Foundation’s fundraising was troubling” (Aug 25, 2016). Got it? Like the WSJ, VOX was also concerned about the possibility of influence peddling.

If this was “troubling” to four handpicked experts by VOX, one can only wonder how Russia understood it. Because after the 2014 coup, Ukrainian state violence against Ukrainian citizens of Russian ethnicity began escalating.

For example, genuine Neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian National Guard repeatedly committed acts of terror and violence, including killings. The USA Congress HAD (past tense) a ban on funding these Neo-Nazis. Read all about it in the reliably left-wing Nation (Jan 16, 2016). That ban was removed in 2018. Git some!

To ensure plausible deniability, Congress did impose a ban on directly supplying the same militias with USA military weapons. Read about that in the Hill (Mar 27, 2018). So at this time, money, YES; our military weapons, NO. But how was such enforced? Where did the money go? Et cetera. Meanwhile, supported by the USA, the Ukrainian government was killing Ukrainian citizens of Russian ethnicity. Because democracy?

Demography as Destiny

What is now deemed a right-wing conspiracy, the “Great Replacement Theory,” was a mainstay of your author’s graduate school years among the Left in the late 1980s — early 1990s: demography is destiny, we said. A few short years later, this would go mainstream.

Noted liberal thought-leader Professor Paul Starr, writing for the American Prospect in 1997, discussed the seeming inevitability of “An Emerging Democratic Majority.”  This “Democratic Majority” would result from irreversible demographic change: more brown people, to state it crudely but fairly. Noted leftist journalist and public intellectual John B. Judis, in cooperation and co-authorship with Democratic Party strategist and Professor of Political Science Ruy Teixeira, published in 2002 The Emerging Democratic Majority, a book-length extrapolation on essentially the theme advanced by Starr and many others: demographic change equals Democratic votes. This effort did NOT go unnoticed — being designated as one of the Economist’s Best Books of Year and winning the Washington Monthly’s annual Political Book award.

By the early 21^st century, demographic change as political destiny (aka, “the Great Replacement Theory”) was well on the way to becoming liberal dogma, a commonsense equation beyond questioning.

Democratic Thought-Leaders in Hive-Mind Unison

Enter belatedly Steve Phillips, an acknowledged MSM expert on American race-relationships, frequent contributor to the usual MSM outlets, and currently a Senior Fellow at the liberal think-tank / activist organization American Progress. Phillips restated the case bluntly in his 2016 tome Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution has Created a New American Majority. Although nearly 20 years after Starr and 14 years after Judis and Teixeira, the contribution by Phillips likewise did not go unnoticed. His book was praised by luminaries such as Van Jones, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Senator Corey Booker, John Podesta, and more; as well, it was favorably reviewed by nearly all the usual MSM outlets. (Surprise, surprise). Thus from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s at least, the intellectual history is undeniable — the record established beyond doubt.

But like the “N” word, your group can’t say it

Strange as it seems to your author, on the issue of massive illegal immigration to the USA, Tucker Carlson is deemed trafficking in a racist, right-wing conspiracy theory. Instead, Carlson is largely repeating the bromides of the intellectual left: demographic change as political destiny, brown is the new white, a new super-majority for the Democratic Party, et cetera.

But Carlson — along with our aforementioned liberal and/or progressive luminaries —also likely has it wrong. We will get to that — but let’s first start with some factual mistakes and perhaps unintentional distortions from his recent (Feb 2, 2024) interview with Bret Weinstein.

Sloppy, Tucker — Five Minutes of Research

Carlson begins by distorting the media coverage on the Darien Gap and assigning to Bret Weinstein undeserved grandiosity and gravitas. Why does these concerns matter? Because the evil at hand is great enough without theatrics and distractions — all of which undermine Carlson’s creditability, to start. As the saying goes: “Five minutes of research.” Carlson has a production team — he has no excuses.

In his interview with Bret Weinstein, Carlson (Feb 2, 2024) claims that “almost no one has taken the time to go the Darien Gap to find out what’s happening there” and so it took “a world-renown biologist [Bret Weinstein] to do that – not a journalist.” Where to begin?

The MSM most certainly has covered the Darien Gap, even if not to the level of detail or slant that Carlson would desire. Adam Yamaguchi for CBS, and now almost seven years ago, authored “The Darien Gap — A Desperate Journey” (Oct 9, 2017): an on-the-scene special report complete with photos and extensive video. Even PBS, for their NewsHour series, dealt with the issue almost four years ago: “What Migrants Face as They Journey Through the Deadly Darien Gap” (Aug 13, 2020). PBS!

Give Due Credit

But far more to point, and prior to Professor Weinstein’s sally forth, we have excellent journalist coverage on Darien Gap by two different men who have spent considerable time there: Oscar Blue Ramirez and Michael Yon.

It was Oscar Blue Ramirez who broke the stories — plural — of how the United Nations (UN) enables and encourages the illegal immigration:  from providing temporary housing along the route to providing what amounts to pre-rape kits for avoiding unwanted pregnancies. Carlson assigns all the UN-expose credit to Weinstein, who contributes nothing new and considerably less overall than Ramirez.

Possibly in response to the recent Carlson interview, Ramirez did a recent and somewhat rambling summary on the UN’s ventures (please see below) — but if you check Ramirez’s body of work, you will find he has been on this topic for some time.

This brings us to the unarguably eccentric Michael Yon who unquestionably puts his ass on the line by not just touring dangerous areas but immersing himself in the same.

Like Ramirez, Yon has also spent considerable time in Darien Gap and along other parts of the immigration trail. On the same, and now for the past several years, Yon has reported for numerous and various alternative media outlets, most notably the Epoch Times, NTD News, and various Substacks – including his own. Moreover, in 2021, Yon was a featured speaker for the Center of Immigration Studies on the Darien Gap. A video clip from the same below:

See also the Washington Examiner exclusive by Tori Richards from the same year, 2021, based on Yon’s raw reportage: “Murder, robbery, and 'Mountain of Death' await migrants crossing the Darien Gap” (Aug 17, 2021).

Anyone who takes these issues seriously knows — or knows of — the work of Ramirez and Yon. Full stop.

And Chill the Hype

But Carlson (Feb 2, 2024) would have us believe that “almost no one has taken the time to go the Darien Gap to find out what’s happening there” and so it took “a world-renown biologist [Bret Weinstein].” Guess what? As an academic, Professor Bret Weinstein was no H. Allen Orr: Weinstein was NOT world-renown as a biologist — not in scientific circles.

Weinstein’s research accomplishments and publication record were appropriate for what amounted to a tenured teaching position at Evergreen State College. After his ghastly and deeply unjust woke crucifixion, Weinstein has done an outstanding job of re-inventing himself as a noteworthy public intellectual. Someone actually worth listening to. He deserves immense respect and credit for doing so — but he should not be represented a former major force in the biological sciences. Just bullshit.

But the Chinese!

What else?

Carlson and Weinstein (Feb 2, 2024) have discovered that Chinese nationals are among the illegal immigrants. (Not news). Wait for it — it gets better. The majority of these Chinese nationals are males, and most of those males are “of military age.” Speculation time by Carlson and Weinstein: sleeper cells?  A CCP plot to infiltrate the USA? To set-up potential terrorist networks?  Woo, woo. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Your author has actual time on the ground in mainland China, working with young people “of military age” — college students and graduate students, some of whom were in the military.  Common enough in mainland China. Your author would like to submit a different hypothesis.

One needs to know something about China, to start — so start with the “Ant Tribe” and “996”. Here — to the shock of your author — Wikipedia is actually useful:

• "Ant tribe" 蚁族  is a “neologism for a group of low-income university graduates who settle for a poverty-level existence in the cities of China.”

• The “996 working hour system” requires that “employees work from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, 6 days per week.”

The deal-lio for real-lio. A young person can graduate college and have absolutely miserable prospects. If the person went to the right university or has the right connections, a bright future is possible. If otherwise, and if the university low-tier enough, a life as a knowledge-worker serf or service worker serf beckons. If the person doesn’t even make the low-tier university cut, there’s always body-destroying grinding dirty dark dangerous manual labor to be done.

Either way, you get to work yourself to death for survival chump change while making Chinese oligarchs richer. Meanwhile, you know or know of people who may not be that much more talented than you — and certainly not more hard-working. But they had the better start and better connections, and have found their way to Tencent, to Weibo, to Google, to Apple, to Microsoft, and so on. Living the dream in Shanghai, San Francisco, or Seattle. Big house, fast car, expensive toys, and blonde (even if bleach-blonde) bimbos and himbos for the fucking.

You know for certain you’re locked out of opportunities in China. But what about the USA — the fabled land of opportunity?

Chasing the Dream

Step back. Historically speaking, what part of the population – in terms of biological sex, and age range — is most likely to immigrate seeking economic opportunity?  1. Males. 2. “Of military age” — young enough to have nothing to lose, everything to gain, and the ability to start over.

The Chinese nationals that Carlson and Weinstein are fretting over fit this common profile. More likely, they want to work themselves to death for BIG money not chump-change, own a McMansion or fancy condo, drive fast cars, fuck blondes (even if they would preferentially marry only Chinese homegirls), have expensive toys, and enjoy some freedom or at least some quality of life. They are desperate — but their situation back home is also desperate. They display the decision-making one might expect from their circumstances and the appropriate mix of youth and testosterone.

Some of these Chinese nationals might well be runaways from the groups of Chinese laborers brought to South America on behalf of Chinese companies engaged in resource extraction (American Exile, Jun 16, 2022). That situation differs significantly them being from hand-picked agents of the CCP.

Yellow Peril Sleeper Cells?

Based on personal experience in mainland Chinese and other sources, in your author’s opinion the CCP doesn’t give a damn about establishing low-level sleeper cells in the USA and blowing anything up. Can’t be bothered.

They are concerned with infiltrating the academic, financial, and corporate spheres from the mid- to highest levels: they are seeking intellectual property, trade advantages, political leverage, and more. But as for the American shitshow, they are too busy sitting back and watching and enjoying it to directly participate. Not their style — not their modus operandi. Yes, I will sell you via a third party all the fentanyl you desire — no, I will not indulge with you. Enjoy.

So dear reader, you have two competing hypotheses for why male Chinese nationals of a certain age range have been joining in the great trek to our open Southern border. One hypothesis seems paranoid nonsense and the other plausible, but you decide which is which according to your preferences.

Domestically Destabilizing the USA

 If the CCP were actively seeking to domestically destabilize our nation, they would throw whatever resources they could — financial, intelligence, et cetera — behind the woke wing of the Democratic party and ultimately behind presidential candidate Gavin Newsom. But mainland China is too busy dealing with its own problems, so the CCP is at best right now passively wishing to domestically destabilize the USA. In truth, they are focused on competing with the USA internationally — and to be fair, they are winning. It is ridiculous to think that the CCP seeks to make NYC’s subways even worse. We have Alvin Bragg, a Soros District Attorney for that. Sorted.

Back to the big picture; or, what Carlson and Weinstein have mostly right. The Southern border should be closed to all but legal immigration. Why?

Close the Southern Border — Now

The ongoing migrant caravan might be described as a mighty human river with several contributing streams — tributaries — from cities in nations across South and Central America. For example, some immigrants from various nations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East will fly to Mexico City and from there catch a cartel-organized bus to USA Southern border; others, whether native residents or citizens of South America or not, will start in Argentina or Chile or elsewhere and make their way up the continent eventually to and through the Darien Gap in Panama on the way to Mexico and then the USA Southern border.

This is more than the movement of bodies — this is mass human suffering and predatory exploitation in motion along the entire greater route, yet enabled by NGOs which claim to respect human dignity and life. For example, it is estimated that roughly 10% of the migrants travelling through the Darien Gap die from the experience (Richards: Aug 17, 2021). In that sense only, a possible Chinese venture to build a roadway and pave part of the Darien Gap seems almost humanitarian. But it is not. The Darien Gap is only one noteworthy place where families are separated and often destroyed, where women and children are raped, and where wide-scale robbery and intimidation by violence take place.

Enriching the Cartels

The immigrants are constantly forced to deal with — and to bargain with — criminals. Hence the sexual violence, the trafficking of children, the loss of personal property, and more. Some — but not all — of these criminals are members of organized crime syndicates, the infamous cartels. This mighty human river — the migrant caravan — vastly enriches these cartels: to be escorted to and across the Southern border, a standard quoted price is $10,000 per person. And if one chooses not to pay — not to go in debt to the cartels, that person will generally not be protected by the local authorities.

Undermining National Sovereignty and the Rule of Law

In each city, region, and nation through which this migrant caravan passes — this mighty human river flows — the rule of law is undermined while the crime syndicates are strengthened. This is both a corruption of sovereignty and a tremendous drain on public resources. Our Open Border policies which encourage this migrant caravan place a vast burden on these South and Central American nations, as they must deal the unrest and lawlessness caused by this large and continuous transitory population, and with the sick and dying stragglers, and with the corpses left behind.

A Globalist Opportunity

So UN agencies and other NGOs step in — enabling greater human suffering and criminal violence under the guise of alleviating it. The mighty human river flows on —corrupting everything it touches.

When many of the migrants do arrive at our Southern border, they have been brutally victimized and traumatized — too many also are in debt to cartels and hence must provide services once they enter USA to pay-off those debts. These are the “sleeper cells” we should worry about: the people effectively in chattel to cartels. In turn, the cartels now seem increasingly to control both sides of the border: the territory in Mexico, and the territory in the USA.

Our Open Border policies are damaging the peoples, nations, and even ecosystems of South and Central America. Causing vast human suffering and misery, perpetuating sexual violence and the trafficking of children, strengthening and enriching criminal cartels at the expense of state sovereignty and the rule of law, and resulting also in thousands of deaths per year. Yet the mighty human river flows on. Why?

Who Benefits? The Failing Standard Explanation

We are back to Carlson’s alleged racist right-wing conspiracy — otherwise known as the commonplace wisdom of the American Left political intelligentsia. Demographic change is political destiny, with brown as the new white and a hence a new super-majority for the Democratic Party. This explanation has two obvious failings, so and will not suffice. In this regard, perhaps, Carlson seems as mistaken as Starr (1997), Judis & Teixeira (2002), Phillips (2016), and many others, including once your author.

Failure One

The first obvious failing: support for the Open Border policies is bi-partisan. Witness the recent farce of a Senate bill for alleged border security. Senior Republican leaders signed off on this — as they have been doing for years on compromising USA immigration policy and enforcement. The Trump Presidency was an aberration, not the norm. These life-long Republican politicians and their advisors, donors, and greater entourages do not fear that the illegal migrants will one day sweep them from power by use of the ballot box. Yet being swept from power is all that some of these politicians do seem to fear. So here they evidently know something which Tucker Carlson does not.

Failure Two

The second obvious failing: brown people do not automatically vote Blue. For the past several decades, black Americans have reliably voted roughly 90% Democratic in the national elections. Hispanic Americans have not: politically speaking, “brown” people are far more diverse than many pundits have generally acknowledged. Moreover, many people from South and Central America are by liberal standards culturally conservative: they are pro-family — including both the nuclear family and the multi-generational extended family. They feel less need to wage cultural war against or for traditional gender roles. More often “live and let live,” despite their strong personal convictions. And some even — God forbid — regularly attend church or religious worship services. Deplorable clingers, to use an Obama-HRC neologism.

The Uni-Party Enters the Chat

Our Open Border policies are not for the benefit of the Democratic Party, despite all the claims, theories, and alleged conspiracies to the contrary. Our Open Border policies are intended to benefit the Uni-Party. Hence why the long-serving Republican and Democratic senators can so easily reach agreement on a border security bill which permits business as usual after some proposed cosmetic and comedic but certifiably ineffectual reforms.

We now need to ask whom does the Uni-Party serve, since the answer is clearly neither the American people nor the USA as a nation. To answer this question, we must understand the great migration in the Americas in a larger context — one which includes the similar migrations being experienced and for the most part embraced by Western Europe while resisted by several nations in Eastern Europe, Poland and Hungary the most outspoken among them.

The Mass Migrations to the USA and Europe: Five Effects

What do these twinned mass migrations to the West have common? Shared intellectual leadership and shared effects. We’ll take those points in reverse. Knowing who benefits will bring the intellectual (and political) leadership into focus.

In both cases, the USA and Europe, the ongoing and encouraged mass migrations (MM) do the following:

1. They (the MM) undermine both national sovereignty and democratic forms of governance. The citizens of the host nations involved do not get to vote – are not permitted to hold — a referendum on the migration issues.  Even when polling shows the majority is clearly against more immigration, the will of the majority is over-ruled. Likewise, the movement of peoples itself is typically enabled or supported by transnational organizations — UN agencies, various NGOs, and in the Europe, the EU. Furthermore, by these transnational entities, formerly sovereign nations are given quotas they must fulfill or be coerced by economic sanctions, lawfare, and so on. (This lead to #2 below).

2. They (the MM) undermine both the conceptual and practical basis of citizenship, of having rights under the law for which the government exists to uphold. Instead, the lines between citizen, resident, and transient are blurred. For one example, initially, the immigrants will typically get preferential treatment by the national government, and this directly at the expense of citizens who must still pay the taxes but who may find themselves denied or restricted services and long-established benefits because of the financial burden imposed by new non-citizen arrivals. Laws are applied arbitrarily or not all to new protected classes. (This leads to #5 below).

3. They (the MM) undermine existing regional and national cultures, norms, and folkways — in a word, civic identity. The rapid erosion of civic identity results from the arrival of so many immigrants at once, the sheer number of peoples who speak different languages, have different worldviews, dietary habits, religious and moral beliefs and practices, and so on. Under these circumstances, assimilation, reasonable cultural accommodation, or even large-scale cultural hybridity becomes impossible. The nation-state may quickly devolve into tribalism and identity politics, no longer possessing any shared sense of civic responsibility or core values. But please note this void is created to be filled. (Also leads to #5 below).

4. They (the MM) impact the labor market by driving down wages in various economic sectors, by increasing the strain on existing social safety nets, and by creating — in the short-term, for certain — a Zero-sum economic game between the recently arrived immigrants and the majority of citizens and legal residents who are either working paycheck to paycheck, or/and carrying significant debt loads to afford housing and transportation, or/and otherwise increasingly reliant on government transfer payments and other forms of relief. In brief, rentier capitalism thrives even as the power and reach of the state grows – all this while members of the existing middle-class and working class are being degraded to the conditions and constraints formerly associated with medieval serfdom. (Also leads to #5 below).

5. They (the MM) create short-term to moderate-term situations of anarchy and chaos which seem to justify the central government suspending long-established rights and liberties – including those rights and liberties either constitutionally assured or once deemed central to Western Civilization. These situations may include violent unrest, committed by migrants in response to unfulfilled promises, or initiated by the protests of long-term residents over-burdened by the newly imposed members of their local communities. These crises may also be provoked by the government itself using false flag psyops such as the Patriot Front in the USA. In turn (in response to the induced anarchy and chaos), the government offers the peoples under jurisdiction — peoples effectively no longer citizens, legal residents, or even immigrants, but subjects — protection from each other and from themselves (their dark urges, xenophobic impulses, et cetera). This protection takes the form of a transnational biosecurity network.

   1. As it applies to the vast majority of the population, this cloud-based network records and reports all financial transactions, all discernable interactions both in physical space and social media, and all surveillable engagements in the public and (formerly) private spheres which are now inundated with IoT devices from Smartphones to security cams to AI-enabled houseware devices. Just ask Alexa. Or Siri.

   2. Permission by biometric analysis will — or is proposed to soon — determine access to goods and services, including those available in (previously) public spaces. For certain test nations in Africa and Asia, this is already becoming reality (Davis and Webb, Oct 2, 2023).

   3. The implementation of a transnational biosecurity network is a primary end-goal. In fact, as Davis and Webb (Oct 2, 2023) have called to our attention, the UN has already declared that we need Digital ID to “promote peaceful and inclusive societies”:  a policy position which Davis and Webb astutely argue more properly reads as “to strengthen and consolidate the power and authority of the [emergent] global governance regime and to exploit threats — both real and imagined — in order to advance regime hegemony.”

Our Glorious Future

Now that we understand the effects of these enabled and encouraged mass migrations, enabled and encouraged by seemingly misguided policies and NGOs, we begin to grasp what our American Uni-Party — just part of a larger global coalition which does include many regulars at the WEF — has planned for our future.

These elites envision a transnational and transhuman global society managed and directed by themselves with assistance of AI, robotics, and the widespread dependence on what we currently deem consumer technology. This brave new world entails the effective destruction of the nation-state, of national sovereignty, of citizenship, and of any people (well, the common people) having a distinct culture or civic identity or sense of history. These apparent losses are deemed positives gains, necessary sacrifices which progress demands. Past limitations which we must transcend.

For a display of this utopian hubris, please listen to John Kerry at WEF Davos 2023.

If all this seems Star Trek positive on the way to a glorious united federation which leaves our petty human differences behind while AI as our better angel guides us through our daily toils, please look more closely: the emerging new if it is order is better described as Neo-Feudalism.

Or, Back to the Past

Your author had previously summarized several sources on Neo-Feudalism, (May 30, 2022), but will briefly recap some key literature here.

Neo-Feudalism; aka, Technofeudalism

To justify this comparison of past and present, Joel Kotkin (2023), a noted geographer, public intellectual, and current Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, has argued the following:

• The clearest parallel in our own time is the concentration of wealth in fewer hands, following upon an era of robust social mobility. In the second half of the twentieth century, growing prosperity was widely shared in the developed world, with an expanding middle class and an upwardly mobile working class — something seen in many developing countries as well. Today, the benefits of economic growth in most countries are going mainly to the wealthiest segment of the population.

• This wealth tends to be handed down from one generation to the next, creating something akin to a closed aristocracy.

• As in the Middle Ages, the power and privilege of this oligarchy are supported by an influential cognitive elite, or what I call the clerisy. ...  Today’s clerisy are the people who dominate the global web of cultural creators, academia, the media, and even much of what remains of traditional religious institutions.

• They [the modern clerisy] seek to replace the bourgeois values of self-determination, family, community, and nation with “progressive” ideas about globalism, environmental sustainability, redefined gender roles, and the authority of experts. These values are inculcated through the clerisy’s dominance over the institutions of higher learning and media, aided by the oligarchy’s control of information technology and the channels of culture.

No surprise our modern clerisy generally support open borders — although some have been muted lately given the push-back by Democratic mayors in Sanctuary cities now finally forced to deal with reality.

The Growing Global Economic Inequality is Real

In regard to the growing global economic inequality cited by Kotkin (2023), this has been well documented by the famed economist Thomas Piketty (2014), who argued we are entering a new stage of rentier capitalism — one increasing dominated by inherited wealth and private equity since the rate of return on rent will predictably exceed the rate of growth:

Under such conditions, it is almost inevitable that inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime’s labor by a wide margin, and the concentration of capital will attain extremely high levels — levels potentially incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles of social justice fundamental to modern democratic societies.

In the now ten years since Piketty (2014) made this claim, global wealth inequality has only increased (see also Piketty: Dec 14, 2021). In particular, cloud computing and machine learning (AI) have been accelerating the trend, creating what Yanis Varoufakis (2023), economist and former Minister of Finance for Greece, has called “cloud capital”:

From factory owners in America’s Midwest to poets struggling to sell their latest anthology, from London Uber drivers to Indonesian street hawkers, all are now dependent on some cloud fief for access to customers.

