Sunday 21st of April 2024

sour, acid, acidic, tart, bitter, sharp, acetic, vinegary, pungent, acrid, biting, stinging, nasty, angry...

hydrochloric acid
US President Donald Trump’s top foreign policy advisor John Bolton appears dead set on resuming his decades-long stand-off with Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega, hinting that Washington-backed regime change may be in the offing.

“The Ortega regime has sentenced three farm leaders to 550 years in prison for their roles in protests in 2018, where Ortega’s police forces reportedly killed 300 activists. As President Trump said Monday, Ortega’s days are numbered and the Nicaraguan people will soon be free,” the national security advisor to the US president tweeted on Wednesday.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/452023-john-bolton-nicaragua-ortega-regime-change/

 

As usual Bolton is the king of dangerous bullshit... One day he will die and leave the world alone. This day is not coming soon enough...

home-grown terrorist — far less dangerous than bolton...

A U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant and self-identified white nationalist has been arrested after federal investigators uncovered a cache of weapons and ammunition in his Maryland home that authorities say he stockpiled to launch a widespread domestic terrorist attack targeting politicians and journalists.

Christopher Paul Hasson called for "focused violence" to "establish a white homeland" and dreamed of ways to "kill almost every last person on earth," according to court records filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland. Though court documents do not detail a specific planned date for an attack, the government said he had been amassing supplies and weapons since 2017 at the latest, developed a spreadsheet of targets that included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and searched the internet using phrases such as "best place in dc to see congress people" and "are supreme court justices protected."

"The defendant intends to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country," the government said in court documents filed this week, arguing that Hasson should stay in jail awaiting trial.

Hasson, of Silver Spring, is expected to appear before a judge for a detention hearing in federal court in Greenbelt on Thursday.

Hasson was arrested on illegal weapons and drug charges on Friday, but the government says those charges are the "proverbial tip of the iceberg." Officials with the U.S. attorney's office in Maryland outlined in court documents Hasson's alleged plans to spark chaos and destruction, describing a man obsessed with neo-fascist and neo-Nazi views.

"Please send me your violence that I may unleash it onto their heads," Hasson wrote in a letter that prosecutors say was found in his email drafts. "Guide my hate to make a lasting impression on this world."

A magistrate judge ordered that the Office of the Federal Public Defender represent Hasson; the office declined comment Wednesday.

Hasson has been working at the U.S. Coast Guard headquarters in Washington since 2016, according to court documents filed by prosecutors. He also served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1988 to 1993 and in the Army National Guard for about two years in the mid-90s.

Agents with the FBI field office in Baltimore and the Coast Guard Investigative Service arrested Hasson on Friday, FBI Baltimore spokesman Dave Fitz confirmed.

 

Read more:

https://www.stripes.com/news/us/coast-guard-lieutenant-is-a-domestic-ter...

 

This guy is far less dangerous than Bolton... though both seem to belong to the supremacist legion...

the USA on the attack...


The United States' provocations in Venezuela, if implemented, would dramatically increase the level of tension and confrontation in the world, the Russian Foreign Ministry has said in a statement.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated that US plans to deliver humanitarian aid to Venezuela could lead to clashes and would create a convenient pretext for the removal of Nicolas Maduro from power.

"The development of events in Venezuela has come to a critical point, everyone understands this. On 23 February, a dangerous large-scale provocation is set to take place, instigated by the Washington-led crossing of the Venezuelan border with a so-called humanitarian convoy, which may lead to clashes between supporters and opponents, forming a convenient pretext for military action to remove the current legitimate president from government", Zakharova said in the briefing.

The US is planning to transfer weapons and special troops close to Venezuela, according to the spokeswoman.

"We have evidence that US companies and their NATO allies are working on the issue of acquiring a large batch of weapons and ammunition in an Eastern European country for their subsequent transfer to Venezuelan opposition forces", she said during the briefing.

READ MORE: Kremlin Hopes Venezuela's Authorities Do Everything to Prevent Escalation

The statement comes amid an escalation of tensions in the Latin America country in light of the situation with US humanitarian aid.

