War Certainly Is A Racket

By Iain Davis

Source: Off-Guardian

In 1935, Major General Smedley Butler’s seminal book “War Is A Racket” warned of the dangers of the US military-industrial complex, more than 25 years before the outgoing US President Eisenhower implored the world to “guard against” the same thing.

One of the most decorated soldiers in US military history, Butler knew what he was talking about, famously writing that war is “…conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.”

While he lamented the loss of his fallen comrades and despite the gongs he received for defending his country, Butler came to understand that he was actually a “high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers.” Later, the historian Antony C. Sutton proved that Butler was right.

When the US administration of George Bush passed its Foreign Operations Appropriation Law in 1991, it ended all US credit to the former, thriving socialist republic of Yugoslavia. At the time the perception on the Hill was that Yugoslavia was no longer required as a buffer zone between the NATO states and their former Warsaw Pact adversaries, so its independent socialism was no longer tolerated.

The US military industrial complex, that Butler and Eisenhower told everyone to tackle, effectively destabilised the entire Balkan region, destroyed hitherto relatively peaceful countries and then fuelled the resultant wars with its pet Islamist terrorists. Ably assisted by the World Bank and the IMF.

So-called “assistance,” via the Train and Equip Program, gave US taxpayers the opportunity to funnel $500M to private security contractors like DynCorp. DynCorp put taxpayer’s money to use, seemingly by training terrorists and child trafficking to paedophiles.

The US and its Western allies’ military industrial complex pulled off more or less the same trick in Iraq, Libya and nearly in Syria. In hindsight this doesn’t appear to have been a very good idea. That is, if you think wars are fought for the reasons we are told.

Having bombed Iraq into the stone age, to stop its regime producing the WMDs it didn’t have, the US then “rescued” the country, from the horrific violence and starvation sanctions the US government itself visited upon the Iraqi people, by establishing the US led coalition’s puppet Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) government. Once installed, the CPA did things like award US engineering firm Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) a ‘sole source contract’ to fix and operate all of Iraq’s oil wells.

That US Vice President Dick Cheney, who lied passionately about Iraqi WMD, was also in receipt of an annual $2M stipend from KBR was just a coincidence. As was the massive boost to the value of his Halliburton shareholdings as a direct result of the war he was instrumental in starting.

When the former UK Prime Minister Teresa May OK’d missile trikes upon Syrian civilians, the fact that her husband made millions out of it, as his investments in missile manufactures went through the roof, was also just a coincidence. In no way did she personally profit from killing children and the fact that her family continues to make a fortune by killing more children in Yemen does not undermine Theresa’s very public profile as a champion of good causes. Although, it appears, not killing children isn’t one of them.

So we shouldn’t be surprised when, once again, we discover that war, far from an impediment to business, actually improves operational margins, increases production, boosts markets and offers white collar criminal enterprises industrial scale profits.

Sure, people, including children, die in huge numbers but so what? Where there’s muck there’s brass. War certainly is a racket.

It turns out that Ukraine has been buying Russian fuel from the EU member state Bulgaria throughout the Ukraine War. An odd oversight for alleged combatants in a war. It is similar to the Ukrainian government’s decision to allow the continuing transit of Russian gas from Gazprom to EU markets through its resident pipelines.

The Russian energy giant Lukoil, whose former CEO Ravil Maganov accidentally fell out of a window a few months ago—a common problem for the wrong Russian executives—has been shipping Russian oil to its refinery in the Bulgarian port city of Burgas. The Burgas refinery is the only one in Bulgaria and the largest in the Balkans. From there the refined gas-oil (red diesel) is exported to Russia’s supposed enemy, Ukraine.

This was all being done in secret, says the Russian MSM, although this is just perception management, pro-war propaganda. There has also been a lot of nonsense written by the Western MSM, alleging that Bulgaria has been illicitly circumnavigating EU “sanctions.” Regardless of the fact that this too is monumental tripe.

There isn’t anything “secret” about it. In truth, the door was left open for Russia and Bulgaria to continue this trade, at least until the end of 2024, because the EU inserted a loophole to ensure that they could. Presumably, the Russian government knew nothing about the massive oil shipments, which is why it remained a “secret,” according to Russian MSM.

Given that the “secrecy” narrative is total claptrap, why would both the Western and the Russian MSM want to peddle essentially the same disinformation? Let’s spend a moment to reflect upon the EU’s non-sanction sanctions shall we?

It means that third party non-EU trading nations, like Kazakhstan for instance, can ship Russian oil to the EU unhindered by the inconvenience of alleged sanctions. The sanctions are for reordering global energy flows, not ending them.

While the switch-over has plunged European citizens into an energy crisis, that’s OK. It is essential for the future of the planet that Europeans are convinced to accept ever increasing energy prices. Otherwise they might not welcome the transition to the “sustainable energy” that will make their lives much worse.

Red diesel in Ukraine is used for industrial and heavy machinery, in agriculture and manufacturing for example. It is also used for, oh I don’t know, fuelling tanks and armoured personnel carriers, mobile artillery units and stuff like that.

Stories from European news outlets that Bulgaria provides nearly 40% of Ukrainian military fuel are all nonsense because reasons. Officials have denied the evidence, such as confirmation from the former Bulgarian President, so it isn’t “officially approved” evidence. Consequently, it can safely be discounted by anyone gullible enough to do so.

Don’t forget, according to Western and Russian MSM outlets, it’s all a secret. Which may come as a relief to some, because otherwise the Russian government would have been colluding with the EU to ensure that the Ukrainian military could stay in the fight wouldn’t it?

Recently, despite apparently running out of weaponry, if you believe Western propaganda that is, Russia has launched a massive missile strike on Ukraine, targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. According to Russian MSM this is part of the Russian governments efforts to undermine Ukraine’s “military capabilities.”

The fact that it ensures that Ukraine will need to be rebuilt by borrowing enormous sums from international financiers, with the diligent assistance of Gazprom investors BlackRock, is not relevant. So ignore this too please.

Gazprom sells gas to Moldova which is now going to provide gas to Ukraine via the Ukrainian transit gas pipelines that Russian bombing has accidentally missed entirely. The Moldovan government is keen to stress that this is not the gas it buys from Gazprom but is rather the gas it buys from somewhere else it hasn’t specified despite admitting that it is completely reliant upon Russian energy.

If the energy and the fuel from countries like Moldova, Bulgaria and Kazakhstan is used by the Ukrainian government’s military, which it won’t under any official circumstances whatsoever, and Gazprom gas helps keep Ukrainian’s lights on, despite the missile strikes, it looks like the Russian government’s objective is to keep Ukraine at war while hobbling it just enough to ensure it can’t win.

