Today’s News 17th June 2019

  • UK Millennials 'Have Secret Cocaine Addiction And Drug Is Used Everywhere'

    Researchers at Substance abuse charity, Addaction, discovered cocaine use in the UK is much higher than previously thought.

    Approximately 80% of the respondents admitted using marijuana, while 70% said they use cocaine and crack cocaine.

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    This is the most extensive study of its kind, surveyed 8,500 drug users in Scotland through social media polls. They shared their findings exclusively with Sky News, determined that cocaine is being used “everywhere” in the UK.

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    Seven in 10 drug users believe cocaine is their first drug of choice, only 14% of them have sought help from healthcare professionals or charities about their addiction problems.

    About 90% of respondents said they’re millennials (aged between 18 and 45). Another 90% said they’re employed or in college.

    “Cocaine is generally seen as a party drug, has a stigma attached with it, is widely used and still nobody is talking about it,” said Andrew Horne, Director of Addaction, Scotland.

    “Even to this day, people think that cocaine is a middle-aged dinner party, middle-class drug, but the results of the survey show it’s everywhere.”

    The study comes as prime ministerial candidate Michael Gove was criticized for previous cocaine addiction, and Boris Johnson recently refused to deny using the drug.

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    Sky News noted that Author and columnist Bryony Gordon had described her addiction with cocaine: “My addiction to cocaine crept up on me while I was busy with a hectic social life. Cocaine destroys lives; it makes one inherently risky.”

    A millennial in his 30s, who remained anonymous in a Sky News interview said: “It’s usually just a weekend thing, when I’m out with the lads, in a pub or club or festival or something like that.”

    And since it appears a vast majority of UK millennials are blowing lines or smoking crack, a separate report has shown small amounts of cocaine have been found in freshwater shrimp in the country.

  • Putin, Xi Urge End To MAD World. Lord Russell's Spectre Frowns

    Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The spectre of nuclear war has long hung over the world like a nightmarish sword of Damocles offering humanity much cause for despair at the dual nature of science as a beautiful source of creative power that uplifts and ennobles on the one hand and acts as a harbinger of death and chaos on the other.

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    However, it would be wrong to blame science for the crisis which mankind unlocked with the atom, when the reality is that we have never freed ourselves from the pest of oligarchical systems of rule. Going back to records of the Roman, Persian and Babylon empires, such systems have always sought to manipulate the masses into patterns of behaviour of self-policing and constant conflict.

    Whether we are talking about the Crusades, European religious wars, Napoleonic wars, Crimean War, Opium Wars, or WWI and WWII, it has always been the same recipe: Get victims to define their interests around material constraints, diminishing resources, or religious/ethnic/linguistic biases that prevent each person from recognizing their common interests with their neighbor and then get them to fight. Classic divide and conquer.

    By the close of WWII, that ancient recipe for managed chaos no longer functioned as a new ingredient was introduced into the geopolitical “great game”. This atomic ingredient was so powerful that those “game masters” managing the affairs of the earth from above like detached Olympian gods, understood that they could now be annihilated as fast as their victims and a new set of rules had to be created post haste.

    Lord Russell’s Nuclear Gamble

    A leading representative of the genocidal mind of the British Empire was one Lord Bertrand Russell, 7th generation member of the hereditary elite known today for his celebrated pacifism and profound philosophical depth. It is an uncomfortable fact that this paragon of “logic” and peace was one of the earliest thinkers on record calling for the nuclear annihilation of the Soviet Union in the wake of the surrender of Nazi Germany. Should the Soviet Union not submit to a One World Government, argued Lord Russell in the September 1946 Bulletin for Atomic Scientists, then it would simply have to face a nuclear punishment.

    Of course that threat was short lived, as Russia’s surprise announcement of their “cracking the atomic code” broke the monopoly which the Anglo-Americans had been salivating over in 1945 as they watched Japan (whose backchannel surrender had already been negotiated) burn under the shadow of a newly emerging Anglo-American Leviathan.

