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http://peakoil.com/generalideas/an-open-letter-to-the-school-of-public-health-uq-re-the-looming-net-energy-cliff

An Open letter to the School of Public Health, UQ, re: the looming net energy cliff

Dear Colleagues,

I am a Cardiologist who convened the group “doctors and scientists for sustainability and social justice” in Brisbane from 2006 to 2013 www.d3sj.org. I am writing to your department in the virtually forlorn hope that a tiny handful of you may open your eyes to the most urgent public health issue we face, which will horrifically accelerate human suffering and die-off within a decade1. The effects are already being felt in many parts of the world, masquerading as global economic recession2 or the collapse of certain Middle Eastern societies. This issue has been ignored, denied and dismissed for years by “endless growth” economists and other flat earthers, but denial does not make a problem go away. I refer to the looming catastrophic curtailment of liquid hydrocarbon fuels, the “net energy cliff” that we face in the near future, which will trigger ever more wars (perhaps even nuclear war), cause global economic and industrial collapse, and cause the die-off of billions of people worldwide.

The countries most addicted to petroleum will be hardest hit and Australia will be no exception.
Climate catastrophe is undoubtedly the greatest existential threat to humanity. Despite a huge campaign of deceit and denial perpetrated by the commercial media bankrolled by fossil fuel interests, it can no longer be ignored, now that we see ferocious firestorms burning communities to the ground or torrential floods sweeping through countries or unprecedented droughts, heat waves and storms year upon year. The horrific humanitarian consequences of sea level rise alone boggle the mind, let alone the devastation of our food bowls and other impacts3. However blinkered focus on climate disaster alone, without examining all aspects of the limits to growth, will result in everyone being blindsided by this more urgent public health issue. Especially because mitigation against climate disasters (fueling the fire fighting vehicles and aircraft, relocating and rehousing communities etc) will depend on energy we will not have. The looming collapse of industrial civilisation due to the net energy cliff will curtail fossil fuel emissions far more precipitously and effectively than any greenie campaigning or the Paris Accords can ever achieve.

Why should you listen to anything I say? Because I cite robust information and analyses from honest independent researchers (not corrupted by business interests), views based on hard mathematics and the laws of Physics, every bit as indisputable as the law of Gravity4,5,6. I have repeatedly invited scientists and engineers to try to falsify these arguments, which they have been unable to do. “Sustainability” activists frequently state that “infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible” which is absolutely true. Equally true is the fact that “infinite consumption from a finite resource base is impossible“. Our supply of “easy” oil is finite, is depleting in a non-linear fashion (net energy availability declines slowly at first, then abruptly falls off a cliff) and we cannot run industrial civilisation without it. It is a fact that we have overshot the carrying capacity of this planet and there will be hell to pay when the “easy” oil suddenly dries up and we face cold turkey withdrawal.

Contrary to the technofantasists, we have no upscalable alternatives6. Unconventional oil is a scam and those who promote it are liars or fools7,8 Current low oil prices have emboldened the peak oil deniers and led to widespread complacency. However low prices are largely due to demand destruction, not oil overproduction. Low prices do not change the reality of ongoing, relentless, terminal depletion of conventional oil.
Prior to the global financial crisis of 2008, a tiny handful of individuals who looked at the hard data predicted that a looming sudden financial crash was inevitable. The only uncertainty was the exact timing. Meanwhile the majority herd of sheeple continued to place blind faith in a fraudulent system without looking at any data. The same situation exists today with crooked financial shenanigans based on bogus claims about unconventional oils made by deceitful commercial interests8.

I expect most of you will ignore this message and bury your head in the sand.
You will only have yourself to blame when food vanishes from the supermarket shelves, mountains of garbage pile up in your neighbourhood and centrally controlled services grind to a halt with dry taps at home, unflushable toilets and failure of the electric grid6. If the impending population cull results in the die-off of stupid people, biologists will simply attribute that to natural selection at work. If you open your eyes however, you will discover how feasible it is to protect yourself and your family from the worst effects of collapse, provided you plan in advance9. But time is short. The tiny handful of you who are sapient enough to apprehend this vital reality must spread this message to other potentially sapient people and you must incorporate Peak Oil studies where they firmly belong: as an integral and essential part of the Public Health education and research curriculum. I can only speculate why so-called “centres of learning” like UQ have essentially ignored this massive elephant in the room10.

What about the risk of spooking the herd and causing a mass stampede by sending out this message? I have been a voice in the wilderness for more than a decade regarding this matter and despite meeting with and writing to politicians, doctors, scientists and engineers, have achieved no traction11. I know of only a few sapients who are truly aware of this issue, who can be counted on the fingers of an amputated hand. Richard Heinberg reckons that less than a million people worldwide actually understand how dire the near future is going to be.
It is irrelevant if the vast majority of sheeple believe that the Earth is flat. If the data and evidence show that the Earth is round, then it is round and the majority sheeple are clueless and deluded. Truth is not determined by democratic vote nor majority opinion of the masses, it is determined by objective scientific scrutiny. The herd mindset has been completely captured by trivial drivel and monumental deceit perpetrated by the establishment media (who propagated the criminal “WMDs in Iraq” lies). Those corporate lackeys dismiss realists such as myself as “alarmists”, to which I respond: if a house is on fire, those who raise the alarm are acting to save lives, but those who deny it are murderers.

Listen or don’t listen, live well or die miserably when the crunch comes, it is up to you.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/new-years-message-and-warning-from-a-war-correspondent/5624406

New Year’s Message and Warning from a War Correspondent

Sometimes it is useful to take a break from news bulletins and newspapers, and even from ‘friendly’ Internet publications.

Occasionally it is good to realize that there are actually two parallel realities that are constantly competing for the ‘hearts and minds’ of people living all over the world. There is real life and ‘fake life’. There is reality and elaborately manufactured pseudo-reality, which is designed to appear more real than the reality itself. It is like that chemically produced green apple shampoo that smells more authentic than the fruit itself.

*

Periodically I disappear into some jungle or a war zone, in Afghanistan, Southern Philippines or in the middle of plundered Borneo Island. When I return to what some people would readily describe as the‘normal world’, and a news bulletin unexpectedly confronts me at some airport lounge, everything suddenly appears to be bizarre, grotesque, totally surreal, at least for the few initial but excruciating moments.

It is because most of the mainstream news communiqués and analyses are produced in the plush comfort of an armchair, or at a mahogany writing table, thousands of miles from shrapnel, sweat, torn flesh, blood, burning forests, polluted waterways, and the other horrors which are, in fact, nothing other than the true reality for billions of human beings inhabiting our planet.

Remembering how things really feel, taste and smell I get desperate. I don’t recognize places described by the mass media. We are talking about two different universes; yes, about two absolutely opposite realities.

*

If mainstream reporters go to the field, they are well equipped with bulletproof vests, helmets, with 4×4 vehicles (some of them also bulletproof), with excellent life and health insurances that include airlifts and other evacuation clauses, as well as with hefty salaries and other compensation schemes. On their chests and their backs, it says loudly and explicitly “PRESS”.

So what am I bitching about? Is it wrong to compensate people who are risking their lives, or to try to protect them?

No, it is not; of course it is not wrong.

Except, there is that one tiny ‘but’… You can never, ever get ‘too close’ to anything real, this way. You cannot turn yourself to a buffoon or a walking media Rambo, and expect to uncover something hidden, something important, and something thoroughly groundbreaking.

If you over-protect your life, over-insure your each and every step, you’d build a thick wall between yourself and the real life.

If you go into the field looking like this, you will be spotted and questioned, and you will need all sorts of permits and stamps. It is almost like declaring: “I’ll play by your rules, I’ll not rock the boat, and I’ll let you monitor each step that I take”. Imagine arriving while being decked out like that and attempting to cover genocide in Papua! Good luck, really. About official permits, if you are from a ‘friendly’ mainstream agency, you can get them almost immediately. Yes, of course, organizations such as the BBC or CNN could easily supply you with all the necessary credentials. You could even count on an official government armed ‘escort’, or you could count on an escort supplied by friendly (to the West) ‘rebel groups’. Not to speak of all those ‘all you can eat’ press briefings.

However, the chances that real people would talk to you would be slim. But would you care about hearing from real people if you work for an official mainstream newspaper or a television channel? I doubt it. Real people could, God forbid, say real things, instead of what you are ordered to ‘discover’ in such places as Bosnia, Rwanda, Syria or Afghanistan. In the end, you’ll hear what you came to hear and report, and your writing and clips would be mainly in accordance with the established stereotypes.

Then what, how? Who could do it; who could describe reality, and actually stay alive?

In a brilliant film directed by Oliver Stone, Salvador (1986), one of the main characters declared:

“You got to get close to the truth. You get too close, you die.”

He died, but what he said – that is precisely it! There is this invisible, imaginary line, in the air or on the ground, somewhere. You never see it, but if you have worked in many war zones before, you sense it, and it is what actually saves your life. It saves it often, most of the times, but of course not always. Those who usually die are men and women who make crucial mistakes during their first attempts, before developing their instincts. What I’m talking about cannot be taught; it is not logical – it’s just ‘there’.

To get as close to the truth as possible, one has to work, fast, decisively and with certain precision, avoiding obvious blunders.

People around you have to trust you, and you yourself have to know whom to trust and from whom to hide.

You are on your own, or at least most of the time you are.

All this guarantees nothing, but these are some of the basic preconditions, if you want to understand a conflict, a war.

Working in devastated places is very emotional, very deep, and sometimes you get overwhelmed, and sometimes your glasses get blurry. You make mistakes; hopefully not too many. Occasionally you go after a particular story, or you know generally what you want to find and a story bumps into you, or you stumble over it, or it just hits you frontally, brutally and at full strength.

If it is good, it is never just ‘reporting’. It is much more than journalism, or it is simply shit. There must be some poetry in what you are doing, there has to be also philosophy and humanism, as well as plenty of context and ideology and passion.

There can be no ‘objectivity’ in this work: objectivity is just an illusion, a fairytale dispersed by mainstream media. But you should never lie: you witness and say what you have to say, the way you believe it should be said, and while you do it, it is your obligation to inform your readers and viewers where precisely you stand.

As a human being, as an artist and thinker, you should always take sides. But your position – on which side of the ‘barricade’ you stand – has to be clear and honest. Otherwise you are a liar.

*

The bitter but essential truth is: Even if you put your life on the line, even if you get badly injured or psychologically exhausted, do not expect much gratitude or support.

Many local victims – people whom you came to defend – will suppose and even tell you straight to your face that ‘you came to get rich using their suffering and misery’.

Your readers in wealthy countries will imagine that you are being generously funded. They were conditioned to believe that there are no altruistic individuals, governments and countries left on this earth.

