- Marine Le Pen Ordered To Stand Trial For Re-Tweeting ISIS Atrocities
Right-wing French politician Marine Le Pen has been ordered to stand trial for tweeting photographs of ISIS atrocities in December 2015, weeks after IS jihadis murdered 130 people in Paris.
A judge ruled in the Western Paris suburb of Nanterre ordered Le Pen to face a charge of circulating “violent messages that incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity,” which included the brutal beheading of journalist James Foley, according to France24. Another depicted a man in an orange jumpsuit being run over by a tank, while a third photo Le Pen posted was of captured Jordanian air force pilot Muath Al-Kasasbeh being burned alive in a cage in January 2015.
“Daesh is this!” wrote Le Pen in a caption, using the terror group’s Arabic acronym.
Le Pen faces a maximum sentence of three years in prison and a fine of 75,000 Euros ($85,000 US).
Last year, an investigative magistrate called for Le Pen to undergo psychiatric tests in connection with the IS tweets.
The 50-year-old trained lawyer, whose party topped France’s vote in the recent European elections, has denounced the case as a violation of her freedom of expression.
She tweeted the images after a French journalist drew a comparison between Islamic State group and her party. –France24
Last year Le Pen, 50, was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to see if she was fit to stand trial. She has denounced the entire affair as a violation of her freedom of expression.
“I am being charged for having condemned the horrors of Daesh,” Le Pen said last year. “In other countries this would have earned me a medal.”
- Putin Sets The Table To Leave The Dollar Behind
Authored by Rory Hall via The Daily Coin,
This is twice that Russian President Putin has said on the global stage the Federal Reserve Note no longer deserves the status and privilege of “world reserve currency” that allows unlimited printing of the currency.
The first time he made mention he actually said that it was a threat to Russia’s national security.
In a speech at the International Economic Forum, in St. Petersburg, Russia, “Russian Davos”, President Putin reaffirmed his position regarding the Federal Reserve Note and it’s international role. For the record, we see the abuse of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve Note, U.S. dollar, in similar light as President Putin. The current status of “world reserve currency” should not be allowed in this day and time. The absolute abuse of power, excessive power granted and the ability to shackle entire nations through the use of a currency that is not even their own should have never been allowed but it is way past time for this system to be dissolved.
In a speech at a plenary session, Mr Putin accused Washington of seeking to “extend its jurisdiction to the whole world.”
“But this model not only contradicts the logic of normal international communication. The main thing is, it does not serve the interests of the future.”
As recently we pointed out Russia has been and is, apparently readying, a gold backed cryptocurrency to use as global trade settlement. When a man steps up to the microphone and says to the world – “The main thing is, it (U.S. dollar) does not serve the interests of the future.” while at the same time announcing that Russia, along with China, are working on a global trade settlement mechanism outside the dollar, well, you would have to be some kind serious stupid to ignore those words.
The Business Times also reported:
Changes in the global economy “call for the adaptation of international financial organisations (and) rethinking the role of the dollar which… has turned into an instrument of pressure by the country of issue on the rest of the world,” Mr Putin said.
Then went on to say:
The Kremlin chief – whose country has chafed under numerous rounds of US sanctions – has repeatedly slammed the global financial system established by Washington in the aftermath of World War II.
Let’s be clear about the effect of the sanctions against Russia. These sanctions that were supposed to cripple Russia have in fact made their economy stronger, more resilient and the ground work for long term growth is now in place. President Putin welcomes sanctions as he simply turns to the people and Russia, funds the next set of projects and Russia becomes a little more self sustaining. Sanctions no longer work, and the Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury and the western allies have now been put on notice.
