Lithuanian capital Vilnius the ‘G-spot of Europe’!

Creative advertisement or desperate for money?

‘G-spot of Europe’ discovered in Lithuanian ad campaign
RT : 27 Jan, 2018

A cheeky tourist ad that proclaims Lithuanian capital Vilnius the ‘G-spot of Europe’ and gives a smart explanation to the metaphor has not only impressed people online but also got a blessing from the Baltic country’s officials.

The poster features a young woman lying on a bed with a map of Europe printed on the sheets. The woman, who is clearly experiencing intense sexual pleasure, is grabbing the sheets with the palm of her hand right in the spot where Vilnius is located.

“Vilnius, the G-spot of Europe,” the caption reads, followed by the cheeky slogan: “Nobody knows where it is but when you find it’s amazing.”

Lithuanians didn’t seem to be offended by the comparison, praising the authors of the ad for their creativity and sense of humor. The public relations specialist for the municipality of Kaunas, the country’s second largest city, Mantas Bertulis, said he would love to shake hands of those responsible for the project.

“This is probably the strongest Vilnius advertising I’ve ever seen. With this line you can go very, very far. And this is probably the best gift that Vilnius could get today. Bravo!” Bertulis wrote on his Facebook page.

Famous Lithuanian TV host, Andrius Tapinas, also agreed that a sexy vibe would help to bring more tourists to the capital, calling the ad pure “Rock. And. Roll.” The head of a major Lithuanian tourist agency, Gabriele Staraite, meanwhile, wrote on her page that the poster was “too good to be true.”

The Go Vilnius company which is involved in the promotion of tourism in the city told Delfi news website the ad wasn’t even an approved project, but a rough draft by the students of the local Atomic Garden Advertising School. However, the company said the city authorities in Vilnius were satisfied with the result and plan to develop the idea further.

Vilnius has a lot to offer to foreign visitors as its history dates back to the 14th century, with the city’s medieval Old Town declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Selected Comments:

# This is what happens when a nation has nothing left to sell except sprats (which only Russians eat and arent allowed to buy them) or male and female genitalia. Welcome to the joys of the Western HoHouse, Lithuanians.

# Villainous?

# Lithuania will not be penetrated!

# Lithuania is in vag*na while Ukraine is in an-US...

# ^deep state(s)

# Entire Europe is there - no morality, no dignity, nothing but pathetic imitation of american (anti)culture. This is the result . The real Europe was mortally wounded in WW1, killed in WW2 and buried in 1945. Fuuuck Europe ......... literally.

# If I don’t experience intense sexual pleasure when I visit then I am going to sue.

# The G stands for Garbage.

# Another beautiful gift of capitalism...

# I thought it meant it's taken over from Holland as the new sex capital of Europe!

# Lithuania is so desperate for attention that it will try anything, so let's all say together "Hello Lithuania, how are you feeling", but please stop thinking that you are the G-spot of Europe. There is no such thing.

So finally USA admits about its hacking & meddling...

No one in their right mind believes anything that Ashton Carter has to say anyway.

‘US hacks and meddling quite unlike China & Russia’s hacks and meddling’ – ex-Pentagon chief
Alexandre Antonov, RT : 27 Jan, 2018

One could almost see the proverbial pots and kettles on Friday, when ex-Pentagon chief Ashton Carter informed us that America’s cyber operations and election meddling are entirely dissimilar to the activities of China and Russia.

The panel, held as part of the World Economic Forum in Davos, was dedicated to state cyberwarfare, the risks of cyber operations spiralling out of control, and ways to rein in the emerging threat – from making better software and incentivizing people to update it, to establishing international rules for states to voluntarily observe.

The ghost of Russia’s alleged interference with 2016 election in the US haunted the event, with supporting roles as cyber menaces given to China, alleged thief of US top secret military technologies, and North Korea, alleged perpetrator of the 2014 Sony hack and last year’s WannaCry ransomware epidemic. The panel were debating how the US and the West in general can respond to such attacks, but barely mentioned the role played by the US in bringing the cyber warfare situation to its current state.

One noticeable exception came from Carter, Defense Secretary during the last two years of Barack Obama’s presidency, who tried to explain how American actions differed from those of China and Russia.

“We conduct espionage on the Internet. And when we are spied on, I don’t complain. I am unhappy with it because I wish we had not had our secrets stolen. But I put it into a different category. Covert action… is not espionage. It has the effect of harming,” he said.

So… when China steals F-35 blueprints, it harms America; when the US spies on German or Brazilian companies and gets competitive advantage in the market, that’s – no biggie? Sounds plausible. But there is more, because US meddling in foreign elections is not the same thing as somebody meddling in US elections, according to Carter.

He said China and Russia tell the US: “You stick up for democracy. You oppose leaders who are oppressing their people… That’s true, but that’s overt.”

First, being a democratically elected official does not mean the US will not have you overthrown, or worse. Just ask Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, or Chilean President Salvador Allende or, if you want someone who is still alive – Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovich.

Second, by implication if hypothetically President Vladimir Putin were to come out tomorrow and say: “OK, we hacked the DNC to help our buddy Donald,” that would somehow make all fine? Carter repeated the phrase “attack is an attack” explaining his attitude to clandestine state-sponsored cyber operations some half a dozen times during the hour-long discussion, and it didn’t sound like a nation claiming credit for one would make it less of an attack in his opinion.

The former Pentagon chief argued during the panel that the US has to “get doctrinally settled” in its response to harmful actions of other states that cannot be clearly attributed to those states. His examples were Russia’s deployment of troops with no insignia from its naval base in Crimea during the 2014 crisis in Ukraine and what he termed “stirring up minorities” in the Baltic states by Russia. “We need a war plan… We need to make it painful to do that kind of thing to us,” he said.