The reality is quite different: if you work independently, if you refuse to repeat lies and take orders, to merge with the mainstream, if you go against the interest of the West and its allies and ‘clients’, the chances are that you will get zero financial support, no protection whatsoever and absolutely no perks.

You may get millions of readers, of course. And you can recycle your reports in your books and films, as I did in my more than 800-page long “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. If your writing is good, your books will sell, somehow, even if they attack the establishment frontally. But don’t count on any support from ‘friendly governments’ or wealthy but ‘left leaning individuals’. There is no Engels around, these days. You are really on your own. Trust me, you are.

You and your determined work may save several villages, or if you are very good, you could make a difference on a global scale. Your writing or your films may help to stop a war. But never expect any official recognition, any practical backing or even mercy from your readers. In 2015, after making several films and writing books about several particularly horrid war zones, mostly in Africa, I totally collapsed. For several weeks, I was not able to move. I thought it was the end. There was no help at all coming from those millions of my readers living in all parts of the world. At that time I made my condition public. Still nothing. Few letters of ‘moral support’ arrived. Few: “Be strong, the world needs you!” In the end, it was my close family circle that literally pampered and rescued me and put me back to my feet and into fighting order.

This is not a reproach, just a warning to those who are getting ready to fight for the survival of humanity: “You will be totally on your own. You will most definitely collapse on several occasions.”

Still, I know no other way how to live meaningfully. I would never trade my life with the life of anyone else.

*

There is another very important and revealing piece of information, which I’d like to share with you, my readers.

In 2017 I worked in several extremely dangerous parts of the world, including Afghanistan, the Pakistani-Afghan border during the exchange of fire between the two countries, on the Turkish-Syrian border in Euphrates area during the Turkish invasion, in the war-torn southern Philippines, in Lebanon and in the fully devastated (by logging and mining) Indonesian part of the Island of Borneo.

Afghanistan Soviet tanks cemetery

I drove all around Afghanistan, with no protection, no security and no one covering my back. My friend who doubled as my driver and interpreter was the only man I could count on. Sometimes I held the wheel myself. We even made it into the Taliban controlled territories and drug-infested slums of Kabul. All in a 20 year old, beat up Toyota Corona.

In all these places, I did not see one single Western mainstream reporter. Not one!

Where were they, all those media superstars, I don’t know, but most likely they were holed up somewhere at the NATO headquarters, or at least in the only remaining plush hotel in Afghanistan – Serena.The same can be said about the southern Philippines, although there, to be ‘objective’, one Aussie colleague actually got hit by a sniper’s bullet, just couple of days before I arrived.

Do never trust those who write about the suffering of others exclusively from the safety of their living room couches. It is fine to write from there, of course, but only after you have actually seen the people you are talking about; after you have seen them at least once, for a substantial amount of time, after you have listened to their stories, to their desperate cries, and after you have got very dirty and very scared yourself, and truly desperate, in short: after you have got right there, near that invisible line which separates life from death, and after you have tasted the water of the proverbial river Lethe.

*

But back to where I began.

Imagine: I leave the places where people are fighting for survival, or where they are fighting for true freedom, or against imperialism. I hardly have time to take a deep breath, to recover from food and air poisoning, to change into some presentable clothes, and it all hits me directly in my face: I see some news bulletin, I read articles published by mainstream media, and while doing it, I absolutely don’t recognize the world, which I have witnessed in all its rainbow of colors, with all its glory and its misery.

I feel ‘out of place’.

I know, some call it ‘Vietnam Syndrome’. There are many other definitions for these feelings, or for this outrage, or desperation, or whatever you want to call it.

You suddenly feel it, you know it: somewhere far away where you had been living and working just several hours ago, there is still what could be defined as the ‘real world’, inhabited by real people. And then, right now, there is this other world, which over imposes, almost fully covers(and even dwarfs) that real one, by using its mainstream clichés and false mass-produced certainties.

*

This year – this ‘departing year’ 2017 – has definitely not been a good year for our planet.

A group of nations, which has been controlling the world for already several centuries brutally and shamelessly, is pushing us, our entire human race, closer and closer towards complete disaster, towards a showdown, towards a confrontation that may abruptly terminate millions of innocent human lives.

I’m concerned. I’m very concerned. I have already witnessed indescribable calamities in so many places. I know, I can perfectly well imagine, where all this could lead.

Colonialism is always wrong. Imperialism is always wrong. Cultural, religious or economic supremacy theories are wrong, with absolutely no exceptions.

If a group of nations from one relatively small continent has been continuously usurping the entire world, shaping it to its advantage and enslaving people of other colors, beliefs and values, it is all unmistakably wrong.

But the world is like that – brutal, unjust, and controlled by one aggressive, greedy, sly and arrogant minority. The world is still like that. Once again, it is increasingly like that.

And I cannot stand such an ‘arrangement’.

I don’t want it to be like that. I’m tired of covering grief, pain, horror and violence. I’m exhausted of filming or photographing perpetual destruction and downfalls.

That’s why I’m writing this, at the very end of the year 2017. Perhaps it is just one more futile attempt to stop something inhuman and unnecessary from happening.

Perhaps it is almost impossible to cut through the pseudo-reality manufactured by the mainstream media, academia and ‘culture’. Or maybe it’s not impossible. I actually believe that ‘it is never too late’, as I believe that nothing in life is truly ‘impossible’.

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2018!

Let me inform you that the world is totally different, actually much more beautiful and diverse than you have been told. Even most of those places that are now in flames are beautiful. And if left in peace, they’d thrive.

The world is worth fighting for. It is worth defending.

Don’t ever trust the “news” and “information” which is being disseminated by those who are continuously trying to loot and enslave the world. Trust only what you see and hear, and what you feel. Trust people who are in love with this world, if you manage to identify them. Trust your own senses, your inner logic, and your emotions.

Do not vote for bombing or putting sanctions on any foreign country, anywhere on Earth, before you see it with your own eyes, before you are really convinced, before you talk to its people, and before you truly understand what they are saying. Do not make decisions or conclusions after staring at the television set only. Remember: pseudo-reality kills! And it wants you to participate in this murder.

Go!

Discover!

After US bombing near Mosul Iraq 4

See for yourself. I hope to encounter you, at least some of you, in Syria, in North Korea, in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Russia, China, South Africa, Cuba, and Eritrea –also in hundreds of other great places, which have been brutalized and smeared by those who are dreaming about making this entire world thoroughly banal, consisting only of a few super-wealthy nations served and fed by all those “others”that have been reduced to slavery.

After seeing the world with your own eyes, after understanding it, I’m almost certain that you will agree with me: right now there are two parallel realities on this planet. One consists of true human lives and human stories, the other one only of trivial but manipulative interpretations of the world. One (true) reality is longing for progress, kindness, optimism and harmony; the other (fake one) is constantly spreading uncertainty, nihilism, destruction and hopelessness.

It is not only what they call “fake news”, it is an entire ‘fake reality’ that has been manufactured by the establishment and upheld by men and women with helmets, bulletproof vests, 4WD’s and prominent PRESS insignia.

Once again, HAPPY NEW YEAR 2018!

Happy Discovery Of The World!

Happy Struggle For Survival Of Our Precious Planet!”

Year 2018 will be crucial. Let us all join forces in order for Humanism and that beautiful lady called ‘The True Reality’survive, to prevail, and to triumph.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48514.htm

Putin Foresaw Death of US Global Power

Like a good wine, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s famous speech delivered in Munich 10 years ago regarding global security has been rewarded with time. A decade on, the many facets contained in that address have only become all the more enhanced and tangible.

Speaking to a senior international audience at the annual Munich Security Conference, on February 10, 2007, the Russian leader opened by saying he was going to speak about world relations forthrightly and not in “empty diplomatic terms”. In what followed, Putin did not disappoint. With candor and incisiveness, he completely leveled the arrogance of American unilateral power.

He condemned the “aspirations of world supremacy” as a danger to global security. “We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law,” adding at a later point: “One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way.”

But, moreover, Putin presciently predicted that the American arrogance of unipolar dominance would in the end lead to the demise of the power from seeking such supremacy.

A unipolar world, he said, is “a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.”

Ten years on from that call, few can doubt that the global standing of the United States has indeed spectacularly fallen – just as Putin had forewarned back in 2007. The most recent example of demise was the sordid business earlier this month of arm-twisting and bullying by the US at the United Nations over the tabled resolutions repudiating Washington’s ill-considered declaration of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.

Other examples of fallen American leadership can be seen in regard to President Trump’s reckless threats of war – instead of diplomacy – with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program. Or Trump’s irrational and unfounded belligerence towards Iran. The American propensity for using military force regardless of diplomacy and international law leaves most nations feeling a shudder of contempt and trepidation.

Another example of fallen American leadership is seen in the boorish way the Trump administration has unilaterally rejected the 2015 international Paris Accord to combat deleterious climate change. Trump views it as a conspiracy to undermine the American economy, as he alluded to in his recent National Security Strategy. How can such a self-declared global leader be taken seriously, much less, with respect?

Putin’s warning that the unipolar-seeking US would “destroy itself” could not be more apt.

Because in order to seek such supremacy, such a power, by necessity of its ambition, must reject the rule of law and the principle of democracy as being nothing other than bothersome constraints on its hegemony.

President Trump likes to talk at times about the “peaceful coexistence of sovereign nation states”. But whatever virtue he may be intending or paying lip service to, it is totally negated by American ambitions of unipolar dominance – ambitions that have been harbored in successive administrations in Washington since the end of the Cold War more than 25 years ago.

To this view of the world, Putin said: “I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world.”

The impossibility, and impermissibility, stems from the inevitable tendency of unilateral conduct, which rejects the principle of all being equal under the law. The would-be unipolar hegemon, by definition, sees itself as above the law. Such a self-anointed view of oneself leads to tyranny and abuse of power.

Since the end of the Cold War balance of power between the US and the former Soviet Union, the world has been plunged into a state of permanent wars and conflicts, due to the proclivity of the United States to act alone and on the basis that its “might is right”.

Ten years ago in Munich, Putin noted: “Unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions have not resolved any problems. Moreover, they have caused new human tragedies and created new centers of tension. Judge for yourselves: wars as well as local and regional conflicts have not diminished… even more people are dying than before. Significantly more, significantly more!”

The unipolar position sought by the US leads ineluctably to a world of lawlessness, chaos, insecurity, fear, violence, and, in a fiendish feedback loop, reinforces the further deterioration in all such facets.

“Today we are witnessing an almost un-contained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts,” said Putin in Munich.

Recall that the Russian leader was speaking at the height of the US, British and NATO wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those wars constitute perhaps the two biggest war crimes over the past quarter of a century. The violations went unpunished, as befitting the arrogance of unipolar power, and because of that impunity, the lawlessness and abuse of national sovereign rights have only become more exacerbated, as Putin forewarned.

