At the conclusion of a meeting yesterday with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, President Vladimir Putin reported: “Let me note that we are closely analyzing the written responses received from the U.S. and NATO on January 26. However, it is already clear, and I informed Mr. Prime Minister about it, that the fundamental Russian concerns were ignored.” Those concerns, including stopping the eastern expansion of NATO, and reversing and preventing the deployment of strike weapons near Russian borders, are existential for the Russian state. The United States and NATO, it has now become clear, however, do not have the cooperation of the present Ukrainian government for the “defense of democracy” pretext they wished to present to their own largely clueless, mentally-captive populations as justification for their mad adventure.“The march of folly” we are seeing, despite certain efforts which are exceptions to that march, will get us to war, one way or another, if not today, tomorrow, or the day after. Though more and more organizations and individuals are speaking out, opposition to war is not enough. Something original, outside of the geopolitical domain, firmly rooted in the immediate moment but tied to the long-term best interests of humanity, that will restore the very idea of humanity, must be adopted, universally, and now. Thanks to the collaboration of South African, Chinese, and other epidemiologists, we now know that a new bat coronavirus, NeoCov, is capable, under certain circumstances, of transmitting a MERS-CoV-2 like disease to humans with, potentially, the sort of efficiency seen in the Delta and Omicron versions of coronavirus. This has not happened yet, but the proposal recently made by Xi Jinping at Davos for a worldwide collaboration to overcome the impending mass death of millions through as yet unknown, as well as known lethal pandemics, a danger possibly greater than even that last seen 660 years ago with the bubonic plague, is probably the only way that this could be avoided, if it can be avoided at all, at this time. This proposal needs an inspired response from the morally depraved trans-Atlantic sector. The World Health Platform proposal of Helga Zepp- LaRouche, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, and others, is, and has been available. But a morally degenerate elite that has lost the will or moral fitness to survive would never properly respond to Xi jinping in time, particularly if they have just proven themselves incapable of properly responding to Russia, and the immediate danger of accidentally launching thermonuclear war on the planet as a whole—which is what we have seen so far. Nonetheless, the scientific capability to do this exists, and because of the Operation Ibn Sina proposal of the Schiller institute, with respect to Afghanistan and the world generally, a clear plan to do this exists. So why is this really not happening? In a June 1981 EIR document entitled “The Strategic Significance of the Ecumenical Negotiations,” Lyndon LaRouche identified the reasons for the morally depraved character of the Roman Empire and the Roman Republic . “St. Augustine addressed the practical side of the doctrinal issue in his devastating proof that not only the Roman Empire but the City of Rome before the Empire represented a morally degenerate society. Pre-Imperial Rome, according to the Roman historian Livius, was controlled by the Cult of Apollo, the same cult notorious as Aristotle’s master at Delphi, and known in the Middle East by the names of Marduk and Lucifer. Imperial Rome was a result of control of the Roman cults from Ptolemaic Egypt. These were representatives of the forces which the Apostle St. John’s Apocalypse (Revelations) identifies as the ‘Whore of Babylon.’” While the United States is still the world’s oldest and most successful republic, since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April 1945, America has been culturally dominated in all aspects of policy-making by the Whore, not of Babylon, but of “Perfidious Albion.” In the last weeks and months, whether at the COP 26 Malthusian “Kill Humanity, Save the Planet” fest, or in the Black Sea military chicken game with the Russian fleet, with the AUKUS (Australia-United Kingdom-United States) adventure, or the present mad gambit against Russia in Ukraine, itself the latest incarnation of the never-ending Christopher Steele/ Sir Richard Dearlove/Robert Hannigan/GCHQ “Russiagate” assault on the American Presidency—the City Of London has been in the driver’s seat of. Britain is now deploying the “junior varsity” of the United States State Department, not only for the greater glory of BAE Systems and such, but for the self-destruction of the United States itself. That’s why the policy pronouncements are both insane, and continuous. Perhaps it was Ukrainian President Zelensky’s one undisputed skill, his penchant for comedy, that has led him to realize that the joke has gone too far. He does not intend to incinerate his nation. He and others have seen “up