    Lord Russell, then heading the CIA/MI6 Congress for Cultural Freedom (whose goal was to create a new anti-culture of hedonism and irrationalism in the arts during the Cold War) was forced to change tune and instead unleash a new doctrine which came to be known as “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD). Russell’s obsession with trying to enslave all of physics to a strict mathematical determinism as displayed in his Principia Mathematica (1910) and his leading role in the CIA’s promotion of abstract art/atonal music under the CCF banner is a useful insight into how societies are managed by oligarchs.

    In a BBC interview years after Russell changed his views on a first strike on Russia, the British aristocratic, now-turned anti-nuclear advocate described his change of heart thus:

    “Q: Is it true or untrue that in recent years you advocated that a preventive war might be made against communism, against Soviet Russia?”

    RUSSELL: It’s entirely true, and I don’t repent of it now. It was not inconsistent with what I think now…. There was a time, just after the last war, when the Americans had a monopoly of nuclear weapons and offered to internationalise nuclear weapons by the Baruch proposal, and I thought this an extremely generous proposal on their part, one which it would be very desirable that the world should accept; not that I advocated a nuclear war, but I did think that great pressure should be put upon Russia to accept the Baruch proposal, and I did think that if they continued to refuse it might be necessary actually to go to war. At that time nuclear weapons existed only on one side, and therefore the odds were the Russians would have given way. I thought they would … .

    Q: Suppose they hadn’t given way.

    RUSSELL: I thought and hoped that the Russians would give way, but of course you can’t threaten unless you’re prepared to have your bluff called.”

    An End to the MAD World

    The new game became “geopolitical balance of terror” under MAD, and in many ways the power it offered an oligarchy was greater than anything a pre-atomic society had to offer. While major wars were no longer desirable (though always a risk in this psychotic game of high stakes poker), asymmetric warfare and regime change became the new “big things” for the next 70 years. A population in constant terror of annihilation created a ripe ground for the spread of a new inquisition under the guidance of a megalomaniac cross-dresser running the FBI. This inquisition purged the west of qualified leaders who were committed to peace between east and west and included great scientists, artists, professors and politicians who watched their careers destroyed as the Deep State grew ever more powerful and atomic bombs more abundant.

    While many foolishly celebrated the success of MAD with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of a unipolar world that would supposedly usher in a peaceful “end to history”, others recognised the grand sleight of hand as NATO continued to expand even though WWs raison d’être had disappeared. Yevgeni Primakov and a circle of Russian patriots (which included a rising Vladimir Putin) were among those who saw through the fraud. This network worked diligently with their Asian counterparts to create a foundation for survival which manifested in the form of the G20 in 1999 and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2001.

    As 2007 began, the wars in the Middle East unleashed after 9-11 had no end in sight, and an intention much darker than many ever imagined was emerging amidst the chaos. A NATO-led Anti-Ballistic Missile shield began construction around Russia’s southern perimeter on Dick Cheney’s initiative and was joined soon thereafter by an “Asia-Pivot” encirclement of China under Obama in 2011. Only the most naive fools then believed that Iran or North Korea were the real reasons for this Hobbesian power grab for a first strike monopoly. Lord Russell’s ghost could be felt across the world threatening a nuclear war if national sovereignty were not abandoned in favor of a world government managed by a “scientific dictatorship”,

    Russia and China Call to Control the Fiery Serpent

    President Putin along with Sergei Lavrov and President Xi Jinping have signalled an end to the era of MAD with an important call for a new international security doctrine based upon a “new operating system”.

    Coming out of the St. Petersburg Economic Summit on June 6, Putin said:

    “if we do not keep this ‘fiery serpent under control- if we let it out of the bottle, God forbid, this could lead to global catastrophe. Everyone is pretending to be deaf, blind or dyslexic. We have to react to this somehow, don’t we? Clearly so.”

    Putin’s words were amplified by Sergei Lavrov on June 11 speaking at the Primakov Readings 2019 conference in Moscow which brought together diplomats, experts and politicians from 30 countries on the theme of “Returning to Confrontation: Are there Any Alternatives?” Lavrov said:

    “It is of principle importance that Russia and the U.S. calm the rest of the world and pass a joint statement at a high level that there can be no victory in a nuclear war and therefore it is unacceptable and inadmissible. We do not understand why they cannot reconfirm this position now. Our proposal is being considered by the U.S. side.”

