The Beltway military punditry floats one of its most inflammatory ideas yet, in calls for a preemptive strike against Moscow along with calls to bolster America’s missile defense system.

On Friday, a DC-based think tank issued a report calling for additional funding to advance US missile defense technology to combat what they view as a rising nuclear missile threat from Russia.

Earlier this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin scoffed at Western assertions that Russia poses the preeminent threat to the US and NATO, labeling the idea of an attack against the military alliance "the type of thing that only crazy people think, and only when they are dreaming."

Faced with the need to keep the budget spigot open, a Cold War-inspired Beltway commentariat continues to ratchet up "protective measures" against Moscow’s "aggression," by installing a missile defense system in Romania and constructing another similar missile defense system in Poland. NATO is now considering deploying permanent troops on the border between Poland and Russia, while undertaking a series of costly and polluting military exercises, steps from Russian lands.

The latest war-drum-beating report is provided by the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments, whose scholars Bryan Clark and Mark Gunzinger not only call for spending more money on lasers, railguns, and hypervelocity projectiles, but also posit fail-safe artificial intelligence systems capable of shooting down incoming missiles, again from Russia.

The two note that while existing missile defense systems like the Navy’s Aegis have an automatic mode, the system lacks the kind of sophistication required to counter large incoming salvos. The paper proposed a plan modeled after a pet project of deputy Defense secretary and, coincidentally, a former vice-president of the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments, Bob Work, who has led efforts to combine artificial intelligence with unmanned missile defense.

In addition to calling for widely expanding appropriations to upgrade the US missile defense system against a hypothetical Russian attack threat, the think tank analysts suggest preemptive strikes against Russia, China, or any other nation, in the event diplomatic relations deteriorate.

The two spell out their enhanced rules of engagement in text that clearly violates international law, detailing a "blinding campaign" of coordinated strikes against hostile headquarters, satellites and radar, using cyberattacks, jamming, and long-range bombing, in anticipation of an attack.

So, what has convinced these theologians and pastors that the end times could be ramping up? That's a question that I cover in-depth in my newly released book, "The Armageddon Code: One Journalist's Quest for End-Times Answers," through interviews with around 20 of the most prevalent eschatology experts.

Many of these theologians and pastors told me that sweeping moral decay, biblical disconnectedness and ongoing violence in the Middle East are just a few of the prophetic markers that they believe were foretold thousands of years ago in both the Old and New Testaments.

But how can Christian leaders be so sure that the biblical end times are approaching? Jesus himself foretold of his future Second Coming. The problem? Christ also proclaimed in Matthew 24:36 that "no one knows" the day or the hour of his return.

While the Bible proclaims that humanity cannot know the "when," Jesus did reveal to the disciples some of signs of his second coming in Matthew 24:6-8: 

"You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed … Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains." 

Surely war has always been with us, though the 20th — and 21st century thus far — have seen broader and more sweeping world wars that involve many nations, with the contemporary battle against Islamic terror crossing international borders.

Read more: http://www.christianpost.com/news/4-reasons-many-christians-believe-the-end-times-are-near-164280/#kihcPB0Xy61LvUMm.99

Between the insanity of the US President and his armies, the insanity of the evangelicals and the insanity of the next presidential candidates, we are in deep shit... Do you mean that after 2000 years of this little planet Christian history, that's it? BOOM? 13.7 billion years of Universal existence, 4.6 billion years of this planet existence and 450 million years of life on the land, 64 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs, god the insane has decided to call back his short-lived idiots? 

After provoking Russia for decades, the United States government has apparently concluded that the Russians are all saints and decided to escalate the provocations with confidence that nothing will go wrong, or go nuclear. Either that or the U.S. government truly wants World War III.

I wouldn't treat a diseased rat the way the United States treats Russia. The Russian government has exercised such incredible restraint that the United States has apparently decided it can get away with being even nastier, a move that is now openly described by Washington insiders as being driven by weapons profiteering:

In fact, the United States spends well over 8 times what Russia does on militarism, not counting "Homeland Security" or Energy or State or Veterans, etc. The world still contains enough nuclear weapons to destroy human life if just a small fraction of them are used, and 93 percent of them belong to Russia and the United States.