Diplomacy, international law, dialogue and consensus have been all but discarded. Look how the US and its NATO allies demolished Libya in 2011, and how they ransacked Syria covertly through a seven-year proxy dirty war; a war that was only stopped by Russia and Iran’s principled military intervention at the end of 2015. Look how the US and its NATO allies have destabilized Ukraine, yet blame Russia, even as Washington readies in the New Year to supply lethal weapons to the regime in Kiev it installed by a violent coup in February 2014.

The provocative expansion of NATO across Europe with its weapons pointed on Russia’s border was also an outcome that Putin warned against in 2007, admonishing that it would lead to more insecurity and tensions in Europe, not less.

Putin was right to talk straight truth to power in that 2007 speech, rather than using “empty diplomatic terms”, as he put it.

We cannot hope to rectify problems unless we address those problems accurately.

In doing so, Putin deserves immense praise for exposing the corruption of absolute power in world relations.

But there can be little doubt that his courageous speech in Munich in 2007 earned him the hatred of Washington’s imperial planners. Putin was in effect giving notice that Russia was shaking off the vassal status that his predecessor Boris Yeltsin had accepted in the early post-Cold War years.

“Russia is a country with a history that spans more than a thousand years and has practically always used the privilege to carry out an independent foreign policy. We are not going to change this tradition today,” said a defiant Putin.

It was this defiant independence and Putin’s searing analysis of how so much of global insecurity is the direct result of American imperialist arrogance that has since made the Russian leader the target for so much hostility from Washington over the past 10 years.

When you step back, it is amazing to observe the campaign of relentless Russophobia, vilification and slander directed at President Putin by Washington and the mass media under its control. The precedent for this demonization can be found in the Munich speech delivered by Putin a decade ago.

But let’s recap on the point he made about unipolar obsession being self-destructive.

The American penchant for lawlessness and violation of democratic principles does not just stop with its intrigues of regime change and subversions abroad. Those very noxious habits of diseased US statecraft are now eating into the body politics of the US itself.

Looking at the necrotic state of US politics and society – the venal, political infighting and corruption, the lack of respect for its own laws, and the lack of respect for its people’s sovereignty and office of the president – there can be little doubt that the once ambitious superpower is dying a slow death from diseased practices that have turned inward.

Putin saw it coming 10 years ago. And in a classic futile case, they have tried to shoot the messenger ever since.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48506.htm

Panic of Boris Johnson in Moscow: Agony of a Rotting Empire

It has been all very ugly, aggressive and often distinctly vulgar: the way the British Foreign Secretary has behaved before and during his official visit to Moscow.

Mr. Johnson described Russia as “closed, nasty, militaristic and anti-democratic” concluding that it could not be “business as usual”.

He did not define what the UK has become, and the Russian hosts were too polite to explain.

The “business as usual” it was not.

During the last few weeks, the behavior patterns of both the UK and US have began increasingly to resemble those of the badly brought up leadership of the provincial Italian mafia: “You do as we tell you, or we’ll poke out your eyes… or break your leg… or perhaps we’ll kidnap your daughter”.

It appears that there is absolutely no shame left in Washington, in London, and in several other ‘provincial capitals’ of the Empire. Insults are piling on insults and then shot to all corners of the globe. Lies are being spread barefacedly, and bizarre deceptions and fabrications have been manufactured with impressive speed.

It is clear that the Empire is now missing its composure, its nerve; that it is scared of losing its control over the world and its monopoly on deciding what should be universally accepted as the truth.

The more the world realizes that it has been controlled and brutalized by shameless neo-colonialist gangsters, the more the Empire says, indirectly but sometimes even straight into the faces of the international community: “Our interests are what really matter! You will behave and obey, or we will smash you to pieces, starve you to death, invade you and bathe your land in blood”.

It is nothing new, of course: the West has been doing all this for many decades and centuries. Hundreds of millions of Asians, Africans, South Americans, Middle Easterners and Russians lost their lives in the process. All non-white continents were occupied, plundered and enslaved; all, without a single exception. But it was always done “for the good of the victims”, or “in order to protect them” (most likely from themselves).

The Brits were at the forefront of the art of manipulating the brains of their ‘subjects’. Their propaganda used to be refined, effective, some would even say ‘brilliant’. For decades after the end of the Second World War, they used to teach its offspring in North America and Australia, how to lie elegantly and how to convince even those nations that were being barbarically raped, that they were actually being rescued, pampered and made love to, gently and respectfully.

Now the masks have fallen off, and the ugly, gangrenous face of imperialism has been clearly exposed. Britain is simply not in the mood for refinements. It is brutal. It was always brutal. Now it is also, finally, honest.

It is all absolutely frightening, but it is also good, truly significant, that the West is suddenly behaving with such clarity.

*****

What is it that Mr. Johnson is accusing Russia of? Of liberating Syria from those Western, Saudi, and Qatari backed terrorist groups? What else could be expected from the Foreign Secretary of the country that had been, for long centuries, the mightiest, ruthless and the most deceptive colonialist empire in the history of the mankind? Mr. Johnson is definitely not going to thank the liberator of the oppressed people, is it?

In his open letter to Boris Johnson, the British writer and journalist Neil Clark wrote:

In April you canceled your planned visit to Moscow and traveled to the G7 talks instead, where you urged other countries to consider fresh sanctions against Russia (and Syria), saying that Vladimir Putin was “toxifying his image” by backing Assad.

But if Russia hadn’t supported the Syrian government, ISIS/Al-Qaeda affiliates would probably have taken control of the whole country. Is that what you wanted?

Of course it was! More chaos, the better!

The UK has been playing appalling, truly Machiavellian games all over the Middle East, and it has been doing it for centuries – in Palestine, in what is now Iraq and Kuwait, and in many other areas. To borrow from the colorful lexicon of the Prime Minister Lloyd George, it was reserving rights “to bomb those niggers”, to bomb them and to fry them alive, to rob them of everything, even of the land itself. The UK, together with their close friends and allies such as Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, managed to manufacture the most conservative branch of Islam, just in order to keep the local population in fear and submission to its commercial and colonialist interests.

The country responsible for hundreds of millions of dead, for tens of millions of human beings who have been hunted down like animals and shipped to America as slaves, has been reserving the right to judge the world, to decide what is ‘free’ and what is not, what is ‘democratic’ and what is dictatorial, what is true and what is false or even ‘fake’.

‘Fake news’ – the latest invention of the crumbling, paranoid Western regime!

Now the Empire is hunting down almost all ‘alternative media’ outlets, including the highly successful and informative RT (Russia Today) international television channel. It is important to remember and to understand: only the official Western channels and press agencies are allowed to spread indoctrination all over the world. To broadcast or to print ‘counter-propaganda’ (or call it an intellectual detox) is considered an arch crime, and punished as such. The RT is now portrayed as a hive of ‘agents’, at least in both Washington and London.

*****

As the Syrian city of Aleppo was celebrating its first anniversary of liberation, grateful citizens were carrying, in reverent silence, portraits of Russian soldiers who spilled their blood for the liberation of their nation.

The Syrian people know, they clearly understand, who ignited the war, and who came to their rescue.

Boris Johnson can insult Russia as much as he desires, but one thing he cannot deny: there are no men, women and children carrying portraits of British soldiers, be it in Iraq or Afghanistan, in Syria, Libya or Yemen.

In Yemen, the UK talks peace but manufactures bombs that are enriching the already deadly Saudi arsenal of weapons, used to terrorize, and to murder thousands of defenseless Yemeni civilians.

Russian Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov said nothing about the crimes against humanity that are being committed by British troops in several parts of the world. I believe that he should have said something, that he should have said a lot, but Mr. Lavrov is a seasoned diplomat, and he knows perfectly well what is appropriate, what is effective and what is counter-productive.

*****

Yes, the Empire is evidently in panic.

It is scared of everything: of public opinion all over the world, of the great Chinese new Silk Road initiative which is gaining great popularity all over the Asian continent, of the Sino-Russian alliance, of the silent rebellion in the ranks of its former allies, particularly in Asia, of the undeniably increasing economic might of its adversaries, of the new ‘alternative media’, and even of its own tail lost somewhere in the darkness.

For many years, one effective way for the Empire to control the world was to spread dark cynicism and nihilism, in order to ‘pacify’, to immobilize its colonies and even its own people living in Europe and North America. Now this strategy is backfiring: British and North American citizens are not only passive and unwilling to fight for the internationalist and left wing ideals, they are also unimpressed, even disgusted with their own rulers and regime. Yes, most of them are cynical about such countries like Russia, China or Venezuela, but they are also cynical about the corporatism, capitalism, as well as Western domestic and foreign policy. They are not willing to commit to anything. They trust nothing. They believe in very few things.

For the Empire, people like Boris Johnson are extremely useful buffoons: they offer cheap entertainment to the masses, and they deliver it with impeccable upper-class English accents (the BBC-style). They play it dirty, trying to smear, to humiliate their opponents. They try to bring back pride to their imperialist and white supremacist regime, by humiliating the victims, who are now finally standing on their feet and ready to fight for the right to be different.

People like Mr. Johnson turn reality upside down, and it is all done ‘spontaneously’, with a boyish, almost innocent grin. Except that there is actually absolutely nothing innocent in this entire charade. It is all perfectly choreographed, all extremely professional.

*****

The Empire is rotting and it is in agony. It panics. It fights for its life.

Peace is dangerous. If the world is at peace, it is indisputable that the Western Empire would lose, in no time. It would be defeated on social, moral, creative and even economic fronts.

That is why the Empire is spreading chaos, fear, war, perpetual conflicts and antagonism everywhere, all over the world: in Syria and Afghanistan, Libya, in all corners of Africa and parts of Southeast Asia, in Iran, Central and South America, even in the tiniest countries of Oceania.

It is challenging, provoking North Korea, it is insulting countries that have already suffered more than enough from Western terror and barbarism; countries like Russia, China and Iran.

It threatens those nations (and even some international organizations like UNESCO) that are supporting Palestine.

It essentially bullies all those who want to live their own lives, their own cultures, and their own economic and social systems. It punishes those countries that are refusing to plunder their own people and resources in order to support the high-life of the Western nations. It overthrows governments, and murders individuals.

*****

In Moscow, the British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson made a fool of himself. He did! With his unmistakable spineless jellyfish style, he tried but failed to humiliate the nation, which, for several centuries fought determinedly against Western imperialism and colonialism, and, on numerous occasions has already managed to save the world.

Mr. Johnson applied an old and rather disgusting approach: he came to Russia with spite and superiority complex, ready to preach, to insult, to scold those white-looking but essentially Asian people – to ‘show them their place’.

But this is 2017 now, not 1990. London is not the center of the universe, anymore, just the capital of a confused and rather aggressive and increasingly badly behaved nation.