This can’t be true because NATO appears to be doing exactly the same thing and Russia and NATO are enemies. Although NATO’s not quite enough assistance differs from the Russian governments not quite enough aggression, it essentially amounts to the same thing.

The piddly number of tanks offered to Ukraine by its NATO “partners,” the reluctance from NATO to give Ukraine military aircraft and the tepid reception for Ukraine’s more recent pleas to join NATO, appears to signal that NATO isn’t prepared to provide, or perhaps isn’t capable of providing, the military support Ukraine would need for victory. But it is seemingly willing to give it just enough old used scrap to keep it loosing.

This means Ukrainians, the new Russian populations in the Donbas, and troops on both sides, though primarily the Ukrainians, will continue to die while the geopolitical landscape continues to shift around them. Meanwhile the military industrial complex and the billionaires it enriches, such as Elon Musk, are making a fortune. When the conflict is concluded, multinational corporations on both sides will be awarded the contracts to rebuild the stuff their government partners have just destroyed.

Butler wrote:

Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted.

While some might think it wise to add politician’s to that list, for some unfathomable reason, far more people seem to think this is a good point but that it isn’t a serious proposal. Why not? Do they not get it, do they not understand what Butler, Eisenhower, Sutton and many more like them have been trying to tell them for nearly a century?

What is it about the military industrial complex that they assume to be inevitable? Why on Earth do they think it is a “necessary evil?”

It is only necessary because millions, perhaps billions, of us accept that war is the “failure” of foreign policy and diplomacy, instead of understanding the obvious fact that it is the extension of foreign policy. As we are seeing right now with the warmongering posturing of the West and China, war is the intended product of foreign policy and sledgehammer diplomacy.

Wars don’t just “happen” by accident. They are planned, engineered and delivered as required. Our’s and our children’s deaths mean nothing to the people who we allow to lead us into war. They don’t have skin in the game but they should and we have the power to make sure that they do. All we have to do is refuse to fight. It really isn’t rocket science. Obedience is not a virtue.

But we won’t because we continue to fall for the same old lies, time and time again. We continue to imagine, like amnesiac slaves, that we can only be led to a better future by following another bunch of parasitic criminals.

Around and around we go: blowing up and starving children to death, condemning pensioners to freezing fuel poverty and accepting that we might just have to sacrifice ourselves and our loved ones along the way.

When the warmongers next press gang our sons and daughters into dying for their ambitions, we will again say it is in a good cause: for the defence of our country, our culture or our way of life.

It isn’t, it never was and it never will be as long as we continue to go along with it.

Hegemon USA and Its Western Vassals: An Unparalleled Threat to Humanity

By Stephen Lendman

Source: Stephen Lendman Blog

From inception, hegemon USA has been a warrior state, an aggressor abhorrent of peace and stability.

In its near-250-year history, it’s been at peace during only 21 of those years — at war against one or more invented enemies over 90% of the time.

Throughout the post-WW II period, it’s been at war by hot and/or other means against dozens of nations threatening no one.

Far and away more than any other countries in world history, the empire of lies and mass deception shuns peace in favor of perpetual war-making against nations unwilling to be subservient to a higher power in Washington.

Currently at war on Russia by use of Nazified Ukrainian foot soldiers, hegemon USA wants it waged perpetually, no matter the human cost.

During a Security Council session last week, Russia’s UN envoy, Vassily Nebenzia, slammed hegemon USA and its Western vassals for shunning conflict resolution in Ukraine in favor of perpetual war.

Peace is an anathema notion for their ruling regimes at a time when Germany’s militant Russophobic foreign minister, Baerbock, expressed support for US-dominated NATO’s preemptive war on Russia.

US/Western merchants of death and human misery rely on war-making for maximum revenue and profiteering.

Billions of US dollars for Ukrainian Nazis go directly to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamic, Northrup Grumman and other merchants of death and mass destruction.

War-making is big business. According to Nebenzia:

US-dominated NATO regimes want it waged perpetually against invented enemy Russia — no matter UAF losses of manpower, arms and equipment.

Hegemon USA and its Western vassals long ago abandoned the rule of law and whatever scant morality their ruling regimes once had.

Using expendable Ukrainian foot soldiers as cannon fodder they don’t give a damn about, they want forever war waged on Russia to the last involuntary conscript.

US/Western regimes are arming them with chemical and other banned weapons, encouraging their use against Russian forces.

They picked a fight with an adversary able to retaliate against aggression with overwhelming force.

Russia is committed to assure “that no threat to (the Motherland), our allies, culture or language ever again comes from Ukrainian territory,” Nebenzia stressed, adding:

“And we will see to it that (the US-installed regime) never again glorifies Hitler’s accomplices who exterminated hundreds of thousands of Jews, Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians.”

Invited by Russia to speak truth to power at the Security Council, activist Pink Floyd founder, Roger Waters, said the following in part:

“We do not willingly raise our sons and daughters to provide fodder for your cannons.”

“The only sensible course of action today is an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine.”

“No if’s, no but’s, no and’s.”

Waters called for the fake Biden, US-installed puppet Zelensky and preeminent world leader, Vladimir Putin, to “change course (by) agree(ing) to a ceasefire now.”

Puppet Zelensky, the US, NATO regimes, Russia, the EU — “all of you, please change course now.

“Agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine today,” Waters stressed.

At age-79, he passionately supports peace and stability over endless wars of aggression against invented enemies.

The Russian Federation and Vladimir Putin personally are on the right side of history — US-dominated NATO regimes on the wrong side by waging perpetual wars of aggression against nonthreatening nations.

“Anyone with half a brain can see that the conflict in Ukraine was provoked” by the Nazi-infested regime as directed by its US master. 

On a related issue, Waters compared apartheid Israel to Nazi Germany.

Mincing no words, he stressed what’s indisputable, saying:

“The Israelis are committing (slow-motion) genocide (against Palestinians) like Great Britain did during our colonial period.”

The difference between Israel and hegemon USA if that the former operates with way in the Middle East compared to what the empire of lies does worldwide.

No nation may legally circumvent international law in pursuit of its geopolitical aims.

Hegemon USA, its Western vassals, Nazi-infested Ukraine and apartheid Israel operate exclusively this way.

Based on all things Russia and Ukraine over the past year and during the run-up to what’s ongoing, I believe that WW III already began.

What’s unknown is whether the empire of lies will use nuclear weapons against Russia in a futile attempt to transform certain defeat in Ukraine to triumph — forcing Russia to retaliate with these WMDs in self-defense.

If what’s unthinkable happens, what Einstein feared may become reality.

Saying he didn’t know what weapons would be used if WW III occurs, he added:

“World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell once stressed:

“Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war.” 

The alternative is mutually assured destruction.

“If we don’t end war(s), (they’ll) end us,” HG Wells stressed.