Why aren't the nukes gone, when Gorbachev was willing to give them up?

Because Reagan was unwilling to give up a stupid, non-functioning, and fraudulent technological defense against a threat that would not have existed if he had. That technology is back in the movie theaters and back in the news: Star Wars.

read more: http://ahtribune.com/opinion/908-war-with-russia.html

As mentioned before, Reagan and his neocons had another idea in their head. Once the USSR was dismantled, then the US could slowly take over the falling bits... which they have been doing, with the grand prize ultimately being Russia. The West tried with "banks" and "businesses" designed to steal Russian resources, but Putin threw them out, knowing that 99 per cent of the Western banks installed in Russia in the 1990s were working for or had been set up by the CIA and MI6...

The Swedish parliament ratified a controversial deal with NATO allowing the bloc to deploy troops in the Nordic country. NATO has been pushing for closer ties with neutral European countries, on the pretext of ‘protection from Russia’.

The so-called Host Nation Support Agreement (HNSA) was passed by the MPs on Wednesday as opponents of the deal vocally protested from the public galleries. Speaker asked security guards to stop the disturbance and escort the activists out.

Sweden’s Left Party, which initially intended to stall the ratification in an unlikely alliance with the far-right Sweden Democrats, dropped the notion when their political rivals withdrew their support. Sweden Democrats said even together with the Left Party they would not be able to push back the deal for more than a couple of weeks, The Local reported.

The HNSA was originally signed in September 2014 and allows NATO to deploy troops in Sweden on an invitation from Stockholm. Visiting soldiers would have legal immunities and privileges while staying in Sweden.

https://www.rt.com/news/344461-sweden-nato-troops-deal/

The Swedes are mad... We knew that with their dogged prosecution of Julian Assange.

A blog From JENS JØRGEN NIELSEN

Thursday, 02 June, 2016 07:48:44

Insane buildup against Russia

If we get a major European war, then nuclear weapons will be used. And who will pay the price? Shall we guess the Baltics, Poland - and Scandinavia? [and the rest of the planet]?

We are closer to a major war in Europe than ever since the Second World War for more than 70 years ago. And in a period that began with dreams of the big global community [not American style globalisation] after the cold war stopped in 1989.

Democrats are not the angels and the Republicans are not the evil that Scandinavians often think.

Russians and other former Soviet people embraced the West and its ideology. Even when NATO began to expand toward the former Warsaw Pact countries, The Russians spoke of a growing stability and peace. But this time is irrevocably past. Several things have to come worry us:

DEPLOYMENT AGAINST RUSSIA

First, there has never been so much military hardware and soldiers not only close, but on the border with Russia, since the Second World War. No wonder the Germans have refused to send soldiers to the Baltics.

The West might have forgotten, but the Russians have not forgotten that Nazi Germany penetrated the same way into Russia and killed around of 27 million people.

Second: cruise missiles are placed very close to the Russian border as well as missiles on ships in the Baltic and elsewhere. It is a result of George W Bush's cancellation of the Treaty on anti-ballistic missiles in 2002.

Cruise missiles can now hit for example Saint Petersburg in under five minutes. Those missiles possess nuclear weapons and you also get the illusion that these so-called defense missiles will neutralize the Russian long-range nuclear missiles and thus nullify the mutual deterrence.

So NATO thinks it can win an atomic war with Russia. The temptation to attack is growing. In reality it is just an illusion. Russians' weapons systems are significantly more advanced than, for example, the Iraqi.

Thirdly, the diplomatic relations between Russia and the West is now below freezing. That a Democratic president, Obama would be the one who throws Europe into such a dangerous situation should make you wonder.

Republican Ronald Reagan took steps to initiate disarmament negotiations with Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s. But it was also the Democrat John F. Kennedy, who was close to triggering a nuclear war because the Soviet Union had installed missiles within 90 miles from the US, in Cuba, 1962.

And today it is a Republican, Donald Trump, who asks why the United States leads so many wars in the world, and why is the United States "at war" [preparing for] with Russia. I like Trump's question. I don not support the man I emphasize.