We All Pay Rent to the Cloud While Fearing the Lightning Strike

All pay rent. All also, knowingly or not, have their activities generated as data and collected, mined, and monitored by the cloud capitalists. All likewise exist under the shadow of a digital death sentence, having traded away basic rights and liberties for EULAs — for End-User Agreement Licenses. As Varoufakis (2023) states:

every vassal capitalist knows that with the removal of a link from their cloud vassal’s site they could lose access to the bulk of their customers. And with the removal of a link or two from Google’s search engine or from a couple of ecommerce and social media sites, they could disappear from the online world altogether. A sanitised tech-terror is the bedrock of technofeudalism.

Well said:

But even when the generated data collected is not overtly used to punish or control, or even if the end-user is blithely unaware, the cloud capitalists still benefit as this data feeds and improves models for prediction and classification, for not just the profiting from but also controlling and shaping attention and desire. 

AI and Cloud Computing Accelerate Neo-Feudalism

Professor Shoshana Zuboff (2019), Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, has described this practice as “surveillance capitalism” which aims “not to dominate nature but rather human nature.” Regretfully, her considerably detailed discussion of surveillance capitalism is beyond the brief scope of this review. Please see Jongseung Kim (Apr 28, 2019) for an outstanding crib. Similar to Kotkin (2023), Piketty (2014), and Varoufakis (2023), Zuboff (2019) also sounds the alarm about our emerging global neo-fuedalism:

Perhaps Zuboff should have added “not yet” — or, retrospectively, clarified whom she meant with the phrase “we, the people.”  This allusion to the preamble of the US Constitution might well likely be lost on the majority of USA inhabitants, just as their Constitutional Rights are likewise being eroded. Zuboff (2019) seems to place her hope for resistance largely in the Western toolkit inherited from the Enlightenment:

We are not illiterate peasants, serfs, or slaves. Whether “middle class” or “marginalized,” we share the collective historical condition of individualized persons with complex social experiences and opinions. We are hundreds of millions or even billions of second-modernity people whom history has freed both from the once-immutable facts of a destiny told at birth and from the conditions of mass society.

The mass migrations are subverting that source of resistance because any such “collective historical condition” requires not just a commonality in material reality but a shared or shareable awareness, itself based on education, socialization, personal interactions, and agreed upon or at least negotiable — meaningfully debated and discussed — norms and values. That shared awareness is being smothered in its cradle. Please see MM effects 2, 3 and 5 above.

Resistance, Meet the Transnational Biosecurity Network

Let us please pause for a moment to remark on the obvious. What Varoufakis (2023) has deemed the “sanitised tech-terror … of technofeudalism,” what Zuboff (2019) has designated as “surveillance capitalism” which is trapping us in a “preindustrial ‘feudal’ pattern” of “economic and social inequalities” — all this reaches it fulfillment with the implementation of the transnational biosecurity network. The transnational biosecurity network is the stateless uber-state, made possible by cloud technology and AI, owned and controlled by elites seeking domination across generations.

These elites comprise the would-be royal families of technofuedalism, of AI and Cloud-computing transforming and reinvigorating rentier capitalism. By proxy, and to ensure continuity, the transnational biosecurity network as it is now emerging integrates not-for profit foundations as well as for-profit corporations — all this in alliance with existing state security apparatus.

The AI Revolution is Just Beginning

Similar to Varoufakis (2023) and Zuboff (2019), the Chinese entrepreneur, AI pioneer, and venture capital investor Kai-Fu Lee (2018) has expressed his concerns that the emerging "AI world order will combine winner-take-all economics with an unprecedented concentration of wealth.” Neo-Feudalism, in short.

But whereas Lee (2018) warns of “the tremendous social disorder and political collapse stemming from widespread unemployment and gaping inequality” caused by AI and robotics replacing humans for many core services, our American Uni-Party and the WEF European elites understand this looming “tremendous social disorder and political collapse” as opportunity.

The Bourgeoisie Facing Planned Extinction

Our transhumanist globalists do — but in this limited sense only — resemble the ideologues and activists of the old-school Marxist International: as Kotkin (2023) states, our new overlords and their clerisy seek to “replace the bourgeois values of self-determination, family, community, and nation.” As a concomitant, they also seek to end market capitalism, true meritocracy and hence disruptive social mobility, and any hopelessly outdated notions of individualism. (This includes individuals possessing inalienable rights and liberties, individuals taking direct personal responsibility for their own physical health, and so on. No worries. Big Pharma has an app for that —and a prescription plan).

Destruction of the bourgeoisie is metamorphosis. The great middling of Western societies must vanish: you will own nothing (be in rent-debt for everything) and be happy (ingest your assigned medications — now likely integrated into your food supply).

The Mass Illegal Migrations: Herd-thinning on the Road to Sedation

In Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), Yuval Noah Harari, WEF illuminati, celebrates the possible transhuman future while proposing that discontents from social inequities be solved with drugs and simulations, the updated version of bread and circuses. After the mass migrations (MM) serve their purposes (please see 1 to 5 above), the global population will be appropriately controlled, sedated, and “right-sized”to the desires of our elite based on their interpretation of the earth’s carrying capacity. People dying on the march to the Southern border — for the time being, plenty more where they came from. Step by step, our glorious future emerges — we, as John Kerry revealed, are superior beings who are saving the planet. No sacrifice made by others is too great to realize this ultimate good.

In direct contrast with Harari, Kai-Fu Lee (2018), wealthy, wise, and unquestionably among the global society’s elite, does NOT wish “to live in a society divided into technological castes, where the AI elite live in a cloistered world of almost unimaginable wealth, relying on minimal handouts to keep the unemployed masses sedate in their place.”  But Lee (2018) offers more in the way of warnings and aspirations than solutions. He does at least openly engage many of the core issues.

Who Benefits?

The technological castes are already here; it remains yet uncertain whether the minimal handouts — some form of Universal Basic Income, or cricket protein powder with added psychotropics, or whatever — will be provided to sedate the masses. For now, too many of them march across South and Central America to the USA Southern border; or arrive by dangerous passage on the shores on Italy, Greece, Spain, France, et cetera. Let these nations effectively be destroyed: until the new global order is fully established, our Uni-Party and WEF overlords expect not just to survive but to thrive on the chaos.

In addition, as is our standard practice, we provide a Github repo with the code and data sets used to produce the visualizations and any related statistical analysis. Again, as always, any data analysis done by Data Humanist for American Exile offers complete transparency and reproducibility. 

As a final introductory disclaimer, to keep the graphs readable and uncluttered, once again we will focus on the two primary races in terms of both population size and arrest frequency: White and Black (aka, Black and African American). As identified by the FBI, these two races typically account for greater than 93% of all annual arrests. For questions about how the FBI understands the American Hispanic and/or Latino communities in terms of Race, please see Part I. For more on the other four race categories used by the FBI — American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and Unknown Race, please see Part I. Thank you.

American Juvenile Crime in Black and White, 1995-2019

The FBI defines juvenile crime when the offender is under the age of 18. Based on the FBI: UCR for 1995 to 2019, the graph below shows the juvenile crime arrest percentage for all crimes as broken down by the two primary races in terms of both population size and arrest frequency: White and Black.

To no surprise, more white juveniles are arrested annually than black juveniles as the general White population as categorized by the FBI is considerably larger than the general Black population as categorized by the FBI.

Similar to what we did in Part I, we can scale the annual Arrest % as simple ratio to annual Population %.  But for the Juvenile crime data, this comes with a caveat. We are comparing the juvenile population of each race group as identified by the FBI against the total population of each race group as identified by the FBI. For the period under consideration, the age demographics within the White population and the Black population are roughly equivalent — but not exactly so. Unfortunately, your author does not have good figures for juvenile population break per year — so we are stuck with the general population figures.

Scaled — but note above qualification

The graph below scales the Juvenile crime data Arrest % as a simple ratio to the general Population %.

For the time period under consideration, juveniles of the Black race as identified by the FBI were twice as likely to be arrested as their juvenile White counterparts. This pattern is largely similar to the pattern shown in the scaled graph from Part I for All Ages — All Crimes, which your author will reproduce below.

All Ages — All Crimes Scaled

The overall trends are largely similar to those shown in the Juvenile data. Please keep in mind that the All Ages — All Crimes data contains the Juvenile data, so this helps account for some of the similarities.

Disproportionate Juvenile Black Criminality

Based upon the best available data, we have undeniable evidence for disproportionate Juvenile black criminality. But does the “All Crimes” data really matter? What crimes? How serious?

Once again (similar to Part I), let’s run the data for Murder and Nonnegligent Manslaughter — aka, Homicide. The following graph is restricted to the Juvenile population.

Juvenile Homicide, 1995-2019

Once again, the bad news here is irrefutable. For twenty-three of the twenty-four years covered, juveniles of the Black race as identified by the FBI were the majority arrestees for homicide — for Murder and Nonnegligent Manslaughter, to use the formal FBI category. That is, even without accounting for differences in population size, a greater number of young Black Americans than young White Americans were arrested for homicide.

Scaled with qualification

Let’s scale the juvenile crime data arrest % according to the general population %, acknowledging the qualifications discussed earlier.

The pattern is horrific. Worse than the scaled All Ages— Homicide data visualization from Part I, which found that for the twenty-four-year time period under consideration, people of the Black race as identified by the FBI were on average 6.72 times more likely (with a standard deviation of 0.74) to be arrested for homicide than their White counterparts. Your author will not provide a ratio average here as the Juvenile scaling is necessarily more imprecise.

But perhaps a quote from 2Pac’s 2004 song, “Thug 4 Life,” will add some context:

What does it take to be a G?
Silence is a must, violence is a plus
Bust shots at my adversaries, them niggas scurry
Pick a spot to be buried, ‘cause I'll be buckin' in a fuckin' hurry

When juvenile Black Americans commit homicide, the victims are primarily other juvenile Black Americans. One could for whatever reasons glorify and hence normalize this — as the late 2Pac did in the above song “Thug 4 Life” (elsewhere he was more critical). Or one can understand the juvenile Black homicide epidemic as a multi-generational, ongoing national tragedy.

Possible Root Causes and Contributing Factors

Let us return to the conversation by Professors Loury and McWhorter (Sept 11, 2023), which was previously discussed in Part I. In coming to terms with juvenile crime in Chicago, both men explicitly compare the Black community since 1960 with that prior to 1960. Because of the now-standard MSM narrative that Black American are perpetual forever victims of White racism and the historical effects of slavery, many Americans do not know that Black Americans had for decades thriving working-class and middle-class communities with property and business ownership, generally stable family structures, and rather more.

A History Lesson

McWhorter engaged this now-abandoned history in his Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority (2003). Starting in the late 19^th century, McWhorter (2003) noted, “American cities typically had thriving black business districts reproducing white America down to the last detail, including excellent schools — Bronzeville, Chicago; the Auburn Avenue district in Atlanta; the Shaw district in Washington, DC; even Harlem before the 1940s.”

Indeed, Harlem, NYC, during the 1920s and 1930s was a national center for black entrepreneurship, politics, scholarship, art, literature, music, dance, and theatre — a flourishing known as the Harlem Renaissance. The photo below (Public Domain) is from a Universal Negro Improvement Association parade in Harlem, 1920. It shows a clean, thriving community. The crowd seems dressed in what we used to call the “Sunday best” — the people are clearly engaged but also highly civil and respectful of each other. No drive-by shootings here. One sign reads “The New Negro has No Fear,” referencing the New Negro Movement which began in 1917, and which reached international recognition by the mid-1920s with the publication of Professor Alain LeRoy Locke’s anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925).

It might be worth mentioning that Professor Locke, a Dean-like figure and mentor to the Harlem Renaissance, graduated from Harvard University with degrees in English and Philosophy; was honored as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society; was a recipient of the Bowdoin prize; and was the first Black American to be selected as a Rhodes Scholar to the University of Oxford. Please keep in mind that Locke accomplished all this decades before the Civil Rights movement.

Harlem was by no means the only example of a thriving Black American community. In False Black Power? (2017), Jason L. Riley has discussed numerous examples. For one, let’s head back to Chicago. As Riley (2017) has uncovered:

According to a business directory, there were already around two hundred black businesses operating in twenty-seven different fields in Chicago alone by 1885. A history of the city’s black Bronzeville neighborhood noted that the “rapid growth of the Negro community between 1915 and 1929 was accompanied by expansion in all types of Negro-owned businesses,” from beauty salons and groceries to banks and insurance companies. “In 1938, Negroes in Bronzeville owned and operated some 2,600 business enterprises,” most of which were small retail and service outfits catering to people in less desirable communities. [Source cited in-text by Riley: Ronald W. Bailey, ed., Black Business Enterprise: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (NY: Basic Books, 1971), 64–65].

Prior to the 1960s-1970s, we have numerous examples of thriving Black American communities with Black-owned businesses, stable family structures, and vibrant cultural and social activities. All this accomplished while Black Americans suffered variously under legalized segregation, Jim Crow laws, and other forms of outright racial discrimination.

So what happened? How, for example, did Chicago become such a mess? (Or Philadelphia, et cetera).  How did Chicago’s young Black people become so lost?

Three Overlapping Factors

Professors Loury and McWhorter (Sept 11, 2023) hash out a few overlapping claims.

First, deindustrialization undoubtably wiped-out entire job categories in a which a single wage-earner without an advanced education would still be able to afford housing, get married, and support a family. But these changes — which started in the 1970s and accelerated greatly during the Reagan-Bush presidencies — impacted working class Americans as a whole and not just Black Americans. Hence the economic explanation is not sufficient.  

Second, both men point to rise of absentee fathers in black households as having a devastating impact on the socialization of black youth.

Third, both men seem to agree that the black underclass now suffers from a culture of expectation and entitlement rather than a sense of entrepreneurship and self-reliance. McWhorter (Sept 11, 2023) pointedly states: “I think it was a whole cultural mood where you were trained to think about Society owing you something — rather than making the best of the worst.”

Your author understands this as learned helplessness — we now have an entire American generation across races and ethnicities being indoctrinated at the K-12 level that they must rely upon the government (the Administrative State) for everything. Take no action on your own, just learn and fulfill your assigned role according to our Intersectionality Matrix.

The Great Cultural Retrogression

That aside for now, what changed during the 1960s and 1970s? The Civil Rights movement made real and necessary historical gains. Legalized segregation was evil and so finally ended. So after all of these legal and political gains, why did many Black American communities regress? To the remarks above by Loury and McWhorter (Sept 11, 2023), we add again the insights of Jason Riley (2017):

In the postslavery era, the differences in black progress before and after the Great Society interventions are glaring. When intact families were commonplace, the rise in black education, incomes, and occupations was significant and steady. As black family disorganization intensified and wealth-transfer programs grew in size and scope, that progress slowed in some cases and stalled in others. Liberals have attempted to compensate for black cultural retrogression since the 1960s with increased black political power.

What happened — starting in the late 1960s and kicking in strongly during the 1970s — were the Great Society interventions. The Black working class increasingly became the Black welfare class, dependent on government transfer-payments. Single motherhood received not just economic support, but economic incentives. Fatherhood became increasingly abandoned. The Black middle class bifurcated — the section that stagnated became tied geographically and economically to the now Black underclass. In many Black urban communities, the explosion in violence and criminality became normalized as a matter of survival. Then perversely, but perhaps understandably, it became for many young black people a matter of identity. For one example, we cited earlier 2Pac’s song “Thug 4 Life” (2004).

What Could Be Done Vs. What Will (Likely) Be Done

The juvenile Black homicide epidemic is a multi-generational, ongoing national tragedy. The property crimes which Loury and McWhorter (Sept 11, 2023) discuss are part of the larger problem to which the homicide epidemic belongs, but these destructive acts of large-scale retail theft should not take priority over the daily murdering of young Black people by other young Black people.

To turn this around, we would need to overhaul the Welfare system and effectively end most of the Great Society interventions. Particularly, we must end the economic and benefit incentives for single mothers to have more children.

We would need to reclaim if not also valorize fatherhood. This seems improbable given the current MSM and academic war against masculinity, but to cite from the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse, research shows that “children with involved, loving fathers are significantly more likely to do well in school, have healthy self-esteem, exhibit empathy and pro-social behavior, and avoid high-risk behaviors including drug use, missing school, and criminal activity” (retrieved Oct 5, 2023).

We would need to re-invent if not replace if Public Education. Take Chicago, for one example. As Hannah Schmid has reported (Dec 12, 2022): “Nearly 80% of Chicago Public Schools students cannot read at grade level. Just 15% met proficiency in math.” Take Philadelphia, for another example. As Reagan Reese (May 9, 2023) has reported: “Only 17% of third through eighth grade students met math grade level expectations in the 2021-2022 school year" and only "34% were proficient in English in the 2021-2022 school year.” These young people are qualified for a future in what?

We would also need to change the culture of victimhood and entitlement and end the glorification of black-on-black violence. All this to start.

Neither the Political Will Nor Leadership

To attempt serious change in any of these dimensions means directly taking on the Democratic Party leadership (DNC) and many of their core supporters, including the Teacher Unions.

If the Democratic leadership must choose between its own destruction and the ongoing destruction of Black America, the choice is obvious — it is one the Democratic leadership has already made, confident in their ability to still secure roughly 90% of the black vote for every national election regardless of how much Black America suffers. The past six decades provide eloquent testimony to the efficacy of this strategy. On the Republican side, and at the very top we have a Uni-Party anyway, no Republican leaders seem to have either the will, the clout, the incentive, or necessary combination thereof to hold their Democratic colleagues accountable for now three generations of failure in both policy and practice.

So what will likely happen is nothing positive — the situation will continue to deteriorate. This serves the interests of our donor class, our bicoastal elites, and the Uni-Party. How so?

Anarcho-Tyranny, Neo-Feudalism, and the Great Reset

Let’s circle back to the property crimes, the looting and large-scale retail theft which Loury and McWhorter (Sept 11, 2023) sought to explain the root causes for, and which McWhorter specifically claimed were “a black thing to join up in a gang like that and to tear everything up for no particular reason.”

In fact, MSM pundits and celebrities have offered no shortage of justifications —massive shop-lifting rampages as a form of political protest, to start. Trevor Noah, for one celebrity race pundit, famously excused incidents of looting during the year of “Mostly Peaceful Protests.” The participants themselves in these events have also — this captured on video on numerous occasions — provided a rationale: reparations. The property crimes are justified as compensation or payback. As reparations.

Juvenile Black Crime and Identity Culture Wars

We now have looting and wide-scale retail theft as part of identity politics, and hence explained by some on the Left as form of political performance — an alternative means of civic engagement. In this context, the criminal behavior by Black American juveniles is merely part of the larger “identity culture war” — a divide and conquer campaign, which as Ungar-Sargon (2021) has astutely claimed, portrays “our nation as hopelessly divided along partisan and racial lines” while serving “as a smoke screen for the actual impenetrable and devastating division that is happening along class lines.” (For more on this concern, please see our earlier Six Notes on Neo-Feudalism).

This serves the interests of our donor class and our bicoastal elites because they seek to replace our Constitutional Republic with a Neo-Feudalistic Administration State. The politicized urban crime discussed above serves the valuable purposes of creating anarchy, undermining working class and middle-class communities, destroying small businesses, and helping to dismantle brick-and-mortar retail more generally. All this has a polarizing effect on American society, working also to undermine civil institutions and public trust in governance.

For a much more in-depth study of these general concerns, please read the following.

What is good for Amazon may not be good for the nation.

Do Our Elites Really Not Care?

For people whom have no experience dealing with the donor class and/or our bicoastal elites, it will seem shocking that they would not just turn a blind eye to what is now a multi-generational juvenile Black homicide epidemic, but that they would exploit the same to their political advantage.

But what almost universally unites our elites and the European WEF globalists are the twin convictions that there are just too many people on planet earth, and that progress on Climate Change and other goals will require sacrifice. Just not by them —but by the masses. Our donor class and bicoastal elites must remain in positions of power and privilege at any cost (not paid by them) — for the greater good, of course.

Sarah Chayes (2021), a globally recognized expert on kleptocracies, brings the general situation home in two sentences:

In an examination of seven anticorruption insurrections on five continents, the tactic I found to be most common — and most effective — was to deliberately enflame identity-based divisions that could pit groups of the population against one another. This is how a vastly outnumbered dominator coalition defeats the rest of us.

This is where we are at. The USA is already in a state of low-intensity, low-simmering Civil War. But think more like the former Yugoslavia before the break-up — and not like 19^th century USA, with blue and grey uniforms. Black youth are being used as cannon fodder to keep the American kleptocrats in power at the expense of the general American public. Understanding this and saying so will cause you to be denounced as a racist. Feel free to unsubscribe. But also feel free to share.

In the Daily Caller YouTube comment section, one finds the remarks one might expect. A majority of which merit no further consideration. But the claim that crime in America lacks racial diversity is not trivial, even if many would wish to pre-emptively denounce it as racist.

First, this claim can be proved true or false. Either outcome has consequences which matter significantly. Second, this claim in various forms has been made recently by prominent black public intellectuals. To cite two, Glenn Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, and John McWhorter, Associate Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University, recently (Sept 11, 2023) had a sobering and even sad discussion about “Mob Behavior” in Chicago — discussing among other concerns the looting and property destruction. 

A black thing?

In this exchange, McWhorter (Sept 11, 2023) specifically claimed:

There’s a sense I have that these things are done almost exclusively by young black men and not even Latino young men as much as black young men. You do not see a bunch of poor Asian kids doing it — you do not see even lower-class white kids doing it. It’s a black thing to join up in a gang like that and to tear everything up for no particular reason.

Loury in turn generally agreed, and both men discussed possible root causes. McWhorter’s remarks hit home with the Philadelphia incident: recall the young black people smashing the iPhones which they could not simply steal and then activate. That iPhones have such theft protection is common knowledge. To “tear everything up for no particular reason” except perhaps the act of destruction itself?

For the sake of argument, based upon all the video evidence thus far, your author will concur in general terms with Professor McWhorter: the recent shoplifting and looting rampages in major American cities have been dominated by young black men and women. Not exclusively so, by any means, but majority so.

Forget Videos — What About the Data?

But what about crime in general? Both the FBI and the Census Department identify different racial groups within the USA. American Exile will use ONLY the government categories and data. Based on USA government data, do we have racial differences when it comes to crime?

A Simplified and Hypothetical Example – About the Math

Before we dive into what our government counts as racial groups — and racial in distinction to ethnic groups, we will consider a simplified example of crime arrest counts per group, crime arrest percentages per group, and crime arrest percentages per group as a ratio to that group’s population percentage. For the non-math people, this sounds harder than it is.

Please consider the first graph which lists the raw number of arrests per group per year.  We have a hypothetical population of 200 million people, 60% of whom belong to Group A — Orange; 30% to Group B — Yellow; and 10% to Group C — Green.  The numbers below on the Y axis represent 100K. For our first year of data, we have 1.2 million Orange arrests; 0.6 million Yellow arrests; and 0.2 million Green arrests.