* * *
Brandon Smith, Founder of Alt-Market.com, had this to add…
And so the globalist plan for a controlled demolition of the US enters the next phase, in which the dollar is abandoned by most of the world as the reserve currency mechanism and is then replaced by a new global cryptocurrency system controlled by the IMF. Make no mistake, Russia and China’s moves to unseat the dollar are EXACTLY in line with what the globalists want. The current trade war being pursued by Trump offers a perfect scapegoat for the end of the dollar’s dominance. The reset is meant to take place, but the banking elites want to make sure they get none of the blame for the suffering that it will cause…
- WTO Warns Global Trade May Plunge 17% In Full Trade War
In the event of a full-blown trade war, global trade would collapse by 17%, a move that would rival the Dot Com bust, warned the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Keith Rockwell, director for information and external relations at WTO, told regional Asian parliamentarians on Tuesday that the global synchronized decline is due to protectionist measures on the rise.
Rockwell said tariffs aren’t uncommon between trading partners, but the sheer magnitude of trade duties between the US and China since early 2018 have been disturbing.
“Between October 2017 and October 2018, measures were put in place affecting US$588 billion worth of trade,” said Rockwell, at the event organized by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) and the WTO.
This amount of tariffied trade comes in at seven times more than the previous year and doesn’t include the recent tariff escalation.
Rockwell said, during the conference about international trade flows, that the WTO has reviewed 24 trade dispute settlement cases in 2018, mostly related to the deepening trade war between the US and China.
The increased trade tensions have forced the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to slash its global growth forecast from 3.7% to 3.5%.
“If the two sides carry through with their threats to wipe out all bilateral trade via prohibitive tariffs, this could have the impact of knocking off even more,” he added.
Rockwell said global imports of capital goods dropped 3% in 1Q19, the lowest level seen in over three years and a warning that the global economy is cycling down through summer. “We see uncertainty rampant, we see manufacturing output stalling, and export orders are down. All of this bodes ill for economic growth,” he said.
Roberto Azevedo, WTO director-general, also spoke at the conference and said world trade stood at 4.6% in 2017, it fell to 3% last year. In 4Q18, trade growth had the most significant drop in a decade, he said.
“When levels of uncertainty are so high, trade simply cannot play its full role in driving GDP growth,” he added.
“We’re working to respond to the challenges in global trade today… We’re also working to support our members in their efforts to reform the WTO.”
The best way to visualize just how dangerous the trade war threat is to the global flow of trade, and the world economy in general, below is a chart on the year-over-year changes in global trade as measured by the IMF’s Direction of Trade Statistics, courtesy of BMO’s Ian Lyngern. It shows the absolutely collapse in global exports as broken down into three categories:
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Exports to the world (weakest since 2009),
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Exports to advances economies (also lowest since 2009), and
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Exports to the European Union (challenging 2009 lows).
Even if the trade war is deescalated, the damage to the global economy is irreversible. The world is likely teetering on the edge of a trade recession, making the likelihood of global trade collapsing by 17% extraordinary high.
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- The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell's 1984 Is No Longer Fiction
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” – George Orwell, 1984
Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.
It’s been 70 years since Orwell – dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm – depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.
Who could have predicted that 70 years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would fail to heed his warning and come to love Big Brother.
“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings!”—George Orwell
1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”
We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” – George Orwell
Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”
And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.
What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.
Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.
Our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” – George Orwell
The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” – George Orwell, Animal Farm
We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.
What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.
In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. For example, USA Today reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security business was booming to such an extent that it eclipsed mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue. This security spending to private corporations such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in the near future.
The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives. At three times the size of the CIA, constituting one third of the intelligence budget and with its own global spy network to boot, the NSA has a long history of spying on Americans, whether or not it has always had the authorization to do so.
Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course.
Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs. As Orwell explains:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” ― George Orwell
How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.
In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.
Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons.
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.
In Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.
And in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
All three—Bradbury, Huxley and Orwell—had an uncanny knack for realizing the future, yet it is Orwell who best understood the power of language to manipulate the masses. Orwell’s Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary. To give a single example, as psychologist Erich Fromm illustrates in his afterword to 1984:
The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free,” since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed as concepts….
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.
This is the final link in the police state chain.
“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” – George Orwell
Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights. In fact, the addiction to screen devices—especially cell phones—has created a hive effect where the populace not only watched but is controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea of a total surveillance state tracking one’s every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11 attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, “Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”
Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.