The British bulldog came to Moscow. Frankly, it did not even look like a bulldog, anymore – it looked totally… weird: stoned and mentally unbalanced. It barked and barked, while the Russian bear was calm, maintaining its composure. It was clear who of the two has the upper hand, and who is provoking and who is refusing to fight. It was also obvious who of the two is really scared.

And, it was so apparent to whom belongs the past and to whom belongs the future!

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48488.htm

The Gangster Nature of the State

Parenti argues that the state perpetuates the most unspeakable crimes against its own people, the gangster nature of the state cloaked by a facade of political representation

video

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48484.htm

De Facto Travel Restrictions Now Exist For Americans

Green Party presidential Candidate Jill Stein is being investigated by the Senate Intelligence (sic) Committee for “Russian connections.”

What has brought Russiagate to Jill Stein? The answer is that she attended the 10th Anniversary RT dinner in Moscow as did the notorious “Russian collaborator” US General Michael Flynn. RT is a news organization, a far better one than exists in the West, but if you were one of the many accomplished people who attended the anniversary dinner, you are regarded by Republican Senator Richard Burr from North Carolina as a possible Kremlin agent.

What is going on here? Stein sums it up: “we must guard against the potential for these investigations to be used to intimidate and silence principled opposition to the political establishment.”

Here I sit considering two interesting invitations. One is to speak at the main Plenary Session of the Moscow Economic Forum in April. The other is to speak at the Summit for Global Challenges in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan in May. The very minute I accept, the NSA will notify its mouthpieces, the New York Times, PropOrNot’s promoter the Washington Post, Senator Burr, and Special Russiagate Prosecutor Robert Mueller. Would I be renditioned to Israel or Egypt or Saudi Arabia and tortured until I confessed that I was a member of the Trump-Flynn-Jill Stein Kremlin spy network?

As the United States is no longer a free country governed by a Constitution that protects civil liberty, that possibility cannot be discounted. What is for sure is that if I accept these invitations, the US Establishment will discredit my voice when I write about US/Russia relations. Indeed, that was the intention of the PropOrNot Washington Post story that attacked 200 truth-tellers as “Russian agents/dupes.” Many of those so attacked have experienced slower growth in their readership. After all, Americans and Europeans are insouciant. They are actually sufficiently stupid to believe what governments and print and TV media tell them.

I, too, was invited to RT’s 10th Anniversary celebration in Moscow. Imagining the celebration would be grand balls in palaces and myself, decked out in white tie with my French Legion of Honor dancing with those beautiful RT women, I almost accepted. But I learned in time that the event was conferences and speeches and decided to forego a Moscow winter.

Otherwise I would be in the dock with Trump, Flynn, and Jill Stein and whomever the Washington Gestapo settles on next.

Russiagate is an orchestrated hoax. That has now become so apparent that even insouciant Americans are catching on, even those low IQ ones who sit in front of TV news. I often disparage Congress, but here is a member who is admirable, Republican Representative Jim Jordan from Ohio.

Watch the short video and delight in the power and force with which Rep. Jordan goes after the piece of crap US deputy attorney general the Twitter President has in office. When the President of the United States has to rely on a congressman to call out the Justice Department and the FBI for its criminal actions and for its treason to overthrow both democracy and the elected government of the United States, you know we have elected a president who is too scared to defend himself. Roger Stone is correct, if Trump were a real man, Mueller, Comey, Hillary, Obama, and the rest of the criminal scum would be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced for their vast crimes, crimes that exceed those of anyone in prison today.

But Trump is nothing but talk. No action.

How much longer can I give interviews to Russian and Iranian media before the Washington Gestapo gives me a midnight knock on my door.

Whatever America is, it is not a free country.

If Trump wants to make America great again, he must shatter the CIA, FBI, NSA, and media into a thousand pieces. The concentrated power that President Eisenhower warned Americans about in 1961 is far too great for liberty to survive.

Instead, the weakest president in American history actually read the speech handed to him by the ruling neocon military/security complex and declared Russia and China inimical to Washington’s interests.

Americans are too insouciant to understand it, but this was a declaration of war against two countries, which when combined are more than a match for Washington.

Neither Russia nor China, much less an alliance between them, will accept Washington’s hegemony.

If the hubris-crazed fools in Washington persist, we are all going to die.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48493.htm

Surveillance Is Not About Fighting Terrorism

The editorial board of the Washington Post, whose sole owner is a CIA contractor, has published a predictably fact-challenged op-ed arguing that congress must reauthorize the Orwellian surveillance program known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is deliberately used to collect communications of US citizens.

WaPo, which to this day continues to violate universal journalistic protocol by refusing to disclose its $600 million conflict of interest when reporting on the US intelligence community, just so happens to once again find itself in full agreement with that same US intelligence community. In a new joint statement by the Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, FBI Director Christopher Wray, NSA Director Michael Rogers, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the US intelligence community warns that should congress fail to reauthorize Section 702, something very, very bad may happen to America.

“There is no substitute for Section 702,” the statement claims. “If Congress fails to reauthorize this authority, the Intelligence Community will lose valuable foreign intelligence information, and the resulting intelligence gaps will make it easier for terrorists, weapons proliferators, malicious cyber actors, and other foreign adversaries to plan attacks against our citizens and allies without detection.”

Am I the only one who’s creeped out by this kind of language? This is after all the same US intelligence community that was seen in CIA documents casually discussing the option of the “real or simulated” sinking of a boatload of Cuban civilians as though they were discussing whether to buy two percent or whole milk at the supermarket. The same US intelligence community which lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident to manufacture support for the Vietnam War, resulting in the needless deaths of millions of people including 58,220 Americans. The same US intelligence community which posed as a black civil rights advocate and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr into committing suicide. The same US intelligence community which infiltrated American civil rights movements and dissident groups in order to disrupt and discredit them and frame them for acts of violence. The same US intelligence community which compiled a list of American dissidents to be thrown in concentration camps in the event of a “national emergency”.

“But Caitlin,” you may be saying. “Despite all the countless unfathomably evil things that the US intelligence community is known to have done in the past, there’s no reason to believe they’re still that vicious and depraved. Just because the language of the joint statement makes it abundantly clear that they really, really want their 702 surveillance reauthorization doesn’t mean they’d do something unspeakable to get it!”

Well that’s an interesting theory, convenient hypothetical objection person, but one of the statement’s signatories, Mike Pompeo, recently said he’s actually helping the lying, torturing, drug-running, warmongering, government-toppling CIA to “become a much more vicious agency”. There is every reason to believe that the US intelligence community is at least as psychopathic as it has ever been.

So excuse the hell out of me if I can’t help but read the intelligence community’s joint statement in the voice of a cartoonish mafia thug threatening to arrange a little “accident” if his extortion victim doesn’t pay up. When a depraved, violent organization with a history of using false flags and psyops to advance its agendas says it urgently needs to be given unchecked surveillance powers in order to prevent acts of terror, I get a little nervous.

With the rare glimpses we’ve been given behind the curtain of USIC opacity, we’ve seen that US intelligence agencies don’t actually use their surveillance capabilities for fighting terrorism nearly as much as they pretend to. With WikiLeaks’ massive leak drop earlier this year on the CIA’s sprawling surveillance system, there was no reference in any of the documents to terrorists or extremists. WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange said in a press conference at the time that there was a “conspicuous” absence of any such references, adding the following:

“What is not there is any reference to terrorists, any reference to extremists. And that actually shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone; no one no one who studies the intelligence world that’s a surprise to. Because even if you just look at the budgets that came out in 2013 to the US intelligence black-budget, you don’t see anything like the majority of the budget going towards extremism, even though there are very strong political reasons to try and couch any operation in countering terrorism and countering extremism to get more money.

Despite that political pressure, something like a third of the entire US intelligence budget is described as countering various forms of extremism. And the overwhelming majority is not, but particularly for the CIA, the vast majority of the expenditure and attack types are geopolitical. They’re about, you know similar to the information revealed about the CIA attacking of the French election cycle — understanding who could be pals with the CIA, who could help out the institution in one way or another. So for example, you spy on Airbus. That information you then pass to the US Chamber of Commerce amongst others, which is listed in the material, and US Chamber of Commerce can then adjust what is doing in order to assist Boeing, and these companies are closely connected to each other.”

So going by what we ordinary people can actually put our eyes on, surveillance is not even really about fighting terrorism at all; it’s about having access to as much information as possible which can be used for geopolitical manipulation and leverage for America’s unelected power establishment. And yet these intelligence agencies, which appear to spend far less energy fighting terrorism than they pretend to, are warning of terrorist attacks should the American people’s elected representatives fail to grant them the reauthorization they demand.

In all probability, congress will bow to these demands. Hell, if they’re seeing what I’m seeing I can’t even say I blame them. To put it lightly, these are scary mofos. As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said earlier this year, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Either way, we need to talk about this. We need to talk about the fact that there is a violent, unelected power establishment with zero accountability or transparency which cannot be trusted not to false flag Americans into consenting to an expansion of the Orwellian surveillance state. The only way to pretend that this is not a very real threat is to live in denial and shove this reality as far away from one’s consciousness as possible.

So let’s bring it into consciousness. This is a real thing. This is happening. America is ruled by a band of unelected, unaccountable thugs who will kill and terrorize in order to shore up power and advance agendas. These thugs rule America, and therefore much of the world. Pay attention to these things, everyone. This affects you personally.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48461.htm

Trump Claims Credit For The Russian/Syrian Defeat Of ISIS

What do we make of Trump’s national security speech? First of all, it is the military/security complex’s speech, and it is inconsistent with Trump’s intention of normalizing relations with Russia.

The military/security complex, using Trump’s position as President, has defined Russia and China as “revisionist powers,” Washington’s rivals who seek to put their own national interests ahead of Washington’s unilateralism. Russia and China are “revisionist powers” because their assertion of their national interests limits Washington’s hegemony.

In other words, Washington does not accept the validity of other countries’ interests if those interests are contrary to Washington’s interests. So, how does Trump expect to work with Russia and China when he reads a speech that Russia and China seek to “shape a world antithetical to our interests and values.”

“Our values” means, of course, Washington’s dominance.

Trump begins by honoring the military, police, Homeland Security, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In other words, “America first” means domination by Washington over the citizenry as well as over foreign countries.

Trump then cloaks himself in the American people who “voted to make America great again.”

Then Trump’s speech picks up the Israel Lobby’s line about a bad deal with Iran and asserts that previous administrations tolerated ISIS, when in fact they created it and set it upon Libya and Syria.

Then he attacks environmental protection and complains of illegal aliens, while ignoring the refugees Washington’s wars imposed on Europe.

In an era of neoconservative celebration of US world hegemony, Trump accuses his predecessors of losing confidence in America. This is extraordinary. When a country’s entire foreign policy is based on the assumption that it is the “exceptional and indispensable country,” how is this a loss of confidence? It is massive arrogance and hubris. The problem is not a loss of confidence by the rulers but an overbearing hubris.