Notice that we can take these raw count numbers per year and express them as percentages of the total arrests per year. This makes the comparison between groups more intuitive — easier. So below is the same graph, but with a percentage rather than raw count.

We see that for our first year of data, Orange has accounted for 60% of all arrests; Yellow, 30% of all arrests; and Green, 10% of all the arrests. In fact, if we average the arrest percentages over all four years of data, we get roughly the same percentages.  Yes, indeed, the Orange population accounts for more arrests — but the Orange population is also considerably larger, at 120 million people; Yellow, at 60 million; and Green, at 20 million. So we might reasonably expect this outcome — more Orange people, so more Orange arrests.

To have a more valid comparison, we can scale the arrest percentage against the population percentage: a simple ratio. When we do, we get the following graph:

If we were to average all four data years on the above, we would reach the following conclusion: based on the data we do have, we have no reason to believe any of our population groups differ in terms of their arrest rate or criminal activity.

For example, based again upon the data and what it shows, if the Orange population were to shrink to 10% of society, and the Green population grow to 60% of society, we would reasonably forecast the Orange arrest rate to shrink proportionally and the Green arrest rate to grow proportionally. We earlier found no meaningful difference between groups in terms of their arrest rate or criminal activity.

Sadly, as it will turn out, this is NOT the case for the FBI Crime data on American society.

When examining the FBI Crime, we will consider the arrest percentages per group (just another version of the arrest raw count per group) and the arrest percentages per group scaled to the population percentage per group. So we will be looking at the equivalent of graphs two and three above.

The FBI Race Categories, and US Census Race Count

As stated earlier, for this post, American Exile will use ONLY the government categories and data. We provide direct links to the original sources. In addition, as is our standard practice, we provide a Github repo with the code used to produce the visualization and the data sets used. Again, as always, any data analysis done by Data Humanist for American Exile offers complete transparency and reproducibility.  

That said, how the USA government defines race for the FBI data and the Census population is likely NOT what you have been led to believe. Take this up with the MSM, with nearly all of academia, with Democratic party pundits, and with the USA government, if you like — American Exile is NOT responsible for the following racial categories.

Data Sources

Our primary data source for crime is the FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR), 1995-2019. The format of the FBI UCR changed significantly in 2020, after 24 years of remarkable consistency. So our supplement source is the FBI Crime Data Explorer, which makes data for the years 2020 and 2021 downloadable. The years 1995-2019 can be treated as one large data set; the years 2020-2021 get treated as a separate data set, although the main categories and classifications are generally equivalent.

Our primary data source for USA population demographics, using USA census data and matching the FBI categories for race, is USAFacts.org: Our Changing Population. Crime data from the FBI; population data from the Census Bureau via USAFacts.org.

Race Categories according to the FBI

We now come to wrestle with the race category bear.

From 1995 to 2012, and consistent with the Census Bureau practices, the FBI had four established racial categories — that is to say, recognized four races: White, Black, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander.

Starting in 2013, the FBI had five racial categories: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Pacific Islander or Native Hawaiian.

Starting in 2020, the FBI had six racial categories: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Unknown Race.

Six Races, no Latinos

What about Hispanic Americans, Latinos? According to the USA government from 1995 to the present, Hispanic or Latino Americans are NOT a separate race — they comprise an ethnicity. The vast majority — but it seems not all — of Hispanic or Latino Americans are classified as belonging to the White race. Such has been consistent since 1995. Your author is reporting this — not attempting to unravel the government math or logic involved with distinguishing race from ethnicity.

What else? The addition of “African American” to Black race category in 2013 added no meaningful gains to that population — this was simply updating the label rather than including a significant new sub-group of people.

Two Consistently Applied Categories

For better or worse, the race classifications White and Black have been applied consistently since 1995 in terms both of crime data collection and census data collection. We have the data that we have — the official USA government data, best available.

For the FBI crime data, the races American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and Unknown Race generally count for less 7% of the total arrests. So we will exclude them from the following visualizations — for that reason, and for the reason that these racial categories are not historically stable. For better or worse, the racial categories White and Black (now, relabeled Black & African American) have been historically stable — the reader can decide what this says about the USA government.

American Crime in Black and White, 1995 to 2019

The graph below shows the population percentages for the Black and White races as defined the USA government for the years 1995 to 2019. Please recall again, that for the purposes of Race not Ethnicity — and particularly for the FBI Crime data — the vast majority of Hispanic and Latino Americans were placed in the White race category. Hence the percentage of the White population will seem much higher than you, dear reader, may typically see reported in the MSM, et cetera. Again, your author is using the government data in accordance and consistent with the government racial categories.

In 1995, according to USA government data, people of the White race comprised roughly 82.8% of the American population; people of the Black race, roughly 12.7%. By 2019, according to USA government data, people of the White race comprised roughly 76.2% of the American population; people of the Black race, roughly 13.5%. Again, we are NOT subtracting people of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity from the people classified as racially White because the FBI Crime data for this time range does NOT do so.

We have the population baseline. Now, we turn to data harvested from the infamous Table 43 of the FBI:UCR, which provides a breakdown of arrests by race. Again, for the visualizations to follow, we are considering the two races which annually account for over 93% of all arrests: White and Black.

The graph below shows the percentage of arrests for all ages and all crimes as broken down by the two primary races in terms of both population size and arrest frequency.

Arrests for All Ages — All Crimes

People of the White race as identified by the FBI are arrested more often, and this pattern is clear and consistent from 1995 to 2019. We now scale for population percentage. This is a simple calculation: divide the Arrest % by the Population %. For example, if Group Orange accounts for 60% of the total arrests and 60% of the total population, we get 60/60 or a ratio of 1. The graph below scales for population percentage.

We see a slight decrease in the Black ratio, and slight increase in the White ratio. But the overall pattern is clear, consistent, and beyond dispute. Once we account for population size, people of the Black race as identified by the FBI are arrested at least twice as often as their White counterparts.

But arrested for what? Does the “All Crimes” data really matter?

American Homicide in Black and White, 1995 to 2019

Let’s run the Table 43 data for “Murder and Nonnegligent Manslaughter” — aka, Homicide. The graph below does so for the same time period.

The bad news here is undeniable. For twenty years of the twenty-four years covered, people of the Black race as identified by the FBI were the majority arrestees for homicide —for “Murder and Nonnegligent Manslaughter,” to use the formal FBI Table 43 category. That is, even without accounting for differences in population size, more Black Americans than White Americans were arrested for homicide.

Now, we will scale these grim results for population size — please see the graph below.

How bad? For the twenty-four-year time period under consideration, people of the Black race as identified by the FBI were on average 6.72 times more likely (with a standard deviation of 0.74) to be arrested for homicide (Murder and Nonnegligent Manslaughter) than their White counterparts.

Does the most recent data available show any improvement?

American Crime in Black and White, 2020 & 2021

We come now to the new and quite frankly confusing version of the publicly available FBI Crime data, the FBI Crime Data Explorer — which makes searching by race almost impossible but does push a hate crime narrative and other MSM standards. By law, however, this government data must be available to the public — so download options exist, and your author found what for most part replaces Table 43 on the previous FBI: UCR.  

First, let’s set the population baseline. Yet again, your author is NOT subtracting people of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity from the people classified as racially White because the FBI Crime data for 2020-2021 likewise does NOT do so. For 2020, according to established USA government racial categories and subsequent data collection, people identified as belonging to the White race comprised roughly 75.9% of the USA population; people identified as belonging to the Black race, roughly 13.5%. For 2021, roughly 75.8% White; 13.6% Black.

Dear reader, if you wish to protest those numbers — take it up with the Federal government. Likewise, once again, your author is excluding below for the purposes of data visualization the four other races recognized by the FBI: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and Unknown Race. Why? Because, once again, people in these racial categories account for less than 7% of the total annual arrests, and because these categories historically have either been instable or applied inconsistently. Got complaints? Send them to the FBI.

The most recent data available (as Oct 5, 2023) is for years 2020 and 2021 and features an improved and expanded Arrest Offense Category. Besides Total Arrests (All Crimes), we will consider once again Homicide Offenses and Assault Offenses — two distinct types of Criminal Offenses. Please see the graph below.

The results are sadly consistent with the previous twenty-four years of data, excepting perhaps an unhappy increase in the homicide arrest percentage for people of the Black race as identified by the FBI.

When we scale for population size, the results again are sadly consistent. Please see the graph below.

In 2020, people of the Black race as identified by the FBI were 7.32 times more likely to be arrested for homicide than their White counterparts; in 2021, 8.13 more times likely. Under no circumstances should these results be understood as an improvement on the previous twenty-four years.

Preview of Part II

We need to talk about possible causes, contributing factors, and hopeful solutions. We need to stop dismissing any talk of disproportionate black criminality as hate speech — which is the standard MSN and DNC playbook. The FBI data is both horrific and undeniable — as well as the best available.

But we will first need to circle back to the issue we started with — race and juvenile crime in the USA. Part II will briefly review the relevant juvenile crime data for 1995 to 2019, based again on the FBI: UCR. Then your author will return to Professors Loury and McWhorter to summarize some of the insights from their discussion (Sept 11, 2023), and your author will provide his own conclusions.

But despite the obvious rewards from the West to anyone who would do so, why has Putin not yet (as of 28 August 2023) been deposed or assassinated? In no small part, Putin has endured because he retains both a strong and broad base of support in Russia — support among the population and key elites.

To understand this, we need to know both how Putin came to power and what he has accomplished for Russia since coming to power.

Easier to work backwards, in this case. Yes, we will cover the details of how the USA helped sway the 1996 Russian election to keep Boris Yeltsin as a puppet in power. Yeltsin, as the evidence will show and as our leaders knew well, was corrupt, deeply dysfunctional, and displayed the instincts of a tyrant.

Likewise, we will also cover at least in passing the globalist rape of Russian assets (including Intellectual Property) under the shock therapy of neoliberal “capitalism” — a kleptocratic lawfare which was anything but free and fair open market competition. 

The Yeltsin Catastrophe

But for now, please understand that in December 1999, Yeltsin (and family members) retired wealthy and protected even as Russia itself had plunged into economic and social catastrophe. The word “catastrophe” not used lightly here.

How bad was it?

Stephen F. Cohen, late Professor of Politics at Princeton University and also Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, has summarized the situation well:

Viewed in human terms, when Putin came to power in 2000, some 75 percent of Russians were living in poverty. Most had lost even modest legacies of the Soviet era—their life savings; medical and other social benefits; real wages; pensions; occupations; and for men life expectancy, which had fallen well below the age of 60. (2018).

Roughly 75% below the poverty line, the former social safety nets either gone or seemingly broken beyond repair, and life expectancy tanking. Let’s add some more data, and fill out Cohen’s summary with some visualizations.

All data used for the following four graphs is initially sourced from the prestigious Gapminder Foundation, which itself aggregates data from various institutions including the World Bank, the Penn World Table (UC Davis & University of Groningen), et cetera. As per American Exile practice, we provide a direct link to a GitHub repository which contains both our code and data: complete transparency, reproducible results.

Economic Status: GDP Per Capita

The following visualization concerns GDP per capita — or gross domestic production per person. GDP per capita is a standard measure of national wealth and economic power. But we do not want to compare apples to oranges given the actual cost of living may differ significantly per nation, and the purchasing value of a dollar changes over time. So for this data set, the data are in constant 2010 US dollars and inflation-adjusted.

Please recall Yeltsin takes office mid-1991 with the deterioration of the Russia economy well underway. (More on this later). Yeltsin leaves office in December 1999, handing over the Presidency to Putin. Excepting an eight-year foray as Prime Minister from May 2000 to May 2008, in which Dmitry Medvedev assumed the Presidency — with most observers holding that Putin remained the power behind the scenes, Putin has served as President of Russia from 2000 to 2008, and 2012 to present.

As the above graph shows, under Putin’s leadership, the Russia economy undergoes a significant and positive reversal of fortune.

If Constant 2010 US dollars seem not the best benchmark, we can use International dollars based upon PPP: purchasing power parity. In other words, how much does that money — whatever the actual currency might be — buy in the way of goods and services in that country?

Economic Status: GNI Per Capita

The next data set and visualization examine GNI (gross national income) converted to international dollars using PPP. As Gapminder explains: “an international dollar has the same purchasing power over GNI as a U.S. dollar has in the United States.”

Using international dollars based on PPP, the positive economic changes under Putin’s leadership are even more dramatic. Do please note that our ultimate source for both sets used above is the World Bank, a Bretton Woods institution which many international observers have claimed serves American imperialism. If we were to expect a data source bias, surely it would be anti-Putin.

For the economic visualizations above, we are using established data sets with the observations based on known and standardized reporting metrics. Even as we shift among metrics, the general trend emerges as undeniable: under Putin’s leadership, the Russian economy undergoes a significant and positive reversal of fortune.

But, corruption …

Moreover, and contrary to what is constantly reported in the Western MSM, under Putin’s leadership the Russian economy has become less corrupt than before — and certainly less corrupt than it was under Yeltsin’s leadership. (More on Yeltsin’s antics later). How less corrupt — and how do we know this? Once again, we turn to the World Bank, which annually offered a global “Doing Business” rating of 190 nations. Rank order: 1, top; 190, bottom.

In 2010, Russia ranked 124 out of 190. In the most recent 2020 rating, Russia improved to position 28 out of 190. Again, this is from the World Bank – not QAnon.

Public Health and Social Stability

As economic conditions in Russia have improved, social conditions for the majority of Russians have likewise improved. We can examine two standard benchmarks of both public health and social stability: Life Expectancy and Child Mortality. In order to significantly improve either or both, a nation must be getting a number of things right.

Life Expectancy

Under Yeltsin, life expectancy surged downward, recovered somewhat, then starting surging downward again. Under Putin, life expectancy stabilized from 2000 to 2005, and then began surging upward until the recent pandemic — after which it promptly recovered.

To reverse the downward trend in life expectancy, Russia needed improvements in policy, infrastructure, health services, and health care access and affordability. None of these in isolation typically have an immediate effect — people who are already moribund may likely not benefit. But all of these in combination can slow the negative trend, stabilize it, and set the conditions for a rebound — for an upward surge in life expectancy. Putin’s team clearly knew what they were doing.

Child Mortality

Similar to increasing Life Expectancy, progress on reducing Child Mortality requires success in multiple domains from policy and infrastructure to clinical practices and household environments. The choropleth (stat map) below shows the global situation circa 2017 — and shows that Russia is roughly on par with the EU and the USA. The rate being expressed in percentages is a bit misleading, however:  more properly, the “child mortality rate (also under-five mortality rate) refers to the probability of dying between birth and exactly five years of age expressed per 1,000 live births.”

The situation was VERY different when Putin took office in 2000. Russia had a child mortality rate more similar to that of nations in Sub-Saharan Africa rather than those in Western Europe. The visualization below reports on child mortality under age 5, with the numbers indicating deaths per 1000; the data set sourced from the Gapminder Foundation.

In the drastic reduction of child mortality, we have once again compelling evidence that Putin has been serving the Russian people as an effective leader — arguably, at least up until his invasion of Ukraine. That matter for another series of posts.

The four above graphs supplied by Data Humanist help tell the story earlier sketched by Professor Cohen: under Putin’s leadership, life in Russia has improved for the vast majority of people.

The Putin Revival

We discussed earlier the Yeltsin Catastrophe — the general situation in Russia under Yeltsin’s leadership from 1991 to 1999, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Your author also cited Stephen Cohen’s excellent summary of the same.

Before diving into how the USA contributed deeply to the Yeltsin Catastrophe, and pathed the way for Putin, let’s return to Cohen (2018) for a summary of Putin’s accomplishments during the first decade of the 21^st century:

In only a few years, the “kleptocrat” Putin had mobilized enough wealth to undo and reverse those human catastrophes and put billions of dollars in rainy-day funds that buffered the nation in different hard times ahead. We judge this historic achievement as we might, but it is why many Russians still call Putin “Vladimir the Savior.”

Based upon credible data concerning key economic and public health indicators, there seems no question that Russia has benefitted significantly from Putin’s leadership and the team he put in place. We find empirical support for — real-world results backing up — Cohen’s 2018 claim that “many Russians still call Putin ‘Vladimir the Savior’.”

Finally, in terms of human rights under Putin because we cannot measure progress purely in terms of economic or public health success, Cohen (2018) has astutely argued the following:

In today’s Russia, apart from varying political liberties, most citizens are freer to live, study, work, write, speak, and travel than they have ever been. (When vocational demonizers like David Kramer allege an “appalling human rights situation in Putin’s Russia,” they should be asked: compared to when in Russian history, or elsewhere in the world today?)

More freedom in Russia or in Saudi Arabia? In Russia, or in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region? In Russia, or in Australia under the Covid lockdowns? Et cetera, and so on.

Still the consensus remains that Putin must go — a Russian regime change is needed. A brief history lesson in how well this worked the last time.

Choosing Russia’s Leader

Why not replace Putin with a more Western-friendly Russian leader? Regime change, covertly or overtly. And given the presumed benefits of being on good terms with the USA, why would the Russian people not go for this?

The short answer: it’s been tried before. The USA helped rig the 1996 election in Russia to keep Boris Yeltsin in power. We got our man. Details to follow. Russia got a catastrophe — some details above, some more to follow.

The longer answer: for a while, the USA did have an excellent cooperative relationship with Putin on reducing WMD proliferation, and on combatting international terrorism. We trashed that — not Putin. But let’s get back to our previously successful attempt at regime change in Russia — in getting and keeping our man in power. The same man, Boris Yeltsin, who chose Vladimir Putin as his successor.

Our man in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin

In the West, Yeltsin seems remembered if at all as a bumbling good-natured populist who briefly brought democracy to Russia — only be to undermined from within, of course. A Bill Clintonesque figure with a drinking problem, minus a Hillary to keep him on the straight and narrow. We might assess how committed to democracy (and related reforms) Yeltsin was by simply checking the history.

Yeltsin, Democratic Reformer?

As President of Russia, a position he assumed in 1991, Yeltsin sought vigorously to expand his powers and more generally those of the executive branch. This power-push and the rapidly deteriorating Russian economy bought Yeltsin in increasing conflict with the legislative branch of the Russian government, the elected members of the Parliament.

Conflicts of interest and views between the executive and legislative branches of government are generic. In the Western tradition, we know this as “checks and balances” — a government without such checks and balances we would deem well on the way to authoritarianism.

How did Yeltsin our presumed democratic reformer respond to Parliament’s push-back? He dissolved Parliament by decree and by force. Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the Russian White House (the equivalent of the US Capitol Building), sent in paratroopers, and performed what some political scientists deemed a “self-coup.” He would rule by decree, not by consent — supported by the oligarchs and the West, not by the Russian people.

The response by our White House? The equivalent of “Yeltsin, you naughty boy. Well done!” As we learned 25 years later. Please consult the George Washington University National Security Archive (Oct 4, 2018) documents and discussion for more details: “Yeltsin Shelled Russian Parliament 25 Years Ago, U.S. Praised ‘Superb Handling’.” One can only imagine Bill Clinton’s envy of his Russian counterpart.

Truth and Sanity when Convenient

Even the Wall Street Journal, albeit again 25 years later, took notice in an op-ed by David Satter, “When Russian Democracy Died” (Sept 20, 2018):

Dramatically violating the constitution he swore to uphold, President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree abolishing the Russian Parliament, the Supreme Soviet, on Sept. 21, 1993. That set the stage for a two-day civil war in October, which cost at least 123 lives, and led to the rise of a dictatorship. By December a new constitution had come into force creating a super presidency and a pocket Parliament, the State Duma, which does not have the ability to contest executive power.  

Credit to Satter for getting the easy call right — by abolishing and then attacking Parliament in order to rule by decree, Yeltsin was NOT engaged in democracy promotion. Evidently, in 2018, the Overton window was briefly open in the USA to selectively discuss the fiasco we aided and abetted.

A decade earlier but well into the Putin era, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty in 2008 published an op-ed by a member of that Parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov, who both witnessed the attack and was arrested shortly thereafter. In “Yeltsin Destroyed Parliamentary Democracy In Russia,” Khasbulatov (Sept 29, 2008) identified (at least) three major consequences:

1. Yeltsin “concentrated unlimited dictatorial powers in his own hands” as he “imposed on the country a constitution that does not even provide any longer for a parliament.”

2. In this new Russian Federation under his sham constitution, Yeltsin was thus left unhindered to conduct the "endless Chechen wars, Caucasian wars" which resulted in "a society with militaristic tendencies, a society rent by enmity, a society in which people distrust each other.”

3. And this “war psychology” in turn “has left an indelible mark on the individual and collective consciousness; it is the source of mutual ill-will and the massive increase in corruption.”

Perhaps you think Khasbulatov (Sept 29, 2008) has exaggerated, a woulda coulda shoulda lament, but there is more. We come now to operation re-elect Yeltsin, our naughty boy, our big man in Moscow.

Fixing the Russian Election of 1996

The pesky democracy thing did not go away entirely — both because the USA needed to justify further interventions and because appearances needed to kept up. Yeltsin, now deeply unpopular, was up for re-election in 1996. (For causes behind Yeltsin’s unpopularity, please recall the earlier data visualizations about the condition of Russia under his leadership).

The Clinton administration and permanent Washington (since “deep state” is now a conspiracy term) were determined that Yeltsin should win.

Mary Elise Sarotte, the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Distinguished Professor of Historical Studies at John Hopkins University, has worked the archives, did the interviews, and established a major chunk of the historical record in her masterwork Not One Inch More: America, Russia, and the Making of a Post-Coldwar Stalemate (Yale UP, 2021).

Big Money, Grift One

Yeltsin needed money for his campaign. Big money. He could not count on contributions by the majority of Russians then living below the poverty line. But he could count on the corrupt oligarchs, and he could count on the West. Let’s start inside Russia, first. As Sarotte (2021) has summarized:

A small tier of oligarchs had enriched themselves impressively while the average Russian was struggling with unemployment, poverty, and pensions of vanishing value. In the course of 1995, it became clear to Talbott [USA Deputy Secretary of State] that Yeltsin had engaged in a series of Faustian bargains with those oligarchs. In exchange for siphoning their wealth into the Russian president’s “campaign war chest,” [Talbott wrote in a 1995 memo] the Kremlin “paid the oligarchs back with vast opportunities for insider trading,” including the infamous loans-for-shares deal, which was essentially a corrupt auction of state assets.

As an in-text footnote by your author, during Yeltsin’s rule, the insider trading was extended to select Western players. This ransacking and pillaging included Russian IP, intellectual property developed at various universities and institutions. Your author in the 1990s knew some graduate students from a fairly prestigious USA program in Russian Studies. A couple of them — employed as translators or cultural experts — got jobs during the Yeltsin gold rush, working in Russia for Western law firms or private equity firms. When later socializing with their old grad school cohorts, these adventurers shared stories about their dubious participation in legalized looting of Russian properties, intellectual and tangible. Fire sale!

Spinning Boris

But the oligarch money was not enough — the polling still showed Yeltsin headed into trouble. The Clinton administration, as Cohen (2018) has explained, “arranged for American election operatives to encamp in Moscow to help manage his [Yeltsin’s] campaign.”