And most likely, they’ll end with a bang, not a whimper.

There Are No Permanent Allies, Only Permanent Power

If we do not build left-right coalitions on issues such as militarism, health care, a living wage and union organizing, we will be impotent in the face of corporate power and the war machine.

Give Enough Rope – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: The Chris Hedges Report

On Sunday, February 19, I will be at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington at noon to speak at the anti-war rally, Rage Against the War Machine. There, I will be joined by Jimmy DoreDennis KucinichAnn WrightJill SteinMax BlumenthalCynthia McKinneyAnya ParampilDavid Swanson and other left-wing, anti-war activists I have shared platforms with for many years. I will also be joined by Ron PaulScott Horton and right-libertarian, anti-war figures whose political and cultural opinions I often disagree with. The inclusion of the right-wing has seen anti-war groups I respect, such as Veterans for Peace (VFP), refuse to join the rally. VFP issued a statement sent to me on Friday saying that “to endorse this event would have caused a huge disruption in VFP and had little effect on the outcome of the demonstration.” The board of Code Pink asked its co-founder, Medea Benjamin, one of the nation’s most important and effective left-wing and anti-war activists, to cancel her scheduled talk at the rally. 

“The left has become largely irrelevant in the U.S. because it is incapable of working with the right,” said Nick Brana, chair of The People’s Party, which organized the rally with libertarians. “It clings to identity politics over jobs, health care, wages and war, and condemns half the country as deplorables.”

We will not topple corporate power and the war machine alone. There has to be a left-right coalition, which will include people whose opinions are not only unpalatable but even repugnant, or we will remain marginalized and ineffectual. This is a fact of political life. Alliances are built around particular issues, in this case permanent war, which often fall apart when confronting other concerns. If I had organized the rally, there are some speakers I would not have invited. But I didn’t. This does not mean that there are no red lines: I would not join a protest that included neo-Nazi groups such as Aryan Nations or militias such as The Proud Boys or Oath Keepers. 

My father, a Presbyterian minister who was an army sergeant in North Africa during World War II, was a member of Concerned Clergy and Laity About Vietnam, an anti-war group that included the radical Catholic priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan. He took me with other clergy, almost all veterans, to anti-war rallies. There was much in the anti-war movement that he and other members of the religious group opposed, from the Yippies — who put forward a 145-pound pig named Pigasus the Immortal as a presidential candidate in 1968 — to groups such as the Weather Underground that embraced violence. He and the other clergy disliked the widespread drug use and propensity of some protestors to insult and bait the police. They had little in common with the Maoists, Stalinists, Leninists and Trotskyites within the movement. Daniel Berrigan, one of the most important anti-war activists in American history who was constantly in and out of jail and spent two years in federal prison, opposed abortion — a stance that today would probably see him deplatformed by many on the left. These clergy understood that the masters of war were their real enemies. They understood that the success of the anti-war movement meant forming alliances with people whose ideologies and beliefs were far removed from their pacifism, abstemious lifestyles and Christian faith. When I was about 12, my father told me that if the war was still going on when I turned 18 and I was drafted, he would go to prison with me. The jolt of that promise has remained with me my entire life.

The demands of the Rage Against the War Machine rally are ones I share. They include Not One More Penny for War in Ukraine; Negotiate Peace; Stop the War Inflation; Disband NATO; Global Nuclear De-Escalation; Slash the Pentagon Budget; Abolish the CIA and Military Industrial Deep State; Abolish War and Empire; Restore Civil Liberties; and Free Julian Assange.

I know war. I spent two decades reporting on conflicts all over the globe, including many months in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, containing two million people including over a million children. I saw thousands of lives destroyed by United States military adventurism in Central America, Africa and the Middle East. Dozens of people I knew and worked with, including Kurt Schork, a Reuters reporter, and the Spanish cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora, died violent deaths.  

We must halt the decades of rampant and futile industrial killing. This includes ending the proxy war in Ukraine. It includes drastic cuts to the funding of the U.S. war machine, a state within a state. It includes disbanding NATO, which was established to prevent Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, not wage war around the globe. If Western promises to Moscow not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany had been kept, I expect the Ukrainian war would have never happened.

To those who suffer directly from U.S. aggression, these demands are not academic and theoretical issues. The victims of this militarism do not have the luxury of virtue-signaling. They want the rule of law to be reinstated and the slaughter stopped. So do I. They welcome any ally who opposes endless war. For them, it is a matter of life or death. If some of those on the right are anti-war, if they also want to free Julian Assange, it makes no sense to ignore them. These are urgent existential issues that, if we do not mobilize soon, could see us slip into a direct confrontation with Russia, and perhaps China, which could lead to nuclear war. 

The Democratic Party, along with most of the Republican Party, is captive to the militarists. Each year, Congress increases the budget for the war industry, including for fiscal year 2023. It approved $847 billion for the military — a total that is boosted to $858 billion when accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction are included. The Democrats, including nearly all 100 members of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Republicans slavishly hand the Pentagon everything it demands.

The rally on February 19 is not about eliminating Social Security and Medicare or abolishing the minimum wage, which many libertarians propose. It is not a rally to denounce the rights of the LGBTQ community, which have been attacked by at least one of the speakers. It is a rally to end permanent war. Should these right-wing participants organize around those other issues, I will be on the other side of the barricades.

“I supported the Rage Against the War Machine Rally from the time of its conception and I support it today, even though I will not be one of the speakers because the organization I have been associated with for 20 years, CODEPINK, urged me not to speak,” Medea Benjamin told me in an email. “The CODEPINK staff felt that my participation would hurt the group’s standing with other coalitions committed to gay rights, women’s rights and anti-racism. They felt that Jackson Hinkle has taken stands that are anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-feminist and Islamophobic, and they were concerned about the sponsorship of the Libertarian Party’s Mises Caucus which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, has ties to white nationalists.”

“So why do I support the rally?” she asked. “Because I am heartbroken by a war that is causing such death and destruction in Ukraine. Because I have real fears that this war could lead us into World War III or a nuclear confrontation. Because both political parties are complicit in giving over $100 billion to Ukraine to keep this war going. Because the Biden administration is pushing this war to weaken Russia instead of promoting solutions. Because we urgently need as many voices as possible, from a broad variety of perspectives, to speak out so we can be much more effective at pressuring Congress and the White House to move this conflict from the bloody battlefield to the negotiating table. The future of our world stands in the balance.”

Benjamin said although she will not speak, she will be at the rally “cheering on the speakers” and is planning a lobby day two days later, on February 21, for those who want to take their anti-war message directly to the offices of Congress. You can register for the lobby day here.