Then Trump claims that through him, Americans again rule their nation.

He says that now Washington is serving the citizens. Looking at the tax bill, he must mean that citizens consist of the One Percent.

He next associates making America first with more money for the military.

Then he blames Iran for terrorism, something that Iran lives in fear of, but he does not mention Saudi Arabia’s support for terrorism or that of the US military/security complex’s which encourages terrorism as a weapon against Iran and Russia and as an excuse for its massive budget and power.

Trump then claims credit for the Russian/Syrian defeat of ISIS. It has been proved that ISIS is supported and financed by Washington. Trump’s claim is even more ridiculous than the previous claims of the Obama regime that the US defeated National Socialist Germany. Russia, which did defeat Germany, was not invited to the anniversary celebration.

Trump next demands that the countries we defend pay for it. Who are these countries and who do we defend them from? He can only mean Europe, Canada, Australia, Israel, and Japan. Is Washington defending them from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran or from the terrorists Washington creates, arms, and supplies to overthrow Libya, Syria and whatever countries Washington is successful siccing terrorists on. Apparently, some of these CIA-created terrorist organizations break loose from their creator and conduct operations on their own. So, Washington is a government that creates its own enemies.

Trump next brags on the sanctions he has imposed on “the North Korean regime.” He doesn’t mention, and I would bet he does not know, that Washington has withheld a peace treaty since the 1950s from North Korea. Washington has kept the war status open for 64 years. Having seen the fate of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, etc., little wonder North Korea wants nuclear weapons.

Trump, standing there threatening the world, says that Washington will take all necessary steps to prevent North Korea from threatening the world.

Trump then delivers the establishment’s propaganda that unemployment is at an all time low and the stock market at an all time high. So, what is Trump rescuing Middle America from if unemployment is at an all time low? What happened to Trump’s case against jobs offshoring?

This is nothing but feel-good talk. Trump is repeating the lies because the lies make him look good. What Trump should be doing is pointing out the meaninglessness of the unemployment rate, because it doesn’t count the unemployed, only those few who looked for a job in the last 4 weeks. He should be pointing out that the stock market is not a sign of a growing economy but a sign of massive money creation by the central banks of the US, EU, UK, and Japan. The massive printing of money has flooded into paper assets, driving up their price and further enriching the One Percent.

Trump says that one leg of the strategy is to “preserve peace through strength.” What peace is he talking about? In the past two decades Washington has destroyed in whole or part eight countries and overthrown democratic governments in others. Is Trump equating peace with Washington’s wars? No other country has initiated wars and invasions and bombings and aggressive military actions on other countries’ borders. Trump says that America is threatened by enemies and to protect us the military will be enlarged. He said he was overturning the “defense sequester,” something that clearly does not exist.

My conclusion is that Trump has surrendered to the real rulers of America—the powerful interest groups such as the military/security complex, the Israel Lobby, the environmental polluters, Wall Street and the banks “too big to fail.”

America is a country in which despite the hopes flyover America had in Trump, an oligarchy rules. The American people, regardless of who they elect, have no voice, no input, no representation.

The governments of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were the last governments that were subject to any accountability. With the Clinton regime the United States entered into the age of tyranny.

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http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/2017-year-review/

2017 Year in Review

2017 was the kind of year when no amount of showers could wash off the feeling of existential yeccchhhhh that crept over you day after day like jungle rot. You needed to go through the carwash without your car… or maybe an acid bath would get the stink off. Cinematically, if 2016 was like The Eggplant That Ate Chicago, then 2017 was more like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, a gruesome glimpse into the twisted soul of America. And by that I do not mean simply our dear leader, the Golden Golem of Greatness. We’re all in this horror show together.

2017 kicked off with the report by “seventeen intelligence agencies” — did you know there were so many professional snoops and busybodies on the US payroll? — declaring that Russia, and Vladimir Putin personally, tried to influence the 2016 presidential election. “Meddling” and “collusion” became the watch-words of the year: but what exactly did they mean? Buying $100,000 worth of Google ads in a campaign that the two parties spent billions on? No doubt the “seventeen intelligence agencies” the US pays for were not alert to these shenanigans until the damage was done. Since then it’s been Russia-Russia-Russia 24/7 on the news wires. A few pleas bargains have been made to lever-up the action. When and if the Special Prosecutor, Mr. Mueller, pounces, I expect the GGG to fire him, pardon some of the plea-bargained culprits (if that’s what they were and not just patsies), and incite a constitutional crisis. Won’t that be fun?

Anyway, that set the tone for the inauguration of the Golden Golem, a ghastly adversarial spectacle. Never in my memory, going back to JFK in 1960, was there such a bad vibe at this solemn transfer of power as with the sight of all those Deep State dignitaries gathering gloomily on the Capitol portico to witness the unthinkable. From the sour scowl on her face, I thought Hillary might leap up and attempt to garrote the GGG with a high-C piano wire right there on rostrum. The “greatest crowd ever” at an inauguration, as the new president saw it, looked pathetically sparse to other observers. The deed got done.

Five days later, the Dow Jones stock index hit the 20,000 mark and began a year-long run like no other in history: 50 all-time-highs, and a surge of 5000 points by year’s end, with 12 solid “winning” months of uptick. You’d think that would make a few thoughtful economists nervous, but there are no thoughtful economists left anywhere around the mainstream media, so this epochal bull market just received polite golf-claps at every new record. Apparently, the concept of financial risk had been bundled in a lead-lined box, flown 12,000 miles away from Wall Street in a Lockheed AC-130 military transport plane to some lonely valley of Turkmenistan, and buried under the shifting sands by local tribesmen sympathetic to America’s noble aims in the region.

Oh, and in the first months of the year, Mr. Trump announced it was “game on” once again in Afghanistan. Now there’s a place that ought to be the poster-child for America “winning” (not). Operations in that “Graveyard of Empires” are going on — what? — fourteen years now? Can one out of ten thousand Americans name a single battle that took place in this now-longest-running war in US history? Me neither. But, by the way, that’s what we’re doing in nearby Turkmenistan, in case you wondering.

The dog days of mid-summer were made grimmer by the riots in Charlottesville between a ragtag white supremacist corps and a battalion of Antifa warriors. One dead, which is a pretty low casualty number by US national standards for public mayhem. Statues of Confederate heroes came down all over Dixieland, and a few were ignominiously ushered out of Statuary Hall in the US Capitol under cover-of-night. It looked for a while there like some of the Founding Fathers — Washington, Jefferson, Madison, et al — were going to get the bum’s rush, too, for once owning slaves. But that hysteria died down and is now pretty much forgotten — to be replaced by new hysterias!

Fall kicked off a round of hurricanes in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico like nothing we’d ever seen before — a long train-wreck of storms that nearly drowned Houston, put several Caribbean island out-of-business for years to come, and climaxed with the near-total destruction of Puerto Rico, where, months later about 40 percent of the island’s electricity is still off and the news media has lost interest in the story. Feliz Navidad, everybody! 2017 was the year that Cable News went All Opinion 24/7. The News channels no longer employ reporters out in the field. Every night now, they just “go to our panel.” Is it any wonder the public is so clueless?

Another story that dropped into the memory hole was the Mandalay Hotel massacre in Las Vegas. Fifty-eight killed by a mysterious gunman and 546 injured, a US record for civilian mass murder. All kinds of lingering loose ends dangle from that one, including the motives of the solitary, rather wealthy identified shooter, Stephen Paddock. The number of lawyers for the victims in that case may exceed the number of active players in the NFL.

Speaking of which, “the knee” is still an ongoing ritual, after a great deal of national kerfuffling inspired by tweets emanating from Golden Golem Central. For the record, I don’t give a fuck about it, nor generally for the NFL, since I think the days of professional mega-sports are numbered in this land. I will be happy when my little town in upstate New York has its own softball league.

Oh, there was a bit of good news this year: Russia Russia Russia (with the wicked Vlad Putin at its helm) managed to put an end to the Syrian civil war, without a whole lot of help from the US-Truly, which has been sending arms to various ISIS clans for years, even though they were our reviled enemy. What you have to admire in this case was how clear-cut the situation actually was without us muddying and bloodying it up — namely, who needs another failed state in the Middle East? (Apparently we do.)

2017 slid down the autumnal chute with a lively witch hunt for sexual predators and abusers in public life. Much as some of them might have deserved censure and perhaps prosecution, it was kind of sad to see their talents stuffed down the memory hole, most of all poor old Garrison Keillor, a truly great American who didn’t have to be vilified for petting some lady on her back, did he? I don’t think the story is over. I suspect an army of lawyers is at work in these cases behind the scenes and there will be a second act in 2018.

Surely I left out quite a bit of the action from the year now passing. Forgive me. I will be busy preparing the perhaps more interesting forecast for the year to come, while you citizens of Clusterfuck Nation gather around your hearths (or flat screen TVs) in the dark nights ahead, waiting for the Sainted Nicholas to bring your tax cuts, and sugar plums for the little ones. I’ll be back here on the morning of the Day-of-Days, preceding my annual journey to dim sum in the quaint old Dutch town that is New York State’s capital. Merry Christmas to all!

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https://www.truthdig.com/articles/permanent-lie-deadliest-threat/

The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat

The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares the way to dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from the opening of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the acceleration of ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the destruction of public education. It does not come from the squandering of federal dollars on a bloated military as the country collapses or the use of the systems of domestic security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice.

Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are justified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. Clinton, when he signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, promised “NAFTA means jobs, American jobs and good-paying American jobs.” George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Clinton did not continue to pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.

The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of “fake news.” They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted to them with the revoking of net neutrality. The iron refusal by those who engage in the permanent lie to acknowledge reality, no matter how transparent reality becomes, creates a collective psychosis.

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. Donald Trump, who lies about the size of his inauguration crowd despite photographic evidence, insists that in regard to his personal finances he is “going to get killed” by a tax bill that actually will save him and his heirs over $1 billion. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a report that proves that the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not increase the deficit—only there never was a report. Sen. John Cornyn assures us, countering all factual evidence, that “this is not a bill that is designed primarily to benefit the wealthy and the large businesses.”

Two million acres of public land, meanwhile, are handed over to the mining and fossil fuel industry as Trump insists the transfer means that “public lands will once again be for public use.” When environmentalists denounce the transfer as a theft, Rep. Rob Bishop calls their criticism “a false narrative.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, after ending net neutrality, effectively killing free speech on the internet, says, “[T]hose who’ve said the internet as we know it is about to end have been proven wrong. …We have a free internet going forward.” And at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phrases such as “evidence-based” and “science-based” are banned.