Frankly, the secret supply of US arms to Syrian anti-government groups, attempts to create a Cuban version of Twitter to foster dissent in the island nation or the reported hacking of the Iranian uranium enrichment facility to blow up centrifuges – arguably the best-known case of a state conducting an act of cyberwarfare on another state, by the way – all fall into the same category. But somehow no war plan for those nations was suggested during the panel.

There were some other things that the panel missed. Like the US intelligence practice of hoarding exploits. The WannaCry attack was based on leaked tools developed by the NSA, not some super-secret North Korean cyber warfare unit. Or the fact that the US public often has to trust its government when it points the finger at another nation and says ‘they did it’. Which is disconcerting, if you take into account the historic record of false claims and the fact that the US cyber warfare experts know how to fake “digital fingerprints” to make an attack look like it came from Russia or China. Or that report that the Obama administration ordered “digital bombs” planted, ready to take out critical Russian infrastructure should Washington chose to do so.

But there was silver lining – a new and pretty hilarious conspiracy theory voiced (probably by mistake) by the moderator, Edward Felsenthal, the Editor-in-Chief of Time Magazine. He mentioned the ballistic missile attack false alarm in Hawaii, saying: “And what if that had been a hack? I suppose, to some degree we don’t know it wasn’t for certain.”

Yes, we do. Unless some creative use of “alternative facts” is allowed. Thankfully, Carter explained that it was a case of human error and poorly-designed warning system interface.

Selected Comments:

# Carter's right, Russians and Chinese don't share the US' geopolitical honour of being the life-giving force behind such blessings as ISIS or al-Qaeda, or the Contras, the Mexican cartels, or the Afghan opium pandemic, internal war and drug-trafficking in Colombia, Albanian drug-and-organ traffickers in Yugoslavia, global regime change schemes, etc.

# Ash Carter, you are a delirious A55hole.

# The epitome of hypocracy. Perfecting the art of double standards.....

# ‘US hacks and meddling quite unlike China & Russia’s hacks and meddling’. You got that right, Mr. Carter. It's much worse. It's despicable. But you are just another minion. One of so many.

# Delusional liar..

# As always, when we do, it's good, for the world safe. When someone else do....kill him, it's a danger for the world safe.

# Another sanctimonious US politician on his high horse trying to smear other nations who are far better than the US government.

America needs to end its addiction to militarism

President Eisenhower warned Americans about the Military-Industrial complex. They will always "manufacture" external threats in order to justify government spending on weapons. Americans need to wake up; their money is being misspent.

US needs to kick Cold War habit and end its addiction to militarism

RT : 22 Jan, 2018

The National Defense Strategy unveiled by Pentagon chief James Mattis illustrates once again the revanchist Cold War mindset dominating Washington which is the inevitable expression of the US’ destructive addiction to militarism.

More than a quarter century after the official end of the Cold War between the US and the former Soviet Union, Washington has the cheek to label both Russia and China as “revisionist powers.”

Policy and discourse dominating Washington shows it is the US that is the biggest “revisionist power,” trying to revive ideological tensions and antagonism with Russia and China.

Defense Secretary Mattis declared last week that fighting non-state terrorism was no longer the primary focus of US national security. He said the “great power competition” with Russia and China was the new priority.

Mattis’ National Defense Strategy echoed themes contained in the National Security Strategy document published in December, which was signed off by President Trump. The NSS also cast Russia and China as “rivals” and existential threats to America’s influence in the world.

As with the NSS paper, Moscow and Beijing condemned the latest Pentagon document as being stuck in Cold War thinking and dealing with foreign relations in an “imperialistic” manner. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said it was regrettable that Washington, “instead of conducting normal dialogue is trying to prove its leadership using such confrontational concepts and strategies.”

The blatant reality is that the Pentagon is making a pitch for ever-more federal spending on America’s already gargantuan militarized economy. Listening to James Mattis, one might think that the US military is being starved of investment, thus threatening national security.

This is after the US government voted last year to increase annual military spending by $50 billion to a record high of $700 billion. Not even during the Cold War was the US military budget anywhere near the current outlay, according to comparative data cited by respected US economist David Stockman.

The US military budget is about fourteen times that of Russia and four times that of China.

Simply put, in order to justify this stupendous largesse with American tax dollars, the Pentagon is compelled, out of logical necessity, to constantly portray the world as a threatening place.

“We are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order – creating a security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory,” states the National Defense Strategy.

Ironically, as Russian military intervention in Syria helped to destroy a Western-backed terrorist mercenary army, the US is now shifting its rationale for military spending from terrorism to Russia.

It is well documented that the US economy is largely dependent on the military-industrial complex. Over half of the nation’s annual discretionary budget is consumed by federal spending on military. This is, in effect, a massive taxpayer subsidized economy driven by militarism. Yet, American capitalism claims to be the paragon of “free enterprise” and “private ownership.”

Since the end of the Second World War, the characteristic feature of the US economy is militarism and the military-industrial complex. Arguably, without this annual massive injection of public money, so-called “American capitalism” would collapse.

That’s why it is vital for US economic survival, under its prevailing economic system, that the world is constantly presented to the American taxpayers as a threat to national security. It’s the equivalent of telling children scary bedtime stories.

US-based political analyst Randy Martin says America’s war-driven economy is not only a threat to world security from the inevitable antagonisms it fosters, but also this economy is threatening the collapse of American society from exorbitant waste of resources.

It is reliably calculated that the US has racked up its national debt by some $6 trillion from wars and military spending over the past 17 years alone. That “war debt” represents nearly one-third of the total US national debt of $19 trillion – making the United States the biggest debtor nation in the world.

In comments for this column, Martin says: “The US needs to undergo its own version of Perestroika, when the Soviet Union realized during the late 1980s that its economic system was unsustainable.”

