Pepe Escobar: Inside look at Kazak & Russia events

 

Max Blumenthal and geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar (journalist from Brazil) discuss the violent coup attempt in Kazakhstan, and its crucial importance as an ally of Russia and the center of China's Belt and Road Initiative. 

Pepe addresses US and Turkish meddling, and why this massive and misunderstood country is suddenly at the heart of the new cold war. 

 They also talk about the failure of the US-Russia talks in Geneva and if war could be on the horizon.

Finding a way during hard times

 

A short video report by Al Jazeera Arabic on how Afghans, especially in the sunny southern regions of Afghanistan, are increasingly resorting to solar power to help cover up for severe shortfalls in the government electricity network.

Tracking the 'Space Force' agenda

 

Fighting Comes Into Focus for the Space Force in 2022  
Air Force Magazine.com

By Amanda Miller

The leaders of the Space Force foresee the service continuing to become more “lethal” in 2022, inventing new tactical scenarios in its third year while maturing its organizational charts and carving out roles for outside entities.

“I hope I am able to say that in Year 3, you’ll see us really putting our tires on the track and just really moving out and delivering the things that we’ve been thinking about and working on and designing,” said Space Force Lt. Gen. Nina M. Armagno.

Space Force’s director of staff at its Pentagon headquarters, Armagno summed up the service’s first two years and looked ahead to 2022 in a Potomac Officers Club webinar.
 

Maturing Organizations

Having now stood up all three of its field commands—two in 2021—the Space Force still needs to finalize where to base the headquarters of one. That process for Space Training and Readiness Command, temporarily at Peterson Space Force Base, Colo., may be forthcoming.

Likewise, at the combatant command level, U.S. Space Command waits to find out whether it will move to Redstone Arsenal, Ala., as announced.

Meanwhile, the Space Force will double the size of its Pentagon headquarters staff, expecting to add 300 people in 2022, said Armagno.

People and satellites from the Space Force’s sister services will transfer to the new service in 2022. This second batch of transfers will turn 670 Marines, Sailors, and Soldiers into Guardians. They, and 259 civilians also transferring, will have a new orientation class to help bridge cultures. The Space Force also plans to add another 521 enlisted Guardians and about 70 officers through recruitment in 2022.

The Space Development Agency moves over in 2022 as well, from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to the Space Force. It will take along its plan for a multilayered, multifunctional constellation of relatively low-cost satellites made of readily available parts.

“I call it ‘cracking commercial’—hacking commercial,” Armagno said, referring to SDA’s role. That means figuring out how companies in the private sector “move so quickly— to capitalize on some of their innovation and inventiveness and bring it into the hands of operational warfighters sooner.” 

Bringing Outside Entities Into the Fold 

Partnerships now formalized with 11 universities will get off the ground in 2022. Selected in part for having Air Force ROTC detachments, the 11 also feature aerospace research programs.

On a visit to the University of Colorado Boulder to shake on the plan, Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David D. Thompson described the Space Force’s training and education needs. He said they’re “very, very focused and very, very high tech.”

 

To “operate successfully in an incredibly complex physical and technical domain,” Thompson said Space Force leaders realized the service needed to adapt.

Armagno, who attended the partnership signing at Georgia Tech, said the program is meant to benefit the Space Force on multiple levels: “world-class research, advanced education, and leadership development.”

In terms of working with companies in the private sector, Armagno said a business fair by the new Space Warfighting Analysis Center was “a recipe for success, and we’re going to repeat it.” The new center brought in companies for briefings “so that industries understood exactly what we need and why we need it.”

As evidence of growing collaboration with other countries’ militaries, Armagno offered the example of Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond’s “chiefs’ summit.” The summit hosted chiefs from 12 partners nations in 2020 and will grow to 22 in 2022.

Space Force’s “partnering arrangements” have delivered cost savings plus “opportunities to grow our relationships with the international community,” Armagno said. “For example, Norway is hosting a Space Force payload on one of its satellite launches, and it’s providing Arctic communications two years sooner than we could do it.”

Fighting Comes Into Focus

Only a few years ago, talking about “fighting in space” wasn’t only taboo: “I can remember when ‘space superiority,’ ‘offensive and defensive operations in space,’ ‘warfighting in space’—you couldn’t even use these words. It was against policy to talk about these things,” said retired Air Force Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, a former astronaut and commander of Air Force Space Command and U.S. Strategic Command.