The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is “correct.” Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true on the Christian right, which is filling the ideological vacuum of the Trump administration, as it is for the corporatists that preach neoliberalism and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.

“The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behavior,” psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” “They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.”

When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day often becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s belief in threats and force. This is why the Trump administration disdains diplomacy and is dynamiting the State Department. Totalitarianism, wrote novelist and social critic Thomas Mann, is at its core the desire for a simple folktale. Once this folktale replaces reality, morality and ethics are abolished.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Voltaire warned.

The corporate elites, who even in the best of times stacked the deck against people of color, the poor and the working class, no longer play by any rules. Their lobbyists, bought-and-paid-for politicians, pliant academics, corrupt judges and television news celebrities run a kleptocratic state defined by legalized bribery and unchecked exploitation. The corporate elites write laws, regulations and bills to expand corporate looting and plunder while imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public, including college graduates burdened by huge loans. They ram through austerity measures that dismantle state and municipal services, often forcing them to be sold off to corporations, and slash social programs, including public education and health care. They insist, however, that when we have grievances we rely on the institutions they have debased and corrupted. They ask us to invest our energy and time in fixed political campaigns, petition elected representatives or appeal to the courts. They seek to lure us into their schizophrenic world, where rational discourse is pitted against gibberish. They demand we seek justice in a system designed to perpetuate injustice. It is a game we can never win.

“Thus all our dignity consist in thought,” wrote Pascal. “It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.”

We must pit power against power. We must build parallel institutions and organizations that protect us from corporate assault and resist corporate domination. We must sever ourselves as much as possible from the vampire state. The more we can create self-contained communities, with our own currencies and infrastructures, the more we can starve and cripple the corporate beast. This means establishing worker-run cooperatives, local systems of food supply based on a vegan diet and independent artistic, cultural and political organizations. It means obstructing in every way possible the corporate assault, including the blocking of pipelines and fracking sites, and taking to the streets in sustained acts of civil disobedience against censorship and the attack on civil liberties. And it means creating sanctuary cities. All of this will have to be done the way it has always been done, by building personal, face-to-face relationships. We may not ultimately save ourselves, especially with the refusal by the elites to address the ravages of climate change, but we can create pods of resistance where truth, beauty, empathy and justice endure.

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http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-darkest-hours/

The Darkest Hours

The Tax “Reform” bill working its way painfully out the digestive system of congress like a sigmoid fistula, ought be re-named the US Asset-stripping Assistance Act of 2017, because that’s what is about to splatter the faces of the waiting public, most of whom won’t have a personal lobbyist / tax lawyer by their sides holding a protective tarpulin during the climactic colonic burst of legislation.

Sssshhhh…. The media has not groked this, but the economy is actually collapsing, and the nova-like expansion of the stock markets is exactly the sort of action you might expect in a system getting ready to blow. Meanwhile, the more visible rise of the laughable scam known as crypto-currency, is like the plume of smoke coming out of Vesuvius around 79 AD — an amusing curiosity to the citizens of Pompeii below, going about their normal activities, eating pizza, buying slaves, making love — before hellfire rained down on them.

Whatever the corporate tax rate might be, it won’t be enough to rescue the Ponzi scheme that governing has become, with its implacable costs of empire. So the real aim here is to keep up appearances at all costs just a little while longer while the table scraps of a four-hundred-year-long New World banquet get tossed to the hogs of Wall Street and their accomplices. The catch is that even hogs busy fattening up don’t have a clue about their imminent slaughter.

The centerpiece of the swindle, as usual, is control fraud on the grand scale. Control fraud is the mis-use of authority in applying Three-Card-Monte principles to financial accounting practice, so that a credulous, trustful public will be too bamboozled to see the money drain from their bank accounts and the ground shift under their feet until the moment of freefall. Control fraud is at work in the corporate C-suites, of course, because that is its natural habitat — remember that silver-haired CEO swine from Wells Fargo who got off scot-free with a life-time supply of acorns after scamming his account-holders — but their errand boys and girls in congress have been superbly groomed, pampered, fed, and trained to break trail and cover for them.

The country has gotten used to thinking that the game of pretend is exactly the same as what is actually going on in the world. The now-seminal phrase coined by Karl Rove, “we make our own reality,” is as comforting these days to Republicans from Idaho as it is to hairy, “intersectional” professors of post-structural gender studies in the bluest ivory towers of the Ivy League. Nobody in this Republic really wants to get his-hers-zhe’s-they’s reality on.

Ah, but reality wants to do its thing regardless of our wishes, hopes, and pretenses, and you can kind of see how these moves taken in the dark waning hours of 2017 will play out in the quickening weeks of 2018. Long about March or April, something’s got to give. Other players around the world are surely eager to assist shoving this mad bull of a polity towards the critical state it deserves to enter, though we are doing quite enough on our own to put ourselves at ground zero of financial and political implosion.

The addiction metaphor does apply to America. We are simply addicted to our own bullshit. But like all floundering addicts, we have to hit bottom before anything like clarity returns to our daily doings. When that does happen, it will be as far from intoxicating as you can imagine. The smoldering wreckage of The World’s Highest Standing of Living will be visible in a 360-degree panorama. A lot of familiar faces will be among the suddenly missing. But we’re already prepped for this by the sexual purges of the season. One day, the reassuring figure of ole Garrison Keillor is there to remind you of the exquisite taste of Midwestern sweet corn on an August night; and the next morning, you’re up to your eyeballs in the colonic explosion of unintended consequences engineered by the least reassuring cast of characters ever assembled under one capitol dome.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/jerusalem-the-straw-that-breaks-the-empires-back/5623077

Jerusalem – The Straw that Breaks the Empire’s Back?

When President Trump on 6 December 2017 declared unilaterally Jerusalem as the capital of Israel to where the US Embassy shall relocate, he violated UN Resolutions, international law, common sense and went against all diplomatic efforts to eventually bring peace to the region, not to speak about 130 countries that have already voiced opposition to such a decision. And this, before the Peace Process is coming to an end, at which point the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords would play out. They are also called the Road Map for Peace, between Palestine and Israel, which foresees a two-state solution and accordingly a mutual decision on Jerusalem becoming the capital city for both Palestine and Israel. These Oslo Peace Accords are still valid today.

But Mr. Trump may not have a clue that such a Peace Accord even exists. And his handlers obviously had no interest of telling him. – And even if they did, it would make no difference, because the exceptional nation has no scruples demolishing any agreements of the past, regardless whether or not it – the US of A – were party to the shaping of them. – See also the Iranian Nuclear Deal.

By the same token, Washington does not give a hoot about international law and UN Resolutions. We are talking about the only and perfect rogue state the world has known in the past two centuries, by far surpassing, actually without any comparison with the western customarily accused villains, like Zimbabwe, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba — and all those that refuse to bend to the Chief-Rogue-State, the United States of America.

In fact, what Trump has done, was just confirming what previous US Administrations had already as an objective, namely following the so-called „Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995“, with which the US Congress already 20 years ago, requested and prepared this step by legislation that says, “Since 1950, Jerusalem is the Capital of the State of Israel…”. Never mind and, of course not reported by the mainstream media, that immediately after promising the US Embassy would be moved to Jerusalem, Trump signed a ‘waiver’ postponing the move indefinitely, or until the international situation becomes ‘clear(er)’. – Who does the US Congress think they are – God the Almighty? To decide over the “Holy City”, Jerusalem, the historic center of the three-religion monotheist culture of 5,000 years of Judo-Christianism, also incorporating Islam, is an act of arrogance without comparison.

This insensitive Trump decision or affirmation at this point in time – another one in his basket of disasters – brought everything else but peace to the region, and especially to Palestine. It caused unrest, angry demonstrations from people who are basically fighting with their bare hands; protests which were immediately oppressed with firepower and violence by the Israeli military and police force, killing people in the Israel imposed ghetto of Gaza and the West Bank – i.e. in Palestine, what should become an independent state.

Instead of bringing peace, Trump killed the aspiration of peace, he de facto killed the notion of a two-state solution – and he effectively isolated the US from literally the rest of the world. Was this a bold provocation inspired by Trump’s Zionist masters, a trial balloon to find out how much of impunity the world would tolerate?

At no time was even mentioned that Jerusalem, if anything, might also be the capital of Palestine. The Motherland of Israel, let’s not forget, Palestine, was ignored. Palestine was provoked into protests, just to be brutally suffocated by the Israeli defense Forces (IDF). They do this with sadistic pleasure, like killing helpless flies. All this prompted by the criminal and irresponsible behavior of the President of the United States, the exceptional Nation – or rather his invisible handlers behind the throne.

But the propaganda mantra must go on – the lie that declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel was good for the Middle East, was good for peace, was and still is repeated over and over again, like a mantra, tras-mantra, tras-mantra – by Trump and his mannequins, his foreign affair puppets, Rex Tillerson and Nikki Haley, who is masquerading as Washington’s UN Ambassador, repeating over and over again, the same lie, the same lie, the same lie, in the hope, as the common saying goes after Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, if repeated enough, the lie becomes the truth. Do these clowns really believe that if a world renown repeat-liar keeps repeat-lying the globes populace believes that the repeat-lie becomes the truth?

The people at large have moved forward towards awakening since the horrendous murderous lies about Iraq with weapons of mass destruction that weren’t; about Gaddafi horrors committed to his people, which he didn’t, to the contrary, he provided them with free education, health services and cutting edge medical facilities, with free infrastructure and a broad social safety net; or UN-proven lies about Bashar Al-Assad’s poison gas used against his own people; the lies about Iran’s nuclear program that never was; the lies about Russia’s meddling in Ukraine, when it is now amply proven that the Maidan massacre was planned and carried out via the US Embassy in Kiev and through US and NATO military and paid mercenaries; the lies about the US and NATO fighting against ISIS which Washington created – and the list of lies go on – endlessly.

The entire vassal state of the European Union, country after country – led by the three “Ms”, Germany’s Merkel, France’s Macron, and the UK’s May – have said they would not go along with Trump’s decision and moving their Embassies to Jerusalem. Bravo! – Will this decision last, or will there be some high-power arm-twisting by Washington? – Is Washington still able to do arm-twisting, economic sanctions? Haven’t they noticed yet, that the west, even the hitherto puppet West, is gradually but surely moving away from the Atlantic Alliance towards the East. Probably for purely selfish economic and financial reasons, though some western politicians may look deeper and see the light, what I call, the Future is in the East.

What is also amazing though, is that nobody seems to even question the basics – the right of the self-styled emperor Trump, the typical emperor without cloths – intervening with the decision of another nation’s capital city. Of course, we know that Trump’s buddy and family friend, Bibi Netanyahu, holds and / or twists arms (smilingly) with the Donald on Jerusalem through the infamous family relations of the two warrying aggressors and through the seemingly unbeatable Zion-power the western world is being subjected to.