We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government. In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst us—the proverbial “needle in a haystack,” as one official termed it—the Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity and credit card transactions. Much of this data is being fed through fusion centers across the country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children. These are state and regional intelligence centers that collect data on you.
“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell
Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.
The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.
Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely. And if any “threatening” words are detected—no matter how inane or silly—the record can be flagged and assigned to a government agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content. Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.
In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” ― George Orwell
Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.
Say hello to the new Thought Police.
Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA is now designing an artificial intelligence system that is designed to anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA will feed vast amounts of the information it collects to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer can then use to detect patterns and predict behavior.
No information is sacred or spared.
Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS. One NSA researcher actually quit the Aquaint program, “citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.”
Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).
Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” – Orwell
So where does that leave us?
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.
It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.
Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.
So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?
We’re running out of options.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.
Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited:
“Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”
- Wealthy Millennials Are Now Moving To These States
According to a new SmartAsset study, wealthy millennials are moving to the coasts, but the Northeast isn’t one of them.
To determine migration flows of wealthy millennials, SmartAsset examined data (IRS 2015 to 2016 tax year) from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. To calculate net inflow of each state, the study used inflow minus the outflow of wealthy millennials to find precisely which states wealthy millennials are moving to.
Seventy percent of the states in the top ten list of where wealthy millennials are moving to are located on the East and West Coast. With Texas on the Gulf Coast, and Colorado and Tennessee in the Heartland.
Wealthy millennials are abandoning the Northeast: Five of the bottom ten states (Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, Illinois, and New York) are located in the Northeast with some of the most significant outflows.
About 4,900 wealthy millennials left New York during the one year, with 10,048 moved into the state, while 14,915 fled the state, for a total net migration of -4,867.
California had the highest net migration of +3,597, was the top ranking state where wealthy millennials were migrating to. Next was Washington state; it had a net migration of +1,920. Texas was third with +1,878, and Colorado was fourth with +1,506.
Even less wealthy millennials, stuck in the gig-economy with insurmountable debts, aren’t flocking to New York anymore.
A SmartAsset study from 2018 showed New York didn’t even make the top 25, but rather Seattle, Washington; Columbia, South Carolina; and Sacramento, California, were some of the top spots where non-wealthy millennials were moving to.
For millennials as a whole, migration trends of 2020 could result in a massive exodus of Northeast states, a move that would lead to economic stress in the region as baby boomers would drain the local economy. There will be a point where states, counties, and even cities will offer some type of incentive to attract millennials.
- "Make Russia Prostrate Again" Is The Only Thing Democrats And Republicans Can Agree On
Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Despite the deep schism that separates America’s deranged political duopoly, they do share a common foreign policy pet project, and that is to prevent Russia from ever shining again on the global stage in all fields of endeavor.
One of Donald Trump’s main pledges on the 2016 campaign trail was to rekindle the dying embers of US-Russia relations, which had been undergoing a mini Ice Age under Barack Obama, his ballyhooed ‘reset’ notwithstanding. But before Trump was ever put to the test of romancing Russia, he was sidelined by one of the most malicious political stunts of the modern age.
It is only necessary to recall the 2016 Winter of Our Discontent when the Democratic leader sent 35 Russian diplomats and their families packing just before New Year’s Eve in retaliation for Russia’s alleged involvement in hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers. Before Trump ascended the throne, those unfounded claims lit the fuse on ‘Russiagate,’ the debacle which continues to undermine not just US-Russia relations, but the entire US political system.
Yet would things have turned out any differently between Washington and Moscow had the Democrats graciously accepted defeat in 2016 without feeling the need to blame remote Russia? I am not sure.
Today, observers reason that the US Republicans have no choice but to ‘get tough’ on Russia in an effort to dispel Democrat-generated rumors of excessive coziness with the Kremlin. Last year, for example, Trump bested Obama on the Russia front when he expelled 60 Russian diplomats in response to an alleged assassination attempt on former British spy, Sergey Skripal; an astonishing move on the part of the US conservative, but with so much riding on the line was it really a surprise?
