Vladimir Putin in January 2017:

You know, there is a category of people who leave without saying goodbye, out of respect for the situation that has evolved, so as not to upset anything. And then there are people who keep saying goodbye but don’t leave. I believe the outgoing administration belongs to the second category.

What are we seeing in the United States? We are seeing the continuation of an acute internal political struggle despite the fact that the presidential election is over and it ended in Mr Trump’s convincing victory. Nevertheless, in my opinion, several goals are being set in this struggle. Maybe there are more, but some of them are perfectly obvious.”

The first is to undermine the legitimacy of the US president-elect. By the way, in this regard, I would like to point out that whether deliberately or not, these people are causing enormous damage to US interests. Simply enormous. The impression is that, after a practice run in Kiev, they are now ready to organise a Maidan in Washington to prevent Trump from taking office.

The reason Russian statements make so much sense is they are the product of a supercomputer playing RISK.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_(game)

Products include close proximity de-confliction zones, the Minsk and Astana agreements.

Kaliningrad is a masterpiece of high density zero conflict battlefield.

The algorithm seeks to avoid conflict.

Deconfliction zones offer the opp for the opposition to degrade themselves with violations of agreements and international law.

The aim is for citizens to lose confidence in their foreign policy and military.

This is part of what happened to France and will happen to Germany, Great Britain and the USA.

Read the Scientific American article the government deemed too dangerous to publish

The banned magazine contained an article, titled “The Hydrogen Bomb: II” written by Professor Hans Bethe, the “wartime chief of theoretical physics at Los Alamos.” His article had an imperative purpose: To clarify technical misconceptions in the daily press and to “take up the moral … meaning of the bomb in the general framework of foreign relations”…

“After such a [nuclear] war, nothing that resembled present civilization would remain … The fight for mere survival would dominate everything … Indeed it is likely that technology and science, having brought such utter misery upon man, would be suspected as works of the devil, and a new Dark Age would begin on earth. Can we who have always insisted on morality and human decency … introduce this weapon of total annihilation into the world?”..

“If we have learned any lesson from the aftermath of World War II, it is that physical destruction brings moral destruction.”

“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.” – Thomas Jefferson.

From Julian Borger at The Guardian:

In setting out the Trump administration’s Middle East policy, one of the first things Mike Pompeo made clear to his audience in Cairo is that he had come to the region as “as an evangelical Christian”.

In his speech at the American University in Cairo, Pompeo said that in his state department office: “I keep a Bible open on my desk to remind me of God and his word, and the truth…”

Vice President Mike Pence and Pompeo both cite evangelical theology as a powerful motivating force…

“We will continue to fight these battles,” the then congressman said at theSummit church in Wichita. “It is a never-ending struggle … until the rapture. Be part of it. Be in the fight…”

For many US evangelical Christians, one of the key preconditions for such a moment is the gathering of the world’s Jews in a greater Israel between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. It is a belief, known as premillenial dispensationalism or Christian Zionism – and it has very real potential consequences for US foreign policy…

Pompeo is an evangelical Presbyterian, who says he was “brought to Jesus” by other cadets at the West Point military academy in the 1980s…

Christian Zionism has become the “majority theology” among white US Evangelicals, who represent about a quarter of the adult population. In a 2015 poll, 73% of evangelical Christians said events in Israel are prophesied in the Book of Revelation…

Eighty per cent of white evangelicals voted for him in 2016, and his popularity among them is remains in the 70s…

Trump’s order to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv – over the objections of his foreign policy and national security team – is a striking example of evangelical clout…

Evangelicals, Chesnut said, “now see the United States locked into a holy war against the forces of evil who they see as embodied by Iran”…

Trump has reportedly insisted he has no intention of going to war with Iran. His desire to extricate US troops from Syria marks a break with hawks, religious and secular, who want to contain Iranian influence there.