Trump, with this unwise decision, may have brought Jerusalem back to the 12th Century, the ages of the Crusades, when in 1187, on behalf of the Muslim Ayyubids Dynasty, Sultan Saladin, a Sunni Muslim, of Kurdish origins, besieged and eventually re-conquered the so-called Christian Kingdom of Heaven, invaded and stolen by the ‘Christian’ emperors of Rome two-hundred years earlier.

Perhaps Mr. Trump nilly-willy has started a new Arab Crusade against the artificially imposed Kingdom of Israel, artificially implanted in the land of Palestine, implanted by the Zionists who used the power of the British Empire which at that time was colonizing Palestine, to corrupt the freshly created UN system in 1948 to cut up and destroy Palestine – see the Balfour Declaration,

The British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote on 2nd November 1917, hundred years ago, to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, suggesting the carving up of Palestine the creation of a State of Israel. The ‘proposal’ was to be transmitted to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. Lord Rothschild was co-drafter of the letter. The text of the declaration was made official by publication in the media on 9 November 1917.

The idea was eventually carried out by a UN Resolution in 1948, bringing about the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, the day Palestine became a non-country and enslaved to Israel.

Behind the Trump strategy lays a broader objective, the creation of a Greater Israel, that would stretch from the Euphrates to the Nile, cutting through Saudi Arabia, absorbing Jordan, a large portion of Syria and most of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. This is to make Israel a Middle Eastern super-power, sitting on a huge junk of the sub-continent’s energy wealth and on most of the Middle east’s fresh water reserves, on behalf of the Anglo-Zionist Empire.

It is yet to be seen whether this bold and aggressive move by Trump went a step too far; whether this impunity is the straw that may break the empire’s back.

What if nobody – not even the traditional allies – participates in this nefarious endeavor to move their embassies from Tel Avia to Jerusalem?

What if sanctions that Washington undoubtedly may dish out to those who do not obey its orders do no longer work?

What if this Trump lunacy opens the gates to the East even further for all those who have been fed-up with the empire’s financial-, fury-and-fire, and propaganda-crusades to conquer the world; and that this Washington insanity leads them to a new healthier, promising and honest economic system striving towards equality – of which we know already the fundamental bedrock – the multi-trillion New Silk Road, President Xi’s One Belt Initiative?

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48434.htm

The Case Against Iraqing Iran

The case against Iraqing Iran includes the following points:

Threatening war is a violation of the U.N. Charter.

Waging war is a violation of the U.N. Charter and of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

Waging war without Congress is a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Have you seen Iraq lately?

Have you seen the entire region?

Have you seen Afghanistan? Libya? Syria? Yemen? Pakistan? Somalia?

War supporters said the U.S. urgently needed to attack Iran in 2007. It did not attack. The claims turned out to be lies. Even a National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 pushed back and admitted that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.

Having a nuclear weapons program is not a justification for war, legally, morally, or practically. The United States has nuclear weapons and no one would be justified in attacking the United States.

Dick and Liz Cheney’s book, Exceptional, tell us we must see a “moral difference between an Iranian nuclear weapon and an American one.” Must we, really? Either risks further proliferation, accidental use, use by a crazed leader, mass death and destruction, environmental disaster, retaliatory escalation, and apocalypse. One of those two nations has nuclear weapons, has used nuclear weapons, has provided the other with plans for nuclear weapons, has a policy of first-use of nuclear weapons, has leadership that sanctions the possession of nuclear weapons, and has frequently threated to use nuclear weapons. I don’t think those facts would make a nuclear weapon in the hands of the other country the least bit moral, but also not the least bit more immoral. Let’s focus on seeing an empirical difference between an Iranian nuclear weapon and an American one. One exists. The other doesn’t.

If you’re wondering, U.S. presidents who have made specific public or secret nuclear threats to other nations, that we know of, as documented in Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine, have included Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump, while others, including Barack Obama, have frequently said things like “All options are on the table” in relation to Iran or another country.

War supporters said the U.S. urgently needed to attack Iran in 2015. It did not attack. The claims turned out to be lies. Even the claims of supporters of the nuclear agreement reinforced the lie that Iran had a nuclear weapons program in need of containment. There is no evidence that Iran has ever had a nuclear weapons program.

The long history of the United States lying about Iranian nuclear weapons is chronicled by Gareth Porter’s book Manufactured Crisis.

Proponents of war or steps toward war (sanctions was a step toward war on Iraq) may say we urgently need a war now, but they will have no argument for urgency, and their claims are thus far transparent lies.

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations claims that Iranian weapons have been used in a war that the U.S.., Saudi Arabia, and allies are illegally and disastrously waging in Yemen. While that’s a problem that should be corrected, it is hard to find a war anywhere on the planet without U.S. weapons in it. In fact, a report that made news the same day as the ambassador’s claims, pointed to the long-known fact that many of the weapons used by ISIS had once belonged to the United States, many of them having been given by the U.S. to non-state fighters (aka terrorists) in Syria.

Fighting wars and arming others to fight wars/terrorism is a justification for indictment and prosecution, but not for war, legally, morally, or practically. The United States fights and arms wars, and no one would be justified in attacking the United States.

If Iran is guilty of a crime, and there is evidence to support that claim, the United States and the world should seek its prosecution. Instead, the United States is isolating itself by tearing down the rule of law. It is destroying its credibility by threatening to abandon an agreement. In a Gallup poll in 2013 and a Pew poll in 2017 the majority of nations polled had the United States receive the most votes as the greatest threat to peace on earth. In the Gallup poll, people within the U.S. chose Iran as the top threat to peace on earth — Iran which had not attacked another nation in centuries and spent less than 1% of what the U.S. spent on militarism. These views are clearly a function of what people are told through news media.

The history of U.S./Iranian relations matters here. The U.S. overthrew Iran’s democracy in 1953 and installed a brutal dictator / weapons customer.

The U.S. gave Iran nuclear energy technology in the 1970s.

In 2000, the CIA gave Iran nuclear bomb plans in an effort to frame it. This was reported by James Risen, and Jeffrey Sterling now sits in prison for allegedly being Risen’s source.

The Trump White House has openly expressed a desire to claim that Iran has violated the 2015 nuclear agreement, but has produced no evidence.

The push to attack Iran has been on for so long that entire categories of arguments for it (such as that the Iranians are fueling the Iraqi resistance) have come and gone.

What’s changed that gives the question more importance than ever is that the United States now has a president who seeks the approval of people who want to bring about the end of the world in the Middle East for religious reasons, and who have praised President Trump’s announcement of moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem for just those reasons.

While Iran has not attacked any other country in centuries, the United States has not done so well by Iran.

The United States aided Iraq in the 1980s in attacking Iran, providing Iraq with some of the weapons (including chemical weapons) that were used on Iranians and that would be used in 2002-2003 (when they no longer existed) as an excuse for attacking Iraq.

For many years, the United States has labeled Iran an evil nation, attacked and destroyed the other non-nuclear nation on the list of evil nations, designated part of Iran’s military a terrorist organization, falsely accused Iran of crimes including the attacks of 9-11, murdered Iranian scientists, funded opposition groups in Iran (including some the U.S. also designates as terrorist), flown drones over Iran, openly and illegally threatened to attack Iran, and built up military forces all around Iran’s borders, while imposing cruel sanctions on the country.

The roots of a Washington push for a new war on Iran can be found in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, the 1996 paper called A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the 2000 Rebuilding America’s Defenses, and in a 2001 Pentagon memo described by Wesley Clark as listing these nations for attack: Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

It’s worth noting that Bush Jr. overthrew Iraq, and Obama Libya, while the others remain works in progress.

In 2010, Tony Blair included Iran on a similar list of countries that he said Dick Cheney had aimed to overthrow. The line among the powerful in Washington in 2003 was that Iraq would be a cakewalk but that real men go to Tehran. The arguments in these old forgotten memos were not what the war makers tell the public, but much closer to what they tell each other. The concerns here are those of dominating regions rich in resources, intimidating others, and establishing bases from which to maintain control of puppet governments.

Of course the reason why “real men go to Tehran” is that Iran is not the impoverished disarmed nation that one might find in, say, Afghanistan or Iraq, or even the disarmed nation found in Libya in 2011. Iran is much bigger and much better armed. Whether the United States launches a major assault on Iran or Israel does, Iran will retaliate against U.S. troops and probably Israel and possibly the United States itself as well. And the United States will without any doube re-retaliate for that. Iran cannot be unaware that the U.S. government’s pressure on the Israeli government not to attack Iran consists of reassuring the Israelis that the United States will attack when needed, and does not include even threatening to stop funding Israel’s military or to stop vetoing measures of accountability for Israeli crimes at the United Nations. (President Obama’s ambassador refrained from one veto on illegal settlements, while President-Elect Trump lobbied foreign governments to block the resolution.)

In other words, any U.S. pretense of having seriously wanted to prevent an Israeli attack is not credible. Of course, many in the U.S. government and military oppose attacking Iran, although key figures like Admiral William Fallon have been moved out of the way. Much of the Israeli military is opposed as well, not to mention the Israeli and U.S. people. But war is not clean or precise. If the people we allow to run our nations attack another, we are all put at risk.

Most at risk, of course, are the people of Iran, people as peaceful as any other, or perhaps more so. As in any country, no matter what its government, the people of Iran are fundamentally good, decent, peaceful, just, and fundamentally like you and me. I’ve met people from Iran. You may have met people from Iran. They look like this. They’re not a different species. They’re not evil. A “surgical strike” against a “facility” in their country would cause a great many of them to die very painful and horrible deaths. Even if you imagine that Iran would not retaliate for such attacks, this is what the attacks would in themselves consist of: mass murder.

And what would that accomplish? It would unite the people of Iran and much of the world against the United States. It would justify in the eyes of much of the world an underground Iranian program to develop nuclear weapons, a program that probably does not exist at present, except to the extent that legal nuclear energy programs move a country closer to weapons development. The environmental damage would be tremendous, the precedent set incredibly dangerous, all talk of cutting the U.S. military budget would be buried in a wave of war frenzy, civil liberties and representative government would be flushed down the Potomac, a nuclear arms race would spread to additional countries, and any momentary sadistic glee would be outweighed by accelerating home foreclosures, mounting student debt, and accumulating layers of cultural stupidity.