Martin adds: “The US has been addicted to economic militarism for decades. It is destroying our economy and endangering global security by continually seeking out wars and enemies. The bitter irony is that Pentagon chief James Mattis claims to be keeping the homeland safe when in fact it is the Pentagon which poses the greatest threat to American society, not fictitious enemies like Russia and China.”

Another integral factor too is that disproportionate US economic exploitation of the planet’s resources is dependent on maintaining military superiority.

With only five percent of the world’s population, the US consumes nearly 25 percent of the total fossil fuel supply, according to the WorldWatch Institute. That disproportionate American consumption of resources is a consequence of its consumer lifestyle.

On that point, Mattis was perhaps more candid than he intended when he stated in the National Defense Strategy document: “The costs of not implementing this strategy are clear. Failure to meet our defense objectives will result in decreasing US global influence, eroding cohesion among allies and partners, and reduced access to markets that will contribute to a decline in our prosperity and standard of living.”

It is a pretty shocking admission by Mattis. He’s saying that America’s “standard of living” is purchased through a strategy of military dominance over the rest of the world. He also discloses, albeit unintentionally, that what is really bothering US state planners is their diminishing power to act unilaterally as before, owing in part to the growing power of Russia, China, and others in a multipolar world.

Mattis laments: “For decades the United States has enjoyed uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, and operate how we wanted. Today, every domain is contested—air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace.”

Analyst Randy Martin says that the ideological discourse coming out of Washington is “akin to the ranting of paranoid delusion.”

“In order to justify its chronic militaristic addiction, Washington is compelled to fantasize about a world of enemies and nemesis,” he says. “The United States’ economic dependence on militarism is like a drug addiction. It craves for its annual budgetary fix and in doing so creates a world of demons.”

Let’s test that diagnosis against another quote from the Pentagon’s strategy document. It states: “In competition short of armed conflict, revisionist powers and rogue regimes are using corruption, predatory economic practices, propaganda, political subversion, proxies, and the threat or use of military force to change facts on the ground.”

Alluding to Russia’s legitimate energy trade with Europe, the Pentagon asserts: “Some are particularly adept at exploiting their economic relationships with many of our security partners.”

So, yes indeed, from ‘Russiagate’ to criminalizing Russia’s international commercial trade, the Pentagon, US media, and assorted think-tanks are all showing signs of Cold War addiction and paranoid delusion.

The US needs to kick the habit before it destroys itself and the world.

‘Executed’ North Koreans return to life !

So everyone who was killed and revealed by the western media as murdered are now alive & well, and proves yet again that the western media are liars and manipulators of the truth...

It simply underlines that the West's narrative to vilify everything about North Korea is false and how people need to stop listening to politicians & MSM.

Zombie Nation? ‘Executed’ North Koreans return to life

RT : 21 Jan, 2018

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is famous in Western media for executing people that fall out of his favor – though some seem to have found the knack of returning from the dead.

Reports regularly surface on Kim’s latest means of execution, ranging from the relatively mundane firing squad to the theatrical, or even cartoonish – such as feeding foes to packs of starving dogs or roasting them with flame-throwers.

The pop star and ‘former lover’

North Korean pop star Hyon Song-wol was spotted alive and well on TV in 2014, despite reportedly being executed by firing squad in a purge of singers, musicians and dancers, a year before.

The performer was allegedly killed along with 11 other people, including members of her group, the Moranbong Band, the head of Unhasu Orchestra, and several dancers from the Wangjaesan Light Music Band.

The 12 victims had allegedly been accused of, among other offenses, recording themselves having sex and selling the footage. Hyon Song-wol, with whom Kim was reportedly romantically entwined, most recently publicly resurfaced on Saturday to inspect Olympic venues in South Korea ahead of the Winter Games.

The military chief

Back in 2016, N. Korean army chief Ri Yong Gil was reportedly executed for “factionalism, misuse of authority, and corruption.” As with a lot of information emanating from the isolated country, this turned out to false.

South Korean intelligence officials seemed to take his removal as head of the army as confirmation of his execution. The only problem was that a couple of months later Ri Yong Gil apparently returned from the dead, with an array of new senior-level positions, when he attended the Workers’ Party Congress in May that year.

The uncle ‘executed by a pack of dogs’

Apparently Kim really has it in for his older relatives, if Western media reports are to believed. So much so, it seems, that Kim was willing to execute his own uncle, by setting a pack of 120 starving dogs on him as part of yet another purge back in 2014.

Though it appears that Jang Song Thaek was indeed executed, the ‘ripped apart by dogs’ story was a complete fabrication that first raised its head on a satirical Chinese microblogging website.

The aunt 'poisoned on request'

Further to ‘feeding his uncle to dogs’, as mentioned above, he reportedly then turned his murderous gaze towards his aunt, Kim Kyong-hui.

Kyong-hui, Kim’s father’s sister and the wife of uncle Jang Song Thaek, was reportedly executed by poisoning on the leader’s orders.

However, once again these reports turned out to be false. South Korean news agency Yonhap reported last year that she is very much alive, although she is being treated for illnesses ranging from depression to cancer.

Selected Comments:

# The way they prepared the west for war with Iraq was to vilify Saddam Hussein, portray everyday life in Iraq as dark and gloomy and falsely accuse them of preparing to use nuclear WMD. None of which proved true. Iraqis now mourn the life they once had under Saddam Hussein compared to the chaos today. North Korea is getting the same drum roll to vilify them.

# US has been manufacturing fake news about Korea since 1945 and all media in south korea are controlled by the US. Many south koreans actually believer this fake news. so it is not difficult to see why many south koreans are simply brainwashed.

# The Media has portrayed North Korea so negatively that they almost got the US to attack. But after learning about them and viewing the North Korean music videos on YouTube, Guess what? This American thinks we have been played. I watched a pop singer from North Korea. There are real people living there. Let's think a little before talking about bombing these people. The Media and politicians are very determined to create an enemy when I don't think North Korea is an enemy. They just want a little respect.