Space Force Unveils Its First Weapon, a Satellite Jammer. The U.S. can now block satellite communications from the ground.

Now serving as the Mitchell Institute’s Explorer Chair for Space Warfighting Studies, Chilton talked about the military’s changing mindset with Space Force Lt. Gen. Chance B. Saltzman in a webinar rounding up some of the service’s accomplishments.

Saltzman suggested that provocative activities such as Russia’s debris-generating anti-satellite test in November are “a natural consequence of military behaviors.”

“When you are behind, you look for ways to seek vulnerabilities of your adversary and your competitor so that you can regain the strategic advantage, and we’re seeing that play out,” Saltzman said.

To be ready in the event that “a very bad day happens in space and the country need to recover,” Armagno said the Space Force practiced a “groundbreaking event” in June 2021—the service’s first “tactical responsive launch mission.” Space Systems Command, another of the three field commands, compressed what Armagno described as “the normal multi-month preparation timeline” for a launch “to just under three weeks.”

The exercise “demonstrated a possible rapid reconstitution capability for the nation,” Armagno said.

Armagno predicted that the service will publicly unveil a new force design for missile warning and missile tracking in 2022, “and we’ll continue to evaluate force designs for other missions.”

To help the Space Force prevent “bad actors” from causing more havoc in space, Armagno said globally accepted norms of behavior are the first step.

“From a military perspective, what’s important about norms of behavior is that we’re going to be able to tell who’s not following them,” Armagno said.

The U.S. Makes a Mockery of Treaties & International Law

By K.J. Noh

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other members of the Biden Cabinet are fond of proclaiming the “rules-based international order” (RBIO) or “rules-based order” every chance they get: in press conferences, on interviews, in articles, at international fora, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and cocktails. Along with the terms “human rights” and “democracy,” the RBIO is routinely used to claim a moral high ground against countries that they accuse of not following this RBIO, and wielded as a cudgel to attack, criticize, accuse, and delegitimate countries in their crosshairs as rogue outliers to an international order.

This cudgel is now used most commonly against China and Russia. Oddly enough, whenever the United States asserts this “rules-based order” that China (and other “revisionist powers”/enemy states) are violating, the United States never seems to clarify which “rules” are being violated, but simply releases a miasma of generic accusation, leaving the stench of racism and xenophobia to do the rest.

This is because there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the RBIO.

The RBIO isn’t “rules-based,” it isn’t “international,” and it confounds any sense of “order,” let alone justice. It is, at bottom, the naked exercise of U.S. imperial power and supremacy, dressed up in the invisible finery of an embroidered fiction. The RBIO is a fraudulent impersonation of international law and justice.

There are many layers to this misnomer, to be deconstructed piece by piece.

‘RBIO’ in Contrast With ‘International Law’

First, the RBIO is not “international” in any sense of the word.

There actually is a consensual rules-based international order, a compendium of agreed-upon rules and treaties that the international community has negotiated, agreed to, and signed up for. It’s called simply “international law.” This refers to the body of decisions, precedents, agreements, and multilateral treaties held together under the umbrella of the Charter of the United Nations and the multiple institutions, policies, and protocols attached to it. Although imperfect, incomplete, evolving, it still constitutes the legal foundation of the body of international order and the orderly laws that underpin it: this is what constitutes international law. The basic foundation of the UN Charter is national sovereignty—that states have a right to exist, and are equal in relations. This is not what the United States is referring to.

When the United States uses the term RBIO, rather than the existing term “international law,” it does so because it wants to impersonate international law while diverting to a unilateral, invented, fictitious order that it alone creates and decides—often with the complicity of other imperial, Western, and transatlantic states. It also does this because, quite simply, the United States does not want to be constrained by international law and actually is an international scofflaw in many cases.