    Since putting themselves between an Anglo-American firing squad and the nations of Syria and Venezuela, in tandem with the surprising unveiling of an array of new military technologies in March 2018, Putin has transformed the geopolitical “rules of the game” so that Lavrov’s proposal is now a real possibility. The new technologies unveiled by Russia in 2018 include supersonic missiles, underwater drones and other nuclear powered rockets that guarantee Russia’s retaliatory attack capability should anyone be stupid enough to launch a first strike against Russia.

    The BRI and the New Operating System

    The St. Petersburg Economic Summit from June 5-6 not only saw 19 000 participants from 145 countries signing $47.8 billion in agreements, but also featured an important meeting by China’s Xi Jinping and Putin who described their relationship as the best of friends and locked their nations ever more deeply into the new operating framework of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which is quickly extending into the Arctic.

    This meeting will be carried to a yet higher level with the June 13-14 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit in Bishkek Kyrgyzstan which will integrate Eurasian nations ever more into the BRI. Putin and Xi will not only meet at this summit once again, but will also be joined by India’s newly re-elected Narendra Modi, whose participation is vital for the re-organisation of the world system.

    After the SCO summit, the world will await the potential meeting at the June 28-29 G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, where U.S. President Donald Trump has indicated his desire to meet with all three leaders for bilateral negotiations. Many onlookers have criticised the idea that Trump could actually desire an honest meeting, but Lavrov has indicated his higher understanding of the strategic complexity in America by making the point in a June 6 interviewthat President Trump’s failures to build constructive relations with Russia are due to sabotage by forces embedded within the government when he said: 

    “Certain US politicians, including those who tied President Trump’s hands, not allowing him to deliver on his campaign promises to normalise and improve relations with Russia, are still unable to accept this fact.”

    In fact at a June 12 press conference alongside the President of Poland, Trump was pressed by a reporter to take a hard line against Russia who is apparently “threatening Poland”. While paying lip service to the Russia=bully narrative, Trump ended his response saying “I hope that Poland is going to have a great relationship with Russia. I hope we’re going to have a great relationship with Russia and, by the way, China and many other countries.” Trump had earlier called for Russia, China and America to convert their hundreds of millions of dollars in military spending into projects that are in the common interests of everyone.

    During his keynote address to the Economic Forum, Putin called out the elephant in the room by bringing up the breakdown of the global financial system: 

    “the degeneration of the universalist globalisation model and its turning into a parody, a caricature of itself, where common international rules are replaced with the laws… of one country.” 

    Putin went on to warn of a “fragmentation of the global economic space by a policy of completely unlimited economic egoism and a forced breakdown. But this is the road to endless conflict, trade wars and maybe not just trade wars. Figuratively, this is the road to the ultimate fight of all against all.”

    The point was driven home that ultimately without a new economic system, the danger of global annihilation and injustice will always hang over humanity. Echoing Xi Jinping’s philosophy of win-win cooperation, Putin said what is ultimately needed is “a more stable and fair development model. These agreements should not only be written clearly but should also be observed by all participants. However, I am convinced that talk about an economic world order like this will remain wishful thinking unless we return to the centre of the discussion, that is, notions like sovereignty, the unconditional right of every country to its own development road and, let me add, responsibility for universal sustainable development, not just for ones own development.”

  • UK Deploying 100 Elite Royal Marines To Gulf After Tanker Attacks

    Iran says it has summoned the British ambassador over the weekend after the UK publicly came out in support of the White House assessment pinpointing Iranian forces behind last Thursday’s two tanker attacks in the Gulf of Oman. 

    Last Friday Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the attacks were “almost certainly” carried out by Tehran. Hunt also warned of the “great risk” of Iran drifting toward war against the US and its allies during a television interview. 

    Crucially, Britain is set to deploy 100 Royal Marines to the Persian Gulf in order to form a “rapid reaction force” to protect UK assets in the region.