Interference in a foreign election? Well, as Cohen (2018) again has recorded:

So large was the role of the American “advisers” in Yeltsin’s (purported) victory that Time magazine bannered it, “Yanks to The Rescue,” on its July 15, 1996 cover and ShowTime made a feature film, “Spinning Boris,” about their heroic exploits as late as 2003. No one asked, as we should, whether any Americans should be so intimately involved in any foreign elections.

All this does — or should — add comedic context to vastly overblown claims of “Russiagate”: the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election.

But “Spinning Boris” was not enough either. More money was needed. Bigger money.

Big Money, Grift Two

Bill Clinton to the rescue. Once upon a time, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had begged the USA for millions in loan money to help further his truly democratic reforms and to help stabilize the Soviet economy. No American presidents stepped up with the big bucks to rescue Gorbachev. But to keep Yeltsin in power despite his known abuses and corruption, Clinton started by putting the screws to that other Bretton Woods institution, the IMF, for a three-year $10 billion loan. Without the usual IMF accountability strings attached, to the dismay of many IMF staffers. At the time, as Sarotte (2021) has noted, this loan was understood by many as discrediting the stated mission of the IMF.

Once the ball got rolling, the World Bank and Japan chipped in — bringing the loan-packages / campaign contributions to roughly $22.6 billion. Real money even today —and more so in the mid-1990s. Yeltsin freely splashed the cash in hopes of getting re-elected. Yet as Sarotte (2021) has cogently observed:

Whatever the exact amount, it did little good. Since the IMF funding was not accompanied by sufficiently credible fiscal measures, the funds quickly floated out of Russia.

Oops. Not necessarily out of the hands of the Russian oligarchs and their Western enablers, but out of the beleaguered nation. With so little accomplished on the ground, Yeltsin was still in trouble come election time. Except that the USA would not let him lose: see no, hear no, speak no evil.

Widespread Voter Fraud Witnessed

The fall of the Soviet Union followed by the comedically tragic dysfunctional government of Yeltsin resulted in hardships for the people of Chechnya, then (and now again) a republic within Russia. To simplify a complex history, the Russian citizens of the Chechen Republic gave up on reforms and sought independence instead. We must add that the Chechen peoples are generally ethnically and culturally distinguishable from Slavic Russians, and Islam is the dominant religion in the republic.

Although the Chechens initially succeeded with their independence movement and did establish a de facto state, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Yeltsin responded with a brutal, multi-year crackdown. Our concern here is the First Chechen War, from December 1994 to August 1996, as it impacted the election in a strange and wonderous way. The brief summary below derived largely from Sarotte (2021).

The First Chechen War resulted in a crisis of Chechen refugees (people who fled Russia entirely) and IDPs (internally displaced persons). When election time rolled around, international observers estimated that fewer than 500 thousand (1/2 million) adults remained in Chechnya.

Your turn. Please estimate the number of Chechens who voted in the 1996 Russian presidential election.

Now, please estimate the number of Chechen votes counted by Russian election officials. If for this second estimate, you guessed over 1 million votes, you are correct!

Now, please guess which candidate received about 70% of these 1 million plus Chechen votes. Boris Yeltsin, the incumbent, who was waging war against Chechnya? Or his opposition?

The correct answer is “Yeltsin.” The Democratic reformer. Below, selected scenes from his “get-out-the-vote” campaign.

As Sarotte (2021) has reported:

Later, a member of the OSCE election-observation team claimed that he was pressured not to reveal the “widespread voter fraud” he had witnessed. A US diplomat serving in the Moscow embassy at the time of the election, Thomas Graham, asserted that the Clinton administration knew the election was not truly fair, but it was a case of “the ends justifying the means.”

The election was neither free nor fair, and was subjected to massive foreign interference. But permanent Washington, the Clinton administration, and most of our Foreign Policy intelligentsia celebrated both the tactics and the outcome because we got our man in Moscow re-elected.

Democratic Election or Foreign-Imposed Regime Change?

A strong case can be made that the 1996 Russian election was not democracy in action but USA-sponsored regime change. Yeltsin’s second self-coup — with help from his Western friends. (American Exile will have an upcoming post on the problems with foreign-imposed regime change).

Let’s wrap this one up. The USA helped put Yeltsin back in power. But the destruction of Russia as a nation became so widespread that Yeltsin had to go: the Russian people hated him (and many still do), and he was even losing support of the oligarchs because of the chaos under his leadership.

Yeltsin and his circle — including various family members — wanted a safe exit while keeping their (now) vast wealth. The Russian decision-makers behind Yeltsin needed a fixer, not just a hammer, but someone who could actually get things done.  

Blowback: “unintended harmful consequences; unwanted side-effects”

Putin had proven himself as someone who could play ball, work with the system, and still deliver results — but he was also a Russian patriot. During his time in Cold War Germany, Putin had numerous opportunities to defect to the West; later, to emigrate from Russia, or to go into private business, etc. Neither a simple opportunist nor a generic apparatchik, and deeply knowledgeable about the West from his KGB career, Putin remained in public service and navigated the chaos of the Soviet Union collapsing.

Yeltsin appointed Putin as his successor: to finish out Yeltsin's term, to grant Yeltsin immunity, to and clean up some of the mess. The rest, as they say, is history. When the next election rolled around, Putin won. He has remained in power since — including the Medvedev pseudo-interregnum of 2000-2008.

We should not expect the Russian citizens to rush to embrace an American solution to what we perceive as their leadership problems. They tried that — or rather, had it imposed upon them. It led to the near-destruction of Russia as a nation. Moreover, since the destruction of Russia too often seems the declared goal of many American politicians and pundits, even if more as rhetorical flourish than articulated policy, we should not expect Russia to cooperate on our terms with their own demise.

The blowback from operation re-elect Yeltsin (aka, “Spinning Boris”) was Vladimir Putin. If the USA has another catastrophic success with a regime change that displaces Putin, God only knows what the blowback from that will be. But likely nuclear and biological, to start. Putin will not live forever. Let the peoples (ethnically, linguistically, culturally diverse) of Russia determine Putin’s successor.

It serves as a parting gift since Crystal is a former student of both JF (the translator) and your author, and your author has ended his formal connections with China.

             Photo of a previous graduating cohort. Crystal is not in this photo.

The Board of Trustees can now Revoke my PhD

Your author no longer has an appointment at the rank of Professor in the College of Liberal Arts for certain university in mainland China. After nearly six years on the mainland, during the Covid pandemic, I was living in a nearby Southeast Asian nation and teaching remote (online). In October 2022, I was ordered to return to campus by 10 January 2023.

I resigned my position instead. I had watched the first bio-security state fully emerge. I would not willing integrate — the Borg is real, the economic comfort and security it offers an illusion. You die with your alleged estate recycled to the medical-industrial complex. You sacrifice your time and energy to have your living corpse exploited as your final obligation. You chose safety over liberty, dependence on the system over personal responsibility. You belong to them, body and soul. So be it.

I had years of scrimping, saving, investing, and relying on NO governments for support — not the USA, and most certainly not China. Fiscal responsibility is good. Savings, not debt, make freedom viable. A personal and national lesson we have largely forgotten. So I effectively bought out my contract — the remaining years of my life belong to me. I can meet my survival needs for years to come.

Finished up my duties mid-January 2023. I did forfeit some personal property still on campus. As well as some back pay (which I apparently needed to arrive in person to collect. Whatever). All worth it — and more. Ex-academic. My current quality of life, which includes my personal freedom, is ludicrously improved.

A CCTV display using the facial-recognition system Face in Beijing.                                                            (Gilles Sabrié / The Washington Post). Cited under Fair Use. 

Teaching the Western Tradition in China

Intellectual freedom as a token American academic in China, curiously enough, was quite a different matter. We — the students and I — discussed readings by such classic Western thinkers as John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Hayek; important contemporaries such as Shoshana Zuboff, Esther Duflo, Joshua Greene, Thomas Piketty, and Victor Davis Hanson. Beyond economic and political theory, our topics included AI, bioethics, environmental ethics, and more. In two other courses, your author walked the students (English or Chinese language majors, generally) through basic text-mining, building data dashboards from the Gapminder data repository, and more.

These young women and men — as the non-binary phenomena has yet to take hold in China — were neither zombies nor robots nor brain-washed ideologues. They had their biases — as we all do —but were generally both curious and critically open-minded. Likewise, they more typically tolerated or even tuned out the relentless CCP messaging. True believers or mindless repeaters were very few and far in between. This was one (and so only one sample thereof a) Chinese university in reality — but not the Chinese campuses so featured in the American MSM.

       A published student dashboard from my Telling Stories with Data course.

One wonders if these MSM portrayals of rigidly indoctrinated and highly regimented Chinese college student populations are not confession by projection: confessions of the fantasies our power elite have for our own universities, and confessions of numerous local actualities where woke student-mobs have displaced critical reasoning, empiricism, and the study of history with ideologically charged narratives of victimization which allow for no dissent or questioning.

For a start on that latter point, please recall how Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying got their start in podcasting. To take the next step, please read Heather MacDonald (2018), The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. But whatever.

Preface to the Poem, “Simply One Flapping of the Wings”

The poem below, “Simply One Flapping of the Wings” does not explicitly criticize the CCP lockdowns, Covid policies, etc. It would never have been published in a local literary magazine, to start; but also, such bluntness is typically not a virtue in Chinese literature. Moreover, in fact, such direct statements become curiously ambiguous — weakened, mysterious — as the context fades.

Rather than making an outright political statement, the writer will more typically create a mood, even an environment. The reader enters into the experience, even if at times obliquely, immersing.

It is this sharing of experience, this vicarious to visceral knowing, which leads a heighted understanding, a differing political awareness. Again, whereas the Covid lockdowns are not explicitly mentioned in this poem, their effects are undeniably exposed:

All of a sudden, it grabbed and gripped every form of life;
Even the babbling infants
And the kittens and puppies that wanted to seek some warmth under the cars
Failed to get free.

The poem is also covertly but strongly critical of the CCP’s relentless efforts to dominate all discourse and hence exert influence — if not control — over all aspects of life. The poet shows her generation offering resistance, creating solidarity, but not living in denial about the CCP’s effectiveness:

With fair play, we have been pulling the cobweb covering each of us,
One pull from you, another pull from me,
And a third from another.
We simply keep pulling and pulling,
Until we are habitually blind to the existence of the web.

But the poet is not blind. If the reader is familiar with the famous speech “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace (2005) —from which a brief excerpt is provided near end of this post, Crystal is demonstrating the

“real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us.”

Although both JF and your author doubtless wish we could take credit for this as her professors, in truth we can at best encourage and clear obstacles, create opportunities. The credit goes to the student who has surpassed her teachers.

This is a quietly heroic poem by Crystal, a former student of both JF the translator and your author. A young lady striving for internal coherence beyond dogma or self-pity, finding or creating meaning despite the power-mad absurdities largely dictating her public reality, and convinced beyond reason but not beyond hope that change will come at last — led by the younger generation (hers) and those still in their cradles:

The long and lingering winter,
Cannot stop the steps of the early spring.
The global wailing
Is being interwoven with the sobbing of the newborn babies.

The poem’s ending might not please those American readers with short attention spans and simplistic notions of progress. The poet’s hoped for renewal requires engagement, not “stillness,” but also NOT the surrender of one’s self to a prefabricated moral tribe, to a politized collective already known to, covertly or overtly supported by, and hence being mobilized for advantage by the elites in power.

This is not about surrendering to a side, and then demonizing the other side. This is not about being cannon fodder in a Civil War for which you are unprepared and will not benefit from. This is not American identity politics.

In contrast to the surrender of self to a collective, an ongoing demand in China and elsewhere, the poet calls for “solitude:” the affirmation of an individual existence, the delay between stimulus and reaction which allows for choice, for response. Which defeats the crass, simplistic, but powerful manipulation of identity politics. By recapturing and asserting the self, one gains the possibility as mentioned earlier in the poem of true solidarity — of voluntarily associating with and connecting with other selves to further shared goals and concerns:

The spring splendor in all the city
Can only prosper in solitude,
And perish in stillness.

Solitude from the overreaching and relentless demands of the CCP, along with the mainland Chinese work-yourself-to-death ethic; but an end to the stifling stillness of lockdowns and seemingly endless top-down control. The authorities demanded that the students always be kept busy busy busy, on drill for this and that; as professors, many of us insisted that the students needed time to think, even time to create.

In contemporary American culture, we have vilified and demonized “individualism.” But “solitude” is about having that personal, psychological, and social boundary-space which makes decision-making meaningful, possible. Crystal reminds us that forced assimilation into a group, mob, or tribe is one of society’s ultimate betrayals of our shared humanity. At some point, we either exercise choice or lose all choices.

My former Chinese students give me hope for the future, even as the CCP does not. Even as our American leadership does not. It has indeed been my honor to work with such young women and men for eight and a half years, the majority of that time in person and in mainland China, with only the Covid-craze online and remote.

Without further ado:

Simply One Flapping of the Wings

The wings of darkness flapped,
For one time, a second time,
And another,
Flapping and flapping…

The heart of darkness
Opened its eyes but slightly,
And the cobweb lying on the ceiling was stirred and stunned out of its dreams,
Then drifting down,
Softly, slowly, in an indolent security.

Right before its fall unto the ground,
All of a sudden, it grabbed and gripped every form of life;
Even the babbling infants
And the kittens and puppies that wanted to seek some warmth under the cars
Failed to get free.

Not until then,
Did we truly come to realise
The very frequency of that flapping.

We, the ones who failed to break away,
Started to question the variety of deities in our hearts,
But how come those past prayers
Had become the melted glaciers, evaporating into thin air?

For the abrupt assumption of devoutness,
Salvation came a bit too late, with lethargy.
For the crimes and sins committed by the human species,
Absolution has long arrived at its expiry date.

The responses of the Providence have been overwhelmed in hurricanes and tempests,
And even the vast land that has been a silent and selfless servant,
Cannot afford the time to sing its lamentation.

We take to the street to get some help,
Dragging the exposed bodies deeply bound in the cobweb,
And through its small spots of space,
The way ahead is reluctantly revealed.

No one can see clearly the face of another,
No one can ever forge ahead in a straight line.
On the way, everyone is linked with kinship,
And each one is locked in enmity.

Occasionally some clowns
Come to add some untimely merriment
To the stagnant metropolis.
They dance comically in the cobweb,
To the accomplishment of our tightly caught lips,
Which try hard to open, unwilling to let the scarce laughters go unnoticed.

On the way, losing the sight of our Mother,
We can do nothing but huddle back into the swaddles of the old days.
Weeping is the weapon we can wield,
But Mother, together with Destiny,
Can no longer hear anything.

Anxiety abounds in the refrigerator,
So the windows are opened to set free the odour of rottenness.
Gusts of wind pour in from outside,
But we are still careless and callous, either about the chill,
Or about the sultriness.

With fair play, we have been pulling the cobweb covering each of us,
One pull from you, another pull from me,
And a third from another.
We simply keep pulling and pulling,
Until we are habitually blind to the existence of the web.
Over time, the fair play becomes a funny game to kill time.

Demonstrations go on and on in the streets;
Even closed windows cannot keep out the tolling of the bells,
Which, like cheerleaders, by celebrating our play and games,
Ceases to be unpleasant to the ears.

Standing up to press the button to flush the toilet,
And staring at the weird and fragmented whirlpool,
Whose vortex is the very centre of this world,
And spreads its smell.

Who else will ever believe,
that the homo sapiens have long before shut up their eyes,
And held their breath.

The long and lingering winter,
Cannot stop the steps of the early spring.
The global wailing
Is being interwoven with the sobbing of the newborn babies.

The spring splendor in all the city
Can only prosper in solitude,
And perish in stillness.

By Crystal, published late 2022, Guangdong Province, CHINA. Translation by JF.

To except two passages from Foster’s speech “This is Water” (2005):

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

…

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

Your author will include below the original Chinese, but please again note that JF, who provided the above English translation, is an accomplished poet and translator in his own right. For literary matters, for which the Chinese language has both numerous conventions and nuances, please trust JF to out-perform Google translate every time.

只不過是翅膀扇動了一下

黑色的翅膀扇動了
一下，两下
又一下
扑棱 扑棱

黑色的心
微微睜開开雙眼
躺在天花板的蜘蛛網也被震醒
輕輕地，緩緩地，若無其事地
飘了下來

就在快要落地的時候
突然，紧紧地罩住每個生命
連咿呀學语的孩童
躲在車底取暖的小貓小狗
都未能幸免

直到這時
我們才真正感受到了
翅膀扇動的頻率

掙脫未果的我們
質問心中的神明
過往的禱告
為何成了融化的雪水，蒸發在空气裏
對於突如其来的虔誠
庇護也來得措手不及，略顯得無力

對於人類的罪行
赦免早已過了有效期

上帝的回應淹没在狂風暴雨裏
連往日默默奉獻的大地
也陷入昏迷
來不及訴說自己的冤屈

我們到街上求救
拖著裹在蜘蛛網裏裸露的身體
透著小小的網格
好不容易纔看見眼前的路

没有誰能看得清誰的脸
没有誰能筆直地前行
路上的每個人都是親人
每個人也都是敵人

有时也會有小丑
給沉悶的城市
貼上些许不合時宜的歡樂
小丑在蜘蛛網裏滑稽地跳舞
我們努力張開被勒紧的雙唇
也不願放過這來之不易的笑聲

我們和母親走散了
只好蜷縮回舊日的襁褓裏
哭啼是我們的武器
可是母親連同命運
都聽不見任何聲音

冰箱裏囤满了焦慮
打開窗户，讓腐爛的氣味散出去一點
一陣陣風从窗外迎面扑來
我們依然感受不到寒冷
也不覺得悶热

我們公平地撕扯彼此身上的蜘蛛網

你一下，我一下
又一下
直到習慣了網的存在
也繼續互相撕扯
時間長了
倒成了一个打發時間的遊戲

大街上無休止的示威遊行
關上窗都能聽到的丧鍾
都像在為我們的遊戲摇旗助威呐喊
變得不再刺耳

从馬桶站起來，按下按鈕
盯著那怪異又破碎的漩涡
滚動的那个瞬間
就是這個世界的中心
散發出這個世界的氣味

又有誰會相信？
人類早已閉上眼睛
屏住呼吸

長冬的滯留
無法阻擋初春的步伐
遍地的哀嚎裏
夾雜着新生兒的啜泣
滿城的春色
也只能寂寞地生長
再安静地凋零

And participate as they wish (providing a match-up) in fights roughly 4 times a year with members from other clubs. The next Interclub match, one week from now in July.

So when our beloved member Dmitri went back to Russia for the first time in nine years to visit his family, the conversation was and remains about his safe return — not about whatever our varied opinions might be on the Russian-Ukrainian war.

A Glimpse inside Russia, early July 2023

But how are things in Russia? A nation on the verge of collapse? A terrified populace suffering under a despotic madman? Et cetera, et cetera.

For many people, life simply goes on. And whatever their feelings are about Putin or the current government, many Russians experience NO shame in being Russian — in sharing a language, culture, and heritage. Their loyalty is not primarily to the state or to any political system, but to themselves — to the greater Russian people.

We denounce any such sentiment in the USA as ethno-nationalism — even though it is both globally and historically normative. Try asking someone born in and native to Lithuania, for example, to apologize for being Lithuanian. Someone born in and native to Eritrea or Scotland, et cetera. Good luck with that.

The “Wall to Wall” brawl

Below, a video (1 minute, 16 second long) from Dmitri, documenting a Russian tradition he was participating in — the “Wall to Wall” brawl:

Your author’s friend is on the front line in the black shirt brigade, squaring off against the yellow shirt brigade. What’s the emblem on the shirts?  An old-fashioned Russian coat of arms. Pre-Soviet.

Toxic or Tonic Masculinity?

Details discussed, back to the “Wall to Wall” brawl. So, toxic masculinity or good, clean fun?

Your author sides with good, clean fun.

The brawl lasts about minute. It’s reasonably all out, but always one-on-one. All fighters must glove up. People who want protective headgear can wear it. There are referees, so to speak, in orange vests supervising the fight. Everyone involved has freely chosen to participate. And it stops when the airhorn blows.

About a minute or so into the video, a man hoists his daughter onto his shoulders so she can get a better view.  Adorable!

Does this look like a dispirited nation on the edge of collapse to you? Does it look like a nation easily conquered and perhaps occupied by NATO-backed forces?

Just wondering. Whatever you make of this video clip, one thing seems certain: the participants have priorities other than their pronouns.

But Your Author Could Be Dead Wrong

But maybe your author is wrong. Dead wrong. This could be ugly political ideology on display.  An effort to terrify and intimidate the general populace. State-enabled, if not state-sponsored, domestic terrorism.

Please compare it with the following below — an American Antifa attack on five unarmed protestors which took place on 25 April 2023 in Fort Worth, Texas:

We certainly cannot mistake these acts of violence as examples of toxic masculinity. The toxic lack of masculinity, perhaps. But it raises some questions about the current state of American culture.

What Counts as Violence? And Why?

An American rendition of the “Wall to Wall” brawl would be denounced as some form of fitness fascism. Dangerously unhealthy for the body politic. But the violent destructive antics of the Antifa get a free pass from the MSM and our cultural guardians. Even praise and support. The individuals involved in this criminal conduct — the Fort Worth incident — were bailed out shortly after arrest.

Why?

Because you are required to submit to this short-term Anarcho-Tyranny.

Why?

Because this current Anarcho-Tyranny will be followed by the totalizing Corporate-Government takeover of all aspects of public and private life. The end of our Constitutional Republic. This takeover is for your own good, of course — wouldn’t want you getting a black eye in a “Wall to Wall” brawl. You might not survive.

Defamation as Intimidation

If you do not submit, you will be denounced as a xenophobic transphobic racist bigot. Fascist. And likely anti-Semitic as well. Sure as Larry Elder is the black face of white supremacy.

Fair enough. Your author grew up in a tough, working-class neighborhood in decline. It was on the way to being the next Kensington, but instead later got gentrified beyond recognition. Small, deeply depressing pockets of the old hood sorta linger on — but are being property-taxed into evaporation.

Your author didn’t fight for his right to party — he fought for his right to carry books home from the Public Library in the summer. No joke.

Beyond dealing with actual physical violence, “faggot” was the term of contempt for young males like myself who did not fall in lockstep with a fearful and rigidly defined but failing social hierarchy. Now, it is “bigot” — and coming from the intelligentsia your author once aspired to join, becoming the first person in his tribe to go to college, eventually earning a PhD.

No matter. The fight continues. Now his sixth decade, your author spars with Russians in South-East Asia — and does what little he can at Substack against the enforcers of our emergent Corporate-State.

Sheryl Crowe has called out Jason Aldean for promoting violence with his song “Try That in a Small Town” (Deadline, 18 July 2023). She also deemed the song Un-American. The MSM, judging by their reaction, has anointed Sheryl Crowe the arbitrator of what is acceptable in popular music.

                        Image copyright 2023 Rolling Stone. Cited under Fair Use.

Over Her Long Career

Well, Sheryl Crowe’s singer-songwriter career does span from the early 1990s to the present — so she should certainly be familiar with the American music scene.