Intel: Bolton’s Iran strike plans leaked after he elevated longtime associate

Why it matters: The leaks to US media outlets came shortly after Bolton doubled down on his hard-line Iran strategy by elevating Charles Kupperman, a longtime associate, to deputy national security adviser on Friday. Kupperman, a former Boeing and Lockheed Martin executive, previously served on the board for the Center for Security Policy, a far-right think tank advocating for a hawkish Iran policy founded by Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney.

Institute for a Secure America: Bolton brought Kupperman and Matthew Freedman, another longtime associate, onto the National Security Council last year to vet new hires. As Al-Monitor first reported in April, Bolton, Kupperman and Freedman started a nonprofit — the Institute for a Secure America — the same day that Trump tapped him to head the National Security Council in March 2018. The three men also founded another nonprofit in 2015 — the Foundation for American Security and Freedom — to air ads against the Iran nuclear deal.

The Memo That Helped Kill a Half Million People in Syria

The memo shows the advice Hillary Clinton was getting to plunge the U.S. deeper into the Syrian war. As Trump seeks to extricate the U.S. the memo has again become relevant, writes Daniel Lazare…

“Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel’s security, it would also ease Israel’s understandable fear of losing its nuclear monopoly. Then, Israel and the United States might be able to develop a common view of when the Iranian program is so dangerous that military action could be warranted…”

Putin said that Ben Rhodes and his fellow Obama officials were “trying to climb a spruce tree naked without scratching our ass.”

Placing the USA on a Collapse Continuum with Dmitry Orlov

Plans to repatriate industrial production from low-cost countries remain vaporous because the three key elements which China had as it industrialized (cheap energy, cheap labor and low cost of doing business) are altogether missing…

Now that Syria has been armed with Russia’s up-to-date air defense weapons the US no longer maintains air superiority there, and without air superiority the US military is unable to do anything…

If the dollar is no longer needed to conduct international trade, other nations no longer have hold large quantities of it in reserve…

US social collapse has largely run its course, although whether people actually believe that is an entire matter entirely. Defining “your people” is rather difficult…

Those proud, conquering, virile Yanks who met and fraternized with the Red Army at the River Elbe on April 25, 1945—where are they? Haven’t they devolved into a sad little subethnos of effeminate, porn-addicted overgrown boys who shave their pubic hair and need written permission to have sex without fear of being charged with rape?..

Your own eyes and other senses can provide all the evidence you need to make that determination for yourself and to decide how much faith to put in “the goodness of humanity” that is evident in the people around you.

War Essay- The consequences of nuclear war on US society

Nuclear power plants rely on electrically powered pumps to circulate water around the reactor cores to keep them from overheating…

Fallout from a nuclear war will be greatly exacerbated by the destruction of nuclear power plants and their spent fuel pools…’

There is often more radioactive cesium in a single spent fuel pool than was released by all the atmospheric nuclear weapon tests combined.

There are 23 GE Mark I “Fukushima” boiling water reactors in the US.

The ‘Private Governments’ That Subjugate U.S. Workers

Walmart, for example, which employs nearly 1 percent of the U.S. labor force (1.4 million workers), prohibits casual conversation, which it describes as “time theft…”

The food industry giant Tyson prevents its workers from taking toilet breaks, causing many to urinate on themselves; as a result, some workers must wear diapers…

These corporations have the legal authority, she writes, “to regulate workers’ off-hour lives as well—their political activities, speech, choice of sexual partner, use of recreational drugs, alcohol, smoking, and exercise…

These corporations, by law, can “impose a far more minute, exacting, and sweeping regulation of employees than democratic states do in any domain outside of prisons and the military…”

The self-employed baker and those who buy the bread appeal to mutual self-interest in the exchange…

The labor contract, instead of leaving the seller free as before, puts the seller under the authority of their boss…

Neoliberalism argues that the essence of freedom is free enterprise, while never addressing workers’ surrender of basic freedoms…

Among the population, only a tiny percentage—most of whom come from inherited wealth and have been groomed in elitist, plutocratic universities and institutions—dominate the corporate hierarchy…

Half of all U.S. workers make less than $29,000 a year, effectively putting their families in poverty.