First black female SCOTUS justice sworn in

Ketanji Brown Jackson has officially become the first black woman to serve on the Supreme Court

Ketanji Brown Jackson has officially been sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, replacing Stephen Breyer, who is retiring after almost 28 years on the bench, and becoming the first black woman to sit on the court on Thursday.

Jackson thanked her new colleagues for their “warm and gracious welcome,” singling out Breyer, for whom she clerked for a year in 1999, as “a personal friend and mentor of mine for the past two decades.” Like Breyer, she is expected to fill out the court’s liberal wing alongside Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

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New US Supreme Court Justice confirmed

The 51-year-old justice was previously a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, a role she was appointed to in 2021 after nine years as a district court judge for the US District Court for DC. Earlier, she was vice chair of the US Sentencing Commission, tasked with judging whether federal sentences were just. She also worked in private practice and as a public defender. 

While Biden made it clear while searching for a replacement for Justice Breyer that race and gender were key hiring factors in her selection, Jackson insisted when she was being questioned during confirmation hearings for her previous position that she would be “methodically and intentionally setting aside personal views” and “any other inappropriate considerations.

I would think that race would be the kind of thing that would be inappropriate to inject in an evaluation of a case,” she said. 

Jackson was also interviewed in 2016 by then-president Barack Obama when he sought to replace deceased justice Antonin Scalia. Obama ended up selecting Merrick Garland, whose nomination the Senate controversially refused to vote on and who was ultimately appointed Attorney General under Biden.


READ MORE: How qualified is Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson?

The Harvard Law grad assumes her role in the midst of a tumultuous time for the Supreme Court, which last week repealed federal abortion protections in a ruling that reversed 1973’s Roe v Wade decision. The ruling was met with waves of protest across the country, and one man was arrested for allegedly plotting to kill conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Israel’s AI-powered radar sees through walls

The newest wall-penetrating system uses AI to distinguish targets, Israeli tech company says

An Israeli tech company has introduced a new portable radar system that can detect living beings through solid walls and uses AI to differentiate between people and animals. The makers of Xaver 1000 call it “essential” and a “game changer” for anything from search and rescue to special forces engaging in urban combat.

The new device boasts “an AI-based tracking of live target patterns,” according to its makers, Camero-Tech. The Israeli military contractor, based in Kfar Netter near Netanya, says the Xaver 1000 provides “an unprecedented resolution of body parts and position: sitting, standing, lying down, and the height of live objects” and can distinguish between adults, children and animals.

Amir Beeri, CEO and founder of Camero, described the device as “a true game-changer for special forces and law enforcement teams conducting urban and rural operations that require reliable information regarding hidden live objects.”

The Xaver “determines the most suitable approach to ensure successful life-saving missions in a variety of operational scenarios, such as hostage rescue situations,” Beeri told Israel Defense.

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Xaver 1000 can “see” through most common building materials, according to Camero-Tech. It is portable and can be operated by a single user, both directly and remotely via wi-fi. One of the features is an integrated touch-screen that can render a 3D display of both living people and objects, both when placed against a wall or from a short distance away, according to the company. Data can be recorded and played back for analysis, debriefing, and training purposes.

Camero-Tech presented the Xaver at the Eurosatory 2022 exhibition of military technology, held earlier this month in Paris, France. 

The new device combines many of the features of other products in the Xaver series, from the handheld “presence of life detector” to the LR80 remote sensor. 

Anti-oil activists glue themselves to Van Gogh painting

The stunt comes a day after the same group targeted another painting in a British museum

Climate activist group Just Stop Oil raided the Courtauld Gallery in London on Thursday, gluing themselves to a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. Two activists targeted the 1889 painting ‘Peach Trees in Blossom’.

The activists glued their palms to the painting’s frame, apparently seeking to avoid damaging the masterpiece itself. It was not immediately clear whether the activists used petroleum-based adhesives for their stunt.

The two activists then called upon the UK government to end new fossil fuel projects. The group also said in a statement that the action targeting museums was supposed to rally “art institutions to join them in civil resistance.”