Before we get to the actual lyrics of “Try That in a Small Town,” let’s briefly review in chronological order a number of pop songs which Sheryl Crowe has evidently found acceptable — nothing to protest about or comment on. Decades of silence. Only now in 2023 she has something to say to and about Jason Aldean.

Acceptable Music

The reader can decide if any of these songs seem to promote violence. Or, if any of these songs are inconsistent with the reader’s understanding of American values.

NWA, “One Less Bitch” (1991), which has a rough body count of 5:

I tied her to the bed, I was thinking the worst / But yo, I had to let my niggas fuck her first / Yeah, loaded up the 44 yo / Then I straight smoked the hoe.

OG Style, “10 B 3” (1991), which has a rough body count of 10:

She turned her head and all you heard was pop / By now they knew we wasn't fakin / Blood over the floor, bodies layin there shakin.

The Convicts (featuring Choice), “Whoop Her Ass” (1991), rough body count of 1:

Slammed her to the flo' and shit / Then started beatin the bitch with a solid wood clobber stick / And threw her ass out the window / She went through the windshield of a fucked-up Pinto.

Big L, “All Black” (1995), which has rough body count of 8:

I be placin' snitches inside lakes and ditches / And if I catch AIDS, then I'ma start rapin' bitches.

Kool G Rap, “Hey Mister Mister” (1995), with no apparent fatality:

Bitch why you lyin', bitch you've been cheatin' / Now I gotsta to give your motherfuckin' ass a beatin / I punched her in the ribcage and kicked her in the stomach / Take off all my motherfuckin' jewellery, bitch run it / I stomped her and I kicked her and I punched her in the face.

DMX, “Bring Ya Whole Crew” (1998), which has a rough body count of 4:

I got blood on my hands and there's no remorse / And got blood on my dick cause I fucked a corpse.

Immortal Technique, “Dance with the Devil” (2001), with a rough body count of 1:

The shirt covered her face, but she screamed and clawed / So Billy stomped on the bitch, until he broke her jaw / The dirty bastards knew exactly what they were doing / They kicked her until they cracked her ribs and she stopped moving.

Brotha Lynch Hung, "Meat Cleaver" (2013), with a rough body count of 5:

Cut niggas up, sector by sector / Next to her dead, first cousin and nephew / Next to her head, bloody intestines / Next to her bed, other intestines.

And this list could be expanded considerably. These songs obviously concern black on black violence in the USA, and also often enough, male sexual violence against females. Do these songs profess the “American” values which Sheryl Crowe espouses?

We have no word to the contrary. In fact, we have decades of silence.

Do these songs promote violence? In anyway glorify violence? Again, it would seem Sheryl Crowe does not think so. Decades of silence.

Dear reader, on the above sample of popular music which passes the Sheryl Crowe test, please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Unacceptable Music

Now, for song that moved Sheryl Crowe to speak out after decades of silence. Below are the lyrics of “Try That in a Small Town” (by Kelley Lovelace, Neil Thrasher, Tully Kennedy, Kurt Michael Allison):

Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
Carjack an old lady at a red light
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
Ya think it's cool, well, act a fool if ya like

Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, ya think you're tough

[Chorus]: Well, try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
Around here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won't take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don't
Try that in a small town

Got a gun that my granddad gave me
They say one day they're gonna round up
Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck

[Chorus]

Full of good ol' boys, raised up right
If you're looking for a fight
Try that in a small town
Try that in a small town

[Chorus]

Try that in a small town
Ooh-ooh
Try that in a small town

Promoting violence? Un-American? How so and how much so? Et cetera.

Your Thoughts on Our MSM-anointed Czar

Your thoughts, please, in comments section below, on Sheryl Crowe as our (MSM-anointed) Czar of Pop Music.

Previously, in the first four posts of this series on Longevity and Healthy Aging, we covered the major concerns of Healthspan, Exercise, Metabolic Health and Diet, and Bio-Hacking (with supplements, off-label prescription drugs, and technology) as discussed by our four medical doctors, Sullivan (2016), Luks (2022), Hyman (2023), and Attia (2023), and as confirmed or challenged by other qualified experts and peer-reviewed sources. 

We had a largely shared path by our experts on Healthspan, Exercise, and even generally on Metabolic Health and Diet. But when it came to Bio-Hacking, this shared path noticeably forked off into two separate routes. From this, two (or more) competing and substantively different visions of longevity and healthy aging have emerged. Our final concern, Emotional Health, seems part of both visions.

All four of our medical doctors writing on longevity — Sullivan (2016), Luks (2022), Hyman (2023), and Attia (2023) offer some discussion of the importance of emotional health to one’s general well-being.

Sullivan (2016) has the least to say. Not from a lack of compassion, but from a fear of overstepping his mandate as any thorough discussion of such matters “is far beyond the scope of this text.” Acknowledging that "overwhelming stress, worry, and despair are threats to health and even to life, and may indicate serious underlying endocrine or neuropsychiatric derangements,” Sullivan (2016) implores anyone “confronted by these difficulties to bring them promptly to the attention of medical or mental health professionals.” Fair enough.

Action Steps for Emotional Health

But many people will want actionable steps to maintain and improve their emotion health, to create wellness and not just treat sickness. So how do we create emotional well-being? Or, at the least, the conditions which allow it to flourish?  At engaging these concerns, Luks (2022), Hyman (2023), and Attia (2023) all have a go.

Defining Emotional Health, to Start

We will start and largely end with Attia (2023), who based upon his own experience now believes:

Emotional health may represent the most important component of healthspan. Nothing else about longevity is really worth much without some degree of happiness, fulfillment, and connection to others. And misery and unhappiness can also destroy your physical health, just as surely as cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative disease, and orthopedic injury.

Attia (2023) holds that “mental health and emotional health are not the same thing,” but “Medicine 2.0 is set up to treat mental and emotional health in pretty much the same way that it treats everything else: diagnose, prescribe, and, of course, bill.” So what is emotional health?

Emotional health, Attia (2023) argues “has more to do with the way we regulate our emotions and manage our interpersonal relationships.” Speaking about his own experience, Attia (2023) reports:

I did not have a mental illness, per se, but I did have serious issues with my emotional health that impaired my ability to live a happy, well-adjusted life — and potentially did put my life in danger.

We will return to his discussion. In the earlier section on Metabolic Health and Diet, we covered the self-admitted failure of American Mental Healthcare. Attia (2023) clearly believes we are failing also at Emotional Healthcare. But two key take-aways for now: (1) we have a rough definition of emotional health as “the way we regulate our emotions and manage our interpersonal relationships;” and (2), emotional health is vitally important both to extending Healthspan and to making any additions to Lifespan worth having.

Luks: “Straightforward, Easy Strategies”

With his focus on better years but not necessarily more, Luks (2022) emphasizes “evidence-based strategies [which] have been shown to improve your metabolic health, lessen the chances of suffering from many chronic diseases and early demise, and therefore increase your longevity.” The last two of his seven “straightforward, easy strategies” concern emotional health [numbers mine]:

1. Create a caloric deficit, then stay lean.

2. Get sleep.

3. Eat real food.

4. Move often, throughout the day.

5. Push and pull heavy things.

6. Socialize.

7. Have a sense of purpose.

Aware that “loneliness is a grave health issue these days,” Luks (2022) asserts that “stress management, optimism, laughing, being socially connected, and feeling a sense of purpose and community” all contribute vitally to “maintaining a long healthspan.” His Longevity … Simplified (2022) has useful insights scattered throughout, and makes numerous connections between emotional health, exercise, and metabolic health, but offers no systematic treatment of emotional health.

Hyman: Social Practice, Individual Purpose, and Spiritual Nourishment

Although his general position is similar to Luks (2022), Hyman (2023) offers a considerable and generally excellent discussion of emotional health in chapter 5, subsection “Social Diseases: Our Social Environment and Health,” and in chapter 9, subsections "Healing Our Minds, Hearts, and Spirit" and "Meaning and Purpose."

To quote one or more key passage from each subsection, from “Our Social Environment and Health:”

Our social determinants of health, including community, relationships, stress, trauma, and sense of purpose and belonging, are just as important for our health as what we eat and how we move. If you’re feeling lonely, stressed, isolated, or powerless, your biology, your cells, your microbiome, literally “hear” your thoughts and feelings, driving inflammation and disease. Working with a trained professional to heal from trauma, serious life events, or struggles like chronic depression is important, but there are simple daily practices that help improve your social and emotional well-being, including practicing gratitude, prioritizing self-care, being of service to others, joining a community, and starting meditation. Whatever strategy you develop for health and longevity, it must include nurturing and developing your own social fabric of belonging, meaning, and purpose. (Hyman, 2023)

From “Healing Our Minds, Hearts, and Spirit:”

The truth is you cannot live a healthy, happy, fulfilled, and long life while neglecting to nourish your mind and spirit. … If your emotions are inflamed, so is your biology. … Nourishing your spirit includes cultivating a positive mindset (optimists live longer even if they are wrong!), developing self-love and self-worth, prioritizing self-care, cultivating community and meaningful relationships, practicing healthy stress-management techniques, finding support, and practicing religion or spirituality if that speaks to you. (Hyman, 2023)

And from “Meaning and Purpose:”

[Research found] that people who have a clear sense of purpose, a reason to get up in the morning, lived up to seven years longer than those who didn’t have a clear purpose. … [Having purpose] is as essential as eating well and exercising for your longevity. It is no accident that the risk of death goes way up after retirement — and it’s not just because of chronological age. … The foundations of health and longevity — diet, exercise, sleep, learning to manage stress and rest our nervous system, building meaningful relationships and community, and finding purpose and meaning in your life — are available to all of us at little or no extra cost in our lives. Just getting these habits and practices embedded in your daily life will make profound changes in your health and extend your life span. (Hyman, 2023)

Beautifully stated: so much we can do now which is “available to all of us at little or no extra cost in our lives” (Hyman, 2023). But what if you are not good — as in you have poor emotional health to start?

Attia: Sharing an Ongoing Personal Journey

With no small amount of self-righteousness, Henry David Thoreau famously declared: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Attia (2023) agrees with the general sentiment, but takes a different approach:

Countless people are in desperate need of help with their emotional health, yet fail to recognize the signs and symptoms of their condition. I was the poster child for this group.

In chapter 17, “Work in Progress: The High Price of Ignoring Emotional Health,” Attia (2023) describes a breakdown he had in 2020, what he now understands as the root causes, and the steps — learned by trial and error — he now takes for improving and maintaining his emotional health.

Deaths of Despair, of Substance Abuse and Mental Illness

Back to Thoreau’s take just for a moment, but updating it: the deaths of despair. “Not all suicides jump from bridges,” Attia (2023) observes:

Many more people sort of slow-roll into misery and early death via various roundabout routes, letting stress and anger erode their health, or falling into self-medicating addictions to alcohol and drugs, or engaging in other reckless, life-endangering behaviors that mental health professionals call parasuicide. It’s not a surprise that deaths related to alcohol and drug abuse have surged over the last two decades, especially among people ages thirty to sixty-five.

In the USA, we have two deeply connected public health crises: poor metabolic health and deteriorating mental health. Moreover, the “substance-abuse crisis,” which is also lowering the average American life expectancy, is according to Attia (2023) “really a mental health crisis in disguise.”

The Trauma Tree: Mapping Childhood Roots of Emotional Disturbance

Attia (2023) understands his recent breakdown in 2020 as ultimately resulting from both unresolved trauma from Adverse Childhood Experiences and the consequences of his subsequent coping strategies, which had survival value at the time but which were now proving maladaptive. A key model which helped him is the Trauma Tree:

The idea behind it is that certain undesirable behaviors that we manifest as adults, such as addiction and uncontrolled anger, are actually adaptations to the various types of trauma we suffered in childhood. So while we only see the manifestation of the tree above the ground, the trunk and branches, we need to look underground, at the roots, to understand the tree completely. But the roots are often very well hidden, as they were with me. (Attia, 2023)

Attia (2023) frankly and bravely recounts his struggles to recover from his breakdown and to improve his emotional health. Meaningful change, he now believes, requires:

[That] we are equipped with a set of effective tools and sensors with which to monitor, maintain, and restore our emotional equilibrium. These tools and sensors are not innate; for most of us, they must be learned, and refined, and practiced daily. And neither are they quick fixes. (Attia, 2023)

As part of his emotional health toolkit, Attia (2023) uses dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, which [boldface his] is “predicated on learning to execute concrete skills, repetitively, under stress, that aim to break the chain reaction of negative stimulus → negative emotion → negative thought → negative action.” DBT, which emphasizes mindfulness, has according to Attia (2023) four pillars [italics his]:

emotional regulation (getting control over our emotions), distress tolerance (our ability to handle emotional stressors), interpersonal effectiveness (how well we make our needs and feelings known to others), and self-management (taking care of ourselves, beginning with basic tasks like getting up in time to go to work or school).

Additionally, Attia (2023) has continued working with a DBT therapist. All good.

Attia (2023) understands that Adverse Childhood Experiences, and some of his were quite awful, contributed significantly to his later dysfunctionality as an adult. He does acknowledge that “there is no bright line between trauma and adversity,” and that he is “not suggesting that it is ideal for children to grow up without experiencing any adversity at all, which sometimes seems to be a primary goal of modern parenting.”

By “Adverse Childhood Experiences,” What Do We Mean ?

Once again, we have a pronounced socio-economic divide in terms of how certain people think about Adverse Childhood Experiences, and about emotional, mental, and general health. This divide is revealed neatly by a recent Washington Post report (yes, your author is surprised as well) by Donna St. George (Apr 28, 2023): “One school’s solution to the mental health crisis: Try everything.” 

St. George (Apr 28, 2023) describes the efforts of an elementary school in Ohio, within the greater Appalachia corridor. To her credit, St. George (Apr 28, 2023) is not Hill-Billy slumming or engaging in poverty porn: Oh, pity the poor white trash! She is respectful, considerate, and aware.

Mental and Emotional Health Problems — Or Even More Basic?

But here’s the rub. It makes limited sense to claim that many of these children are having emotional and mental health problems — they are having basic resource and even survival problems.

Let’s hear a sample of the stressors or challenges these K-12 students face (St. George, Apr 28, 2023):

• “Our water got turned off, and my mommy doesn’t want to tell you.”

• “My dad died … and I’m sad"

• Missing family members, parents, and grandparents, in part because of increased number of alcohol and drug related deaths in the county (i.e., “deaths of despair”).

• Food and housing insecurity because of the high levels of unemployment with few viable prospects for this former blue-collar community.

• Multiple generations of family crammed into small houses or trailer homes.

• Adult caregivers — and the occasional lack thereof — who themselves suffer from emotional, mental, and general health issues.

Another way to put this: these children don’t have first world problems. They have third world problems. Their emotional reactions seem entirely appropriate — and in that sense, healthy — given their circumstances. They should feel angry, sad, confused, and even at times hopeless.

Questioning the Chemical Imbalance Model — The Status Quo

Would putting these children on prescription medications — the standard anti-depressants and anti-psychotics, for example — make things better? Why and how? These children are reacting to their social environments and material circumstances: exactly what our brains are supposed to help us do. Respond to external stimuli because the real world does matter.

If we have a child suffering from severe depression, for example, does it make sense to treat this as a chemical imbalance? Or, does it make more sense to ask what might be provoking that chemical imbalance? What do we gain — and equally vital, what do we lose — by treating these Adverse Childhood Experiences as mental health challenges? An adult reflecting back on their childhood is one scenario; a child going through it in real time is another.

Balyee Bently, the WashPo Poster Child

St. George (Apr 28, 2023) offers the case study of Baylee Bently, a high school sophomore whose father died suddenly. Baylee went to live with her grandparents, who had a house fire, and then suffered an eviction. After which her grandfather was hospitalized. Baylee, in her own words, "wasn’t getting any school work done."

Baylee believes that her therapy is helping her to cope — along with the support of other family members and friends. Please note that in Baylee’s case, she needs more than someone to speak with. She needs a place to live and food to eat. Nor is it reasonable to expect an unskilled high school sophomore to support herself. What does Baylee need more: DBT (or some other talk therapy) and anti-depressants, or some basic stability in her life?

Peter Attia, the Alpha-Male Poster Child

On the one hand, your author admires the willingness of Peter Attia, MD, millionaire celebrity, to openly discuss his emotional health issues and his ongoing efforts to be better a human being, and a truly loving and considerate husband and father. On the other hand, your author wonders if Attia’s presentation isn’t at times just a bit self-indulgent or even narcissistic. Italics his: “If you take nothing else from my story, take this: If I can change, you can change.” Got it. So you are THE role model for alpha-male high-achievers who wake up one day and realize they’ve been behaving like assholes for years. Inspiring.

Thank you for that, although your author doubts that Andrew Tate is paying much attention. Thank you also, Dr. Attia, for the reminder that it is NOT “ideal for children to grow up without experiencing any adversity at all, which sometimes seems to be a primary goal of modern parenting” (Attia, 2023).  Your author wonders who are the children and who are the modern parents which Attia has in mind.

By “Modern Parenting,” What Do We Mean?

Perhaps any discussion of Adverse Childhood Experiences, emotional health, and longevity should be more inclusive, to start. According to one credible source, "America has one of the highest levels of single-parent families with children in the world" and  the "share of American families with children living with a single parent has tripled since 1965”  to comprise roughly 30% of all American families with children (The Hill, Mar 19, 2021).

Do Fathers Matter?

Taboo time. Does the rise of single-parent families have any possible correlation or relationship with the rise of metabolic and mental health issues?  Consider the following USA government demographic report on households (graph below):

This could get ugly fast. Let’s not go there in detail — at least not in this discussion. Try “The Fatherless Crisis in America” (Jan 16, 2023) for a deeply informed rant. For our purposes at hand, give Attia the credit he deserves. We all have shit to deal with — but too often we don’t. Or certainly not effectively. Attia highly recommends the work of Terrance Real, author of I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression (1997). To cite just the blurb:

Problems that we think of as typically male—difficulty with intimacy, workaholism, alcoholism, abusive behavior, and rage—are really attempts to escape depression. And these escape attempts only hurt the people men love and pass their condition on to their children.

As your author’s father was an alcoholic steelworker who died of lung cancer at age 48, although such a description does your author’s father a great injustice, what Terrance Real claims above seems to have some real merit. What also has merit? A vast body of evidence [ref] which shows that missing fathers generally result in worse outcomes for children than imperfect fathers.

       Infographics for public distribution by the National Fatherhood Initiative, 2023.

Good of Attia (2023), truly, to publicly share the working through of some of his own bullshit — his own trauma, damages, mistakes, and ongoing efforts to improve. Motivated in large part by his desire to be a better father to his children, and a better partner to his spouse.

As Mental Health Problems, What Else Do We Disguise or Medicalize?

But for a teenager like Baylee Bently, or for millions of other American children, we’re missing a vital part of the picture if we focus primarily on emotional and mental health issues — and especially if we do so with our current “chemical imbalance” model. We likewise ignore the many other factors which contribute to or detract from health more generally. Your author doesn’t have the answers.

Your author is also uncertain that the medical doctors cited above have the answers. That said, since what we cited from Attia (2023) earlier is so important, your author will simply repeat it:

Emotional health may represent the most important component of healthspan. Nothing else about longevity is really worth much without some degree of happiness, fulfillment, and connection to others. And misery and unhappiness can also destroy your physical health, just as surely as cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative disease, and orthopedic injury. (Attia, 2023)

Nearly all of us need to do better with emotional health, including yours truly. And for men above a certain age, Attia (2023) has a viable blueprint. Likewise, Luks (2022), Hyman (2023), and yes, even Sullivan (2016) have useful contributions on the more general topic of emotional health.

Your Life is NOT Determined by Adverse Childhood Experiences

Finally, on this topic, Chris Palmer, MD, does not discuss mush of his personal history in Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health—and Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More (2022). He does for some of his interviews. As a child, Palmer experienced a period of homelessness and was living with his mother in their car after she had suffered a psychotic breakdown. He dedicates Brain Energy (2023) to her:

If we are in need of an emotional health “poster child” in Attia’s phrase, and your author thinks we all have our own stories to share and so your author feels no such need, then over Peter Attia American Exile recommends either Chris Palmer or Baylee Bently. But even this seems the wrong way to go.

Whatever one’s individual path forward with emotional health might be, when as an adult, it should not begin with privileging one’s own victimhood. Self-care is required, yes. Dealing with what happened, yes. But concern for other people goes hand-in-hand with improving relationships with other people.

Or, in the words of your author’s late father, who recovered from alcoholism and was successfully rebuilding his life before he died of lung cancer at the age of 48: “The greatest mistake I ever made in my life was feeling sorry for myself.”

Conclusion to Our Five-Part Series

A ludicrously vast cloud of smoke is now blowing from both longevity research labs and supplement manufacturers across the globe. This smoke has the delirious, hallucinogenic qualities of snake-oil burning. Whiff the fumes and believe at least for the moment that the Foundation of Youth has been unearthed, the Peaches of Immortality are now within reach. But if your author is placing bets, the current estimation (Gavrilova and Gavrilov, 2020) of human longevity capping out at around 120 years will NOT be readily overcome. Yet with all this smoke, there is a hint of fire. Some highly promising lab results, indeed. A greatly improved knowledge of how metabolism contributes to health and hence longevity.

Your author now places a second bet: a significant increase — proportionally, and not just by raw count — in the centenarian population (people who reach the age of 100 and beyond). Although the Grim Reaper at some point will have his due, demographically, we will witness a growing percentage of people aged 100 to 120 years or so. But this increase in longevity will be thoroughly undemocratic, as it were. It will require the finest advanced healthcare, well out of the reach of the majority of the global population. We can gain insight into this divide by comparing Sullivan (2016) and Luks (2022) to Hyman (2023) and Attia (2023) on their approaches to Bio-Hacking with supplements, off-label prescription drugs, and technology.

If longevity is the bad news, healthy aging is possibly the good news. When it comes to Healthspan, our medical doctors Sullivan (2016), Luks (2022), Hyman (2023), and Attia (2023) have strong and considerable agreement on the areas of Exercise and General Nutrition. Their essential and highly cost-effective recommendations, however, both run smack into mainstream American cultural practices and require people to individually and responsibly re-negotiate their relationships with Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Medicine, and Big Tech.

Although many motivated individuals and small networks of people have already done so, and hence this solution is more than theoretically possible, it will (likely) not scale. It has no government or MSM support; in fact, the opposite. No matter.

Still good news. If you wish to be something other than a sickly and indebted serf, you have both the means and opportunity to retain or regain your health and liberty. Otherwise, please embrace your future as a prescription-addicted, subsidy-dependent, bio-medical tracked and certified zombie-drone within the emergent Neo-Feudal caste system now replacing our constitutional republic (and replacing Western democracies more generally).

Enjoy your GMO cricket powder with added psychotropics.

So other news. Unless you have substantial means and travel in the right circles, you likely will not be joining select members of our (often deeply corrupt) power elite in their quest to push up to (or even past?) the 120-year barrier. But their success here in the short-term or even the intermediate term is by no means guaranteed. Even then, knowledge travels. Prometheus stole fire from the gods. His punishment is legendary, but his gift endures. Whatever advances are made in longevity may yet become available by merit to those who have maintained their health and their freedom.