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    Image source: Royal Navy

    According to the Sunday Times:

    Military sources said that 100 marines from 42 Commando, based near Plymouth, will form a rapid reaction force, Special Purpose Task Group 19. They will operate from ships patrolling the region from Britain’s new naval base in Bahrain.

    The marines are expected to arrive in Bahrain “within weeks” as well as a team of British experts to assist in investigating precisely what materials were used in the tanker attacks, which contradictory accounts say could have been mines or torpedoes, or even an aerial projectile. 

    UK defence minister and MP Tobias Ellwood told Sky’s Ridge on Sunday: “We have a substantial presence in the Middle East that looks after our interests there. We understand the Middle East, we have a number of allies there as well.”

    He added that Britain would beef up its presence in coordination with US forces: “We will be working with the United States to make sure this area is safe and to make sure that we actually deescalate the tensions there but I don’t think Iran should be under any doubt [about] that fact that we will be determined to protect our assets and our interests in the region.”

    Among the more interesting quotes from the Sunday Times report suggests the ease with which a direct firefight between US-UK allied forces and Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces – which patrol the vital Strait of Hormuz – could erupt

    A military source said that having marines with machine guns on the decks of warships or merchant ships was likely to see off any Iranian speedboats trying to sneak up on them.

    Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News Sunday that while the US maintains the view that it is “unmistakable” that Iran is responsible for the attacks, and that it has “lots of data, lots of evidence”  the White House does not actually want war

    “President Trump has done everything he can to avoid war. We don’t want war,” he said. “The United States is going make sure that we take all the actions necessary, diplomatic and otherwise that achieve that outcome,” Pompeo added.

    But given the potential for a rapid build-up of western forces in the already crowded Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, and with Iran’s IRGC on a heightened state of alert, it could be too little too late given both sides appear “war ready” and are already blundering precisely toward that dire scenario. 

  • Gottfried: No, America Isn't In Danger Of Becoming A Socialist Nation

    Authored by Paul Gottfried via The American Conservative,

    The old S-word bugaboo has surfaced again but the real threat comes from globalism and social progressivism…

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    At a dinner in his New Jersey home to which John O’Sullivan and I had both been invited, former president Richard Nixon posed the question: “What is politics?”

    My response was “friend-enemy relations.”

    “No,” said O’Sullivan. “It’s about finding themes for an electoral campaign.”

    Our differing answers reflected a difference in backgrounds: I had just published a book on the very dark German political theorist Carl Schmitt and was a great fan of Thomas Hobbes; O’Sullivan had been a campaign advisor to Margaret Thatcher before going on to become National Review ‘s chief editor.

    Of course, both of us were right. Political life in Western countries is about the organization of electoral campaigns, in which one side depicts the other as the Devil. Typically the ideological confrontations are not as substantive as they’re made to appear; the ritualized battles are waged over issues that politicians and their donors want to talk about.

    I thought about this conversation while recently listening to political talking points, namely the babble coming from our Republicans and from Emmanuel Macron and his centrist coalition in France about a looming “socialist” danger. In neither country is this claim persuasive. I’m not denying that the Left isn’t demanding lots of “free stuff,” including free college education in the US, even for those who have neither the interest nor the inclination to engage in serious academic studies.Young people who hang around universities also want to restructure the economy around various “green deals,” such as the plan recently trotted out by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her Green New Deal scheme would be incredibly costly and in any case would have only minimal effect on the environment. But the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden, doesn’t seem too eager to sign on to a radical ecological proposal anyway (though he does advocate a $1.7 trillion “clean energy” plan).

    Simply put, what these “socialists” want is certainly not what exists in Venezuela, China, or Cuba. None of our Democratic presidential candidates are trying to establish economies that are similarly nationalized. A Democratic administration would likely slow down economic growth and impose more PC requirements on the commercial sector. But this would hardly make us Castro’s Cuba or the former German Democratic Republic. Someone who was once a true socialist is Bernie Sanders, but even Bernie is now pushing mostly the “free stuff,” together with “intersectional politics.”