 

 

The United States as International Outlaw

For example, the United States refuses to sign or to ratify foundational international laws and treaties that the vast majority of countries in the world have signed, such as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women), ICESCR (the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights), CRC (the Convention on the Rights of the Child), ICRMW (the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families), UNCLOS (the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea), PAROS (the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space), the Ottawa Treaty (the Anti-Personnel Landmines Convention), and the majority of labor conventions of the ILO (International Labor Organization). In fact, the United States harbors sweatshops, legalizes child labor (for example, in migrant farm labor), and engages in slave labor (in prisons and immigration detention centers). Even the U.S. State Department’s own 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report acknowledges severe problems in the U.S. of trafficking and forced labor in agriculture, food service, manufacture, domestic service, sex work, and hospitality, with U.S. government officials and military involved in the trafficking of persons domestically and abroad. Ironically, the United States tries to hold other countries accountable to laws that it itself refuses to ratify. For example, the United States tries to assert UNCLOS in the South China Sea while refusing—for decades—to ratify it and ignoring its rules, precedents, and conclusions in its own territorial waters.

There are also a slew of international treaties the United States has signed, but simply violates anyway: examples include the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, UN treaties prohibiting torture, rendition, and kidnapping, and of course, war of aggression, considered “the supreme international crime”—a crime that the United States engages in routinely at least once a decade, not to mention routine drone attacks, which are in violation of international law. Most recently, the AUKUS agreement signed between the United States and Australia violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by exploiting a blind spot of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

There are also a multitude of treaties that the United States has signed but then arbitrarily withdrawn from anyway. These include the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, the Agreed Framework and the Six-Party Talks with North Korea, the Geneva Conventions, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and many others.

There are also approximately 368 treaties signed between the Indigenous nations and the U.S. government; every single one of them has been violated or ignored.

~ K.J. Noh is a journalist, political analyst, writer and teacher specializing in the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region.

STOPP NATO in the High North!

 

 

Be sure to hit the 'cc' to get English sub-titles.

The video is produced by STOPP NATO on the issue of the growing US-NATO militarization of the high north.

Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland currently host NATO war games and Sweden and Finland are under strong pressure by the US to join NATO. The public is reluctant but their corporate dominated governments are easily susceptible to pressure from Washington and Brussels.

Look a the map and see why the US is pursuing the Nordic nations for bases and wargames.

 

What was Washington's real agenda at Russia meeting?

 

A US weapons hub at a base in Poland. Each time the Pentagon holds a war-game in eastern Europe weapons are shipped from the US and stored afterward at this hub and a similar one in Norway virtually on the Russian border.

When I was a union organizer with the United Farm Workers I twice served on a contract negotiating committee - as the note-taker. I learned that the very first clause negotiated in any union contract is the 'Recognition' by the company of the union's right to bargain on behalf of the workers.

This recent meeting between Russia and U.S. in Geneva proved to me that Washington does not recognize Russia as an equal bargaining entity. Instead the US arrogantly believes it can pre-determine its policy - in this case steroidal NATO expansion and regime change in Russia. This is clearly the US agenda.

Washington and Brussels (and London of course) can't afford to recognize Russia as an equal. They must keep demonizing Moscow and Putin to stay 'relevant' in the world today as the west declines and China, Russia, Iran and others in the global south rise.

Plus we must always remember that there is big money at stake for the military industrial complex as they believe they can ride this aggressive wave another 50 years. So what if it leads to WW III and nuclear Armageddon.  

Thus the US delegation left the meeting on January 11 and said, "We have your demands. We'll let you know in a week our response." I don't expect much.

Just so we all remain clear, these so-called 'unreasonable' demands by Russia (listed below) are quite rational and appropriate when you consider that the US-NATO are deep in the process of creating a Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse for the Russian Federation.  

Who is actually being peaceful and rational - the US-NATO or Russia?

 

Russian demands in negotiations with US:

 

* NATO will cease all efforts to expand eastward, notably into Ukraine and Georgia.

* NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missile batteries in nations bordering Russia.

* An end to NATO military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia.

* The effective restoration of the treaty covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons. The U.S. abandoned the INF pact in August 2019.

* An ongoing East-West security dialogue.

 

I went looking for some comments on this current situation and of course the Washington Post and New York Times buried the story. So the only thing the people in the US know is that Joe Biden sent his team to Geneva to threaten Russia not to invade Ukraine. 

Below are some good comments that I think cover many elements of this story. First though we must hear from Washington officialdom. 

 

Bruce

 

This bit  from a statement signed by Democrat and Republican warhawks.