close” the mental difficulty the United States has in facing reality in the form of “the Other,” be that in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Ukraine. A recent example: Take Tony Blinken’s ham-fisted attempt to stop Argentina’s President Fernandez from visiting, first, Putin, and then China’s Xi Jinping, where an MOU on the Belt and Road Initiative is to be signed. On top of that, Brazil’s President Bolsonaro will visit with Putin Feb. 14. Brazilian Vice-President, Gen. Hamilton Mourao (ret.) says that he doesn’t think that Russia plans to invade Ukraine, or that Bolsonaro should not visit Russia because of tensions with the United States. “Let’s remember that Brazil is part of a group with Russia, the BRICS, through which we have a partnership with Russia. Russia is an important country for doing business…and we can’t give that up.” This is the real world, the world of physical economy, the world of what was once termed the American System, but which has been rejected in the United States since the largely-successful 1980s campaign to destroy the reputation and influence of Lyndon LaRouche. In all those areas now in the existential crosshairs—from the spread of lethal pandemics, to the collapse of the international monetary system and what to do about it, to stopping the danger of thermonuclear war though an ecumenical dialogue of cultures, to joint missions on the industrialization of space, and the production of advanced high-density energy platforms based on a revolution in nuclear power plant production, including thorium reactors, HTGR reactors, fission/fusion hybrids,etc.—the writings and campaign of Lyndon LaRouche, featured through the pages of Executive Intelligence Review, has provided a record of what to do, and how to do it. POSTSCRIPT: VERNADSKY, PASTEUR, LAROUCHE In the course of his 1981 discussion of the topic, “The Tragedy of U.S. Education” with a group of academicians in Poland, Lyndon LaRouche may also have provided an idea useful for the next ecumenical and scientific step that could be taken to advance the recent proposal made by President Xi Jinping for an international collaboration of scientists and economists to join together to fight the coronavirus. “Now, we have a case of a very famous Ukrainian-Russian scientist, who probably is one of the most important figures for the 21st Century, Academician Vernadsky. Vernadsky was a student of Curie (the son of Curie, the son-in-law of Pasteur), as well as of [Dmitri] Mendeleyev. Vernadsky went beyond this, but [he was] in the same school of Mendeleyev, of Pasteur, and actually the French school of Arago before them. He went through this, to develop a conception of what he called ‘biogeochemistry.’” “By working in the school of Mendeleyev—he studied originally under Mendeleyev in Petrograd—[he] showed a way of thinking about the relationship between living processes and what we call non-living processes. He demonstrated, for example, that the atmosphere, the oceans, and most of the area on which we live on the surface of the Earth, is a biosphere. These things he called the”natural products of life." That is, one could measure a change in the characteristic of the planet, produced by the continuous action of life, or life transforming the planet. He went further, in his work during the 1930s, and defined what he called the “noösphere,” that is, the action of human cognition in transforming the biosphere, and transforming the relationship of man to the universe. “Vernadsky was also the founder of nuclear science in Russia and Ukraine….” Can the investigation of the work of Vernadsky, and Lyndon LaRouche’s observations on Vernadsky from the standpoint of physical economy, provide a way to initiate an international dialogue that takes up the method of inquiry required to make breakthroughs in the field of biology and medicine, the harnessing of thermonuclear power, and the redefinition of the presently bankrupt notions of ecology and environment, from the standpoint of investigating Vernadsky’s scientific conception of the noösphere? How might that dialogue be proposed by a “Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites” in terms of the collaborations among people in many different nations, and across disciplines, to address both the short-term emergency of saving humanity from an onslaught of infectious disease, and the long-term investigation of the very nature of life, and of creativity as a unique form of life distinct from all others?

As war mongering loonies from U.S. and U.K. intelligence and diplomatic circles keep foaming at the mouth about Russia's "invasion plans", saner voices are being heard. Even Ukraine's President Zelensky doubts U.S. intelligence reports of an imminent invasion, which has made him a target for the War Hawks who ran the 2014 Maidan regime change coup, as inadvertently revealed in an article in the {Washington Post}. With nuclear war as a real possibility if the war hawks are not stopped, it is time to place them in an asylum, and let diplomacy take over.