Ralph Nader, who has just founded the Capitol Hill Citizena newspaper focused on Congress, has long advocated a left-right coalition as the only effective mechanism to push back against corporate power. He argues that those on the left who refuse to join left-right alliances are engaging in “self-immolation.” This refusal, he says, fosters political paralysis, not unlike the paralysis in the face of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts in the 1950s against supposed Communists. Although many loathed McCarthy, the Republican establishment refused to join forces with the liberals and Democrats to end the smearing, blacklisting and imprisonment of dissidents. The left-right coalition is especially important if we are to rebuild labor unions, Nader points out, the only mechanism capable of crippling the ruling oligarchy. If we cannot reach across ideological divides, we will slit our own throats.  

“A left-right alliance on issue after issue, whether it’s on a living wage, ending endless wars of aggression by the United States; whether it’s striking down hard on corporate crime, fraud and abuse; whether it’s universal health insurance is an unbeatable movement,” Nader told me when I reached him by phone. “Just think of a senator receiving ten constituents from back home and five are liberals and five are conservatives. How is a senator going to game them? How is a senator going to sugarcoat them? It’s very difficult. Any time there is a left-right alliance, as in the enactment over 30 years ago of the Federal False Claims Act to go after corporate fraud in government programs and contracts, it’s an unbeatable combination.”

Sponsored by leading Republicans and Democrats, the False Claims Act amendments of 1986 have been used by the federal government to recover more than $62 billion of fraud and mismanagement funds stolen by corporations with government contracts.

“If you want to prevail on Congress to fulfill its duties under the Constitution and never engage in wars or become co-belligerents without a declaration of war by Congress — the last war that was declared by Congress was World War II, and we’ve engaged in many wars since then and are continuing to do so — you must have a left-right coalition,” Nader said. “Because there is no coalition in Congress, both Republicans and Democrats are war parties. They support a Pentagon budget that gives the generals more than they ask for. They have done this for almost eight years, most recently giving the Pentagon $48 billion more than the generals and President Biden requested, instead of giving that money for public health to prevent pandemics, death, injury and disease.”

Those who will pay the steepest price for this paralysis are those killed, wounded and displaced by the war machine, including the over 900,000 civilians killed directly, and millions more indirectly, as a result in the post-9/11 U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Pakistan. But the left, mesmerized by a self-defeating boutique activism, also pays a price. As the empire unravels, the woke left, demanding moral absolutism, marginalizes and discredits itself at a moment of crisis. This myopia is a gift to the oligarchs, militarists and Christian fascists we must defeat.

Distract, Divide and Conquer: The Painful Truth About the State of Our Union

By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness.

These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, yet we cannot afford to ignore them much longer.

Foreign interests are buying up our farmland and holding our national debt. As of 2021, foreign persons and entities owned 40.8 million acres of U.S. agricultural land, 47% of which was forestland, 29% in cropland, and 22% in pastureland. Foreign land holdings have increased by an average of 2.2 million acres per year since 2015. Foreign countries also own $7.4 trillion worth of U.S. national debt, with Japan and China ranked as our two largest foreign holders of our debt.

Corporate and governmental censorship have created digital dictators. While the “Twitter files” revealed the lengths to which the FBI has gone to monitor and censor social media content, the government has been colluding with the tech sector for some time now in order to silence its critics and target “dangerous” speech in the name of fighting so-called disinformation. The threat of being labelled “disinformation” is being used to undermine anyone who asks questions, challenges the status quo, and engages in critical thinking.

Middle- and lower-income Americans are barely keeping up. Rising costs of housing, food, gas and other necessities are presenting nearly insurmountable hurdles towards financial independence for the majority of households who are scrambling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, mounting layoffs in the tens of thousands are adding to the fiscal pain.

The government is attempting to weaponize mental health care. Increasingly, in communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, even if they pose no danger to others. While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with the government’s ongoing efforts to predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), the specter of mental health round-ups begins to sound less far-fetched.

The military’s global occupation is spreading our resources thin and endangering us at home. America’s war spending and commitment to policing the rest of the world are bankrupting the nation and spreading our troops dangerously thin. In 2022 alone, the U.S. approved more than $50 billion in aid for Ukraine, half of which went towards military spending, with more on the way. The U.S. also maintains some 750 military bases in 80 countries around the world.

Deepfakes, AI and virtual reality are blurring the line between reality and a computer-generated illusion. Powered by AI software, deepfake audio and video move us into an age where it is almost impossible to discern what is real, especially as it relates to truth and disinformation. At the same time, the technology sector continues to use virtual reality to develop a digital universe—the metaverse—that is envisioned as being the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one.

Advances in technology are outstripping our ability to protect ourselves from its menacing side, both in times of rights, humanity and workforce. In the absence of constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, we desperately need an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.

The courts have aligned themselves with the police state. In one ruling after another, the courts have used the doctrine of qualified immunity to shield police officers from accountability for misconduct, tacitly giving them a green light to act as judge, jury and executioner on the populace. All the while, police violence, the result of training that emphasizes brute force over constitutional restraints, continues to endanger the public.

The nation’s dependence on foreign imports has fueled a $1 trillion trade deficit. While analysts have pointed to the burgeoning trade deficit as a sign that the U.S. economy is growing, it underscores the extent to which very little is actually made in America anymore.

World governments, including the U.S., continue to use national crises such as COVID-19 to expand their emergency powers. None are willing to relinquish these powers when the crisis passes. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the U.S. government still has 42 declared national emergencies in effect, allowing it to sidestep constitutional protocols that maintain a system of checks and balances. For instance, the emergency declared after the 9/11 has yet to be withdrawn.

The nation’s infrastructure is rapidly falling apart. Many of the country’s roads, bridges, airports, dams, levees and water systems are woefully outdated and in dire need of overhauling, and have fallen behind that of other developed countries in recent years. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that crumbling infrastructure costs every American household $3,300 in hidden costs a year due to lost time, increased fuel consumption while sitting in traffic jams, and extra car repairs due to poor road conditions.

The nation is about to hit a healthcare crisis. Despite the fact that the U.S. spends more on health care than any other high-income country, it has the worst health outcomes than its peer nations. Experts are also predicting a collapse in the U.S. health care system as the medical community deals with growing staff shortages and shuttered facilities.

These are just a small sampling of the many looming problems that threaten to overwhelm us in the near future.

Thus far, Americans seem inclined to just switch the channel, tune out what they don’t want to hear, and tune into their own personal echo chambers.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

New Cold War Propaganda: About China’s Spy Balloon and the US Spy Planes that have Violated the Airspace of Sovereign Nations

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Washington’s political establishment says China was spying on US sovereign territory with what China has called their ‘weather balloon.  China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry Spokesperson issued a statement:

The airship is from China. It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course. The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure. The Chinese side will continue communicating with the US side and properly handle this unexpected situation caused by force majeure

However, the Western mainstream-media has been non-stop with the hysteria on China’s “spy balloon” invading US sovereign territory, but when it comes to the US government and its Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) who has consistently invaded the airspace of many sovereign countries, it is barely mentioned and forgotten.  The bottom line is that the China balloon story is all about war propaganda.  The US and its allies are setting the stage for another war, this time against China. 