The West should also widen its political counteroffensive to retake the initiative from Moscow as it tries to use the threat of force to intimidate Ukraine, Europe, and the United States into acquiescing to its demands, many of which are plainly unjustified and unacceptable.

 

 

Dr Paul Craig Roberts, no stranger to the inner workings of the Deep State, put it rather starkly recently:

When Putin says Russia has nowhere left to which to retreat, he is telling the idiot West that Russia has reached the extent of its ability to avoid war. 'We simply have no room to retreat' means Russia has done all she can do to avoid war and now the Americans must get off Russia’s doorstep.

 

Scott Ritter wrote at Consortium News:

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman faced off against Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov in Geneva, with the fate of Europe in her hands. The sad thing is, she doesn’t see it that way. Thanks to Biden, Blinken and the host of Russophobes who populate the U.S. national security state today, Sherman thinks she is there to simply communicate the consequences of diplomatic failure to Russia. To threaten. With mere words.

What Sherman, Biden, Blinken, and the others have yet to comprehend is that Russia has already weighed the consequences and is apparently willing to accept them. And respond. With action. 

 

Sputnik International reported:

Russian and US officials spoke for nearly eight hours in Geneva on Monday to discuss a pair of Russian security proposals Moscow says would dramatically ease tensions between Russia and the Western alliance. Among the proposals' points is a firm demand by Russia that NATO halt its decades-long eastward expansion.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization will not drop its 'open door' policy on membership, and will pay no mind to Russia's request to limit troop and weapons deployments in countries which joined the bloc after 1997, Julianne Smith, US ambassador to NATO, has said.

The Donetsk News Agency (from the Donbass region in Ukraine that is constantly attacked by the US installed regime in Kiev following the 2014 coup) reports on continued shelling on the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republics by the US-NATO armed and directed Ukrainian Army.

Ukrainian side is determined to provoke DPR to open retaliatory fire, the head of the DPR Mission to the JCCC Ruslan Yakubov said commenting on the deteriorating security situation along the line of contact.

"Domestic and international situation prompts Ukrainian leadership to commit armed provocations. The situation is aggravated by artificially fueled by media tension around the so-called "Russian aggression". It seems that the target of  the Ukrainian armed forces is to provoke DPR retaliation to escalate (the situation), including the media background."

The recent attacks on the DPR were carried out by nationalistic [Nazi] formations deployed to the contact line since mid-December.

The security situation along the contact line deteriorated on January 9 as Kiev forces intensified barrages of frontline areas in the DPR and LPR.

 

Finian Cunningham writes at the Strategic Culture Foundation:

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S.-led Western powers became deluded with arrogant entitlement. As Alex Krainer points out, the Western empire-builders presumed to have the right to wage wars and flout international law. For much of the past three-decade period, Russia was too weak economically and politically to challenge this reckless aggression. But now it has grown strong enough to “check-mate the empire’s global ambitions”. This is why war or regime change in Russia has become an obsessive goal for the U.S. and Western partners. It accounts for the relentless sanctions, Russophobia and surge in tensions over Ukraine and more recently Kazakhstan.

Russia is perceived as an obstacle to Western control over the strategically vital Eurasian continent. The prize of Eurasia has long been coveted by Western imperialists, from the British Empire’s Sir Halford Mackinder to the U.S. strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski. As Krainer notes, it was this imperial calculation by the Anglo-American capitalists that led to the building up of Nazi Germany as a bludgeon to destroy the Soviet Union and purportedly to give the empire-builders global hegemony. This imperial machination led to World War II and the greatest conflagration in human history with as many as 85 million dead. The Soviet Union and China accounted for more than half of the death toll.

In August 2018 in a briefing to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee by the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Wes Mitchell stated that the “central aim of the [Trump] administration’s foreign policy is to defend U.S. domination of Eurasian landmass as the foremost U.S. national security interest and to prepare the nation for this challenge.” Mitchell also said that the administration was “working with our close ally the UK to form an international coalition for coordinating efforts in this field.” Now, if Russia reasserts itself as the dominant power in Eastern Europe, this pretty much check-mates the empire’s global ambitions, so containing Russia and limiting its influence in Europe is absolutely critical and I think they will not give up on this even at the price of a nuclear war.

How the Big Pharma game works....