    Having socialized medicine may be a good or bad thing (I personally abhor it), but as I’ve argued before, advocating for it doesn’t make one a socialist. Countries that even our Republican think tanks consider to be “capitalistt”, like Canada, Germany, and Britain, all have single-payer medical systems.

    Moreover, major corporate interests are backing our political Left and don’t seem concerned that the culturally leftist Democratic presidential hopefuls plan to inflict socialism on the hand that feeds. Procter and Gamble, Citibank, Coca Cola, Gillette, and Silicon Valley lavish gifts on Democrats, while pushing LGBTgutting the Second Amendment , expanding abortion rights , and trying to weaken national borders.

    I’m sure these corporate titans aren’t interested in having the state seize their holdings and redistribute their profits. They are backing the Left because the real ideological cleavage in our society doesn’t run in any case between capitalists and socialists.

    Rather, it lies, as Steve Bannon recently pointed out in the French monthly L’incorrect, between globalists and “those who value their nations and civilization.”

    The center-right in Western countries has rightly or wrongly decided that it can’t win elections by designating the real Leftist enemy for what they are – globalists who want to push their social values on everyone else. So they instead attack their adversaries as “socialists,” or what Macron denounces as “les socialo-communistes.”

    Over the decades, Western countries have moved sharply to the Left on social issues. For example, even our supposedly ultra-rightist president is now seen posing beneath an LGBT rainbow flag and expressing his commitment to promoting gay rights everywhere . And though Mayor Pete may dispute the intensity of Trump’s enthusiasm for gay marriage, Trump himself has told us in no uncertain terms that he finds an institution that most Americans vehemently opposed 20 years ago to be “absolutely fine.” Significantly, most young Republicans are fervently in favor of gay marriage .

    On immigration and abortion, the goalposts have also moved leftward – at least in national electoral campaigns. The GOP is now officially against late-term abortion or killing newly born infants, but some states are seeking to prohibit abortions at an earlier point in pregnancy. Republican operatives call for controlling illegal immigration but avoid talking explicitly about reducing immigration.

    In view of what is perceived as the declining utility of highlighting “Judeo-Christian values,” the RNC will in all likelihood run against that golden oldie: “socialism.” It may also bring back such ideas as being for the individual against the state and (better yet) “getting government off our backs.” In France, it’s also “déjà vu all over again.” There the globalists are railing against the ghost of the French Communists, who once collected a quarter of the national vote. But Macron’s major opponents are now on the nationalist Right and on the multicultural globalist Left, represented by the Greens—not real socialists.

    Both the French president and the GOP need to find timelier and more honest rhetoric, or else risk losing more elections and partisan support. The socialist bugaboo has a limited shelf life, which may expire far sooner than its critics realize.

  • Visualizing The Father-Absence Crisis In America

    There is a crisis in America. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 19.7 million children, more than 1 in 4, live without a father in the home. Consequently, there is a “father factor” in nearly all of the societal ills facing America today. Research shows when a child is raised in a father-absent home, he or she is aected in the following ways…

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    Source: National Fatherhood Initiative, 2017. U.S. Census Bureau. Data represent children living without a biological, step, or adoptive father.

  • Russia Expert's 2017 Prophecy About The Nuclear Threat Of Russiagate Is Coming True

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    The New York Times has published an anonymously sourced report titled “U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid” about the “placement of potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before” which could potentially “plunge Russia into darkness or cripple its military,” with one anonymous official reporting that “We are doing things at a scale that we never contemplated a few years ago.”

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    Obviously this is yet another serious escalation in the continually mounting series of steps that have been taken into a new cold war between the planet’s two nuclear superpowers. Had a report been leaked to Russian media from anonymous Kremlin officials that Moscow was escalating its cyber-aggressions against America’s energy grid, this would doubtless be labeled an act of war by the political/media class of the US and its allies with demands for immediate retaliation.

    To put this in perspective, The New York Times reported last year that the Pentagon was pushing for the US Nuclear Posture Review to include the strategy of retaliating against serious Russian cyberattacks on American power grids with nuclear weapons.