Democrats are not the angels and the Republicans are not the evil that Scandinavians often think..

EUROPE HAS CLOSED RANKS FOR USA'S PURPOSE

The question that must be asked now is why the European countries have closed ranks behind a mad thrust that is uniquely controlled by America and its global interests.

US knows Russia and China will not threaten the United States directly, but they could challenge the US hegemony status in the world. 

It is even more ludicrous when you look at the fabrications: Russia is aggressive, Putin is a crazy man. We read this in newspapers and books — and are bombarded with this on TV, every day.

So what justifies placing Europe's existence at stake? Ukraine.

At the elections in 2010 and 2012 the majority of people voted for politicians who were against Ukrainian NATO membership. [This changed with pressures from the USA that also "sponsored "thugs", mafia and media to destabilise the country].

Since 1992, Crimea had wished to be separated from Ukraine. There are no indications that Russia would attack the Baltics.

But the Russians feel threatened. Anything can now happen.

http://blog.transnational.org/2014/05/jens-jørgen-nielsens-cv/

Translation by Gus.

Anthony Bourdain, an outspoken critic of President-elect Donald Trump, has called out “privileged Eastern liberals” — including himself — for their “utter contempt” of working-class Americans that he says made Trump’s presidency possible.

In an interview with Reason magazine, the celebrity chef and television host lamented the proliferating “fear of the Other,” which he believes has led to a rise in nationalism globally, citing examples in the Philippines, Russia and Italy, as well as the Brexit vote in June.

“When people are afraid and feel that their government has failed them, they do things that seem completely mad and unreasonable to those of who are perhaps under less pressure,” Bourdain said.

read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/12/31...

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A chef, Bourdain used food as his point of entry into foreign cultures, which made him a scourge of multinational restaurant chains. He might have swallowed fermented shark and roasted sheep testicle, but the most disgusting thing he said he’d ever eaten was a Chicken McNugget. How to feed America’s poor? Forget Wendy’s, Bourdain said, and bring back street markets the likes of which you find in developing countries, old men tossing roaringly hot frying pans and revelry around every corner.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/anthony-bourdain-america...

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The whole concept of feeding oneself is fraught with dependencies and fallacies. We need to improve. This is where one show on the ABC (Australian BC) shines above all others at most time. No I don't mean the Charlie Pickering Show which has improved A massive LOT since its launch in 2015, but LANDLINE. 

Landline, ABC, is a programme dedicated to the bush and the people who work the land, but is also very important to the city people — the many hordes who eat the stuff. This week's contribution was exemplar of lateral thinking and patience. A while back I mentioned that I preferred watching a doco on fishing sardines than watch Q&A...

Landline (Series 2018 Ep 18) tells us of a fishing family in WA (Western Australia) trying to make sardines more acceptable to the average Aussie burntbeefburger eater. I eat sardines quite regularly, fresh (most) and canned, from Australia. The show this week was also about "vertical farming". A lot of this weather-independent grown food is actually "fresh, wholesome and nutritious". It's the food of space age technology that does not need sun nor a constant water supply since there is a lot of recycling. The humble inventors and growers of this "technology" see themselves as the "stars of the next gens". I can see why. The less fields we need, the more wild forests we can have. Don't snigger. But we still need the infrastructure. It's a choice between tractors and containers. Wait and see what happens next. Meanwhile all the chooks I cook are from small farms where the beasts roam wild during the day, and are fed with "organic" grains. The flesh is tender yet full of fibres, as it should, reminding me of the chickens my mother bought at the fresh markets, in the golden olden days...

Bourdain would have liked what we ate in Europe when we were kids... But he was still a very younf fellow... Read from top.

...

Goal three, “adding up to something that is part of CNN’s whole” in “perfect synchronization,” is where Bourdain really shined. Bourdain’s innumerable fawning profiles highlighted his alleged authenticity and curiosity, and so did the leadership at CNN, which remunerated him very handsomely for what he did. Even in his life outside of the Time Warner empire, Bourdain seemed to have many of the same goals. For instance, Bourdain became an investor and editor for a new travel site called Roads & Kingdoms, in which capacity he funded a project to bring Cuban musicians to South By Southwest. Here’s how he described the aims of this initiative:

geopolitically: a window has opened, a door, hopefully—and the artistic and cultural exchanges that are happening now are important. They hold out the possibility of raising up people who deserve better. Cubans have been shut off from the world for so long.