 

 

The pandemic has revealed the power of big pharma.

Major drug manufacturers and suppliers have the power to set prices, influence regulators and lobby lawmakers.

This power has allowed big pharma to push potentially dangerous drugs.

How?

Palki Sharma tells you.

Narrative and reality of the Libyan crisis

 

 The Art of War

 By Manlio Dinucci (il manifesto, Italy) 

NATO is concerned about the crisis in Libya which "has direct implications for regional stability and the security of all Allies". NATO, therefore, assures us that "it remains committed to providing advice to Libya for defense and security". The US, France, Germany, Italy, and United Kingdom governments declare that "free elections will allow Libyan people to strengthen their sovereignty" and to be "ready to hold to account those who threaten the stability in Libya". They, therefore, reaffirm "their full respect and commitment to Libya's sovereignty and independence".
 
Solemn words uttered by the same powers that after demolishing Yugoslavia in the 1990s by disintegrating it from inside, and attacking it from outside demolished the Libyan state with the same technique in 2011. First, they financed and armed tribal sectors and Islamic groups hostile to the government, and infiltrated special forces, in particular Qatari, to ignite armed clashes. Then they attacked it from the outside: in seven months the US-NATO air force carried out 30,000 missions, 10,000 of them were attack missions with over 40,000 bombs and missiles. Italy took part in the war - directed by the United States, at first through the Africa Command, then through NATO under US command - with 7 air bases, fighter-bombers, and an aircraft carrier.

 

Thus, the African state was demolished. The World Bank documented in 2010 that Libya had "high levels of economic growth and human development". About two million immigrants, mostly Africans, had found work there. Thanks to energy exports the Libyan State had invested about 150 billion dollars abroad. Libyan investments in Africa were crucial to the African Union's plan to create its own financial organizations, a common market, and a single currency for Africa. 

Emails from Obama Administration Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, subsequently brought to light by WikiLeaks, show that the United States and France wanted to eliminate Gaddafi before he used Libya's gold reserves to create a pan-African currency at the alternative to the dollar and CFA franc (currency imposed by France on 14 former colonies). Before the bombers went into action, banks went into action: they seized the 150 billion dollars invested abroad by the Libyan State, right after most of them disappeared thus blocking the entire African project.
 
All this about the Libyan crisis is erased in the political-media narrative, allowing the main responsible for the social catastrophe caused by the war on Libya to present themselves as its saviors. Today in Libya, revenues from energy exports are hoarded by militias and multinationals. Large quantities of Libyan oil are sold to European Union countries by smugglers through Maltese companies that recycle them disguising their origin. The living standard of the population has collapsed. 

 

Libya has become the main transit route of a chaotic migratory flow that caused more victims than the war in 2011. According to IOM (International Organization for Migration) data about 1,500 migrants drowned in the Mediterranean in 2021, but certainly more as many cases are not reported. In 2021, about 30,000 migrants were intercepted on the sea and brought back to Libya by the "Libyan" Coast Guard, that was created, trained, and financed with 33 million euros by Italy. Many of them ended up in detention centers of both Tripoli's "government" and militias. 

Today over 600,000 migrants of about 45 nationalities are trapped in Libya, practically reduced to a state of slavery, forced to work without pay, and beaten. More and more migrants ask not to be taken to Europe but to return to their own countries to escape this condition. Particularly dramatic is the situation of young women, sold at auction, raped, and forced into prostitution.

All thanks to the "Unified Protector" Operation which, according to the Ministry of Defense, was carried out by NATO in 2011 for "the protection of civilians in Libya".

US-Russia Talks May Be the Last Chance

 

It’s crunch time in Russia-U.S. relations. High-level talks starting Monday will determine the shape of world security for decades to come, observes Tony Kevin.  

See this excellent article here

 

Russian demands in negotiations with US:

 

* NATO will cease all efforts to expand eastward, notably into Ukraine and Georgia.

 

* NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missile batteries in nations bordering Russia.

 

* An end to NATO military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia.

 

* The effective restoration of the treaty covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons. The U.S. abandoned the INF pact in August 2019.

 

* An ongoing East-West security dialogue.