And what was it exactly that was ‘riding on the line’? Aside from good relations between the world’s two premier nuclear powers, not to mention thwarting nuclear Armageddon as Prime Minister Theresa May very unwisely issued an ultimatum to Russia over the matter, there is the question of hundreds of billions of dollars of business contracts – from gas supplies to military hardware. Tycoon Trump would sooner win over European gas supplies than the plains of Central Asia, for example, the geopolitical lynchpin so dear to the hearts of US policymakers, like the late Zbigniew Brzezinski. This is where so many people misread Donald Trump: His heart and mind is devoted to the business deals, not the military steals. But that doesn’t necessarily make his moves are any less dangerous.
From President Trump’s perspective, Russia is a 500-pound cigar-chomping guy at the negotiating table with an ego and stature equal to his own that must be vanquished lest The Deal be lost and he – Donald J. Trump, CEO and Founder of The Trump Organization – look like a second-rate negotiator and fraud. Similar to the methods a belligerent globalist, Trump the inveterate businessman will do anything to achieve leverage in the pursuit of profit.
This is where Trump was only too happy to oblige the British with their extremely suspect Skripal story because vilifying the Russians, once again, would give the US an upper hand in stealing business away from Moscow, most notably in the realm of European gas supplies. Presently, the Trump administration is trying hard to halt progress on Nord Stream 2, an ambitious 11 billion euro ($12.4 billion) project to construct a gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany.
Speaking from Kiev this week, US Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Washington, once again endorsing the spirit of free competition and enterprise, was preparing to introduce sanctions on foreign companies involved in the project.
But that’s just the beginning.
To show how low the Americans would stoop to get a piece of this lucrative European market, which the Russian’s have been dutifully supplying for many decades, they’ve gone for some dramatic rebranding, calling LNG supplies “freedom gas.” You know, the byproduct of ‘freedom fries.’
“Increasing export capacity from the Freeport LNG project is critical to spreading freedom gas throughout the world by giving America’s allies a diverse and affordable source of clean energy,” said US Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes.
Dmitry Peskov, official spokesman of the Russian president, scoffed at such cynical attempts by Washington to strong-arm nations into accepting its preferred version of the ‘free market.’
“Instead of fair competition they prefer to act like in Wild West times,” Peskov told RT’s Sophie Shevardnadze ahead of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). “They just show the gun and say that no, you guys here in Europe, you are going to buy our natural gas and we don’t care that it is at least 30% more expensive than the gas coming from the Russians. This is the case.”
Perhaps nowhere else is this effort to ‘control the market’ more evident than in the realm of military spending, and particularly among NATO states. Currently, European countries spend some $240 billion annually on military weapons and forces, while Russia spends just $66 billion each year. Yet for businessmen like Trump, that is not good enough. Employing the vacuous claim of an ‘aggressive Russia,’ Trump is passing around the proverbial hat, demanding that NATO members contribute an ever-higher amount of their GDP to military spending. At the same, the eastern border with Russia has become militarized like never before.
Here there is striking convergence on the part of the Democrats and Republicans when it comes to Russia. The Democrats under Barack Obama, accepting the baton passed to them by the Bush administration, dropped a US-made missile defense system in Romania, a stone’s throw from the Russian border. Obama’s assurances that the Russians would be allowed to participate in the project were casually forgotten. But the Russians, who know a thing or two about military strategy, did not forget.
Last year, Vladimir Putin unveiled a number of daunting military breakthroughs, including hypersonic weapons, which the Russian leader explained were developed with the sole purpose of striking a strategic balance between the two nuclear superpowers. And if the world needs more of anything these days, it is certainly balance.
With such ploys in mind, it is easy to see why Moscow has little cause for celebration with either a Democrat or Republican in the White House. Both political parties have long viewed Russia not as a potential partner that could lend tremendous assistance in resolving some of the planet’s most intractable problems, but rather as some Cold War foe that needs vilified and vanquished. Of course there is good reason for this decades-long duplicity. The double-pronged attack by the Democrats and Republicans allows Washington to continue to make strategic inroads against Russia, as well as China, while filling the corporate coffers at the same time.