The Associated Press (AP) China balloon: Many questions about suspected spy in the sky reported on what the Pentagon has claimed regarding China’s spy balloon, “The Pentagon says the balloon, which is carrying sensors and surveillance equipment, is maneuverable and has shown it can change course. It has loitered over sensitive areas of Montana where nuclear warheads are siloed, leading the military to take actions to prevent it from collecting intelligence.”  Brigadier General Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s press secretary said, “the balloon was not a military or physical threat” and that “once the balloon was detected, the U.S. government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information.”  

CNN also jumped in on the propaganda bandwagon and published What is a suspected Chinese spy balloon doing above the US?’, and surprisingly asked a legit question, “Don’t spies use satellites now?”  But CNN switched back to  its propaganda mode when they reported on what Peter Layton, a fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia and former Royal Australian Air Force officer had said, “Using balloons as spy platforms goes back to the early days of the Cold War. Since then, the US has used hundreds of them to monitor its adversaries.”  So, the US has used these types of balloons in the past, “But with the advent of modern satellite technology enabling the gathering of overflight intelligence data from space, the use of surveillance balloons had been going out of fashion.  Or at least until now.”  They mention the advancement of “miniaturization of electronics” which complements the idea of “floating intelligence platforms.”  Layton said that “Balloon payloads can now weigh less and so the balloons can be smaller, cheaper and easier to launch.”  An article published by The Washington Post ‘How do stratospheric Balloons Work? Here’s a Visual Guidesaid that “Experts in national security and aerospace said the craft appears to share characteristics with high-altitudes balloons used by developed countries around the world for weather forecasting, telecommunications and scientific research.”   

The Democrats and Republicans are united against a common adversary and that is China.  They say how dare the Chinese Communist Party release a surveillance balloon on our sovereign territory and defy international law.  Well, it is true that a foreign object that invades a sovereign country’s airspace  does violate international law, but for decades, the US has invaded the sovereign airspace of many countries around the world including Nicaragua, Venezuela, Iran, and others. 

So let’s go back to November 11th, 1984, the United Press International (UPI) headlined with Nicaragua said U.S. spy planes Sunday broke the sound… reported that “Nicaragua said U.S. spy planes Sunday broke the sound barrier twice over the country, causing minor damages and fueling the leftist Sandinista government’s fears of an American invasion.”  The SR-71 or its more accurate name, “The SR-71 “Blackbird” is used for “strategic reconnaissance” or in other words, to spy on its adversaries.  The SR-71 Blackbird is manufactured by Lockheed Martin, a heavyweight in the MIC was identified by the Sandinistas during the time of the Iran-Contra affair “Within two hours of each other, what the Nicaraguans identified as a U.S. SR-71 ‘Blackbird’ jets flew over Managua and other cities, breaking the sound barrier with a loud boom.”                  

Another incident happened on December 5th, 2011, this time in Iran. Lockheed Martin’s RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was noticed in the city of Kashmar, located in northeastern Iran and was seized by a cyberwarfare unit from Iranian forces.  The Cyberwarfare unit gained control of the UAV spy drone and landed the plane although the western media reported that the spy plane was shot down.  The Obama regime initially denied Iran’s claims but later admitted that the aircraft that was supposedly shot down, was a US drone.  Iran did file a complaint to the United Nations over the US violating its airspace shortly after.  The RQ-170 Sentinel Unmanned Aerial Vehicle is described in Airforce-technology.com as “a high altitude and long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed and manufactured by Skunk Works, a division of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the United States Air Force (USAF)” and that “The UAV can capture real-time imagery of the battlefield and transfer the data to the ground control station (GCS) through a line of sight (LOS) communication data link.”  It was also used against various countries, “The low-observable design enables the aircraft to fly on the borders of Iran, China, India and Pakistan for capturing real-time information regarding missile tests, telemetry and multispectral intelligence.”

On July 21st, 2019, Venezuela’s airspace was also violated by the US military as Reuter’s headlined with U.S. says Venezuelan plane aggressively shadowed a U.S. military aircraftnot mentioning that it was a spy plane, “The U.S. military on Sunday accused a Venezuelan fighter aircraft of “aggressively” shadowing a U.S. Navy EP-3 Aries II plane over international airspace, in yet another sign of the increasing hostility between the two nations.”  Keep in mind that that Obama had imposed sanctions against Venezuela, “The encounter between the U.S. and Venezuelan planes occurred on Friday, the same day that the Trump administration announced it was sanctioning four top officials in Venezuela’s military counterintelligence agency.”  The US military had issued a statement about the incident and said that “it had determined the “Russian-made fighter aggressively shadowed the EP-3 at an unsafe distance in international airspace for a prolonged period of time, endangering the safety of the crew and jeopardizing the EP-3 mission.”  So, what was that mission?  To spy on Venezuela’s oil fields?  This was during the time when the Trump regime’s hostilities towards the Maduro government was at an all-time high,  “U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has repeatedly used sanctions in an effort to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whose 2018 re-election has been deemed illegitimate by the United States and most Western nations.”  The EP-3 stems from the P-3 Orion.  The P-3 Orion is an anti-submarine and surveillance aircraft also developed by Lockheed Martin in the 1960’s for the US Navy.  The EP-3 known as ARIES (Airborne Reconnaissance Integrated Electronic System) has specific capabilities that can intercept various signals.  It is an aircraft that is operated by naval personnel with specific skills that includes cryptographers, technicians and even linguists to translate intercepted messages in foreign languages. 

Online news website ‘The Drive’ is one of the internet’s main sources for news, features and guides about modern automotive culture and other technologies has a section called ‘The War Zone’ published an article titled The U.S. Army’s Newest Spy Plane in Action in Africa and Latin America admits that “After almost getting canned in 2012, the enhanced Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System is now snooping abroad.”  “Rules for thee, and not for me” is the US model, so “snooping abroad” is I guess justified.  According to The Drive:

The first version of the U.S. Army’s newest spy plane is in action in Africa and Latin America. At the same time, the service is finishing tests of three additional sub-variants in Arizona.  On March 12, 2017, Scout Warrior first reported these overseas deployments. The War Zone subsequently learned only some of the four signals intelligence-focused versions of the Enhanced Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System (EMARSS-S) were snooping abroad.