 

Earlier in February, the Venezuelan opposition stated that the delivery of US humanitarian aid to Venezuela would begin on 23 February. The government of Nicolas Maduro intends to prevent the aid from being supplied to the country. The president has slammed the US move as an attempt to overthrow him.

On 21 February, Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, alongside members of the opposition-led parliament, set off to the country's border with Colombia to welcome the delivery of US aid despite Maduro's pledge to turn it back.

Guaido, the speaker of Venezuela's parliament, proclaimed himself the country's interim president on 23 January. Maduro has reacted to the move, calling Guaido a US puppet and accusing Washington of organising a coup in the country.

 

The United States, Canada and a number of other countries have recognised Guaido's administration, while Russia, China, Mexico and Turkey, along with others, have emphasised that Maduro is the legitimate president and called for dialogue.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/latam/201902221072653394-us-aid-venezuela/

 

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The United States does not want Venezuela to be a "Cuban puppet state," US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in an interview on 21 February.


 

 

 

unnecessary intervention for? ...

 

Andrew Bacevich recalls Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement about American indispensability, and notes how poorly it has held up over the last twenty-one years:

Back then, it was Albright’s claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright’s insistence that “we see further into the future.” 

In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright’s “we” napping. 

Albright’s statement is even more damning for her and her fellow interventionists when we consider that the context of her remarks was a discussion of the supposed threat from Iraq. The full sentence went like this: “We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.” Albright was making a general claim about our supposed superiority to other nations when it came to looking into the future, but she was also specifically warning against a “danger” from Iraq that she claimed threatened “all of us.” She answered one of Matt Lauer’s questions with this assertion:

I think that we know what we have to do, and that is help enforce the UN Security Council resolutions, which demand that Saddam Hussein abide by those resolutions, and get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, and allow the inspectors to have unfettered and unconditional access. 

Albright’s rhetoric from 1998 is a grim reminder that policymakers from both parties accepted the existence of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” as a given and never seriously questioned a policy aimed at eliminating something that did not exist. American hawks couldn’t see further in the future. They weren’t even perceiving the present correctly, and tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqis would suffer because they insisted that they saw something that wasn’t there. 

A little more than five years after she uttered these words, the same wild threat inflation that Albright was engaged in led to the invasion of Iraq, the greatest blunder and one of the worst crimes in the history of modern U.S. foreign policy. Not only did Albright and other later war supporters not see what was coming, but their deluded belief in being able to anticipate future threats caused them to buy into and promote a bogus case for a war that was completely unnecessary and should never have been fought.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-myopia-of-interventi...

 

Andrew Bacevich is a bit disgenuous here. The danger seen by the hawks in the USA from Iraq was not the "weapons of mass destruction" which was a deliberately manufactured alibi for invasion, but the fact that Saddam was trading oil in other currencies than the dollar. This was the real threat to the "indispensable" nation. Albright was part of that clique of psychopaths that pushed (and still push) for war. Bolton (a Republican) is the "mad son" of mad Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright (a Democrat). Hillary Clinton was (is) also part of that mad clique.

The public at large would not have accepted war for a flimsy excuse such as to "protect the dollar" (or the oil market), so all the mad psychos in the US government invented (that is to say got the "intelligence agencies" to invent) the Saddam has weapons of mass destruction mantra

Presently, the US, with mad Bolton at the helm of the puppet, do not even pretend to have a moral obligation of wagging war or toppling a government he does not like — like Venezuela. Bolton is a dangerous psychopath. People will die but he will say the usual crap ("freedom for the people") but does not believe in it. The beef against Maduro is ONCE AGAIN about (freedom for) oil (and about US multinational companies "rights" to exploit it wherever oil is)

WMDs

... and bad taste...

US Senator Marco Rubio has posted a picture of the brutal murder of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in a less-than-subtle threat to Venezuela’s Maduro. Twitter blasted Rubio as a manic warmonger… who has extremely poor taste.

The two pictures –one showing Gaddafi while still in power, the other showing the Libyan leader being tortured minutes before his brutal murder– were posted by Sen. Rubio (R-FL) on Twitter without any caption. Yet, given his open calls for an armed insurrection in the Latin American country to depose President Nicolas Maduro, the message was clear.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/452329-rubio-gaddafi-venezuela-tweet/

exclusively allowing himself to piss in someone else backyard...