Strategically, legally, and morally weapons possession is not grounds for war, and neither is pursuit of weapons possession. And neither, I might add, with Iraq in mind, is theoretically possible pursuit of weapons never acted upon. Israel has nuclear weapons. The United States has more nuclear weapons than any other country. There can be no justification for attacking the United States, Israel, or any other country. The pretense that Iran has or will soon have nuclear weapons is, in any case, just a pretense, one that has been revived, debunked, and revived again like a zombie for years and years. But that’s not the really absurd part of this false claim for something that amounts to no justification for war whatsoever. The really absurd part is that it was the United States in 1976 that pushed nuclear energy on Iran. In 2000 the CIA gave the Iranian government (slightly flawed) plans to build a nuclear bomb. In 2003, Iran proposed negotiations with the United States with everything on the table, including its nuclear technology, and the United States refused. Shortly thereafter, the United States started angling for a war. Meanwhile, U.S.-led sanctions prevent Iran from developing wind energy, while the Koch brothers are allowed to trade with Iran without penalty.

Another area of ongoing lie debunking, one that almost exactly parallels the buildup to the 2003 attack on Iraq, is the relentless false claim, including by candidates in 2012 for U.S. President, that Iran has not allowed inspectors into its country or given them access to its sites. Iran had, in fact, prior to the agreement voluntarily accepted stricter standards than the IAEA requires. And of course a separate line of propaganda, albeit a contradictory one, holds that the IAEA has discovered a nuclear weapons program in Iran. Under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), Iran was not required to declare all of its installations, and early last decade it chose not to, as the United States violated that same treaty by blocking Germany, China, and others from providing nuclear energy equipment to Iran. While Iran remains in compliance with the NPT, India and Pakistan and Israel have not signed it and North Korea has withdrawn from it, while the United States and other nuclear powers continuously violate it by failing to reduce arms, by providing arms to other countries such as India, and by developing new nuclear weapons.

This is what the empire of U.S. military bases looks like to Iran. Try to imagine if you lived there, what you would think of this. Who is threatening whom? Who is the greater danger to whom? The point is not that Iran should be free to attack the United States or anyone else because its military is smaller. The point is that doing so would be national suicide. It would also be something Iran has not done for centuries. But it would be typical U.S. behavior.

Are you ready for an even more absurd twist? This is on the same scale as Bush’s comment about not really giving much thought to Osama bin Laden. Are you ready? The proponents of attacking Iran themselves admit that if Iran had nukes it would not use them. This is from the American Enterprise Institute:

“The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, ‘See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.’ … And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem.”

Is that clear? Iran using a nuclear weapon would be bad: environmental damage, loss of human life, hideous pain and suffering, yada, yada, yada. But what would be really bad would be Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon and doing what every other nation with them has done since Nagasaki: nothing. That would be really bad because it would damage an argument for war and make war more difficult, thus allowing Iran to run its country as it, rather than the United States, sees fit. Of course it might run it very badly (although we’re hardly establishing a model for the world over here either), but it would run it without U.S. approval, and that would be worse than nuclear destruction.

Inspections were allowed in Iraq and they worked. They found no weapons and there were no weapons. Inspections are being allowed in Iran and they are working. However, the IAEA has come under the corrupting influence of the U.S. government. And yet, the bluster from war proponents about IAEA claims over the years is not backed up by any actual claims from the IAEA. And what little material the IAEA has provided for the cause of war has been widely rejected when not being laughed at.

Another year, another lie. No longer do we hear that North Korea is helping Iran build nukes. Lies about Iranian backing of Iraqi resisters have faded. (Didn’t the United States back French resistance to Germans at one point?) The latest concoction is the “Iran did 911” lie. Revenge, like the rest of these attempted grounds for war, is actually not a legal or moral justification for war. But this latest fiction has already been put to rest by the indespensable Gareth Porter, among others. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, which did play a role in 911 as well as in the Iraqi resistance, is being sold record quantities of that good old leading U.S. export of which we’re all so proud: weapons of mass destruction.

Oh, I almost forgot another lie that hasn’t quite entirely faded yet. Iran did not try to blow up a Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., an action which President Obama would have considered perfectly praiseworthy if the roles were reversed, but a lie that even Fox News had a hard time stomaching. And that’s saying something.

And then there’s that old standby: Ahmadinejad said “Israel should be wiped off the map.” While this does not, perhaps, rise to the level of John McCain singing about bombing Iran or Bush and Obama swearing that all options including nuclear attack are on the table, it sounds extremely disturbing: “wiped off the map”! However, the translation is a bad one. A more accurate translation was “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” The government of Israel, not the nation of Israel. Not even the government of Israel, but the current regime. Hell, Americans say that about their own regimes all the time, alternating every four to eight years depending on political party (some of us even say it all the time, without immunity for either party). Iran has made clear it would approve of a two-state solution if Palestinians approved of it. If the U.S. launched missile strikes every time somebody said something stupid, even if accurately translated, how safe would it be to live near Newt Gingrich’s or Joe Biden’s house?

The real danger may not actually be the lies. The Iraq experience has built up quite a mental resistance to these sorts of lies in many U.S. residents. The real danger may be the slow start of a war that gains momentum on its own without any formal announcement of its initiation. Israel and the United States have not just been talking tough or crazy. They’ve been murdering Iranians. And they seem to have no shame about it. The day after a Republican presidential primary debate at which candidates declared their desire to kill Iranians, the CIA apparently made certain the news was public that it was in fact already murdering Iranians, not to mention blowing up buildings. Some would say and have said that the war has already begun. Those who cannot see this because they do not want to see it will also miss the deadly humor in the United States asking Iran to return its brave drone.

Perhaps what’s needed to snap war supporters out of their stupor is a bit of slapstick. Try this on for size. From Seymour Hersh describing a meeting held in Vice President Cheney’s office:

“There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.”

Now, Dick Cheney is not your typical American. Nobody in the U.S. government is your typical American. Your typical American is struggling, disapproves of the U.S. government, wishes billionaires were taxed, favors green energy and education and jobs over military boondoggles, thinks corporations should be barred from buying elections, and would not be inclined to apologize for getting shot in the face by the Vice President. Back in the 1930s, the Ludlow Amendment nearly made it a Constitutional requirement that the public vote in a referendum before the United States could go to war. President Franklin Roosevelt blocked that proposal. Yet the Constitution already required and still requires that Congress declare war before a war is fought. That has not been done in over 70 years, while wars have raged on almost incessantly. In the past decade and right up through President Obama’s signing of the outrageous National Defense Authorization Act on New Years Eve 2011-2012, the power to make war has been handed over to presidents. Here is one more reason to oppose a presidential war on Iran: once you allow presidents to make wars, you will never stop them. Another reason, in so far as anybody any longer gives a damn, is that war is a crime. Iran and the United States are parties to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which bans war. One of those two nations is not complying.

But we won’t have a referendum. The U.S. House of Misrepresentatives won’t step in. Only through widespread public pressure and nonviolent action will we intervene in this slow-motion catastrophe. Already the United States and the United Kingdom are preparing for war with Iran. This war, if it happens, will be fought by an institution called the United States Department of Defense, but it will endanger rather than defending us. As the war progresses, we will be told that the Iranian people want to be bombed for their own good, for freedom, for democracy. But nobody wants to be bombed for that. Iran does not want U.S.-style democracy. Even the United States does not want U.S.-style democracy. We will be told that those noble goals are guiding the actions of our brave troops and our brave drones on the battlefield. Yet there will be no battlefield. There will be no front lines. There will be no trenches. There will simply be cities and towns where people live, and where people die. There will be no victory. There will be no progress accomplished through a “surge.” On January 5, 2012, then-Secretary of “Defense” Leon Panetta was asked at a press conference about the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he replied simply that those were successes. That is the kind of success that could be expected in Iran were Iran a destitute and disarmed state.

Now we begin to understand the importance of all the media suppression, blackouts, and lies about the damage done to Iraq and Afghanistan. Now we understand why Obama and Panetta embraced the lies that launched the War on Iraq. The same lies must now be revived, as for every war ever fought, for a War on Iran. Here’s a video explaining how this will work, even with some new twists and lots of variations. The U.S. corporate media is part of the war machine.

Planning war and funding war creates its own momentum. Sanctions become, as with Iraq, a stepping stone to war. Cutting off diplomacy leaves few options open. Electoral pissing contests take us all where most of us did not want to be.

These are the bombs most likely to launch this ugly and quite possibly terminal chapter of human history. This animation shows clearly what they would do. For an even better presentation, pair that with this audio of a misinformed caller trying hopelessly to persuade George Galloway that we should attack Iran.

On January 2, 2012, the New York Times reported concern that cuts to the U.S. military budget raised doubts as to whether the United States would “be prepared for a grinding, lengthy ground war in Asia.” At a Pentagon press conference on January 5, 2012, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reassured the press corpse (sic) that major ground wars were very much an option and that wars of one sort or another were a certainty. President Obama’s statement of military policy released at that press conference listed the missions of the U.S. military. First was fighting terrorism, next detering “aggression,” then “projecting power despite anti-access/area denial challenges,” then the good old WMDs, then conquering space and cyberspace, then nuclear weapons, and finally — after all that — there was mention of defending the Homeland Formerly Known As The United States.

The cases of Iraq and Iran are not identical in every detail, of course. But in both cases we are dealing with concerted efforts to get us into wars, wars based, as all wars are based, on lies. We may need to revive this appeal to U.S. and Israeli forces!

Additional reasons not to Iraq Iran include the numerous reasons not to maintain the institution of war at all, as laid out at WorldBeyondWar.org.

Here’s another way of looking at this:

Iran Deal Prevents Naked Muslim Ray Gun

Nukes get all the attention, but the fact is that intense inspections of Iranian facilities will also prevent Iran from developing a ray gun that causes your clothes to vanish and your brain to convert to Islam.

No, there is not the slightest scrap of evidence that Iran is trying to create such a thing, but then there’s also not the slightest scrap of evidence that Iran is trying to create a nuclear bomb.

And yet, here are a bunch of celebrities in a video that certainly cost many more dollars than the number of people who’ve watched it, urging support for the Iran deal after hyping the bogus Iranian nuclear threat, pretending that the United States gets “forced into” wars, making a bunch of sick jokes about how nuclear death can be better than other war deaths, suggesting that spies are cool, cursing, and mocking the very idea that war is a serious matter.

And here’s an otherwise intelligent guy in a video claiming that the Iran deal will prevent the “Iranian regime” (never a government, always a regime) from “gaining a nuclear weapon.” Well, I say it also prevents Iran from gaining a Naked Muslim Ray Gun!

When you question supporters of diplomacy and peace with Iran on why they focus their rhetoric on preventing Iran from getting nukes, even though at least some of them privately admit there’s no evidence Iran is trying to, they don’t come out and say that they’re cynically playing into popular beliefs, even false ones, because they have no choice. No, they tell you that their language doesn’t actually state that Iran was trying to get nukes, only that if Iran ever did decide to try to get nukes, this deal would prevent it.

Well, the same applies to the Naked Muslim Ray Gun.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Or rather, stop being afraid. Don’t listen to the pro-war propaganda even when it’s parroted by the pro-peace advocates. It doesn’t improve your thinking, your understanding, or the prospects in the long run of avoiding war.