BREAKING: Just Stop Oil protesters have glued themselves to a Vincent Van Gogh painting at London’s Courtauld Gallery. More follows… pic.twitter.com/5a1ZblKgzu

— TalkTV (@TalkTV) June 30, 2022

The stunt has prompted a heavy police response, with multiple officers arriving to the scene to detach the protesters from the painting’s frame and bring them in, footage shared by the group on social media shows.

A piece of art receives this protection and state concern. Whilst people’s in Ethiopia, Somalia, India, Pakistan, the USA, Australia (to name a few) who are suffering from climate change NOW get ignored and left.
What’s more important? This painting? Or a future?! #JustStopOil pic.twitter.com/rFfozEPlYE

— JustStopOil (@JustStop_Oil) June 30, 2022

The protest comes a day after the group staged a similar stunt at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. The activists targeted a 19th century painting by Horatio McCulloch, ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands’, with two gluing themselves to its frame. Other activists spray-painted the museum’s walls with the ‘Just Stop Oil’ slogan. All in all, five activists ended up arrested for the group’s stunt in Glasgow.

Why America’s nuclear threat to Russia now is bigger than the Soviet nuclear threat to America was in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

Eric Zuesse

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the central issue was how short America’s available reaction-time to a Soviet blitz nuclear attack would be and whether it would be too short for America to respond before America’s leader, JFK, would be able to press the nuclear button and retaliate against such a Soviet nuclear first-strike (from so near a location as Cuba). That time-interval would have been about 30 minutes, and Kennedy told Khrushchev that that would be unacceptably short and so if Khrushchev would go through with his plan to place his missiles in Cuba, then America would preemptively launch our nuclear warheads against the Soviet Union. Khrushchev decided not to do it. WW III was thus averted. But now we’re potentially down to around 5 minutes, in the reverse direction, and almost nobody is even talking about it. 

The present version of that threat (to the entire world) started in 2010, when U.S. President Barack Obama (who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize for his rhetoric) met privately in the White House with the then newly and democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who had just been elected by Ukrainians on a platform of continuing into the future the geostrategic neutrality of Russia’s next-door neighbor Ukraine regarding the continuing goal of the U.S. Government to conquer Russia. Yanukovych refused to assist America in that regard, but would also not oppose it; Ukraine would remain neutral. Later that same year, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met privately with Yanukovych in Kiev, and the result was the same: Ukraine would remain neutral regarding Russia and the United States. Then, in 2011, two agents of the CIA-created Google Corporation, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who happened to be personal friends and associates of Ms. Clinton (plus some of those men’s close associates), met privately with Julian Assange for a ‘friendly’ visit allegedly in order to quote him in their upcoming book, The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives  how to stir up and organize a grass-roots movement online so as to enhance democracy. Only later did Assange recognize that he had divulged to them tips that were subsequently used by the U.S. State Department and CIA to organize the coup that overthrew Yanukovych in February 2014. Assange then headlined in October 2014, “Google Is Not What It Seems”. That’s when Assange noted, “Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s ‘director of regime change.’”

This coup (called ’the Maidan revolution’ or “Euromaidan”) started being organized inside the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine by no later than 1 March 2013, but Wikipedia says instead: “Euromaidan started in the night of 21 November 2013 when up to 2,000 protesters gathered at Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti and began to organize themselves with the help of social networks.” (Nothing was mentioned there about the U.S. Embassy’s having organized them.)

The U.S. Government had also engaged the Gallup polling organization, both before and after the coup, in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in its Crimean independent republic, regarding their views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU; and, generally, Ukrainians were far more pro-Russia than pro-U.S., NATO, or EU, but this was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew that Crimeans would be especially resistant. However, this was not really new information. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.

In other words: what Obama did was generally successful, it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it chaged Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American neoconservative heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow. Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, that figure had already risen to 42%.)