Earlier on Monday, the United States said that the deployment by Russia of air force planes and personnel in Venezuela over the weekend was a "reckless escalation of the situation" in the country.

US National Security Adviser John Bolton, commenting on the situation in Venezuela, said that US would not tolerate what he described as "hostile meddling with the Western Hemisphere's shared goals of democracy, security and the rule of law."

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201903261073537192-us-will-not-tolerate-hosti...

 

 

Read from top.

 

and pissing in someone else's frontyard...

US President Donald Trump’s recognition of the disputed Golan Heights as Israeli territory is “an act of brigandry,” former Labour Party MP George Galloway told RT. Trump’s declaration has been condemned in the Arab world.

Trump on Monday signed a declaration recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, seized from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War – a move that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “historic justice” and a “diplomatic victory.” This is despite the UN declaring Israel’s occupation of the heights “null and void,” and the Arab League calling it “completely beyond international law.”

Galloway called Trump’s declaration “an act of brigandry which will send a clear message to the entire world that the US cares nothing for international law, for treaties, just force.”

Crucially to Israel, the Golan Heights is one of only three sources of freshwater feeding the arid Jewish state. Perhaps more crucially to Israeli and American interests, the region also sits on top of sizable oil reserves, discovered in 2015. US oil company Genie, through its Israeli subsidiary, was given exclusive exploration rights to drill the occupied territory, and until now has been held up by the small matter of the land being illegally occupied under international law.

“The US will underwrite any Israeli crime as long as its imperial interests in the Arab world are furthered,”Galloway told RT. “The oil reserves in the Golan are already being stolen in absolute violation of international law but for the further enrichment of western businessmen.”

Read more and more:

https://www.rt.com/news/454734-trump-golan-heights-george-galloway/

 

 

Highway robbery has been the trademark of the USA on the world stage. 

what crisis?

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - US National Security Advisor John Bolton said on Tuesday that the Western hemisphere is united on resolving the Venezuelan crisis and the days of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro "are numbered".

"Look forward to working together. The region is united, and Maduro’s days are numbered", Bolton said in a Twitter statement after his meeting with Brazilian Defense Minister Fernando Azevedo at the White House.

Earlier in March, Bolton said that the United States was applying the Monroe Doctrine, a policy penned in the 1820s that aimed at securing an all-democratic Western hemisphere through influence over Latin American countries, to the situation in Venezuela.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/latam/201903271073569749-usa-brazil-venezuela-bo...

 

Read from top.

nationalism is the refuge of a half neocon...


Nationalism, Not Neoconservatism


It would be a shame if the promising conservative movement of the future was co-opted by the pro-war operators of the past.


By W. JAMES ANTLE III • July 17, 2019


Asked to weigh in on co-keynoting a conference with national security adviser John Bolton, Tucker Carlson demurred, saying different perspectives should be heard. Bolton was similarly deferential toward the Fox News host when asked the same question, but with a twist. “I’m delighted to be after him,” Bolton cracked. “That’s called a diplomatic answer.”


Many of the main voices at the inaugural National Conservatism Conference reject a foreign policy of forever war. This includes not just Carlson but fellow keynoter Peter Thiel (“On this most important issue Donald Trump is right,” Thiel said at the 2016 Republican convention. “It’s time to end the era of stupid wars and rebuild our country.”), organizer Yoram Hazony, who was sharply critical of neoconservatives in his own speech, and best-selling author J.D. Vance.


But a nontrivial number of speakers who were on the schedule purely for their foreign policy expertise would have been comfortable during the administration of George W. Bush, who was no nationalist conservative. Bolton, who at one point stressed the common ground between President Trump and John McCain, illustrated how to package the old foreign policy to appeal to those interested in a new conservatism.


That is, speak in concrete terms about American interests and security rather than abstract appeals to American values; invoke Samuel Huntington, whose “Clash of Civilizations” is a major influence among nationalist conservatives; play up nationalist concerns about China; don’t talk about democracy promotion or nation-building; quote Edmund Burke liberally.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/nationalism-not-neocons...

 

Read from top.

 

A bit of humility would not go astray either...