After a tremendous increase in fertilizer prices since 2019, and particularly during the course of 2021, the world stands on the brink of a substantial drop in global food production in 2022, at a time when mass starvation has already hit Afghanistan, Yemen, and six nations in Africa. If dramatic actions are not taken to reverse this process right away, more than 100 million more human beings can be added this year to the ranks of those in danger of starvation, which already number more than 200 million in the latest judgment of the World Food Program and its head David Beasley.The causes of this terrible toll of hunger and starvation are mostly a failed economic model which must be replaced; but in Afghanistan, they are viciously geopolitical and we must undo this punishment now. Regarding the economic failure: The World Bank Fertilizers Price Index for the world, which in April of 2020 was at 66.24 and in January 2021 had risen slowly but steadily to 82.96, by December 2021 had exploded to 208.01, more than tripling in 20 months. The rise of 60% in just the last two months of 2021 has particularly devastated farmers around the world. Their situation is even worse in the Northern hemisphere where fertilizer (and pesticides) for the spring planting look entirely inaccessible. The Wall Street Journal’s Jan. 21 article, “‘Farms Are Failing’ as Fertilizer Prices Drive Up Cost of Food,” reported that despite global food prices having risen to the highest level in a decade, rapid food inflation is almost certain to continue in 2022 due to fertilizer prices and accessibility. This, the paper understates, “would exacerbate hunger—already acute in some parts of the world.” World wheat output is set to drop by 10 million tons in 2022, according to the French agriculture analysis firm Agritel. The effect on maize production will be worse. Corn/maize production costs are rising 15-20% in the major producers America and Ukraine. Lower yields of many foods and agricultural products are projected around the world in 2022. Amid widespread famines already in 2020-21, and loss of informal agricultural work in the developing countries, food may enter global shortage in 2022. And according to the International Fertilizer Development Center, exceedingly high fertilizer prices could result in a reduction of agricultural output in Africa alone, which will be “equivalent to the food needs of 100 million people.” Although this monumental fertilizer price increase coincides with sharp rise prices of natural gas and is exacerbated by them, it is far larger, and far more widely and evenly spread around the world, than the natural gas spikes. As corn/maize growers in the United States insist, the gas price spike is not the primary cause of the fertilizer shock and loss of food production. In fact, as fertilizer use and price both rose in 2019, the International Fertilizer Association forecast that global production and use would drop after 2019, as they did—by roughly 10% in 2020-21. The huge fertilizer price rise after 2019 went along with sharp price rises across the whole range of important global commodities for industry and agriculture; its cause was wild money-printing by the major trans-Atlantic central banks starting late 2019; and global monopoly of production by a few big firms. Four monopolies control 75% of nitrogen-based fertilizer distribution: They are Nutrien Ltd., (Canada-based), Yara (Norway-based), CF Industries (U.S.-based), and Mosaic (part of Cargill, U.S.-based). Afghanistan is a terrible special case, where when NATO countries withdrew their forces after 20 years of destructive war, they retaliated with a punitive cutoff of international aid and development investment, and the United States Treasury seized Afghanistan’s own financial reserves. A German official just back from Kabul reported in Tagesspiegel Jan. 30 that 7 million children are starving now in Afghanistan; 1 million, he said, would be in hospital ICUs if they were in Europe. Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche said of the plight of Afghanistan’s population, and the world threat to food-growing this year, “This is the greatest threat to civilization, not nuclear weapons.” She demands, now with many others, that the frozen Afghan funds be released to restore the lost liquidity in the entire economy; and has launched Operation Ibn Sina, to make the nation an exemplar for building a modern healthcare and public health system in every country in the world. To do this the United States must cooperate with Russia, China, and India in particular. And it must break up both its biggest banks with Glass-Steagall, and with anti-trust acts break up the food monopolies.