# Indeed the lying of the politicians and the mass media are a big problem, but the biggest problem is the deficit of social intelligence, gullibility, worse the credulity of the population, especially the Western mass population.

# Western media spread lies as directed by "their democratic regime". In the West there is no democracy - those who have the money/capital rules. Learnt this on my own example. Therefore until some better times we all have to suffer lies and propaganda of falling empire.

The subject header says it all...

Winston Churchill: Hero, racist, and imperialist

RT : 17 Jan, 2018

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” So said Oscar Wilde and so describes the life and legacy of Britain’s most famous and revered leader, Winston Churchill, a political giant who wore his racism and imperialism proudly.

New Churchill movie: history or hagiography?

In the wake of the release of the Hollywood biopic on Churchill, ‘Darkest Hour,’ which is attracting rave reviews and features Gary Oldman as Churchill and Kristin Scott Thomas as his long-suffering wife Clementine, a raft of articles on the man and his legacy has been produced, confirming that his place in history remains the subject of dispute and conjecture over half a century after his death in 1965.

‘Darkest Hour’ focuses on the period of Churchill’s life for which he is most famous, when as prime minister he led Britain during the darkest period in its history after the military disaster of Dunkirk in May 1940.

Prior to his ascension to the role of the nation’s prime minister, Churchill had spent years on the backbenches as a lone Cassandra, warning of the threat posed by Hitler. As far back as 1932, after returning to Britain from a trip to Germany, he addressed the House of Commons thus: “All these bands of Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for their Fatherland, are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons.”

At the end of May 1940, with Hitler’s panzers at the Channel ports of northern France, it would have come as small comfort to know that he had been proven right, and the bulk of a British political establishment in which Nazi sympathies ran deep throughout the 1930s was proven wrong.

The movie depicts the seminal struggle that took place between Churchill and those within his cabinet, led by the country’s Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax (played by Stephen Dillane), who believed there was no prospect of defeating the Germans militarily after Dunkirk, and who were adamant that the country should now seek terms with the Nazi dictator with the objective of saving the empire.

Churchill, as history reveals, saw things differently. This is powerfully depicted in the film when, exasperated at Halifax’s repeated urgings that the time had come to negotiate, he slams his desk and bellows, “When will the lesson be learned? You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth!”

The ugly side of Churchill’s legacy

But, if 1940 was Churchill’s finest hour, there were countless hours of ignominy and mendacity in his life too, which his legion of fawning admirers have done their utmost to elide in favor of the legend.

Winston Spencer Churchill, born in 1874, was a scion of class privilege in a British society suffering the dead weight of aristocracy in the late 19th century. From a young age he was captivated by war and military life, developing a Nietzschean attachment to conflict as the testing ground of so-called manly virtues of courage, honor and discipline. He experienced war up close, when as a young army officer he saw combat in India, Sudan and on the Western Front during the First World War.

This sets him apart from contemporary British ‘war leaders,’ the likes of Tony Blair and David Cameron, who’ve sent British military forces into combat with the objective of establishing their own Churchillian legacy, resulting in disaster.

The ugly side of Churchill’s legacy is, as averred in the opening paragraph, the racism and imperialism that underpinned his worldview. His belief in racial hierarchy was outlined in the testimony he gave to the Peel Commission in 1937, which was established to investigate the 1936 Arab revolt against the influx of European Jewish settlers to Palestine with the connivance of the British.

When asked about the rights of the indigenous people in Palestine, Churchill refused to accept that they had any: “I do not admit, for example, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the Black people of Australia. I do not admit that wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, to put it in that way, has come in and taken their place.”

Years previously, as Britain’s secretary for war, Churchill had championed the use chemical weapons to put down rebellion in India and Iraq, writing in a memo, “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.” He was also responsible for the use of chemical weapons in Russia in 1919 with the aim, in conjunction with various other imperialist powers, of crushing the Russian Revolution.

During the Second World War, Churchill’s disdain for non-white European peoples was laid bare with his culpability in the deaths of three million men, women and children in the Bengal Famine of 1943.

Despite the starvation that had swept through this blighted province of India, Churchill ordered the diversion of desperately needed food from India to Europe. The fact that the 70,000 tons of food exported by the British from India in the first seven months of 1943 would have kept 400,000 people alive for a year is a chilling one. “I hate Indians,” Britain’s most venerated prime minister is said to have told one of his underlings. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

Veneration and vilification in equal measure

The veneration accorded Winston Churchill for his leadership of a country on its knees after the military disaster of Dunkirk in 1940 must be weighed in the balance against his disgusting racism and fanatical imperialism. And though Churchill’s defiance of Hitler and his Nazi war machine was important, it should be pointed out that Hitler’s military and strategic priority had never been war with Britain.

On the contrary, the fascist dictator was an admirer of the British empire, which he sought to emulate in Eastern Europe with the colonization and plunder of large swathes of Russia. As William L. Shirer writes in his landmark work, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,’ after the fall of France, convinced that Britain would see sense and seek peace terms, Hitler expressed “his admiration of the British empire and [was] stressing the necessity for its existence. All he wanted from London, he said, was a free hand on the continent.”

The answer to the question of who Winston Churchill was can never be answered in a movie made with the purpose of reinforcing the reverence in which he is held in the West. Born with the blood of the English aristocracy running through his veins, he was a man for whom the world was divided between racially and culturally superior white European peoples and non-white Europeans fated to occupy the role of latter day Helots.

Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943, captured the contradictions that defined Churchill, when in his voluminous diaries he noted, “For all his seriousness, Churchill is a rather amusing man!”

Churchill the great wartime leader or Churchill the racist and imperialist? The simple answer is that he was both.