It is an age-old strategy – albeit a foolhardy one in an age of nuclear weapons – which is doomed to ultimate failure, if not disaster, if left unchecked.
- Meanwhile, In Russia…
Russian slapping competitions have become all the rage after the Siberian “Male Slapping Championships” went viral in March.
But who wants to see two giant men slap each other into the next dimension when you could watch smoking hot women spanking each other’s firm, supple asses instead in “The Booty Slapping Championships”?
The rules are simple; take turns hitting your opponent’s ass so hard that they’re knocked off balance.
Watch:
One of the tournament’s winners was fitness blogger Anastasia Zolotaya, whose Instagram page includes video demonstrations of strict workout routines, which surely help her achieve buttocks sturdy enough withstand the flogging and win her match. –RT
Tickets to the ass-slapping event run around $6 US, while there’s no word on how much the winner takes home.
The spanking contest took place alongside another female competition in which women (which we presume are also smoking hot) whack each other’s bare shoulders until one of them gives up.
- Secrecy & Lies: How The Chernobyl Story Sheds Light On The Dangers Of America's Warfare State
Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,
SPOILER ALERT: If you have not yet seen the excellent HBO miniseries Chernobyl and might yet do so, you might want to wait to read this article until after you have seen the series, as it contains spoilers.
The five-part series documents the catastrophic nuclear explosion that took place at a nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, an event that threatened the lives and health of millions of people, not only in the Soviet Union but also in Europe. The series documents the heroic life-endangering efforts of thousands of people in an effort to resolve the crisis with the least amount of damage and loss of life.
The most powerful part of the series occurs in part 5.
Whenever power plant officials conducted tests on the system, everyone knew that there was a failsafe button in the event that everything went wrong with the test and an explosion became imminent. All that the power plant people had to do was push the failsafe button and the entire plant would come to a halt. The reason was that the button activated the introduction of control rods containing boron into the fissioning uranium, which would cause the entire system to be immediately shut down.
To save money, Soviet officials had used graphite in the rods. In the 1970s, a Soviet nuclear scientist wrote an article stating that the graphite would serve as an accelerator, not a suppressant, of an impending nuclear explosion. He wrote that it was imperative that all the control rods be replaced immediately.
Soviet authorities redacted the warnings and buried the report as a national-security-state secret. Thus, when the testing at Chernobyl went out of control, the managers at the plant, who were relying on the failsafe button, had no idea what was going to happen when they pushed the failsafe button, which they did. The result was a massive ongoing and out-of-control nuclear explosion.
After the crisis was brought under control, the Soviets continued to maintain as much secrecy as they could, first with a secret show trial of the plant managers and then by trying to prevent any evidence of state involvement in the disaster through the use of the defective control rods and the suppression of the 1975 warnings from the nuclear scientist.
At the trial, one of the Soviet officials responsible for resolving the crisis refused to be silenced. In his powerful testimony, he pointed out that the Soviet Union was based on two things — secrecy and lies, which was the primary cause of the disaster. For speaking the truth, he was prohibited from working again in the Soviet nuclear industry and was ostracized by Party officials. He committed suicide two years later.
As I watched that moving scene, it occurred to me: secrecy and lies! Why, that is precisely what the U.S. government has been based on ever since it was converted into a national-security state after World War II. In fact, in many ways the U.S. national-security establishment has come to bear many of the characteristics of the Soviet Union.
Look at how they are treating Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and other people who have revealed the dark secrets of the deep state. They aren’t alleging that such people have lied. They are acknowledging that they revealed the truth about the national-security state. That’s why they want them punished – for revealing the truth to people.
Edward Snowden, for example, revealed the massive illegal surveillance scheme that the NSA was conducting on the American people. He didn’t lie about. He disclosed the truth about it. That was his “crime” — speaking the truth to people about what the NSA was doing.
On the other hand, when former Director or National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr. was asked by Congress whether the NSA was conducting such secret surveillance on the American people, Clapper knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately lied, under oath. Of course, when he lied to protect the secret, he never dreamed that Snowden or anyone else would reveal the truth.