For someone who was advertised so aggressively as an unaffected straight-shooter, Bourdain proved himself to be fluent in Beltway NGO-speak. Translated from diplomatese, though, “cultural exchanges” serving the geopolitical purpose of “raising up [Cubans] who deserve better” and have been “shut off from the world” means soft-power initiatives and subversion to end socialism in Cuba. This sounds an awful lot like what CNN has to say about the US government’s goals for Cuba:

what is clear is that a quarter of a century after the collapse of [Cuba’s] principal sponsor neither of the [Castro] brothers could stand in the way of their people’s wishes any longer.

President Obama travelled to Cuba. Already relations between the two countries had been improving with the US allowing closer cooperation in telecommunications as the door to trade begun to creak open.

However, it currently feels less that [Raúl Castro] is opening the country up than the country and its people are beginning to burst free.

An open door… a burst of freedom…the will of the people. This was identical language to that which Obama used in 2014, when he announced a shift in the US’s Cuba policy so as to better “advance our interests.” As they might say in a corporate press release, Bourdain’s values were clearly in alignment with those of his parent company, and the government which also serves his parent company. This is synergy.

CNN is, of course, the first 24-hour cable news network and one of the giants of the Western propaganda apparatus. Determining which US media outlet is most servile is like parsing which branch of the military is most imperialist, but CNN mounts a good case in its favor. This is the network that invited US Army psychological operations personnel to work as interns during the 1999 NATO war on Yugoslavia—though, to be fair, it was probably as dishonest in its reporting on Yugoslavia as all the other news outlets. There’s an incredible moment in a BBC documentary about Iran where CNN’s longtime celebrity Christiane Amanpour—“the Queen of fake news”—describes how she approaches her work:

Christiane Amanpour: We got final word, CNN, that this [interview with President Khatami] was going to happen. I was on my first holiday with my very serious boyfriend, who happened to be a State Department official.

US State Department Spokesman James Rubin: Her due diligence was to find out what the US government was waiting to hear from the Iranians, and she had the US government right beside her. So she did what any journalist would do.

Christiane Amanpour: I went into “what shall I ask him” mode.

James Rubin: And I did what I was supposed to do, which was identify for her the things the US government cared about

When CNN isn’t figuratively in bed with the Pentagon, it’s literally in bed with the State Department. While this is true of all major media organs (and most of the small ones), CNN may have an edge in that it looks like it aided an assassination attempt on a foreign government figure (a war crime). As reported by Robert Fisk in 1999, Serbia’s information minister Aleksandar Vučić received an invitation to discuss Serbia’s perspective on the Larry King show, which was allegedly to air at 2:30am Belgrade time. Vučić was late, which meant that he missed the NATO bombing of Radio Television Serbia, which happened a few minutes after he was scheduled to arrive and killed 16 people. Whatever criticisms one has of the “alt-right,” Breitbart has never been implicated in facilitating a criminal NATO assassination during wartime.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/06/12/anthony-bourdains-state-department-s...

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Note: was this part of Bourdain's "demons"... knowing he was a pawn in a big game to "control" other cultures through the smell of food?

American celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain gave an interview shortly before his death in which he blasted the Clinton family’s handling of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Talking with a journalist from Popula magazine, Bourdain, who was an outspoken supporter of the #MeToo movement, called former US President Bill Clinton a "gropey, grabby, disgusting" person.

"Bill Clinton, look, the bimbo eruptions — it was f*cking monstrous. That would not have flown today," Bourdain said about the Lewinsky scandal. He also slammed Bill's wife, Hillary Clinton, for shutting down his accusers.

"[Bill Clinton is] a piece of sh*t," Bourdain unequivocally declared. "Entitled, rapey, gropey, grabby, disgusting, and the way that he — and [Hillary] — destroyed these women and the way that everyone went along and, and are blind to this!"

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201807171066414452-bourdain-clinton-weinstein-interview/

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