= = =

John Wight has written for newspapers and websites across the world, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal. He is also a regular commentator on RT and BBC Radio. John is currently working on a book exploring the role of the West in the Arab Spring. You can follow him on Twitter @JohnWight1

Influence of Money on U.S. Foreign Policy

Nothing new aka lobbying culture - that's actually bribery in plain English.

The UN is a fraud organization just an American dominated Ponzi buying vote scheme. America gives money to smaller nations under USAid and in turn America expects those nations to vote America's way at the UN and normally they do but they finally stood up and said enough at the Jerusalem vote well except for 9 countries that nobody has ever heard of.

Politics 101: The Influence of Money on U.S. Foreign Policy. The Cases of Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran

By Prof Rodrigue Tremblay

Global Research, January 16, 2018

 “I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. — And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.” – U.S. Republican President George W. Bush (1946- ), in a conversion with a Palestinian delegation in July 2003, during the Israeli-Palestinian summit at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

“They [the George W. Bush administration] lied… They said there were weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq]. There were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction… We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives. … Obviously, it was a mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” – U.S. Republican President Donald Trump (1946- ), statement made during a CBS News GOP presidential debate, on Saturday, February 13, 2016.

“I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.”  – Benjamin Netanyahu (1949- ), current Israeli Prime Minister, in a video in 2001, addressing Israeli settlers.

[After 9/11 in 2001, I was shown] “a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” – General Wesley Clark (1944- ), in a video interview on Tues. Mar. 2, 2007 by journalist Amy Goodman.

Just as Republican George W. Bush invented the pretext of “weapons of mass destruction”, in 2003, to deceive Americans and the rest of the world and to justify a military invasion of Iraq, Donald Trump seems to follow on Bush’s footsteps in actively searching for a pretext for another military confrontation in the Middle East, this time against Iran. George W. Bush had even claimed, at the time, that religion was behind his military interventionism when he said, in the summer of 2003, in a bout of hubristic delusion, that “God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq.”

Now another American Republican president, Donald Trump, appears to see himself on a similar mission, i.e. to attack another country, in violation of international law. This time the target of his nasty attack du jour is the country of Iran, a country run by theocrats, which is facing deep domestic problems, both economic and political. Indeed, for some time now, Trump has been making inflammatory remarks against that country’s domestic affairs, in the hope of provoking a response and thus justifying a military aggression.

According to Donald Trump, “We Should Have Never Been in Iraq.”

Donald Trump’s attacks against Iran are all the more amazing and unreal because, on multiple occasions during the last U.S. presidential campaign, candidate Trump openly accused George W. Bush of lying to invade Iraq, adding during a CBS News GOP presidential debate, on Saturday, February 13, 2016,

“We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.”

Is Donald Trump suffering from amnesia, or is he simply incoherent in his thoughts?

As a matter of fact, and despite the neocon propaganda to the contrary, the Bush-Cheney administration did destabilize the Middle East, and these politicians caused the death of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, and they created millions of refugees, many of them ending up in Europe. But possibly worse, from a U.S. and Israel point of view, the 2003 American military invasion of Iraq has resulted in significantly increasing the geopolitical influence of Shiite Iran in the region, by removing from power the Sunni government of Saddam Hussein (1937-2006) and by installing a Shiite government in its place.

This is a question that I raised in my book about the Iraq war, The New American Empire. In it, I not only questioned the legality of such a military invasion of a sovereign country, in violation of the U.N. Charter, but also its wisdom, since Iran was undoubtedly going to profit immensely from a newly installed Shiite government in Baghdad… as it did.

What is doubly amazing is that both Republican American presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, received the same uncritical financial and political support from the very same super rich American Zionist donors and from American Evangelical Christians, although Bush’s support was more widespread than Trump’s, due to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. This time around, however, Donald Trump is not only an abnormal president; he is also a minority president, staunchly supported by only about one third of Americans.

Money is King in U.S. Foreign Policy, Especially Regarding the Middle East

Nowadays, in American politics, money talks and big money talks even louder. In 2010, the partisan U.S. Supreme Court made sure that this be the case when it imposed its anti-democratic doctrine of “Money Is Speech”, in a 5-4 decision. For instance, in 2016, because of huge campaign contributions from one-issue super rich donors (mega donors), nearly all GOP primary presidential contenders, Donald Trump in front, ended up promising to move the American embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem and to ring up Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on their first day in the Oval Office, according to a Newsweek report.

So far, Donald Trump has already paid some of his political debt to his mega donors by announcing his willingness to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But even before his inauguration on January 20, 2017, Trump’s entourage was actively intervening on behalf of a foreign government, the Israeli government, at the United Nations.

Such subservience of American politicians to the wishes of big campaign contributors may partly explain why the United States has one of the lowest voter turnouts in its elections among modern world democracies. During the 2016 American Presidential election, for example, less than 56% of voting age citizens bothered to vote, a 20-year low. According to the Pew Research Center, among the 35 highly developed countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States ranks 28th in terms of turnout in recent national elections. For example, electoral turnouts in Belgium (87%), Sweden (83%) or Denmark (80%) were much higher.

Because of the overwhelming importance of money in U.S. politics and because rich pro-Israel lobbies are very active and prominent political donors, American policies in the Middle East have been increasingly skewed in the direction dictated by the Israeli government and its lobbies in the United States. There seems to exist a de facto US-Israel axis, which often includes Saudi Arabia, as far as the Middle East is concerned.

Indeed, it’s impossible to understand what has been going on for decades in that part of the world, with its string of wars, destruction and deaths, without taking into consideration the overwhelming influence of that axis, which goes beyond partisan party lines in Washington D.C. [In a speech during the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, in April 2008, when she was a presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton declared “If I’m President, we will attack Iran… We would be able to totally obliterate them!”]