In an Email, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Sean Smith confirmed this particular model was supporting U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) operations. “There are no other EMARSS variants fielded or deployed at this time,” he added.  Despite its name, the EMARSS-S has a suite of signal-snooping gear to track and listen in on enemy communications, as well as the ability to record full-motion video during the day or at night. Each aircraft also has work stations connected to the controversial Distributed Common Ground System – Army (DCGS-A) intelligence data network, which is supposed to help collect, compile, and distribute information rapidly across units

Not only do they openly admit that the US has spy planes in Africa and Latin America, to them it makes perfect sense! 

Sending the aircraft to work with AFRICOM and SOUTHCOM makes perfect sense for early deployments. The regions these commands work are relatively low threat environments for American aircraft, but offer no shortage of work tracking drug smugglers, terrorists, and insurgents in remote areas

Let me get this straight, they are using spy planes “to track drug smugglers, terrorists, and insurgents”?  Call me cynical but “tracking drug smugglers, terrorists and insurgents” is only a half-truth.  Maybe in a small number of cases they have tracked real drug smugglers and others, but the US government has been involved in drug smuggling operations in the past, just ask the CIA.  As for tracking terrorists, the US government and the intelligence community has supported terrorists in the Middle East and Latin America for decades and as for tracking insurgencies of let’s say, in Iraq, it is usually against US and NATO occupiers, so who are they fooling? 

In Central and South America and Africa, Army spy planes such as the RC-12X Guardrail Common Sensor (GRCS) and EO-5C Airborne Reconnaissance Low – Multisensor (ARL-M) already fly routine missions, in cooperation with other aircraft and personnel from the U.S. Air Force, American law enforcement agencies, local security forces, and private contractors. After 9/11, the Pentagon found renewed interest in monitoring terrorist groups and potential hotspots in Africa with a similar mix of assets

To the US establishment, any form of spying on its territory is considered a declaration of war, but any violation of airspace of their perceived enemies anywhere in the Global South is justified because the US government can do whatever they want and bypass international law.  The Chinese spy balloon story is to create fear that an enemy is collecting data on its nuclear missile sites and on the American people.  Now they are accusing China of spying on Latin America with another balloon which asks the obvious question, why?  China has a good relationship with most of Latin America.  The US establishment, the MIC and the mainstream media are all pushing for a new war with a nuclear power that has a formidable military that would fight any foreign invasion on its territory.  China is not interested in becoming a global empire, it is the US who wants to remain a global empire.  It’s all war propaganda, nothing more, and nothing less.             

A Star is Born!

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com


“Everything that can be engineered is being engineered dishonestly.” —Truman Verdun

If you think the reasons behind the First World War were incomprehensible, imagine what historians of the future — pan-fraying peccary loins over their camp fires — will think about World War Three. Some people started something in Ukraine… and then the USA blew up the main energy supply line of its NATO ally, Germany… say, what…?!?

    Weird, a little bit.  A sane person in a sane world would call sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines an act-of-war against a friendly nation, since the result was to virtually destroy the basis of Germany’s industry, not to mention the domestic comfort of German citizens. Now, thanks to 85-year-old Seymour Hersh, the independent investigator who uncovered the My Lai Massacre in 1969 and reported on the depraved antics of American jailers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, we have a pretty good idea how the Nord Stream caper went down.

     For a year before the op, “Joe Biden” and Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland — architect of the 2014 Maidan Coup in Ukraine, which kicked-off the present fiasco there — blabbed about “ending” the Nord Streams. Curiously, the Germans said nothing. Meanwhile, the US made a deal to beef up military bases in Norway, an original NATO signatory (1949), for staging the Nord Stream sabotage op. Of course, Norway, being Western Europe’s remaining sole oil-and-gas exporter, had an interest in eliminating its competition.

    In June of 2022, under cover of an annual NATO naval exercise in the Baltic Sea, US Navy divers attached mines to the Nord Stream pipelines. The mines had triggers that could be activated remotely at any time of choosing, and that moment came on September 26… kaboom. Ms. Nuland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken gloated publicly. Naturally, the US blamed Russia. America’s news media — catamite of the Intel Community — amplified the charge, despite the absurdity of Russia blowing up its most lucrative source of export revenue. The New York Times has so far made no mention of Mr. Hersh’s recent update of the Nord Stream sabotage.

     Germany, too, hardly made a peep, nor did the rest of Western Europe, which now faces a future that looks, energy-wise, like a return to the Fourteenth Century. Maybe they’re all jaded with modern life, all that tiresome bathing and malingering in the brightly-lit cafes. Under the sagacious guidance of the WEF they were all going “green,” anyway — but was that green like the heart-shaped leaves of the linden tree or green like the moldy veins in Roquefort cheese? I guess they’ll find out.

     Luckily, America had the Chinese balloon to distract them, and then “Joe B’s” State-of-the-Union extravaganza where the nation learned that we are living in the most extraordinary economic boom since the days of Babe Ruth and Charlie Chaplin. The perpetually-vacationing Leader of the Free World has apparently made America great again, despite the dastardly plots and ongoing insurrections of his far-right, white supremacist adversaries. Did the annual SOTU smell a little bit like a reelection pitch, though? I hope so.

     Speaking of insurrection, the House commenced hearings this past week, debuting with the Oversight Committee’s witness panel of Twitter execs who carried out a years-long censorship campaign against the First Amendment in cahoots with the FBI, CIA, DOD, DOJ, DOS, DHS… well you get the picture. A more arrogant crew of dedicated fascists would be hard to find in any other corner of the world today, except perhaps Canada, than the likes of Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, Anika Collier Navaroli, and James Baker, former chief counsel of the FBI. They “moderated” speech on the chat app for the good of the American people, you understand, lest the public succumb to “misinformation” — otherwise known as reality.

     One reality being that the sedulously-repressed news of Hunter Biden’s crime-stuffed laptop represented interference in the 2020 election. James Baker told the committee he could not recall at the time (October 2020) whether he spoke to anyone back in his old haunts at the FBI about the matter — though there is no question that, as chief counsel, he knew the agency had possession of the laptop since 2019, and what was in it. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) warned the four former Twitter employees that “this is the investigation part, later comes the arrest part.” Let’s hope so on that one, too.

     Meanwhile, the House Special Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held a lively colloquy with four “experts” including former FBI agents Nicole Parker and Thomas Baker, GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley, and one Elliot Williams, former DOJ Assistant AG and currently shill for DC Lawfare tank the Raban Group. The theme, generally, was the change-in-mission in the FBI-DOJ nexus from law enforcement to harassment of US citizens who oppose Democratic Party policy.