Lastly, if you have time to read only one book of the four (or more) we have discussed in this series, please make it Luks (2022), Longevity…Simplified. Living A Longer, Healthier Life Shouldn’t Be Complicated. Alternatively, if you have already been captivated by Sinclair (2019) or Hyman (2023) — and Hyman does offer much useful information, please consider Brenner (2022), “A Science-Based Review of the World’s Best-Selling Book on Aging” [PMC9669175].

This ends our current series on Longevity and Healthy Aging. Thank you for reading.

Necessary Disclaimer: American Exile does not offer medical advice, and none of our five posts in this series on Longevity should be understood as such.

Sources are cited in text. The primary books and essays discussed in this series: Sullivan (2016), The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40; Sinclair and LaPlante (2016), Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To; Taubes (2020), The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-carb/High-fat Eating; Luks (2022), Longevity…Simplified. Living A Longer, Healthier Life Shouldn’t Be Complicated; Palmer (2022), Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health—and Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More; Brenner (2022: 10.1016/j.archger.2022.104825), “A Science-Based Review of the World’s Best-Selling Book on Aging”; Hyman (2023), Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life; Attia (2023), Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity; and St. George (Apr 28, 2023), “One school’s solution to the mental health crisis: Try everything.” 

Previously, in the first three posts of this series on Longevity and Healthy Aging, we covered the major topics of Healthspan, Exercise, and Metabolic Health and Diet as discussed by our four medical doctors, Sullivan (2016), Luks (2022), Hyman (2023), and Attia (2023), and as confirmed or challenged by other qualified experts and peer-reviewed sources.

Despite salient differences when it comes to their visions of Longevity, so far we have found vast areas of agreement among our four medical doctors on Healthspan, Exercise, and even Metabolic Health and Diet. This changes considerably when it comes to our next area of concern: Bio-Hacking with supplements, off-label prescription drugs, and technology. We lose common ground. We rediscover (at least) two competing visions of Longevity, and hence also on how to extend Healthspan. Our previous consensus on healthy aging has evaporated.

The Longevity Promise Spectrum

On one end of the spectrum, the goal is better years — but not really more. You have a certain natural Lifespan even under ideal conditions, and you want to extend your Healthspan towards the very end of your Lifespan. On the other end of the spectrum, aging itself is a disease in the process of being overcome and so human life expectancy itself can be significantly expanded — the new limitations yet unknown.

We quoted earlier the declaration by Hyman (2023): “I plan to live to be 120, maybe even 180, in good health, savoring the miraculous gift of this life every day.” He holds that living to “150 or 200” is “not beyond current scientific possibility” and things are only improving. In this, Hyman (2023) is strongly influenced by and largely follows David Sinclair, PhD, Professor in the Department of Genetics and co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School.

The Pied Piper of Immortality

American Exile has chosen not to directly review Professor Sinclair’s Lifespan: Why We Age — and Why We Don't Have To (2019) in this series of articles because (in our opinion):

• He has received far too much attention already — although he has thus far delivered comparatively little in practical terms for human longevity.

• His major popular statements seem a wonderous mix of promise, potential, extrapolated lab results from mice, counterfactuals and carefully crafted legalese so no actual commitment is made even though the majority of his public readers and listeners seem convinced that Sinclair has the Grim Reaper on the ropes and heading for the canvas.

In other words, Professor David Sinclair, PhD, is both a world-class researcher and a smooth operator. He has no shortage of admirers and no shortage of funding. He also has some high-level detractors. Charles Brenner, PhD, Alfred E. Mann Family Foundation Chair in Diabetes and Cancer Metabolism at the City of Hope National Medical Center, publishes research in largely the same areas as Sinclair and takes exception to several of Sinclair’s claims. Brenner’s (2022: 10.1016/j.archger.2022.104825) “A Science-Based Review of the World’s Best-Selling Book on Aging” should be required reading for any discussion of Sinclair’s claims.

Of Mice and Men

In contrast to the academic researcher Sinclair, PhD, all the practicing or formerly practicing medical doctors cited in this post — Sullivan, Luks, Hyman, Attia, and Palmer — have successful real-world results with formerly unhealthy people. They have case studies of and testimonials from former patients. Likewise, the majority of research studies they cite are of humans, not rodents. Sinclair is the Pied Piper leading cohorts of lab mice to significantly extended lifespans — all good. But your author advises caution before you sell everything to follow Sinclair on the road to immortality.  Nonetheless, we must discuss some of his work in this section as he has influenced Hyman (2023) and Attia (2023) among many others.

The Bio-Hacking Spectrum

We can also view the Bio-Hacking spectrum as a continuum of minimalist to maximalist — and this largely tracks our first distinction of better years vs. better years & (potentially) MANY more years.

Three Levels of Supplement Usage

We can start with how our experts seem to understand and employ supplements. Using the minimalist to maximalist spectrum, we have three overlapping levels —areas of our spectrum that blend into each other:

1. Supplements for general nutritional purposes — and particularly, for correcting diet deficits. For example, a multi-vitamin or a B-complex vitamin or Omega 3 fish oil.

2. Supplements for enhanced performance or enhanced healing, designed to support the increased metabolic and perhaps anabolic demands of a stressed body. The stress might be transient and beneficial — such as exercise-induced stress. Or, the stress might result from a chronic condition being treated. For example, creatine monohydrate for strength training, and Coenzyme Q10  for someone on statins or who has symptoms of congestive heart failure.

3. Supplements intended to help up-regulate or down-regulate specific metabolic pathways processes in order to change the default (and often, normatively “healthy”) state of homeostasis. Two targeted outcomes are increased autophagy (the body cleaning out damaged cells) and increased mitophagy to result in new and healthier mitochondria (mitochondrial biosynthesis). For these purposes, the supplements seem invariably at some point combined with off-label usage of prescription medications. Please see, for example,  the supplement list(s) cited shortly below as used by Hyman (2023) in his breakfast smoothie and his “advanced longevity stack.” Or, the similar list provided by the highly informed and obviously healthy bio-hacker behind “My NHM Experiment.”

These three levels as stated do overlap and readily blur into one another, but nonetheless this mapping of the spectrum has some use.

Third Level Transhumanism

The third level treats aging itself as a disease. Hence it is NOT good enough to be a normatively healthy 60-year-old, for example. You must hack your metabolism (and more) to reverse aging — you must achieve a new and improved state of homeostasis, one typically not available through diet, exercise, and healthy living. You are reversing biological time across your body (or so intend to) — and this cannot be accomplished by purely natural means.

Hence supplement usage level three, maximalist Bio-Hacking, participates in Transhumanism. Supplement usage level one, minimalist Bio-Hacking, does not; and supplement usage level two, particularly when it concerns enhanced performance, bridges the divide.

Our Experts Across the Bio-Hacking Spectrum

Luks (2022) and Hyman (2023) provide excellent examples of the minimalist and maximalist approaches to supplement usage; Sullivan (2016) and Attia (2023), largely likewise occupy the minimalist and maximalist parts of the spectrum, respectively, but we will save that comparison for our discussion of technology.

Minimalist Luks

You will not find health and weight loss in a supplement bottle,” Luks (2022) declares, so “save your money.” Luks (2022) is not against supplements per se — he is against “magic bullets” and “magical supplements.” “We are all too easily fooled,” Luks (2022) holds, into “trying highly restrictive and unsustainable diets, or experimenting with supplements and unproven medications to improve our strength and lifespan without results or evidence of efficacy.”

In contrast, Luks (2022) argues that we know what works and we can start doing all that right now:

Some of the significant factors critical to maintaining a long healthspan are a combination of lifestyle, sleep, diet, and movement [exercise] and avoiding toxic habits like smoking. Many non-physical factors are also important, such as stress management, optimism, laughing, being socially connected, and feeling a sense of purpose and community.

Supplement usage for Luks (2022) should be based primary upon your biomarkers as determined by a comprehensive blood panel, and any existing conditions you might have:

Make sure you know your biomarkers. If something is off, ask what you can do to correct it. For example, your cardiologist might recommend vitamin B or folate supplements if you have high homocysteine. ... See an expert, assess your risk, and define a prevention strategy that works for you. Creatine may have a role in improving our brain’s energy systems.

In addition to recognizing the potential value of creatine, a supplement that other medical experts swear by, Luks (2022) also thinks “supplements such as flavanols (cocoa), fish oil, extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) plus the Mediterranean diet” have demonstrated some promising results with improving “memory, cognition, and muscular performance.”

But proper nutrition first, supplements second when indicated by your biomarkers or advised by a qualified health professional. Go slow with Bio-Hacking yourself. Start with a healthier diet, regular movement, exercise, and staying socially connected.

Luks (2022) does believe the research on longevity is promising — but the proven efficacy is not there yet:

Over the next decade, researchers will have supplements or medications and targeted therapeutics that will improve our healthspan meaningfully.

Maximalist Hyman — the Future is Now

For Hyman (2023), that next decade is now. We turn next to the ingredient list —including optional ingredients — for [capitals his] “DR. HYMAN’S HEALTHY AGING SHAKE” which “provides support for muscle synthesis, mitochondrial health and repair, microbiome support, detoxification support, and hormone and adrenal support” as well as healthy aging.

• 30 grams (2 scoops) goat whey from organic or regeneratively raised goats; or, Vegan alternative, 42 grams (2 scoops) Garden of Life Sport Organic Plant-Based Protein

• 1 packet Mitopure by Timeline

• 5 grams (1 scoop) creatine by Thorne

• 9 grams (1 scoop) Gut Food by Farmacy

• 1 tablespoon MCT oil or Brain Octane oil

• 1 teaspoon Stamets 7 Mushroom Powder

• 8 to 12 ounces unsweetened macadamia milk or other nut or seed milk without emulsifiers or sweeteners — Elmhurst recommended

• 1 handful frozen berries

To which you should freely add:

• 1 scoop or packet Athletic Greens

• 1 tablespoon each Organic Pomegranate and Cranberry Concentrate

• 1 teaspoon matcha powder by Navitas

Hyman (2023) intends his “HEALTHY AGING SHAKE” as either a breakfast alternative  or for post-workout recovery. To understand how practical this might prove or not for many people, let’s just consider the set-up costs using Hyman’s recommended brands. Also, please note that we cannot purchase just one tablespoon of this or one teaspoon of that. Your author will also choose the one-time purchase price, and the not the generally discounted subscription price when available, on the basis that a newcomer would likely try this first before committing to it.

Wise Investment or Budget Buster?

Here goes! Naked Goat protein powder at $70 for 30 servings (60 scoops) or $2.33 a serving; or, the Vegan Garden of Life protein powder at $41 for 19 servings or $2.16 a serving. Timeline Mitopure Powder at $125 for a one-month supply (30 servings) or $4.17 a serving. Throne Creatine at $40 for 90 servings or $0.44 a serving. Gut Food by Farmacy at $99 for 30 servings or $3.63 per serving. Brain Octane Oil at $44 for 63 tablespoon servings or $0.70 a serving. Stamets 7 Mushroom Powder at $23 for 33 teaspoons servings or $0.70 a serving. Elmhurst unsweetened nut milk around $7.34 per single quart (32 ounce) bottle with four 8-counce servings at $1.84 per serving. Frozen organic berries at roughly $7 per 32-ounce pack of 6 servings or $1.16 per serving.

We have not gotten to optional ingredients yet, but let’s do a total. Your set-up costs for the non-Vegan shake: roughly $415. Some of your items contain more than a month’s supply, some less. Your cost per shake (the per serving cost for all your items): roughly, $14.97. Your savings on the Vegan version, insignificant.

A solution for whom?

Who is this for? A single mother and wage-earner trying raise her two children? A senior citizen who must work at an Amazon Warehouse or a Wal-Mart to make ends meet? As Victor Davis Hanson (2021) has reminded us:

Fifty-eight percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in the bank. A missed paycheck renders them destitute, completely unable to service sizable debt. Most of what they buy, from cars to electronic appurtenances, they charge on credit cards.

Yet many of these Americans — the above 58% — are the ones suffering from, or at risk at of suffering from, largely preventable chronic diseases. Likewise, many of these American are on the SAD (Standard American Diet). They need to improve their health and extend their Healthspans. Chronic illness can be financially devasting to these Americans on the individual level, and chronic illness also imposes a horrific public health burden. Back to our breakfast shake as a solution — or not.

Finish the HEALTHY AGING SHAKE!

Let’s add in the optional ingredients — for which Hyman (2023) instructs “include as many as you can.” Athletic Greens (AG1) at $99 for a 30-day supply or $3.30 per serving; Lakewood Organic Pomegranate Concentrate at $16.67 per single bottle of 12.5 ounces or roughly 32 tablespoons at $0.52 per serving; Lakewood Organic Cranberry Concentrate at $13.90 per single bottle of 12.5 ounces or roughly 32 tablespoons at $0.43 per serving; and Matcha powder by Navitas at $21 for 85 grams or roughly 42 teaspoons at $0.50 per serving. Our set-up costs have risen by over $150 to about $566; our cost per shake is now around $19.72.

With the optional ingredients, consuming one “DR. HYMAN’S HEALTHY AGING SHAKE” per day would cost about $7200 a year. Minimum wage differs per US state, but the 2023 Federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour or $58 for an 8-hour day and so roughly $15,080 per year.

Obviously, Hyman (2023) is targeting a higher end clientele — and likely people who are well-educated, who already eat and well and exercise, who do regular doctor visits, and more. We would have great difficulty separating out the benefits from his shake versus those from those of the healthy user effect and of the placebo effect. But for Americans conditioned to poly-pharmacy, poly-supplementation feels natural.

Wait, there’s more — much more!

That’s just “DR. HYMAN’S HEALTHY AGING SHAKE” — your daily breakfast and/or workout recovery shake. Hyman (2023) also shares with us the “advanced longevity stack I recommend daily.”

The advanced daily longevity stack

Are you ready for this? Not just any daily longevity stack, but the “advanced longevity stack” (Hyman, 2023):

NMN or NR, 1,000 mg a day; Fisetin, 500 to 1,000 mg a day; Quercetin and other flavonols; Pterostilbene, 100 mg once or twice a day; Curcumin, 500 to 1,000 mg a day; Epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), 500 to 1,000 mg a day; Glucoraphanin; Urolithin A (but covered in Mitopure if you do the shake); Branched-chain amino acids; Creatine, 5 to 10 grams daily (but also covered if you do the shake).

But wait. If you want to go ALL-IN, do add (Hyman, 2023):

RegenerLife by Natural Factors, 1 scoop or 4 capsules a day; Acetyl-L-carnitine, 500 to 1,000 mg a day; N-acetylcysteine, 600 mg twice a day; PQQ, a derivative of coenzyme Q10, 100 to 200 mg a day; and Alpha-lipoic acid, 300 to 600 mg a day.

When you combine all of this, it seems near-impossible to determine which supplement is doing exactly what and how, and what the possible interaction effects are between all the supplements. Because these generally get treated by body as food sources, however, the risk is reduced. Oh, and how much would the “advanced longevity stack” set you back? Well, if you have the ask the price, peasant …

Poly-supplementation as a replacement for poly-pharmacy?

American Exile has already covered the failure of poly-pharmacy: yes, poly-pharmacy has failed in delivering better health outcomes. It may for many people add a few marginal (sickly, diseased, dysfunctional) years to Lifespan: it does NOT improve Healthspan. Furthermore, a nationwide cohort study by Chang, et alia (2020: 10.1038/s41598-020-75888-8) found that poly-pharmacy was “associated with a higher risk of hospitalization and all-cause death among elderly individuals.” So we are not even sure that poly-pharmacy helps extend Lifespan. Over the next decade, American Exile might yet be covering the failure of poly-supplementation. Or not. We will report what the data reveals.

Bio-Hacking with Off-label Usage of Prescription Drugs

We stated earlier that Luks (2022) and Hyman (2023) provide excellent examples of the minimalist and maximalist approaches to supplement usage. To cite one more Luks-ism supporting the minimalist position: “It doesn’t matter what supplement you take if you remain insulin resistant and at risk for type 2 diabetes.”

But we also noted that Bio-Hacking with supplements at the third level, the maximalist level as exemplified by Hyman (2023) and many others, at some point typically gets combined with off-label usage of prescription medications. In other words, the maximalist approach to longevity combines both poly-pharmacy and poly-supplementation. What could go wrong?

Brenner (2022: 10.1016/j.archger.2022.104825) asserts that Sinclair “has popularized a stack of drugs and supplements with significant potential to harm the general public,” and astutely reminds us that “polypharmacy is associated with greater mortality when controlled for comorbidity and age.” So that could go wrong: greater mortality risk or a shorter and sicker life.

We will go down that rabbit-hole soon enough, and meet David Sinclair (as well as rejoin Hyman and Attia) in this new wonderland. But let’s take a step back for a moment.

Deep Breath Before the Plunge

For too many Americans, what Hyman (2023) proposes in terms of supplement usage is NOT a viable option: neither affordable nor practical. But even if only 1/5 of the American public could implement Hyman’s proposed routine in whole or part, that is still over 67 million people. Not a bad start, assuming Hyman (2023) is on to something that justifies the hassle and expense.

Likewise, for the daily cost of “DR. HYMAN’S HEALTHY AGING SHAKE” alone, some people manage to daily feed small families. But for some Americans, $20 or so is not unreasonable for a meal or for a daily indulgence. Your author has spent far too much time (in his opinion) in conversation with people who consider themselves aficionados of small-batch bourbon, or of fine cigars, or of cannabis, or of cheesecake, et cetera. Is it better to go to a high-end bar and have two shots of fancy liquor, or to save your money for a home-made longevity smoothie?  Smoothie, please.

Your author respects the bio-hacker behind “My NHM Experiment.” This person obviously does regularly exercise and seems to have his general health well in order. Your author has also explored the content provided by many other bio-hackers using supplements for improved Healthspan and potentially extended Lifespan. These people have taken responsibility for and taken charge of their health. Almost invariably, they are doing all the right things which Luks (2022) would recommend —but they are also adding complicated and expensive supplement stacks into the mix. Well, their money and their bodies, so their decision.

American Exile is NOT anti-supplements

Let’s take one more step back before we go down further into the third level rabbit hole where poly-supplementation meets poly-pharmacy. The quality of your supplement depends on the manufacturer and the supply chain. Consumer Lab provides independent testing and reviews, and regularly flags poor quality products or contaminated products — even those from big-name manufacturers. Even if you are taking a supplement of proven value, please do a careful background check on your supplement source.

American Exile is NOT against supplement. On a daily basis, your author uses creatine, fish oil, a high-quality multi-vitamin, and glucosamine plus chondroitin. Depending on bio-markers and other factors, your author has also cycled in zinc, or/and magnesium, or/and extra B-vitamins. But the more complex a supplement routine becomes, the more expensive and more problems with compliance.

But why so many?

Two of the most desired outcomes from longevity supplement stacks are autophagy and mitochondrial health and repair. The question is not only “what else” but “what PRIMARILY” helps your body with both autophagy and mitochondrial health and repair? EXERCISE. Second only to or perhaps co-equal with exercise, good general nutrition: DIET. We know exercise and healthy nutrition work: we do not know how well the various longevity stacks work, but at best their contributions are minor compared to those from regular exercise and a healthy, low-glycemic diet. In other words, get your metabolic house in order before you start spending a small fortune on supplements — otherwise, your longevity stacks will likely largely be going to waste and possibly “waist” as well. Health comes first; optimization for performance, second. If what you are doing is contra-indicative to health, who needs longevity?

But again, your money and your body. So your informed decision. Still in your author’s opinion a better enthusiasm than whiskey or cigars, et cetera. But in regard to maximalist bio-hacking with supplements, American Exile agrees with Luks (2022) that we just do not know enough yet and will likely have much more clarity within a decade from now. But let’s cut Hyman (2023) a break. He states unequivocally:

Bottom line: The most important thing you can do for healthy aging is to balance your blood sugar and keep your insulin levels low and your cells insulin-sensitive, which means eating a low-sugar, low-starch diet with plenty of good-quality fats and protein, and a boatload of phytochemical- and fiber-rich fruits and vegetables.

So there it is. Eat clean. Get moving. Build strength. The foundation for any supplement usage.

In the Wonderland of Poly-Supplementation/Poly-Pharmacy

Time for the plunge: deep into third level rabbit hole where poly-supplementation meets poly-pharmacy.  

Sinclair (2019) posits the “Information Theory of Aging.” Our DNA is constantly under attack from “epigenomic noise,” and as a result, cells “lose their identity and malfunction” and the chaos which then ensues “materializes as aging”:

It’s why our hair grays. It’s why our skin wrinkles. It’s why our joints begin to ache. Moreover, it’s why each one of the hallmarks of aging occurs, from stem cell exhaustion and cellular senescence to mitochondrial dysfunction and rapid telomere shortening.

For Sinclair (2019), “aging and the diseases that come with it are the result of multiple ‘hallmarks’ of aging”:

1. Genomic instability caused by DNA damage

2. Attrition of the protective chromosomal endcaps, the telomeres

3. Alterations to the epigenome that controls which genes are turned on and off

4. Loss of healthy protein maintenance, known as proteostasis

5. Deregulated nutrient sensing caused by metabolic changes

6. Mitochondrial dysfunction

7. Accumulation of senescent zombielike cells that inflame healthy cells

8. Exhaustion of stem cells

9. Altered intercellular communication and the production of inflammatory molecules

The big promise (Sinclair, 2019): “Address one of these [hallmarks of aging], and you can slow down aging. Address all of them, and you might not age.” Forever Young, as Hyman (2023) titled his own book.

Addressing the Hallmarks of Aging

How do we address the hallmarks of aging? In part, it seems according to both Sinclair (2019) and Hyman (2023), we must hack the insulin signaling pathway, and the mTOR and AMPK metabolic pathways, to start. For this, we might make off-label usage of the prescription drugs rapamycin (Sinclair, Attia, and Hyman) and metformin (Sinclair and Attia) for now — until better drugs are developed.

Encouraging Autophagy, Repressing the mTOR pathway

Down-regulating the mTOR pathway can promote and provoke autophagy — essentially, the cleaning out of and recycling of old cells. But we do not want mTOR down-regulated or silenced for too long — because we need it up-regulated or activated for protein synthesis, building muscle, building tissue, etc.

Hence biohackers will cycle low-doses of the drug rapamycin, which down-regulates mTOR, to induce autophagy and cell clean-up. This is an off-label usage of rapamycin. Attia (2023) both engages in the practice described above, cycling rapamycin, and apparently offers the same medication on a controlled schedule for interested and select patients/clients.

Overcoming Insulin Resistance, Activating the AMPK pathway

Up-regulating or activating the AMPK pathway — as Hyman (2023) describes it — “improves your cells’ ability to produce energy, reverses insulin resistance and improves blood sugar control, enhances stress resistance, and improves your cells’ housekeeping functions.” The well-known diabetes drug metformin works in part by activating the AMPK pathway. Attia (2023) discusses the possible longevity benefits in some detail. Sinclair (2019) in much greater detail.

As a result, many bio-hackers are experimenting with off-label usage of metformin as a longevity drug. Hyman (2023) so far does NOT do so. He uses diet and nutritional timing instead to up-regulate the AMPK pathway. The sense of timing is important.