A Joint U.S.-Israeli Operation Against Iran could now be in the Making

When the U.S. government wishes to undermine a foreign government and create the conditions for a regime change, one should be on the lookout for some false flag operations by well-funded so called “intelligence or covert organizations”, which are specialists in fomenting destabilization in a country, under the hypocritical cover of defending human rights.

As General Wesley Clark  (1944- ) revealed in 2007 (see quote above), Iran is the last country in a long list of countries, whose government the Pentagon had plans to overthrow. The fact that some superficial media fail to inform their readers and listeners about such well-known plans is nothing less than a journalistic scandal.

Such an overall plan would fit perfectly well with the recently announced American-Israeli “strategic plan” against Iran. It is a curious coincidence that the most important political protests in Iran since 2009 have come about just after a secret agreement was finalized between the U.S and Israel, (with the assistance of Saudi Arabia), to destabilize Iran. Indeed, in their relations with Iran, the United States and Israel seem to be acting as a single political entity.

This could also explain why President Donald Trump, against all logic, is so adamant in insisting that the Iranian government is not in compliance with the P5+1 nuclear deal, even though the U.N. and the five other nations in the deal (China, France, Russia, the U. K. and Germany) all agree that Iran is actually in compliance with the agreement. On January 12, Trump renewed his charges against the Iran Deal, without completely withdrawing his country from the deal, but by adding new conditions and economic sanctions against Iran, an act that is, in itself, a violation of the deal. The only government that is in violation of the Iran Deal is the Trump administration, not the Iranian government.

About Iran, it can be said that Donald Trump is dutifully following the long established neoconservative script, at the U.S. Pentagon and elsewhere in Washington D.C., to target this country for the same destabilization overall plan, which was implemented successfully against Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2013, without forgetting the coup in Ukraine in 2014.

It doesn’t matter much who sits in the White House or which political party controls the U.S. Congress, at a given time, the same political forces are dominant and the same neocon-inspired American foreign policy is implemented in the Middle East. The slight difference recently has been that Barack Obama was somewhat less enthusiastic in implementing the policy than George W. Bush or Donald Trump. The results, however, have been the same: governments have been overthrown and people have been killed.

Conclusion

In foreign affairs as in other matters, the Trump administration is going full speed ahead with improvised and dubious policies without fully considering all the consequences ahead. The crises will come later on.

*

International economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles”, and of “The New American Empire”.

This article was originally published by The New American Empire Blog.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Prof Rodrigue Tremblay, Global Research, 2018

The First Victim of War...

In plain words...

Supermassive black hole caught ‘burping’ gas!

A rare event caught by telescope verying related theory...

Supermassive black hole caught ‘burping’ gas by NASA telescopes

RT : 14 Jan, 2018

NASA astronomers caught a supermassive black hole “snacking on gas and then burping” it out – twice, in fact – using data from several telescopes.

The composite image shows the two ‘burps’ using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (in purple) and Hubble Space Telescope (in green, red and blue), with the galaxy named J1354.

The burps, which occurred about 100,000 years apart, are the result of the blackhole’s “two-course meal” from J1354’s previous collision with another galaxy. The crash produced a stream of stars and gas that caused the first ‘burp’ and the second outburst was a result of different clumps also caused by the stream.

“We are seeing this object feast, burp and nap, and then feast and burp once again, which theory had predicted,” said Julie Comerford of the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder’s Department of Astrophysical and Space Science.

“Fortunately, we happened to observe this galaxy at a time when we could clearly see evidence for both events.”

A “telltale sign” of the supermassive black hole – which NASA says is millions or perhaps
even billions of times bigger than our sun – was captured by Chandra in the form of a bright, point-like X-ray emission.

“The X-rays are produced by gas heated to millions of degrees by the enormous gravitational and magnetic forces near the black hole,” NASA wrote.

“Some of this gas will fall into the black hole, while a portion will be expelled in a powerful outflow of high-energy particles.”

The team compared images from Chandra and Hubble and determined that the black hole is embedded in a heavy veil of dust and gas and located in the center of the galaxy, “the expected location for such an object.”

Republications & Democrats dance to the same tune...

They are just birds of same feathers! Like America, most western (and many also eastern) countries essentially have two-party dictatorship. Once elected by people, they simply ignore the views of their constituencies, and vote on different issues in the parliaments along party lines!

Comic Relief: A Chinese man settling in America...

A Chinese moves to USA after 50 years of living in Shanghai.

He bought a home on a small piece of land.

The friendly American neighbor decides to go across and welcome the new guy.

He goes next door but on his way up the drive-way he sees the Chinese man running around his front yard chasing about 10 hens.

Not wanting to interrupt these 'Chinese customs', he decides to put the welcome on hold for the day.

Next day he decides to try again, but just as he is about to knock on the front door, he looks through the window and sees the Chinese urinate into a glass and then drink it.

Not wanting to interrupt another 'Chinese custom', he decides to put the welcome on hold for yet another day.

A day later he decides to give it one last go, but on his way next door, he sees the China-man leading a bull down the drive way .....pause...... and then put his left ear next to the bull's butt.

The American bloke can't handle this, so he goes up to the China-man and says, 'Jeez Mate, what the hell is it with your Chinese customs? I come over to welcome you to the neighborhood and see you running around the yard after hens.

The next day you are pissing in a glass and drinking it and then today you have your head so close to that bull's butt, it could just about shit on you.'



The next day you are pissing in a glass and drinking it and then today you have your head so close to that bull's butt, it could just about shit on you.'

The China man is very taken back and says, 'Sorry sir, you no understand, these no Chinese customs, I doing, these American Customs.'

'What do you mean' says the neighbor, 'Those aren't American customs.'

          _You will love this_

'Yes they are, man at travel agent tell me' replied the China-man.

'He say to become true American, I must learn to

..... chase chicks,

..... get piss drunk,

and

..... listen to bull-shit!'