After Snowden revealed the truth, Snowden was vilified as a bad guy, while Clapper, who of course was never indicted for perjury or contempt of Congress, was celebrated as a good guy who was “keeping us safe.” While Snowden was forced to live a life of exile in Russia to avoid incarceration or execution in the United States as a “traitor,” Clapper became a popular political commentator.
Another example: Assange revealed a secret video showing U.S. helicopter pilots committing war crimes by firing on innocent people with total indifference to the moral implications of what they were doing. The revelation resulted in criminal charges, not against the pilots but rather against Assange for disclosing what they had done.
Consider other dark-side practices of the U.S. national-security state: Assassination. Torture. Indefinite detention. Denial of due process. Military tribunals. Coups. Sanctions and embargoes targeting innocent foreigners for the sake of political aims. Installation of and partnerships with dictatorial regimes.
During the Cold War, if Americans were to learn that the Soviet Union, which itself was a national-security state, was engaged in any or all of those dark-side practices, no one would have been surprised. That’s how communists regimes were expected to act. The problem for Americans arises when they learn that their own national-security state is engaged in these same types of dark-side practices. Suddenly people are faced with a crisis of conscience. What do they do now? That is precisely why national-security states are based on secrecy and lies. They don’t want their citizens to be confronted with crises of conscience.
Unfortunately, all too often the citizenry prefers to go along with the secrecy and lies. Better that they don’t know what is happening. In that way, they don’t have to deal with their consciences and then have to make discomforting and possibly dangerous choices.
Oftentimes it’s just a lot easier and safer to keep praising the ones who are keeping the secrets and the lies and condemning those who disclose the truth.
- Dems Push Plan To Hold Gunmakers Liable For Mass Shootings
What’s next? Will Dems push legislation to make General Motors liable for injuries sustained from car accidents involving an ’87 Chevette? On Tuesday, Dems introduced legislation in the House and the Senate that would hold gunmakers liable for crimes involving firearms, the Daily Caller reports.
If passed, the bill would repeal legislation passed in 2005 that enshrined protections for gun manufacturers in federal law. Unsurprisingly, California and Connecticut lawmakers appeared to be leading the charge: Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and one of President Trump’s favorite punching bags, tweeted that victims of gun violence deserve their day in court.”
Victims of gun violence deserve their day in court.
Watch as @SenBlumenthal and I, alongside activists with @MomsDemand, @NewtownAction, @bradybuzz & @GiffordsCourage, introduce legislation to hold the gun industry accountable: https://t.co/qmPp8mH9XF
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) June 11, 2019
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Sen. RIchard “Da Nang Dick” Blumenthal, the Connecticut senator and fellow Trump critic, is one of the bill’s co-sponsors. Since he’s from Connecticut, where Adam Lanza murdered 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School back in 2012, Blumenthal has long been one of Washington’s loudest pro-gun control voices.
During comments to reporters on Tuesday, he explained that the bill isn’t scapegoating gunmakers for marketing a perfectly legal product, but rather – like Schiff said before – the plan will simply give those who have been shot by deranged individuals soneone else “All we’re doing through this proposal is giving victims of gun violence their day in court,” Blumenthal, a co-sponsor of the Senate bikk, said.
The NRA the NSSF (the National Shooting Sports Foundation) have loudly opposed the plan to strip the liability protections from gunmakers.
“It’s like blaming Ford or General Motors for the negligent use of their cars,” Lawrence Keane, senior vice president of government affairs for the NSSF, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “It is wrong to hold the gun or any other industry liable for the criminal misuse of non-defective products sold lawfully.”
This isn’t the first time Dems have pursued their plan to cripple the American gun manufacturing industry, as the DC recounts.
Schiff’s first measure to repeal the gun manufacturer liability protections was introduced in 2013, and has been repeated at least twice since. None of the measures passed.
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which was passed in 2005 and signed into law by former President George W. Bush blocked civil actions against ammunition and firearm dealers, builders or trade groups over crimes involving firearms like – say – a school shooting.
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