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    So that’s scary enough. What’s even scarier is the information that the Timesburied way down in the 21st to 23rd paragraphs of its report:

    “Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place ‘implants’ — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.

    “Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.

    “Because the new law defines the actions in cyberspace as akin to traditional military activity on the ground, in the air or at sea, no such briefing would be necessary, they added.”

    In an article titled “Pentagon Keeps Trump in the Dark About its Cyber Attacks on Russia”, Rolling Stone’s Peter Wade described this jarring revelation as follows:

    “New laws, enacted by Congress last year, allow such ‘clandestine military activity’ in cyberspace to go ahead without the president’s approval. So, in this case, those new laws are protecting American interests… by keeping the sitting president out of the loop. What a (scary) time to be alive.”

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    So Trump is in a bit of a bind now. The escalation has already been put in place, which will likely see an equal response from Moscow if it isn’t scaled back. But scaling it back would mean a whole new wave of shrieking alarmism from the political/media class about the conspiracy theory that just won’t die no matter how much evidence is mounted against it: that Trump is a controlled puppet of the Kremlin. All as he’s working to build the case for re-election in 2020.

    Stephen F Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton University and one of America’s leading experts on US-Russia relations, has been warning for years that exactly this would happen. In an April 2017 interview on Democracy Now, Cohen warned that placing political pressure on a US president to never step back from escalations during a showdown between nuclear superpowers could have potentially world-ending consequences should mounting tensions see a situation similar to the Cuban missile crisis again.

    “I think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations, at least since the Cuban missile crisis,” Cohen said. “And arguably, it’s more dangerous, because it’s more complex. Therefore, we — and then, meanwhile, we have in Washington these — and, in my judgment, factless accusations that Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in American-Russian relations, we have an American president who’s being politically crippled by the worst imaginable — it’s unprecedented. Let’s stop and think. No American president has ever been accused, essentially, of treason. This is what we’re talking about here, or that his associates have committed treason.”

    “Imagine, for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis,” Cohen said.

    “Imagine if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been crippled. And the only way he could have proved he wasn’t was to have launched a war against the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear war.”

    People rarely take time to deeply reflect on the uniquely important fact that our species came within a hair’s breadth of total annihilation during the Cuban missile crisis. We learned long after it was all over that the only reason a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine didn’t discharge its payload on the US Navy and set off a full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR was because one of the three men in the sub needed to authorize the weapon’s use stood against the other two and refused. That man’s name was Vasili Arkhipov, and he’s responsible for the fact that you and everyone you love exists today. There’s a good PBS documentary about the event on YouTube if you’re curious.

    President Kennedy was constantly going back and forth in communication with the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis, and any number of things could have gone cataclysmically wrong during that exchange had Kennedy not made certain concessions at certain times and known when to hold back instead of pressing forward. He made a series of diplomatic moves that would not be possible in this current paranoid, leak-prone climate, including secretly recalling the USA’s Jupiter missiles from their position in Turkey at Khrushchev’s request.

    For all the outrage that liberals display whenever a high-profile Republican utters the phrase “deep state”, it sure is interesting that the Commander-in-Chief has found himself in a situation where he is at the whim of a collective of warmongers who are advancing pre-existing agendas against a nation they perceive as a geostrategic threat to US hegemony. It begs the question, who is really in charge?

    The US war machine is the most powerful military force in the history of civilization, and the alliance of nations that it upholds is functionally the most powerful empire that the world has ever seen. Because so much power depends on the behavior of this gargantuan war engine, it is seen by those with real power as too important to be left to the will of the electorate, and too important to be left to the will of the elected Commander-in-Chief. This is why Americans are the most propagandized people in the world, this is why Russia hysteria has been blasted into their psyches for three years, and this is why we are all at an ever-increasing risk of dying in a nuclear holocaust.

    UPDATE: Trump now seems like he might be denying that what The New York Times’ sources said is happening is happening. It’s unlikely that the Timeswould fabricate a story whole cloth, so if Trump is in fact denying the story then either the sources are lying about what they’re doing in their own purported jobs, or Trump is still being kept in the dark, or Trump is just lying.