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Social media as tools of US foreign policy

Conscientious people have always suspected about it but now it has been proved to be true...

From ‘Russian meddling’ to Iran regime change: Social media as tools of US policy

Finian Cunningham

RT : 5 Jan, 2018

An opponent of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani chants slogans during a protest outside the European Union Council in Brussels, Belgium January 3, 2018 © Francois Lenoir / Reuters

As US-based social media companies crack down on dissent at home in the name of fighting phantom ‘Russian meddling,’ Washington seeks to leverage them for regime change in places like Iran.

If social media platform Twitter can ban German politicians for incitement (of race hate), then why doesn’t it apply the same sanction on President Trump over his incendiary comments regarding Iranian protests?

Arguably, Trump’s incitement is far graver. He is recklessly encouraging violence in a whole nation. The arrogance is astounding and yet Twitter and other US news media just go along with it. So too do European leaders and media.

Trump and his administration have been full-on in public statements egging on protests which broke out in Iran last week. Trump’s denouncing of the Iranian government as “brutal and corrupt” and urging “time for change” is a brazen incitement to sedition.

Meanwhile, Nikki Haley, the insufferable US ambassador at the United Nations, added to the hysterical chorus coming out of Washington. She called for an emergency meeting Friday at the Security Council in order to condemn Iranian authorities for their handling of demonstrations in which some 20 people have been killed after nearly seven days of disturbances.

Earlier, Haley embarked on one of her geopolitical fantasies when she hailed the “Iranian people crying out for freedom” and “rising up against dictators.”

This is grossly irresponsible interference in the sovereign internal affairs of Iran.

Russia has rightly censured the US for meddling in Iran’s domestic politics. Moscow said the emergency meeting called by Haley at the UN was “harmful and destructive” grandstanding.

The laughable irony of this is that American politicians and news media have been banging on for over a year with allegations of Russian meddling in US internal affairs, notwithstanding that no credible evidence has been provided for these American claims.

However, the US entitles itself to plow headlong into Iranian politics with reckless abandon.

First of all, there is the gross distortion by Washington and the US media about the nature of the protests. Rather than being accurately reported as small-scale demonstrations largely motivated by discontent over economic policies, the US has tried to lionize the protests as somehow heralding a “democratic revolution.”

The initial protests, which only involved hundreds of mainly youth, have since been dwarfed by massive rallies in support of the Iranian government of President Hassan Rouhani. But from the Trump administration and US media spin, one would think the whole country was in mass revolt.

The protest agenda against economic poverty and austerity was evidently hijacked by violent elements. Most of the reported 20 deaths over the past week occurred during armed clashes with police officers. Videos showing rioters attacking and burning police stations are hardly evidence of citizens innocently demonstrating for “democratic freedom.”

What unfolded in Iran was reminiscent of how initial protests in Syria back in March 2011 were quickly hijacked by violent agitators serving a regime-change agenda pushed by Washington, Britain, France and regional partners. That led to an all-out proxy war in Syria which has only now subsided, thanks largely to Russia and Iran’s military intervention in support of the Syrian state.

Such an outcome is unlikely to happen in Iran. As noted, the initial protests have waned and the government appears to have security matters under control.

Nevertheless, the involvement of US and to a lesser extent European states was no doubt a repeat attempt at destabilizing Iran. The US State Department has openly sided with the Iranian street protests, demanding the government “to allow the free exchange of ideas and information.” It also urged social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to promote the protests. That, by the way, would answer our opening question about why Twitter doesn’t shut down Trump over incitement in Iran. Twitter is evidently being used as a tool of American foreign policy.

It’s not just social media working with the US government. Large sections of the mainstream news media were evidently deployed to fabricate the turmoil in Iran as a pro-democracy uprising. Images purporting to show young Iranian men and women holding up clenched fists amid clouds of teargas were repeatedly published by CNN, New York Times and Washington Post, among others.

What we saw over the past week was an audacious propaganda campaign by the Trump administration in concert with supposedly “independent” American news media. The narrative of “freedom-versus-oppression” has little basis in reality of the situation in Iran.

Much larger public rallies occur all the time in American and European cities decrying police racial brutality or economic austerity policies. But somehow the relatively minor demonstrations in Iran this past week are supposedly a harbinger of revolution.

Another illustration of media perception management (propaganda) is the lack of coverage given to major rallies that take place in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, two important US Arab allies. Dozens of people have been killed and thousands imprisoned during recurring demonstrations. Arguably, protests in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are genuinely motivated by pro-democracy demands against autocratic regimes. But we hardly – if ever – hear about that in US and European news outlets.

In Iran’s case, well that’s different. Not for any objective reasons, but simply because the Trump administration has ramped up an aggressive policy towards Tehran, in league with Saudi Arabia and Israel.

In one of this Twitter attacks, Trump vowed “great support from the United States at the appropriate time” to the rioters in Iran. American media also reported US diplomats seeking to “coordinate strategies” with European counterparts on Iran. That suggests Washington is going to step up its interference in Iranian domestic politics.

The White House and State Department are using the UN, European governments, social media and mainstream news outlets to advance a hostile agenda. And the Europeans – with typical timidity – appear to be obliging the American bully. This week, Britain and France issued condescending pejorative statements calling on the Iranian government to “allow peaceful protests” and to show “restraint.” One wonders how the British and French governments would respond to demonstrators who were torching police stations in their own countries.

French President Emmanuel Macron also added that Iran was “destabilizing the region” by interfering in other countries.  You could hardly make up the absurd hypocrisy coming out of Washington and European allies regarding Iran.

Let’s be clear, there are doubtless real grievances among the Iranian people over deteriorating economic conditions. Iran’s President Rouhani has acknowledged these grievances must be addressed in a review of government policies. That is something for the Iranian nation to resolve. Besides, much of the adverse economic conditions have been caused by the US and Europeans failing to implement the 2015 nuclear accord and sanctions relief.