     Most instructive in Thursday’s session, though, was the political debut of Rep. Danial Sachs Goldman (real name), newly elected member for New York’s Tenth District (which encompasses Wall Street). Among other distinctions, Mr. Goldman is an heir to the Levi-Strauss blue jeans fortune, and was lead counsel during the 2019 impeachment hearings against Donald Trump in the House Intelligence Committee. This vicious prick, an apt replacement for the inveterate liar and seditionist, Rep. Adam Schiff (CA), put on a florid demonstration of hectoring witnesses, cutting them off, and re-directing the committee’s attention at every opportunity to the so-called “insurrection” at the Capitol of 1/6/20.

      Mr. Goldman is a man to watch, especially as the House actually does give its complete attention later this year to the 1/6/20 matter and the true facts behind the FBI’s engineering of the event, including the nefarious actions of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Capitol Police. When it comes, I can’t wait to watch Mr. Goldman unwind like one of those cheap counterfeit Rolex watchers that peddlers hawk on Wall Street’s sidewalk.

Quake Delivers Earth-Shattering Blow to U.S.-Led NATO Hypocrisy

By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

When a real-world emergency happens, all of NATO’s pious and self-regarding talk implodes in a pile of dust.

A 7.8. magnitude earthquake hits Europe’s southern neighbors Türkiye and Syria – and the NATO alliance does next to nothing in response. What sort of security organization is that?

Rather, it seems to be too busy trying to start World War Three by undertaking an unprecedented mobilization of resources and equipment in Ukraine against Russia. A mobilization that is completely unwarranted and indeed is an audacious gaslighting charade played on the Western public.

The United States-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization has an annual military budget that exceeds well over $1 trillion spread over its 30 member nations. One of those members is Türkiye.

What sort of priorities has NATO? Not rhetorical, theoretical, or presumed priorities, but real-life practical, demonstrable priorities.

On Monday morning this week, southern Türkiye and neighboring Syria were devastated by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake and multiple huge aftershocks. The death toll in both countries has risen to over 11,000 with tens of thousands injured and made homeless. With thousands of missing people trapped under rubble, the casualties will increase over the coming days.

Many countries were quick to send emergency rescue teams to the zone of havoc that straddles the border between Türkiye and Syria. Russia and Iran – experienced in such natural disasters – were among the first neighboring countries to send in aid and salvage crews.

By contrast, the apathetic response from the U.S.-led NATO bloc has been abject. What’s even more incredible, Türkiye is a long-time prominent member of the organization and is considered a vital partner for the European Union.

NATO bills itself as a “collective security organization”. Its remit is not just about military security. It touts itself as protecting the Euro-Atlantic hemisphere from all security threats including from natural disasters. Its lackluster response to the earthquake this week on the very doorstep of Europe is like that of a big shiny red fire engine parked lazily near a building ablaze – and doing diddly-squat about it.

All one has to do is compare the massive mobilization of military and financial aid that the U.S. and NATO mounted for Ukraine. The proxy war in that country against Russia has been fueled with over $100 billion in “emergency” spending by the United States and its European allies. No expense has been spared by Western governments who have signed off a blizzard of cheques funded by their taxpaying citizens to prop up a corrupt regime in Kiev to fight against Russia. (If you don’t know about the farcical Zelensky cabal and its teeming corruption then you have been reading too much Western media and getting your geopolitical views from Hollywood celebs.)

NATO has been bragging about showing “unity” and “resolve” in support of Ukraine where Ukrainian foot-soldiers are being slaughtered in what is a proxy confrontation for Washington against Russia.

The United Nations estimates that civilian deaths in Ukraine’s year-long war are around 7,000. That’s relatively low compared with the military casualties which amount to perhaps 200,000. Up to 10 million Ukrainians have been displaced by the violence and most of them are being sheltered in Russia. About four million Ukrainians who fled their country are being put up in hotels across the European Union, given visa-free status and generous comforts funded by taxpayers.

In a matter of hours, however, the earthquake to have hit Türkiye and Syria resulted in civilian casualties far surpassing the year-long war in Ukraine.

Why aren’t the United States and NATO members mobilizing tens of billions of dollars in aid and rescue crews for the quake victims? What are all those airplanes, ships, tanks and engineering equipment for if they can’t be deployed with efficient timing and logistics to save lives? Where is the will to move heaven and earth to dig people out of crushing debris?

Of course, the answer is that NATO is not a “security organization” in the normal meaning of the word. It is a war machine that serves U.S. imperialist objectives. It’s a relic from the Cold War that has now been redeployed to fight Russia and China, and in doing so push the world to the abyss of global nuclear war – the ultimate “insecurity”.

If practical security concerns had anything to do with NATO, the disaster this week in Türkiye and Syria demonstrates beyond doubt that the organization is nothing but a monstrous hypocritical front.

This week U.S. President Joe Biden gave his State of the Union speech before Congress. He was speaking less than 24 hours after the earthquake wrought devastation. He did not even mention the calamity during an hour and a half of cloying self-admiration about the virtues of the “unique nation”. Preposterously, he insisted in his nationwide address that the war in Ukraine is “a test of our age” for American leadership.

Biden claimed that the ever-so-chivalrous U.S. was “defending a stronger Europe” and “defending democracy” in Ukraine from “Russian aggression”. How’s that? By installing and weaponizing a Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev from a CIA-backed coup in 2014 and which is up to its eyeballs in corruption? Joe Biden is deceiving himself and the American public with narcissistic fairytales. No wonder the United States and its Western minions are in such a mess economically, socially and morally when unabashed delusion is aired nationwide on primetime TV.

The truth is far more ugly and bloody. And the truth is that the earthquake has inflicted such horrendous damage this week because of the decade-long U.S. and NATO proxy war in Syria. That failed war from 2011 for regime change in Damascus (using Islamist terror gangs as NATO foot-soldiers) caused millions of refugees and weakened infrastructure in the afflicted border area. A humanitarian crisis was already in place before the quake struck – a humanitarian crisis that Washington and its crime syndicate NATO organization have created from their criminal intrigues for regime change.

Adding ignominy to grievous injury, the international response to the earthquake is being hampered by U.S. and European Union sanctions against the Syrian state. Washington heartlessly said this week it was not going to lift its sanctions off Damascus in the aftermath of the quake.

All the grand vanity and deception of Washington and its NATO minions gets buried in an instant by a sudden movement in tectonic plates.

The United States and its lackey Western “powers” talk endlessly – and nauseatingly – about democracy, humanitarianism and security. Then when a real-world emergency happens, all the pious and self-regarding talk implodes in a pile of dust. And when the dust settles and the heartrending cries of children fade, all that’s left of Western claims is earth-shattered hypocrisy.

Worst Ever State of the Union in US History

By Stephen Lendman

Source: The Stephen Lendman Blog

With lines scripted for him to recite via teleprompter, crib notes, and an earpiece for instructions, the fake Biden mumbled and bumbled through the regime’s Tuesday state of the union (SOTU) address for 72 painful-to-hear minutes.