 

Russia has seen how under successive U.S. presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden, a strategically destructive pattern of U.S. and NATO behavior had emerged since 1999, when President Bill Clinton welshed on the 1989-91 agreements between Reagan and George H.W. Bush with Gorbachev, that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe following the reunification of Germany. ‘Though there was no formal written treaty as such, subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were well founded in numerous written contemporaneous memcons and telcons (formal written records of conversations) at the highest levels.

As the West offered soothing words and prevarications, NATO expanded, first with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in 1999. There were further large expansions in 2004 and 2009, bringing NATO right up against Russia’s Western frontiers. Provocatively, NATO then listed Ukraine and Georgia as candidates for NATO membership.

The West successfully engineered an anti-Russia ‘colour revolution’ in Ukraine in 2014 and nearly succeeded in doing so in Belarus in 2020. It continued even to try to subvert Russia itself through lavish funding of anti-government human rights NGOs. Military and naval maneuvers and build-ups continued on Russia’s Western approaches.

The covid storm

 

A couple of days ago a friend sent me a message from his hospital bed here in Maine where he was held due to covid reactions to his lungs. 

What was his message? He told me about a book I should read called 'Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies'  by Edward Curtin. 

The endorsements for the book came from RFK, Jr, author of The Real Anthony Fauci; James W. Douglass, author, JFK and the Unspeakable; Oliver Stone, filmmaker, writer, and director; Douglas Valentine, author of The CIA as Organized Crime; Graeme MacQueen, author of The 2001 Anthrax Deception; David Ray Griffin, author of The Christian Gospel for Americans; Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Studies, NYU and more.

Needless to say I immediately bought the book - particularly because one of the endorsers wrote, 'A powerful exposé of the CIA and our secret state'. This is one of my largest areas of interest - the CIA control of the US (and many so-called US allies).

Happily my friend has now returned home from the hospital and reports that he is up and walking. He was very pleased to hear that I bought the book.

I was deeply impressed that my friend, from his hospital bed, was continuing on with his usual work to expose the CIA-controlled government in the US. That is real commitment and determination. Even in his moment of sickness (and likely some fear) he was still doing what he could to serve life, to serve the present age, and future generations. He was refusing to surrender to the insanity of our moment.

History is full of stories of human misery and suffering. We must though gather our love, our mutual respect, and our solidarity during these times of covid as Big Pharma (with their links to the CIA, MIC, and other corrupt institutions) tries to turn this bio-agent into a massive money-maker at the expense of millions of lives around this fragile planet.

These chemists of evil are the opposite of love and peace. Thus we must nourish the soul forces in order to create a human chain of love and caring to defeat those who prey on humanity.

Around this same time Mary Beth had to take me to a doctor appointment in nearby Brunswick. As we returned home in the middle of a snowstorm we discovered two of our neighbors were shoveling and snow-blowing our driveway, our sidewalk and our front porch. A deeply touching instance of sharing love, concern and hearts during harsh times.

For every covid case there appears to be examples of someone doing what they can to light a candle of hope and love for the living and for those who have sadly passed away. 

Let us all find moments where a candle can be lit to bring illumination during times of darkness. Let the light of love open our hearts and guide our lives always.

Bruce 

The US orchestrated coup in Ukraine 2014

 

The deep story behind Ukraine-Russian-US-NATO tensions.

 

May 2, 2014 people of Ukrainian city Odessa were trapped in a building and set on fire. They were attacked as they gathered referendum signatures in protest against the new nationalist government that came to power in Kiev as a result of the coup d'état orchestrated during the Obama administration by V-P Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland.

 

Officially, 42 were announced dead, including 7 women and 1 minor. (Many more were never accounted for and were either killed or jailed by the new regime.) No one has been held responsible for this massacre. 

 

Alexander, one of the few survivors, shares his memories of what really happened and new battles he has to fight in the aftermath.

Sunday special: MIC occupies Washington

 

Pushback with Aaron Maté

Douglas MacGregor, a retired US Army Colonel and former Pentagon senior advisor, analyzes the US-Russia standoff in Ukraine; the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan; Trump's failure to act on 2016 campaign anti-interventionist rhetoric, only to surround himself with neocons; and the ongoing, overlooked US military occupation of Syria after the decade-long CIA dirty war.

"The Military Industrial Congressional Complex," MacGregor says, "seems to be more powerful than anyone who occupies the office of the presidency."

Sunday song