We do not want the AMPK pathway always turned on either. It inhibits anabolic pathways needed for the building of cells, tissues, and organs. Given that at some point your cells must reproduce for your life to continue, anabolism leading to biosynthesis and growth is also vital.

Any Noteworthy Objections to Bio-Hacking Off-Label?

So does a bio-hacker know better than their own body as to whether or not they should be a catabolic or anabolic state? There’s more. Remember Chris Palmer, MD? That one — the practicing and board-certified Psychiatrist, Director of the Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education at McLean Hospital, and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

In reviewing the literature, Palmer finds (2022) that taking metformin might well work AGAINST improving mitochondrial health. To cite just one example (2018: 10.1111/acel.12880), Palmer notes:

improvements in muscle mitochondrial function were abrogated in the people taking metformin. The metformin group had no overall change in whole-body insulin sensitivity, even though the placebo group experienced improvement. These researchers summarized their findings in the title of their study: “Metformin Inhibits Mitochondrial Adaptations to Aerobic Exercise Training in Older Adults.”

Palmer (2022) is concerned enough that he declares:

So, in all the studies looking at the effects of exercise for weight loss, diabetes, or mental disorders, we would need to know if any of those participants were taking metformin. If they were, they were likely being set up for failure to improve their mitochondrial function, and this might be the reason some of the studies showed no benefit.

If you have poor mitochondrial health, you have poor metabolic health — to start. Palmer (2022) is not the only expert expressing possible concerns about metformin in this regard.

Brenner (2022: 10.1016/j.archger.2022.104825) is also highly unamused by Sinclair’s passion for metformin:

it is no surprise that the book includes Sinclair’s daily regimen, which includes 1 gram of type 2 diabetes drug metformin in addition to aspirin, resveratrol and three vitamins.  … The regimen is potentially damaging for individuals without type 2 diabetes as there is strong evidence that metformin use blunts the beneficial effects of physical activity (Konopka et al., 2019).

And we still have the risks posed by poly-pharmacy whereas we know exercise (physical activity) works and produces benefits across the metabolic landscape (Sullivan, 2016).

Still in Wonderland with mTOR and AMPK

We will stick with discussing the well-studied mTOR and AMPK  pathways: your author will not be wading to the quagmire of claims by Sinclair (2019) and Hyman (2023) that revving up sirtuin activity will improve gene transcription and help reverse the damage done by epigenomic noise. Simply, too many other high-level researchers deem the sirtuin solution as speculative even if promising; and some have far harsher things to say. Nothing approaching a consensus.

Why bio-hack the mTOR and AMPK pathways? To put your body in survival mode so it engages in house-cleaning, recycling, and repair. What else does this?  Hormesis: good stress, the kind that comes from exercise, intermittent fasting, and other activities which challenge but do not overwhelm your metabolism.

For example, your author recently went on a back-packing and hiking trip with some friends from the boxing gym. We did not take a case of beer. We did bring some fresh food and some prepared food to cook for the weekend, and after the first day, we drank boiled water from the mountain streams.

By the end of this trip, which turned into a vigorous but enjoyable challenge, your author was in a catabolic state and 3.3 kilograms lighter as indicated by scale on Monday morning. During this time, your author was neither hungry nor meaningfully dehydrated: he was burning fat and cleaning the crap out his body.

Think of it as “outdoor activity-based intermittent fasting,” a phrase which American Exile should cynically trademark and license. A system reset: autophagy and mitophagy, resulting in improved mitochondrial and metabolic health. The minor loss in muscle mass was easily corrected by your author upping the protein in his diet and returning to the gym on his regular schedule to hit the weights, hard and heavy.

But even more moderate physical challenges — good ol’ exercise — will put your body into repair mode. Get some of that autophagy and mitophagy work done.

The Miracle Diabetic Weight-loss Drug that Fails

Too many people want shortcuts at home, not long hikes in the fresh air outdoors — they want exercise in a pill. If bio-hacking with a drug intended to treat diabetes sounds familiar, welcome to Ozempic — the TikTok-celebrity craze! Does Ozempic (semaglutide) help you lose weight. YES! But does our elite bio-hacker to the elites, Peter Attia, MD, recommend it for his clients/patients?  NO! In fact, HELL NO!

Why not? Well, you don’t want to just lose weight. You want to improve your body composition. You want lose unhealthy fat. You do NOT want to lose lean muscle mass. All our medical doctors, ALL — Sullivan, Luks, Attia, and Hyman— agree that the loss of lean muscle mass, sarcopenia, is bad as in really bad for your Healthspan and Lifespan. You want to retain and even add to your lean muscle mass.

When his clients/patients are out to lose weight, Attia knows that some muscle mass will also be lost. Designing their programs, he strives for a 3 to 1 ratio of fat loss to lean tissue loss. (Otherwise, a rough 2 to 2 ratio seems more typical). But for Ozempic usage, Attia observed that people lose body mass at 1 to 3 ratio of fat to lean tissue.

Since the majority of lean tissue mass is muscle, the Ozempic ratio is just a disaster for older adults. Given the importance of lean muscle mass as we age, this is like spending 10 health dollars to get back maybe 3 health dollars. Losing lean muscle mass sets you up for poor metabolic health, lowers your basal metabolic rate, leaves you weaker and more fragile, and so on: “tik-tok” goes your mortality clock.

Exiting Poly-Supplementation/Poly-Pharmacy Wonderland

Attia knows these things because he makes extensive use of technology and has an entire team: a neurologist, a body movement specialist, and so. Using active glucose monitoring technology, he and his clients can track some changes in their metabolism in real time. Using scheduled Dexa scans, comprehensive blood panels, and more, Attia and his clients/patients can track their progress both in a timely manner and in extreme detail.

If a program redirect or intervention is indicated, team Attia is all over it. If you regularly fly international business class or by private jet, you no doubt expect this level of personal service. If you cannot afford this level of service, you might well be setting yourself up for a world of hurt by bio-hacking your metabolism with off-label prescription drugs. But even with team Attia or the equivalent in your corner, you still run risks because of the poly-pharmacy and unforeseeable down-stream consequences. Your body and your money, your decision. We know that exercise and good nutrition work.

One final note on Attia here: in practice, he is a maximalist bio-hacker. But he does not promise his clients/patients extreme extended longevity or “forever young”— he works to ensure that they have better years. So philosophically, in that sense, he is positioned between Sullivan (2016) and Luks (2022) at one end of the spectrum, and Hyman (2023) and Sinclair (2019) at the other end.

Between the three of them, Sinclair (2019), Attia (2023), and Hyman (2023) have received a great deal of media attention for their writings on longevity. The work of Brenner, a world-class researcher on human metabolism and related matters, is far less known. Hence to be contrarian, American Exile will give the last expert word on this particular topic to Brenner (2022: 10.1016/j.archger.2022.104825):

Today, at least on social media, longevity followers appear to include a significant proportion of young adults, suggesting that anti-aging fad diets, drugs and practices are being adopted in ways that could add many years of exposure to drugs that lack an evidentiary basis for their off-label adoption.

In your author’s opinion, many more years of drug usage is not the solution for people seeking improved health or an extended Healthspan. Your author knows many people who are poly-pharmaceutical — who take multiple prescriptions for chronic conditions. Your author does not know of one single person — not one — who has become healthier from doing so.

Finally, for this subtopic, Sinclair (2019), Attia (2023), and Hyman (2023) go into much greater detail about bio-hacking with supplements and off-label usage of prescription drugs. The discussion above does NOT comprehensively represent their claims or positions. Moreover, your author has an obvious bias towards minimalism in medical treatment.

Bio-Hacking with Technology

The extensive data-tracking and hence safeguards that Attia (2023) wisely builds into his programs brings us to the final subtopic in this discussion of Bio-Hacking: technology. In the one corner, we seem to have the steak and eggs caveman Sullivan, MD, PhD, former emergency room doctor turned PBC (professional barbell coach), and in the opposing corner, the former investment banker and now bleeding edge practitioner to the elites, Attia, MD, celebrity maximalist bio-hacker. Attia did some boxing in his youth and Sullivan is a Krav Maga blackbelt as well as a former USMC officer, so this has all the makings of a good fight — but the contrast is unfair to both our medical doctors.

A cursory reading of Sullivan (2016) might lead one to mistakenly believe that all you need is chalk, a notebook and pen, perhaps lifting straps, and perhaps a good ol’ school weight belt for heavy lifts.

A more careful reading of Sullivan (2016) tells a different story: get your annual check-up. Get a blood panel. Get any additional screenings as indicated. Take your prescribed medications — although you ideally would want to taper down or even off some to all of them, pending tangible progress and the appropriate all-clear. Take charge of your own health but listen to and work with qualified medical professionals rather than with practitioners of the mystic healing arts.

Sullivan as of 2016 — now 7 years ago — had not much use for fitness trackers, let alone real-time glucose monitoring. Although he seems to incorporate Sullivan’s base package, Attia (2023) further offers his clients/patients a high-end sports performance or even a NASA astronaut-like package of health data collection and monitoring. Once again, we have a socio-economic divide in regard to feasibility and affordability.

Good News, Bad News

Good news: the prices are coming down for comprehensive blood panels. More good news: fitness trackers and metabolic trackers are becoming more common and more affordable.

Bad news: if you rely on health insurance, you are likely still shit out of luck (SSOOL) and so paying out of pocket if you can afford it. More bad news: your doctor might be relatively clueless about all this as their Med School curriculum did not spend much time on exercise and nutrition. (Your doctor did learn how to write prescriptions). So even if you have some user-friendly tech, you still might have problems finding support for translating your new-found data into effective actions.

A Middle Ground?

Do we have a middle ground? Sorta, kinda. Your author turns to both Luks (2022) and then your author’s own personal experiences.

“Fitness trackers can change your life — if you let them,” Luks (2022) proclaims based upon his experience as a doctor and a consumer. Although “no single technology is right for everyone,” Luks (2022) has conversed with many people who use fitness trackers and found that “their tracker will cause them to modify their lifestyle to hit certain achievable goals.”

Although the information provided by various and now increasingly affordable trackers always comes with a margin of error, Luks (2022) is optimistic:

The research is becoming clear. The more we move, the longer we live. The more we know about our weight, body fat percent, heart rate, and blood pressure, the better we will be able to help our doctors help us. Any physician will tell you, we have seen many patients able to stop their blood pressure medications, diabetes medications, and more because they put a little effort into their health-related activities, so yes, if the tracker gets you moving, it can truly change your life.

Your author’s experience is generically similar to that of Luks. Family members, friends, and associates with fitness trackers are almost always more active and committed to health and well-being than those without. Moreover, the tracker crowd believes that the trackers help them.

For low-cost technology which provides actionable information for you to improve your health and extend your Healthspan, please know that you can go far indeed with an annual checkup, a comprehensive blood panel (perhaps twice a year), and a fitness tracker. If you do not travel in Attia’s rarified socio-economic strata, consider taking the steak and eggs caveman Sullivan bio-technology package and adding a fitness tracker.

Do the work — the results will follow. If you wish to go upscale, the last third of Hyman (2023) reads like an advertisement for various services and products with which he has some affiliation. Huberman lab provides links to sponsors, et cetera. Your money, your decision.

Necessary Disclaimer: American Exile does not offer medical advice, and none of our five posts in this series on Longevity should be understood as such.

Sources are cited in text. The six primary books and one key essay discussed above: Sullivan (2016), The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40; Sinclair and LaPlante (2019), Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To; Luks (2022), Longevity…Simplified. Living A Longer, Healthier Life Shouldn’t Be Complicated; Palmer (2022), Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health—and Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More; Hyman (2023), Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life; Attia (2023), Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity; and Brenner (2022), “A Science-Based Review of the World’s Best-Selling Book on Aging.”

Previously, in the first two posts of this series on Longevity and Healthy Aging, we covered the major topics of Healthspan and Exercise as discussed by our four medical doctors, Sullivan (2016), Luks (2022), Hyman (2023), and Attia (2023), and as confirmed or challenged by other qualified experts and peer-reviewed sources.

Our four experts agree that regular exercise — that increasing your muscular strength and cardiorespiratory fitness – will help extend your Healthspan across your natural Lifespan. This is the “squaring off the curve” as Luks (2022) puts it — the slowing of age-related decline, and the compression of morbidity. A vast body of research strongly — undeniably, in fact — confirms this general claim.

                                 Image copyright Luks, 2022. Cited under Fair Use.

All good, although we have not cracked yet neither the mystery of biological aging nor that of biological death — at least according to Sullivan (2016), Luks (2022), and Attia (2023). Hyman (2023) seems more optimistic we can reverse biological aging.

Yet even if “forever young” is not in the current deck of cards, we can postpone chronic illnesses or delay their debilitating effects until near the very end of our natural Lifespans.

The Four Horsemen

But the “odds are overwhelming,” as Attia (2023) points out, “that you will die as a result of one of the chronic diseases of aging that I call the Four Horsemen: heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, or type 2 diabetes and related metabolic dysfunction.”

In broad strokes, as this does not apply to all forms of cancer or dementia, the “Four Horseman” have a common etiology — a shared root cause: poor metabolic health.

Poor Metabolic Health — the Common Etiology

In the words of Sullivan (2016) [his citations expanded]:

People with metabolic syndrome or its components are more likely to become frail (Barzilay, et al., 2007; Ottenbacher, et al., 2002), to suffer from stroke, cardiovascular disease and heart attack (Roger, et al., 2013), to develop heart failure (Horwich and Fonarow, 2010), to develop kidney failure (Peralta, et al., 2006), and to suffer from erectile dysfunction (Chughtai, et al., 2011), depression (Rasgon and Jarvik, 2004) , loss of independence, and premature death (Rana, et al., 2006).

In the words of Luks (2022):

Heart disease, metabolic syndrome, stroke, dementia, type 2 diabetes, and many cancers all have poor metabolic health in common as a root cause.

In the words of Attia (2023):

The metabolic derangement that leads to type 2 diabetes also helps foster and promote heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.

And in the words of Hyman (2023):

A 2018 study found that 88 percent of Americans are in poor metabolic health—meaning they are on their way to heart disease and diabetes and dementia and cancer.

88% of Americans. On their way. To heart disease and diabetes and dementia and cancer. Likewise, as we reviewed earlier, according to the CDC, 6 in 10 adult Americans — 60% of the adult population — already suffer from at least one chronic disease. What to do?

We know that “exercise transforms the metabolic landscape” (Sullivan, 2016) and “has the greatest power to determine how you will live out the rest of your life” (Attia, 2023).  But what about diet and nutrition? Can we combat poor metabolic health by changing what we eat and how we eat?

Does Diet Make a Difference?

We have no shortage of diet plans and nutrition guidelines — and yet we still have widespread failure in improving metabolic health. Rising rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, et cetera and so on. What do our four longevity experts think? What does the research indicate?

Our four medical doctors are NOT all in agreement. But we can shift through it all and find some useful recommendations.

Steak and Eggs?

Sullivan (2016) offers marvelously a deep dive on the human metabolic system in chapter 4 of The Barbell Prescription, but saves his advice on diet and nutrition until chapter 16. Since Sullivan (2016) is about building muscle and strength, he declares “the best nutritional plans start building out the diet with the protein sources first.” His sample menus are big on scrambled eggs, grilled chicken breasts, whey protein shakes, and sirloin beef steaks — all in one day.

Sullivan (2016) recommends consuming “most dietary starches and sugars around the training sessions” — although he does recognize that “too much dietary carbohydrate may promote fat accretion and possibly even the development of metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance.” Yes, indeed. Much more on this shortly.

Otherwise, Sullivan’s (2016) comments on the relationship between metabolic health and diet strike your author as perhaps the weakest part of his Barbell Prescription. But his emphasis that older adults need more quality protein in their diets is shared by our other three experts — and two additional expert sources.

Whole food plant-based (WFPB) diets?

Luks (2022) fully recognizes how highly processed foods and an abundance of refined carbohydrates and sugar contribute directly to poor metabolic health:

I recommend that you stick with real food, cook and prepare your meals, and leave the food industry’s junk in the supermarket. ... Head to your kitchen with an oversized garbage bag or two [and toss all the ultra-processed food items].

Although “diets rich in natural foods, including vegetables, fruit, lean meat, complex carbs, and grains” are what appears best to Luks (2022), he realizes that each person will need to experiment to find an enjoyable and sustainable healthy diet. So Luks (2022) offers a simple strategy to get started:

• Consume less sugar.

• Favor unsaturated fats vs. saturated fats.

• Eat more plants.

• Avoid ultra-processed carbohydrates (think cereal, instant oatmeal, white rice).

• Include more fiber from vegetables and fruits into your body.

If more Americans just followed the above advice, our population would have significantly better metabolic health.

His highly actionable, commonsensical advice notwithstanding, Luks (2022) does recommend for his patients “whole food plant-based (WFPB) diets” and provides detailed suggestions in chapter 6 of Longevity … Simplified for getting enough quality protein if one chooses to avoid meat sources.

SAD is Failing!

Although NOT a fan of the Keto diet, and strongly preferring “whole food plant-based (WFPB) diets” instead, Luks (2022) does fully recognize the failure of the SAD (Standard American Diet).  “Since the low-fat craze began,” Luks (2022) points out, “several things have happened”:

1. Obesity rates have skyrocketed.

2. The incidence of type 2 diabetes has increased.

3. Systemic inflammation within our body has become the norm.

So for Luks (2022), “ultra-processed carbohydrates are not okay,” “water should be the primary beverage we choose throughout the day,” and the “food industry will try very hard to convince you that the opposite is true.”

Good Nutrition ~ Transformative Healing

Hyman (2023) has definite ideas about the relationship between diet and metabolic health, and the influence of Big Food. His claims are generally similar to Luks (2022), but stronger and developed in much greater detail. Based upon his clinical experience, Hyman (2023) is passionate about the transformative effects of good nutrition:

Janice was sixty-six when she came to see us, severely obese, suffering from clogged arteries that needed stents, heart failure, high blood pressure, fatty liver, failing kidneys, and type 2 diabetes on insulin. Her blood tests were scary, and she was on her way to a heart and kidney transplant. She was on a pile of medications for which her co-pay was $20,000 a year.

So co-morbidly obese with several chronic conditions, and poly-pharmaceutical to boot. A near-perfect example of what Sullivan (2016) has described as the “sick-aging phenotype.” What to do?

Hyman (2023) focused on diet and related life-style changes:

Within three days of joining our group program, by changing her diet from a lifetime of junk food to using food as medicine, consuming a very low-glycemic, high-fiber, good-fat, phytonutrient-rich, plant-rich diet, and following a simple vitamin regimen (multivitamin, fish oil, and vitamin D) she was able to get off her insulin.

Off her insulin in only three days? Almost miraculous, but Gary Taubes (2020), in The Case for Keto, interviewed numerous medical professionals who related similar stories of positive transformation once their patients got off crap food and starting eating clean. Such seeming miracles do happen.

Janice: No Surgeries, No Prescriptions Needed

There is more. Hyman (2023) further reports:

Within three months she [Janice] was off all her medication and her numbers were all normal (heart failure gone, kidneys and liver normalized, and blood pressure and blood sugar normal). After a year she lost 116 pounds and was able to fully return to a vibrant, active life as a leader in her community.

No organ transplants needed, and that former $20K a year prescription co-pay also considerably reduced. “Food is the key lever” for Hyman (2023), and the bottom line as far as diet goes:

Cut the sugar and starch and processed food. Eat lots of phytochemicals from colorful fruits and vegetables, good fats, and high-quality protein.

But the problems with the SAD (Standard American Diet) go well beyond just our nation. “The United States,” Hyman (2023) asserts, has “created the worst diet in the world and exported it to nearly every country on the planet, which is why 31 million of those global deaths from chronic disease are in low- or middle-income countries, double the deaths from infectious disease.”

The Big Business of Exporting Death by Metabolic Syndrome

Your author strongly agrees with Hyman (2023) on this claim, outrageous as it might first seem. To learn more, please consider the work of Dr. Suneel Dhand, and the following documentary “How the U.S. is Exporting Obesity.”

In chapter 5, “Dying of Too Much or Too Little: Why Balance Matters,” Hyman (2023) explains in detail his case against the SAD. This chapter is both a delight and horror to read, and the section on nutrition closes as follows: “All in all, if we were to design the perfect diet to create an epidemic of chronic disease and a shortened life span, it would be our current industrialized, toxic diet.”

Praise the truth when you hear it spoken.

Robert H. Lustig, MD, in Metabolical (2021) has no issues assigning blame to “Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Government”:

As people get sicker, Big Pharma benefits from complicity, the food industry is protected from the costs of its actions, and the government profits from tariffs on processed food shipped to other unsuspecting countries.

Not to mention the revolving doors of consultancy, lobbying, corporate directorship, and public officialdom between elite members of Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Government.

A Direction to Go Forward

Whether one agrees with such geo-political analyses or not, we have on the topic of nutrition from Luks (2022) and Hyman (2023) strong agreement on some basics:

• Cut the sugar as much as possible — including and especially the added sugars in highly processed foods.

• Cut out highly processed foods.

• Cut out all the junk carbs — which simply promote insulin resistance and poor metabolic health.

• Eat a rainbow of vegetables and fruits.

• Eat good fats.

• Eat quality protein.

• Pay attention to your microbiome — your gut health.

Hyman (2023), again, goes into considerable details on certain concerns — please considering purchasing his book or tracking down his many interviews if these deeper dives appeal to you.

But No One Path to Travel

Similar to Sullivan (2016), Luks (2022), and Hyman (2023), Attia (2023) holds that (italics his) “protein becomes critically important as we age.” Attia (2023) was a devout supporter and promoter of the Keto diet, but his clinical experience has led him in another direction as some of his clients responded wonderfully to the Keto diet whereas others did not.

As a result, Attia (2023) has become in a sense diet-agnostic:

Almost all “diets” are similar: they may help some people but prove useless for most. Instead of arguing about diets, we will focus on nutritional biochemistry—how the combinations of nutrients that you eat affect your own metabolism and physiology, and how to use data and technology to come up with the best eating pattern for you.

This does NOT mean he endorses the SAD (Standard American Diet). In fact, Attia’s (2023) key discussion on nutrition, chapter 15 — “Putting Nutritional Biochemistry into Practice: How to Find the Right Eating Pattern for You”— provides a comprehensively damning indictment of the SAD.

The Evil that is the SAD

To quote just four highlights from Attia (2023) [numbers mine]:

1. The SAD foils our key objectives with regard to nutrition: it induces us to eat more than we need to, becoming overnourished, while its preponderance of low-quality, ultraprocessed ingredients tends to displace other nutrients that we need, such as protein, to maintain optimal health.

2. The SAD disrupts the body’s metabolic equilibrium. It places enormous strain on our ability to control our blood glucose levels, and causes us to store fat when we should be utilizing it.

3. The elements that constitute the SAD are almost as devastating to most people as tobacco when consumed in large quantities, as intended: added sugar, highly refined carbohydrates with low fiber content, processed oils, and other very densely caloric foods.

4. The farther away we get from the SAD, the better off we will be.

So what does Attia (2023) propose instead?

Your Bespoke Alternative?