    “Do you believe that the Failing New York Times just did a story stating that the United States is substantially increasing Cyber Attacks on Russia,” Trump tweeted.

    “This is a virtual act of Treason by a once great paper so desperate for a story, any story, even if bad for our Country. ALSO, NOT TRUE! Anything goes with our Corrupt News Media today. They will do, or say, whatever it takes, with not even the slightest thought of consequence! These are true cowards and without doubt, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”

    Curiouser and curiouser.

    *  *  *

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  • Israel Unveils Newest Golan Settlement: 'Trump Heights'

    First in Poland it was the proposed “Fort Trump,” but now in Israel it is “Trump Heights”. In a breaking story that had us doing a double take just to assure it is indeed real, a new Israeli settlement in the occupied Golan Heights has been named ‘Trump Heights’ in honor Trump’s deeply controversial decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the territory

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    Image source: AFP

    None other than Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu presided over the opening ceremony, which featured the unveiling of a large sign bearing Trump’s name and US-Israeli criss-crossing flags. 

    The United Nations and other countries have not given international backing to the US recognition, which further last month involved the State Department officially changing world maps to reflect the new status. The settlement is yet to be established though the sign is in place, in what is sure to unleash a new wave of controversy and protests in Syria and the Palestinian territories. 

    Israel’s premier pledged in April to name a new settlement after Mr Trump, soon after the president overturned decades of US policy by recognising Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan.

    The region is located about 60km (40 miles) south-west of the Syrian capital, Damascus, and covers about 1,000 sq km (400 sq miles).

    The new settlement is expected to be built near Kela in the northern Golan Heights. —BBC

    Israel fully annexed the Golan Heights in 1981 after capturing it from Syria during the Six-Day War of 1967. The United Nations has never recognized Israeli annexation and settlement there, but has repeatedly condemned it — all of which has resulted in a Syria-Israel state of war ever since. 

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    Later in the day Sunday President Trump retweeted a congratulations and photos highlighting the event – which had been sent from the US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who was on hand representing the United States during the ceremony.

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    Friedman noted it was the “first time Israel has dedicated a village in honor of a sitting president since Harry Truman (1949)” and further wished the president a happy birthday weekend (June 14). 

    Apparently, Israel’s Golan Regional Council has already received hundreds of requests from Jewish applicants abroad, especially in the US and Canada, who wish to move into the settlement. 

    According to local Israeli media, the Golan authority offices “have been ‘flooded’ with requests for information about new Golan community.”

  • President Trump Is Repainting Air Force One To Look Like His Personal Commercial Jet

    It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the President who did most of his campaigning traveling in his own private branded commercial airliner has plans to revamp Air Force One. And that’s exactly what President Donald Trump is doing, according to Bloomberg. Trump unveiled a new paint job for Air Force One on ABC late last week – one that looks similar to the “TRUMP” branded jets he flew around commercially while campaigning. 

    He told ABC: “There’s your new Air Force One, and I’m doing this for other presidents, not for me.”

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    He also claimed he got $1.6 billion in savings off the price of the project, while the Air Force said that Trump negotiations with Boeing yielded $1.4 billion in savings. The Air Force is responsible for managing the $5.3 billion program for Boeing to build two new presidential plans. 

    But Trump’s plan is being held up in congress – an amendment to the annual defense policy bill approved by the House Armed Services Committee (H.R. 2500) would bar changes to plans for the planes.

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    Air Force One’s paint job isn’t the first time that Trump has intervened in defense department projects. He personally pushed for cost cuts for Air Force One and the F-35 fighter and has demanded that “the Navy use old-fashioned steam-based catapults on its new aircraft carriers instead of a more advanced but occasionally unreliable electromagnetic system.”

    A final decision on the paint job will come in 2021, so the plans could be abandoned if Trump loses his re-election bid next year. Estimates put the actual production of the plane – should Trump win – at September 2024, meaning he may never even get to fly on the plane, once completed. 

  • From Friendster To Facebook – 20 Years Of Social Networks In 85 Seconds

    Nothing lasts forever…

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