What is inadmissible, however, is the arrogant presumption shown by the US and Europe to immediately meddle in and distort Iranian politics. That presumption betrays the regime-change prerogative that these same powers appoint themselves with.

The criminal interference in sovereign nations by the US and Europe has resulted in horrendous conflicts across the Middle East region in particular.

What the US government and media are doing in Iran is another case of criminal interference. Calling people out on the streets of Iran, as Trump and his officials are doing, to overthrow their government cannot be a more brazen example of incitement.

Intel bug that may affect billions of devices!!!

I won't worry too much on this. We would have been victimised on a massive scale had the hackers known about this hardware bug. But luckily this didn't happen - at least not reported. Hopefully, some software patches would come out pretty soon to overcome this nuisance.

‘Meltdown’: Google team flags Intel bug that may affect billions of devices

RT : 4 Jan, 2018

Information stored on every desktop computer, smartphone and cloud server since 1995 could be accessed by hackers if two hardware bugs are exploited, a new report has warned.

On Wednesday, security researchers at Google Project Zero disclosed technical details on two security flaws that allow hackers to engage in unauthorized reads of a computer’s memory data, which may contain sensitive information such as passwords.

The researchers discovered that the vulnerabilities affect many CPUs, including those from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and ARM Holdings, as well as the devices and operating systems running on it.

The first method of attack, known as Spectre, can be exploited by hackers to dissolve the barrier that separates different applications and trick otherwise error-free applications into leaking information stored on their memory.

Last year, researchers demonstrated how hackers could utilize “speculative execution” – a technique used by most modern processors to optimize performance – to gain access to sensitive information.

In order to improve speeds, modern processors execute certain functions speculatively, or before it is known whether they are needed. The technique prevents the delay that would come from executing the functions after they are requested.

Jann Horn, a lead researcher for Project Zero who first reported both vulnerabilities, discovered that attackers can take advantage of this technique in order to read information on the system’s memory that should be inaccessible.

In the original report, researchers said the vulnerability affects “billions of devices” that use microprocessors from Intel, AMD, and ARM

The second flaw, known as Meltdown, allows hackers to “melt” security boundaries between user applications and the operating system normally enforced by hardware. Hackers can exploit the vulnerability to gain access to the memory of other programs and the operating system, which could include passwords and other sensitive data.

In the original report, researchers said the vulnerability affects “virtually every user of a personal computer.” However, researchers at Google’s Project Zero have only been able to show that ‘Meltdown’ affects Intel microprocessors.

Daniel Gruss, one of the researchers who originally discovered Meltdown, told Reuters the flaw is “probably one of the worst CPU bugs ever found.”

Gruss said Meltdown was the more serious attack, because it was easier for hackers to take advantage of. However, he said that Spectre was much harder to patch, and would be a bigger problem in the future.

In an overview of the attacks, researchers said it would be “unusual” for either attack to be blocked by an antivirus, since they are “hard to distinguish from regular benign applications.” Google said, however, that an attacker must first be able to run a malicious code on a computer before they can exploit the vulnerability.

Researchers also warned it would be nearly impossible to detect if hackers had exploited the weakness, since the attack would not leave “any traces in traditional log files.”

In a blog posted Wednesday, Matt Linton, senior security engineer at Google, said there is “no single fix for all three attack variants,” but many vendors made several patches available Wednesday.

Google provided a list of their products that are vulnerable to the attacks, as well as their mitigation status. The company said as soon as they discovered the vulnerabilities, their security teams updated their systems and affected products to protect against the attacks.

Researchers also provided a link to software patches for Linux Windows, and OS X that guard against Meltdown attacks.

Microsoft released a patch Wednesday to protect customers against the vulnerabilities. However, the company said some anti-virus vendors will need to update their software to be compatible with the new patches.

The company has also released an emergency update for all devices running Windows 10, and further updates are planned. Microsoft also said they are in the process of deploying mitigations to cloud services. However, the fixes will also rely on firmware updates from Intel, AMD, and ARM.

Microsoft said they have not received “any information to indicate that these vulnerabilities had been used to attack our customers,” according to a statement to The Verge.

Amazon has also reportedly said they have protected most of their cloud servers from the vulnerabilities.

Apple Insider reports that Apple has already deployed a partial fix for the bug in MacOS 10.3.2 that was released last month.

The report also said that tests show the update does not cause any notable slowdowns.

On Tuesday, The Register first reported on the vulnerabilities, saying the patches to fix the problem would slow computers by 30 percent.

While researchers do not know how much the updates could slow the performance of older processors, Intel released a statement Wednesday that said the updates will not “significantly” slow computers for the average user.

“Any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time."

Intel rejected claims that either of the vulnerabilities were unique to their products, adding that it affects “many types of computing devices – with many different vendors’ processors and operating systems – are susceptible to these exploits.”

However, AMD said their products were not vulnerable to any of the attacks.

“Due to differences in AMD's architecture, we believe there is a near zero risk to AMD processors at this time,” representatives of the company told CNBC.

ARM also released a statement Wednesday that said the “majority” of their products are “not impacted by any variation” of the Spectre attack.

Selected Comments:

# Backdoors installed by the chip makers to allow spying, not flaws. It ain't no bug. It's by design.

# considering all 3 big cpu producers have the same "bug", no surprise there...

# Microsoft and Intel have been scamming their customers - these patches are designed to slow your machine down. Y'all won't be using your current hardware for long and the 'buy-use-sell' consumer cycle will continue (until we run out out landfill space).

# major scam but people have blinkers and won't see it and of course they announce the slowdown in advance to prevent any class-action lawsuits (as what happened to Apple).

# The call that planned obsolescence.

# ISIS inside.