It came at a time when undemocratic Dems are waging war at home on Americans targeted for elimination by kill shots and abroad against militarily, morally and ethically superior Russia — what risks humanity-destroying nuclear war if push things too far.

The fake Biden is an embarrassment to what leadership is supposed to be, what’s absent with undemocratic Dems in charge — especially with an imposter, a detached from reality buffoon in the White House.

This year’s SOTU came at a time of hegemon USA’s war against invented enemy Russia, a must-win conflict it’s losing to a superior foe.

Throughout the post-WW II period, the empire of lies and mass-deception always picked fights with militarily inferior nations free from its control — until overstepping by challenging Russia belligerently in support of Nazi-infested Ukraine, a major strategic blunder for which it’s paying dearly. 

Separately in response to international community calls for the Biden regime to aid rescue work in earthquake-devastated northern Syria by lifting illegally imposed sanctions, interventionist Blinken’s so-called spokesman, Price, showed contempt for its people in need by the following perversion of reality remarks, saying:

“It would be…counterproductive for us to reach out to a government” on the US target list for regime change for not subordinating its sovereignty and rights of its people to a higher power in Washington.

And this perversion of reality from Price, falsely claiming that the empire of lies and forever wars on invented enemies provided “more humanitarian assistance to the people of Syria than any other country (sic)” — a bald-faced Big Lie by a regime waging all-out war on nations free from its diabolical control.

Following Obama/Biden regime aggression against Syria in 2011, the empire of lies continued waging war on the country and its people by hot and other means.

At this time, hegemon USA illegally controls about one-third of Syrian territory, including its oil-rich areas and most fertile agricultural land.

Hegemon USA’s so-called 2020 Caesar Act is all about wanting 17 million Syrians starved into submission for failure of Damascus to bend to the will of the empire of lies and forever wars.

At the time of its enactment into US law, Syrian envoy to Russia, Riyad Haddad, explained that threatened US sanctions under the measure “not only target Syria, they directly or indirectly jeopardize all its allies and are also aimed against Persian Gulf countries, so that none of these countries dares to invest in” the Syrian Arab Republic.

“And each party that will say it wants to invest, must get permission from the US.”

The measure is similar to US state terror and illegal sanctions war on Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries free from its control, what aims to inflict enormous harm on their people.

At this time, US hostility toward sovereign independent nations is a sideshow compared to its aggression against Russia, what poses an ominous risk of humanity-destroying nuclear war.

As in virtually all his public remarks, the fake Biden’s SOTU trampled on truth by a litany of pre-scripted bald-faced Big Lies.

It’s how the empire of lies operates on the world stage, treating truth and full disclosure of major issues as mortal enemies. 

On March 11, 2022, the fake Biden called tanks to Nazi-infested Ukraine “WW III.”

Launched preemptively by the empire of lies against nonthreatening Russia, it’s been raging long before the fake Biden “announc(ed) that (hegemon USA) will be sending ‘Abram’ tanks to Ukrain(ian)” Nazis days earlier.

Will F-16 or other US warplanes follow — for Russia to target and destroy in flight?

The Russian Federation controls Ukrainian airspace and offshore waters.

Its high-precision hypersonic missiles can target and destroy anything threatening its security.

Sounding detached from reality and delusional, the fake Biden ignored reality about more monster than nation-state USA.

He ignored how Russia is outgunning, outmaneuvering, outwitting and defeating Nazi-infested Ukraine and the empire of lies at the same time.

And at a time of perpetual wars by hot and/or other means on invented enemies, soaring inflation and deepening economic weakness, the fake Biden pretended that Americans never had things better than since undemocratic Dems usurped power in 2020 by brazen election rigging.

And once again he ignored that what’s called covid is seasonal flu renamed, that kill shots are designed to destroy health, that democracy in the US/West exists in fantasy form alone — the real thing not tolerated at home or abroad.

What he called “the great American story” is a humanity-destroying monster.

Tucker Carlson is an exception to dominant fourth estate rubbish.

Commenting on the fake Biden’s Tuesday night SOTU before delivered, he said:

“(I)t would take a lot of brass to stand up on live television and claim that the (empire of lies and forever wars) is better off than it was when you took over” when reality is worlds apart different.

As long as undemocratic Dems run things, the ominous risk of nuclear war will threaten humanity’s survival.

Carlson correctly expected not “a single honest word” from the White House imposter in his SOTU address.

Instead of truth and full disclosure, he recited a litany of bald-faced Big Lies about all things domestic and geopolitical.

He didn’t run for president.

He was installed unelected to serve wealth, power and privileged interests exclusively at the expense of peace and beneficial social change.

At the same time, the regime he represents is waging war on Russia and losing badly to its military and tactical superiority.

On the home front, real inflation as calculated pre-1990 is 16.2%.

Most jobs created are rotten part-time ones paying poverty or sub-poverty wages with few or no benefits.

What the fake Biden called “near record low unemployment for Black and Hispanic workers” is pure fiction.

At a time when the nation’s industrial base operates in low-wage countries, he lied claiming that the empire of lies “created 800,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs, the fastest growth in 40 years (sic).”

He compounded his Big Lie by falsely claiming that “we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs (sic).”

He turned truth on its head and trampled on it by falsely blaming Russia for made-in-the-USA inflation, a fake pandemic and perpetual war-making on invented enemies.

Virtually every positive claim he made was a bald-faced Big Lie — reflecting his detachment from reality.

The empire of lies and perpetual wars on invented enemies is declining because of its imperial arrogance, its endless wars against invented enemies, and unwillingness to change its wicked ways.

The fake Biden is symbolic of hegemon USA’s nonexistent exceptionalism, its illusory moral superiority and fantasy military supremacy.

It’s the same dynamic that doomed other empires in world history.

The long ago founded US republic no longer exists, replaced by the imperial state and ruinous military Keynesianism while vital homeland needs go begging.

China, Russia and other independent nations are rising in preeminence on the world stage at a time of hegemon USA’s fall from grace with no prospect of turning things around.

The nation I grew up in long ago no longer exists.

A humanity-destroying monster replaced it.

If not effectively challenged and changed, US-launched nuclear war may kill us all.

A Final Comment

The fake Biden lied and mass-deceived by pretending to represent “all Americans.”

He was installed unelected to wage perpetual wars by hot and/or other means on invented enemies to serve wealth, power and privileged interests exclusively.

The regime he represents is an unparalleled menace to humanity at home and worldwide.

As long as it’s empowered, we’re more greatly endangered than ever before in world history because of its contempt for peace in favor of perpetual war-making on invented enemies.