Back in 2012, when Obama was running for re-election, against Mitt Romney, that figure was still remaining at 11%, where it had been approximately ever since Gallup had started polling on this question in 1989. So, Obama, and the U.S. Congress, and the newsmedia owners who had sold all of those poliiticians to the American public, had a lot of work yet to do after Obama’s re-election in 2012. During that contest, Obama was aware of this fact, and used it to his own advantage against the overtly hyper-anti-Russian candidate Romney.

A major reason why the American people re-elected U.S. President Barack Obama, instead of elected a new President Romney, was Romney’s having said of Russia, on 26 March 2012,

Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe. They — they fight every cause for the world’s worst actors. … Russia is the — the geopolitical foe.

Not just “a” geopolitical foe, but “the” geopolitical foe.” (Wow! In a world with growing jihadist movements, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS?)

Obama responded to that at the re-election campaign’s end, by springing this upon Romney during a debate, on 22 October 2012:

Governor Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that Al Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not Al Qaida; you said Russia. In the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.

Obama’s campaign had very successfully presented himself as NOT being like Romney (even though he secretly WAS). Lies like this had, in fact, won Obama his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. But now he won his re-election.

Regarding the incident on 26 March 2012, when Obama spoke with Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev at the South Korean “Nuclear Security Summit”, Politifact reported:

In March 2012, at a summit in South Korea, Obama was caught in a “hot mic” incident. Without realizing he could be overheard, Obama told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have more ability to negotiate with the Russians about missile defense after the November election.

“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [the incoming President Putin] to give me space,” Obama was heard telling Medvedev, apparently referring to incoming Russian president Vladi­mir Putin.

“Yeah, I understand,” Medvedev replied.

Obama interjected, saying, “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

So: Obama was telling Putin there, through Medvedev, that his next Administration would soften its stand on America’s installing in eastern Europe, near and even on Russia’s borders, missiles that are designed to disable Russia’s ability to retaliate against a U.S. nuclear first-strike — the U.S. ABM or anti-ballistic-missile system and the nuclear weapoons that America was designing.

Obama wasn’t lying only to America’s voters; he was shown there privately lying to Putin, by indicating to Medvedev that instead of becoming more aggressive (by his planned ABMs, and super-advanced nuclear fuses) against Russia in a second term, he’d become less aggressive (by negotiating with Putin about these matters — as you can see there, the nub of the issue was George Herbert Walker Bush’s lie to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990).

Whereas Cuba was around 30 minutes away from nuking Washington DC., Ukraine would be around 5 minutes away from nuking Moscow. No other country is that close to Moscow. This is probably the main reason why, on 24 February 2022, Putin finally decided to invade Ukraine. But even if he wins there, Finland is only 7 minutes away from Moscow. And Finland was one of the Axis powers in Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa invasion against the Soviet Union between 25 June 1941 and 19 September 1944; so, Finland’s rejoining the nazi alliance now would certainly pose an even greater danger to Russians than Cuba’s joining the Soviet alliance posed to Americans in 1962. But this time, the aggressor-nation in the matter is the U.S. and its allies, not Russia, and yet Russia is responding with far less urgency than America had done in 1962. We’re still on borrowed time, borrowed now from Russia.

To all this, a friend has replied:

Completely invalid analogy.  Having Russian missiles in Cuba in the early days of ICBM technology was to the USA what having USA missiles in Turkey was to Russia.  The crisis was resolved when both countries agreed to withdraw their missiles. Made sense in those days.  Today, the technology is such that proximity of launch sites to targets is irrelevant.

However, some of America’s top nuclear scientists don’t share that view. They concluded, on 1 March 2017:

The US nuclear forces modernization program has been portrayed to the public as an effort to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance their military capabilities. In reality, however, that program has implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing — boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three — and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.

Starting in 2006, the predominant American meta-strategy has been called “Nuclear Primacy” — meaning to attain the ability to win a nuclear war — not merely what it had previously been (M.A.D. or “Mutually Assured Destruction), to prevent one.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.