Customized diet plans for each of his individual clients. Since Attia (2023) calls his general approach Medicine 3.0, he extends the upgrade here:

The real art to dietary restriction, Nutrition 3.0–style, is not picking which evil foods we’re eliminating. Rather, it’s finding the best mix of macronutrients for our patient — coming up with an eating pattern that helps them achieve their goals, in a way that they can sustain.

Good luck with scaling that approach. Following Luks (2022) and Hyman (2023), your author believes that individuals should begin “eliminating” certain food products. Full stop. Or, to quote Attia (2023):  “The farther away we get from the SAD, the better off we will be.” Then the individual can experiment with what diet rich in natural foods will prove sustainable, enjoyable, and almost invariably more nutritious. 

Attia (2023) does qualify that most of his Type A (and often enough, A-list) clients “are already on some sort of ‘diet’ when they come to me” and hence have renounced the SAD. But obviously the majority of adult Americans have not.

Just Start by Cutting the Crap

These qualifications notwithstanding, we are not quite done with elimination diets, including Keto — the diet Attia (2023) once advocated but has now put aside. Because — as Attia would surely appreciate — we have more and new information about metabolic health and how it affects mental health.

Enter Christopher Palmer, MD, a practicing and board-certified Psychiatrist, Director of the Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education at McLean Hospital, and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Similar to Hyman (2023), Palmer has his own stories to tell — his own patient case studies — about transformative healing initiated primarily with diet and related life-style changes.

Good Nutrition ~ Transformative Healing Yet Again!

The breakthrough for Palmer occurred in 2016 with a patient named Tom, a thirty-three-year-old man with schizoaffective disorder, who tried seventeen different medications which did not stop his hallucinations or delusions, but did cause him to gain over 100 pounds. Tom wanted to lose weight.

Gone Keto, Got Functional

Thinking that this would at least help Tom feel a greater sense of control over his own life, Palmer (2022) reports: “we decided to try the ketogenic diet — a diet low in carbohydrates, moderate in protein, and high in fat.”

Tom lost weight, but much more happened. Palmer (2022) reports that within weeks:

I began to notice remarkable and dramatic changes in his [Tom’s] psychiatric symptoms. He was less depressed and less sedated. He began making more eye contact, and when he did, I saw a presence and spark there that I had never seen before. Most astonishingly, after two months, he told me that his longstanding hallucinations were receding and that he was rethinking his many paranoid conspiracy theories. He began to realize that they weren’t true and probably never had been. Tom went on to lose 150 pounds, move out of his father’s home, and complete a certificate program. He was even able to perform improv in front of a live audience, something that would have been impossible for him prior to the diet.

I was flabbergasted. I had never seen anything like this in my entire career.

This experience set Palmer on a research and clinical practice which still continues. [He discusses the same experience on the Huberman Lab podcast (Nov 21, 2022), starting at 00:27:52].

Mental Disorders are Metabolic Disorders of the Brain?

What has Palmer (2022) discovered — or, in some cases —rediscovered? That (italics his) mental disorders are metabolic disorders of the brain. Moreover, nutrition is emerging as a major tool in treating mental illness — by fixing poor metabolic health to start.

As Palmer (2022) well states:

What we eat, when we eat, and how much we eat have direct effects on metabolism and mitochondria. Everyone knows that diet plays a role in obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. What most people might not know is that diet also has profound effects on mental health and the brain.

So there it is: “diet also has profound effects on mental health and the brain.”

So what is the SAD (Standard American Diet) contributing to the state of American mental health? We have no direct answer to this question, but according to the National Institute of Mental Health (2023 March), “more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (57.8 million in 2021)” and the prevalence of any mental disorder among adolescents is 49.5% — of which “an estimated 22.2% had severe impairment and/or distress.” The NIMH report is not good.

Perhaps not surprising given that — according to a 2018 study — “88 percent of Americans are in poor metabolic health” (Hyman 2023). American Exile has likewise presented the data.

Bottomline: the state of American metabolic health is horrible; the state of American mental health, on road to horror.

As a psychiatrist, Palmer has treated dozens of patients and heard from hundreds more, many of whom experienced a complete remission of symptoms and so were able to significantly reduce or even get off their medications. How? By changes in diet and related lifestyle factors — by fixing their poor metabolic health.

The SAD and Mental Illness — Questions, Questions

What does Palmer think about the SAD?  In a fairly recent interview, Palmer (Jan 18, 2023) observed:

Our current food supply is a lot of non-food. It’s a lot of chemicals and highly-processed food things that are formulated to be addictive. Even though the American Psychiatric Association doesn’t recognize food addiction, the Director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse has done a lot of research studies that have found that some highly-processed foods are in fact addictive and use the exact same reward pathways as cocaine addiction and nicotine addiction.

Our current food supply is a lot of non-food. Check. But highly palatable and designed — formulated — to be addictive. Double-check. So to quote Attia (2023) once more: “The farther away we get from the SAD, the better off we will be.”

Elimination Diet and the “Mildred Miracle”

Let’s hear one more success story resulting from in large part from an “elimination” diet. Summarizing from Palmer’s (2022) Brain Energy, we turn to the case of Mildred, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age seventeen and by age seventy, after decades of psychiatric medication and several suicide attempts, found herself combatting obesity. (Weight gain is a common side-effect of many psychiatric medications — and so is metabolic harm).

Mildred joined the weight-loss clinic at Duke University and was put on the ketogenic diet. She lost weight. Her symptoms improved. She was able to taper off her psychiatric medications as her symptoms went into full remission. Even thirteen years later, having lost 150 pounds and kept it off, Mildred remained symptom-free, off medication, and learned how to take care of herself — to live independently. She no longer had or needed a court-appointed guardian.

As Palmer (2022) poignantly notes:

Stories like Mildred’s . . . just don’t happen in psychiatry. Even with the best traditional treatments that we have to offer, this is unheard of. Mildred’s story and the theory of brain energy say it is possible.

Right. Let’s hear from Thomas Insel, MD and neuroscientist, a former Director of the HIHM (National Institute of Mental Health).

Our Mental Health Status Quo

In an interview shortly after leaving the NIMH, Insel admitted that after spending $20 billion dollars on research and related: “I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness” (May 11, 2017). Oopsie. Insel should have added: “Not that any of that stopped us from playing GOD.”

Your author knows people with mental illnesses who have been in treatment for years with no improvement — if anything, they have experienced deterioration. Your taxpayer dollars at work. So please find some entertainment in this. To quote some select lines from MIA’s “Paper Planes”:

If Palmer has even a piece of puzzle, or a partially better solution, we should be all over it on a national level. Because what we are currently doing only works for Big Pharma/Big Medicine, and not for the people suffering from mental illnesses.

Palmer: Three Key Points

So three key take-aways from Palmer’s Brain Energy (2022):

1. Diet has profound effects on mental health and the brain.

2. All mental states, even normal ones, relate to metabolism.

3. Mental disorders are metabolic disorders of the brain. (So Palmer explicitly argues).

Let’s sum up our discussion of metabolic health, diet, and nutrition in regard to Healthspan and Lifespan.

Summary of Key Points on Diet and Metabolic Health

Poor metabolic health is a shared root cause for the chronic diseases of aging. A shared root cause for what Attia (2023) calls the Four Horsemen: heart disease, cancer (many kinds), neurodegenerative disease, and type 2 diabetes and related metabolic dysfunction.

Poor metabolic health has now been directly implicated in many forms of mental illness (Palmer, 2022). Obviously, mental illness can and often does significantly and negatively impact Healthspan and Lifespan.

Poor metabolic health is almost guaranteed by the SAD (Standard American Diet).

Metabolic health can be improved. Diet and Exercise are the two primary interventions. Exercise alone will likely not be sufficient because the full benefits of exercise cannot be realized without proper nutrition. Casey Means, MD (Sep 30, 2022) provides an excellent general overview for people seeking to learn more about and to improve their metabolic health.

People who were severely ill with chronic disease(s), or with major mental illness(es), have experienced transformative effects when getting off of the SAD and moving to the Ketogenic or other Low-Glycemic diets. Diets based on natural foods (i.e., natural foods as opposed to highly-processed food products). For this, Taubes (2020), Palmer (2022), and Hyman (2023) in toto provide numerous case studies — not extrapolations from lab mice, but real-world examples of people getting better. In many cases, these people experienced near-miraculous improvements in health — improvements beyond what the best conventional medical treatments would allow one to hope for or expect. In other words, improving your metabolic health can have tremendously beneficial downstream consequences for Healthspan and Lifespan — and this holds true almost regardless of your current condition.

To improve metabolic health and get away from the SAD, the generic nutritional advice offered by Luks (2022) and Hyman (2023) provides an excellent starting place for many Americans:

• Cut the sugar as much as possible — including and especially the added sugars in highly processed foods.

• Cut out highly processed foods.

• Cut out all the junk carbs — these directly promote insulin resistance.

• Eat a rainbow of vegetables and fruits.

• Eat good fats.

• Eat quality protein.

• Pay attention to your microbiome — your gut health.

But as Palmer (2022) warns us, similar to Attia (2023), there is “no simple cure” or “any single treatment.” You will need to personalize your diet to find what is sustainable, enjoyable, and nutritious. This will require some experimentation. If you can afford to do so, consider getting a comprehensive blood panel to identify possible nutritional deficiencies and to map out your current state of metabolic health as indicated by the standard bio-markers.

In particular regard to metabolic health and mental health, Palmer (2022) does NOT recommend that psychiatric patients simply drop their medications should their new diets start producing beneficial effects. This caution is vital! Because the majority of psychiatric medications when used long-term create dependency conditions in their users, Palmer (2022) holds that withdraw from such medications should be carefully managed while under professional supervision.

Finally, our experts cited in this section engage in detailed and nuanced discussions about intermittent fasting (generally recommended), mitochondrial health, microbiome health, metabolic processes and pathways, and much more. The dialogic synthesis presented above does not attempt to capture the entirety — only some key actionable points.

Necessary Disclaimer: American Exile does not offer medical advice, and none of our five posts in this series on Longevity should be understood as such.

Sources are cited in text. The six primary books discussed above: Sullivan (2016), The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40; Taubes (2020), The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-carb/High-fat Eating; Luks (2022), Longevity…Simplified. Living A Longer, Healthier Life Shouldn’t Be Complicated; Palmer (2022), Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health—and Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More; Hyman (2023), Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life; and Attia (2023), Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity.

Previously, for our first post in this series, we discussed the catastrophic effects of chronic diseases on American public health, and on our annual health expenditures. Experiencing a demographic shift, the USA has an aging population. The data is damning: Americans are NOT aging well (CDC, 2023: 1, 2023: 2).

                             Image Source USA CDC, 2023. Public Domain

We want solutions, not doom and gloom forecasts. We want to extend Healthspan across the Lifespan, and when necessary and possible, reverse or ameliorate the chronic diseases from which currently 6 of 10 American adults suffer (CDC, 2023: 1).

Our Four Experts in General Harmony

For these concerns, the “most powerful medicine available,” Sullivan (2016) declares, is “exercise medicine” which “has beneficial effects at every stratum of biological organization, from the molecular and cellular levels to the realm of neuropsychiatric health.”

Likewise, Luks (2022) declares that exercise “is the best medicine for your physical and emotional well-being” because it positively impacts “our weight, our glucose metabolism, our sleep, blood pressure, and the function of our immune system.”

“I used to prioritize nutrition over everything else,” Attia (2023) remarks, “but I now consider exercise to be the most potent longevity ‘drug’ in our arsenal, in terms of lifespan and healthspan.” Why? Because Attia (2023) has found that the “data are unambiguous: exercise not only delays actual death but also prevents both cognitive and physical decline, better than any other intervention.”

“The fitter you are, the healthier and longer you live,” Hyman (2023) declares, and so exercise is the “one simple intervention that can help reverse most of the hallmarks of aging."

The Research Behind the Consensus

We have strong consensus among our four medical doctors on the importance and centrality of Exercise to Healthspan and even Lifespan. Let us briefly review two major, large-scale studies which provide support for this consensus. The first concerns grip strength (which serves as a reliable proxy for overall strength); and the second concerns cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF).

Examining the data for over 460K participants, Esteban-Cornejo, et alia (2022: 10.1002/jcsm.12857) found that “lower grip-strength was associated with a higher risk of all-cause dementia incidence and mortality, independently of important confounding factors.”

The charts below show the results from three models. Model 1: Adjusted for Age, Sex, Ethnicity, and Deprivation.  Model 2: Adjusted for Health-related Conditions, including BMI and Co-Morbidities. Model 3: Adjusted for Lifestyle Behaviors (Diet; Smoking; etc). The top row shows the results for Dementia; the bottom row, for Mortality. For all models (1 to 3) for both negative outcomes (Dementia & Mortality), risk decreases as strength increases. (The dotted horizontal line indicates the baseline risk for people with poor grip strength — that is, poor general strength).

                        Source: Esteban-Cornejo, et alia (2022: 10.1002/jcsm.12857)

So “independently of important confounding factors,” being stronger lowers your risk for dementia and improves your chances of living longer.

Strength Matters

Strength matters. Particularly so for healthy aging, as confirmed by yet another recent study (2022: 10.1152/ajpcell.00365.2021) — this one a randomized controlled trial. For the public science exposition by lead researcher, Casper Søndenbroe, PhD, please see “Are you aged 40 or over? In that case, you need to do heavy weight training to keep fit” (Jul 15, 2022).

On the same, American Exile discussed the basics earlier in “Why Strength Training is Fundamental to Health and to Preventing Cognitive Decline” (Jul 9, 2022).

Cardiorespiratory Fitness Matters

Basic cardiorespiratory fitness also greatly matters — with no marathon running required. Examining “Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Mortality Risk Across the Spectra of Age, Race, and Sex” in a study size of over 750K people, Kokkinos, et alia (2022: 10.1016/j.jacc.2022.05.031) found that “relatively poor CRF [cardiorespiratory fitness] is a stronger predictor of mortality than any of the traditional risk factors examined regardless of age, sex, or race.”  

“Any of the traditional risk factors”: poor CRF is worse than smoking, believe it or not. Moreover, the study found that by achieving even moderate CRF, people could significantly reduce their risk — by “at least 50%” in most cases.

Build strength and improve CRF. But how? What exercises? When? How often? And how do we measure results?  

Exercise Prescriptions

For people new to, or getting back to, or intimidated by exercise, Luks (2022) provides the most accessible, immediately actionable, and friendly approach. For Luks (2022), a good exercise program has four pillars:

1. Resistance Training (strength)

2. Aerobic (cardiorespiratory fitness)

3. Balance & Mobility (coordination; strength; flexibility; and range of motion)

4. High Intensity Training (cardiorespiratory fitness)

He provides a basic but highly useful and actionable guide to getting started with all four. Longevity…Simplified (2022) has our highest recommendation for a general readership. Or, even to an expert audience for a case study in communication effectiveness. Truly outstanding. 

Beyond Beginnings

But people with more experience — such as recreational athletes, personal trainers, physical therapists, and so on — will want more. People who are performance-driven and work with data professionally, who want numbers, benchmarks, models and deep dives, will also want more. And medical professionals who share the interests of Sullivan, Luks, Attia, and Hyman will also want more.

When it comes to a discussion of exercise, Hyman (2023) does not advance upon Luks (2022) — politely put. We can safely drop Hyman (2023) from the remainder of this section. In contrast, Sullivan (2016) and Attia (2023) both strive diligently at designing exercise prescriptions.

For their exercise prescriptions, Sullivan (2016) and Attia (2023) offer two highly detailed but divergent approaches. Before describing their considerable differences, let’s focus on one key commonality.

Performance in the Arena of Life: Sullivan and Attia

Both Sullivan (2016) and Attia (2023) are concerned with what people need to do — and ideally, want to do — in real life. Consequently, exercise must result in greater functionality as well as extended Healthspan — and the ultimate performance metrics are not based on lab or gym results, but on the individual’s ability to safely and successfully complete needed and desired tasks.

Sullivan (2016) understands this as “performance in the Arena of Life”:

We’re talking about the ability to get out of bed, snatch a child from danger, lift a box overhead into a cupboard, pick up a heavy bag of groceries, leap for joy, play Frisbee with the dog, remodel the bathroom, row a boat across the fishing pond, or make love to our spouse.

All of these and other activities that “play out in the Arena of Life,” Sullivan (2016) declares, “involve expressions of strength, power, mobility, and balance” and none of them “involve running, biking, swimming or skiing for hours” or “feats of aerobic endurance.” So prioritize “strength, power, mobility, and balance.”

Sullivan (2016) is concerned that endurance training directly competes with strength training, not only in terms of time but also on the molecular level. For those lacking access to Sullivan’s tome, Andy Galpin, PhD, has an excellent discussion of this topic on the Huberman Lab podcast (25 Jan 2023) at 00:45:56.

Sullivan: Fight Sarcopenia

Likewise, Sullivan (2016) from his years of experience as an emergency room doctor knows firsthand the dangers of sarcopenia (muscle-wasting): “Muscle loss is endemic in older individuals, and it predicts frailty, illness, loss of independence, injury, and all-cause mortality.” In contrast, retaining lean muscle has considerable health benefits:

Healthy muscle is also a deep biological sink for carbohydrate and fat disposal, bristling with receptors sensitive to insulin signaling, and the most abundant secretory tissue, pound-for-pound, in the human body — your most massive ‘gland’.

So build strength, retain or increase lean muscle mass, and improve your CRF along the way. Biking, tennis, tai-chi, kick-boxing, walking your dog — all good. Be active. But your TRAINING is strength-training, and for Sullivan, barbells are the preferred toolkit with an emphasis on five major movements: squat, hip hinge (deadlift), press, pull, and loaded carry.

Sullivan (2016) to his considerable credit devotes three chapters, chapters 4 to 6, discussing alternatives to and hence the rationale for his Barbell Prescription. Chapters 7 to 13 comprise Sullivan (2016) and Andy Baker, SSC describing the Barbell Prescription framework. Obviously,  Sullivan (2016)  has thought about these concerns carefully and thoroughly, and provides for many people what would prove a hugely beneficial and readily actionable solution.

Are Barbells for Everyone?

Your author uses dumbbells and kettlebells instead of barbells for many major lifts, based on a previous mountain-biking injury which left one shoulder permanently subluxated. Your author can and does still lift heavy — but forcing symmetry of path as the barbell does on many movements is a recipe for injury. Certain barbell lifts presume an orthopedic normality which not all adults possess for various reasons.

Likewise, another possible criticism of Sullivan’s Barbell Prescription is that he undervalues the importance of working in the transverse plane — doing rotational exercises, in layperson’s speak. This is where suspension training (TRX, to many people), resistance-band training, and weighted tools like kettlebells, Indian clubs, and the Bulgarian bag can prove highly useful. As someone with years of on-again, off-again fight training, and as someone who is still taking boxing lessons after six decades on planet earth, your author has come to know that working in the transverse plane is not only essential to combat sports but also transfers readily to many daily life activities.

Roll your own CRF?

Moreover, for another possible criticism, although he recognizes the value of HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training), Sullivan (2016) seems generally uninterested in programming for CRF. People are encouraged to do whatever they like — provided it does not interfere with their strength-training regime. This approach seems overly informal, but is perhaps well-suited to the busy adults who participate in his Greysteel Strength & Conditioning clinics. Sullivan knows better than your author who his clients are.

These remarks notwithstanding, Sullivan (2016) still provides the basis for strength training as it concerns Healthspan and longevity. Whether his Barbell Prescription is sufficient or appropriate for nearly all American adults over 40 is up for debate – but some form of resistance training certainly is required for improved Healthspan and perhaps an extended Lifespan. Strength training is essential.

Attia: Maintain Your Active Lifestyle

In contrast to Sullivan (2016), MD, PhD, the former emergency room doctor turned Professional Barbell Coach and personal trainer in his presumed retirement years, the Stanford and Hopkins educated MD turned investment banker and then returned to medical practice Attia (2023) deals with a rather more affluent clientele: “[My patients] feel supremely confident that they will still be snowboarding or kickboxing, or whatever else it is they enjoy doing now, when they’re in their seventies and eighties.”

Attia (2023) informs these Type A (and often enough, A-list) seekers of performance and longevity:

In order to do that, you will need to have a certain level of muscular strength and aerobic fitness at that age. But even right now, at age fifty-two (for example), your strength and your maximum volume of oxygen uptake (VO2 max) are already barely sufficient to do those things, and they are virtually certain to decline from here.

Attia (2023) also — like Sullivan (2016) — emphasizes that older adults need physical strength, cardiorespiratory fitness, and cognitive reserve simply to function:

The list [of daily activities] includes such basic tasks as preparing a meal for oneself, walking without assistance, bathing and grooming, using a phone, going to the grocery store, handling personal finances, and so on. ... [To] continue to live actively as we age, retaining even these minimal abilities, requires us to begin building a foundation of fitness and to maintain it diligently.

Again, all this strongly overlaps with what Sullivan (2016) refers to as your "Physiological 401K: saving strong muscle, hard bone, and full mobility for your retirement." But Attia (2023) pays greater attention to cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) and cognitive reserve. He breaks exercise down as follows: “strength, stability, aerobic efficiency, and peak aerobic capacity.”

Set Goals for CRF as well as Strength

Since Attia (2023) holds that “increasing your limits in each of these areas is necessary if you are hoping to reach your limit of lifespan and healthspan,” his exercise prescription sets benchmarks for VO2 max as well as muscular strength, and includes ZONE 2 training as well as high-intensity work for CRF. This is similar to but a more intensely designed and quantified version of the “four pillars” recommended by Luks (2022).

Use Technology to Monitor Progress

Attia (2023) also heavily uses technology: fitness trackers, glucose monitors, DEXA body composition scans, blood testing well beyond the basic metabolic panel, and more. (We will discuss some aspects of this in the section on Bio-Hacking). He establishes both age-related and biological sex related fitness benchmarks for his clients, but also seems to heavily customize their fitness programs as per the individual client.

For strength and resistance training as programmed by Attia (2023), the barbell exercises endorsed by Sullivan (2016) are one valuable option in a larger toolkit. Attia (2023) also seems always to program for improving aerobic efficiency (some degree of cardio endurance) and increasing VO2 max.

In our upcoming post on Bio-Hacking, which follows our next post on Diet and Metabolic Health, we will discuss further how our experts recommend using technology to improve health outcomes.

Summing Up Exercise as Intervention

Although your author feels that the pioneering Sullivan (2016) is criminally undervalued, the last expert words for our discussion of exercise will go to Attia (2023), who expresses here nothing that Sullivan (2016) or Luks (2022) would disagree with:

Exercise has the greatest power to determine how you will live out the rest of your life. There are reams of data supporting the notion that even a fairly minimal amount of exercise can lengthen your life by several years. It delays the onset of chronic diseases, pretty much across the board, but it is also amazingly effective at extending and improving healthspan. Not only does it reverse physical decline, which I suppose is somewhat obvious, but it can slow or reverse cognitive decline as well.

Get moving. Get stronger. You will live better — and you will likely live longer.

Necessary Disclaimer: American Exile does not offer medical advice, and none of our five posts in this series on Longevity should be understood as such.

Sources are cited in text. The four primary books discussed above: Sullivan (2016), The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40; Luks (2022), Longevity…Simplified. Living A Longer, Healthier Life Shouldn’t Be Complicated; Hyman (2023), Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life; and Attia (2023), Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity.