Sixty years ago today (October 28) the US and Russia stepped back from the brink of nuclear war by making a deal. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would yield to President John F. Kennedy’s demand that Soviet missiles be removed from Cuba; Kennedy pledged not to invade. There is an instructive analogy with Ukraine today. Soviet documents that were revealed after the USSR imploded show how this all went down – and how we all would have "gone down," literally, were it not for the statesmanlike...

Thursday night I wrote a column on the challenges faced by Elon Musk in taking over Twitter and suggested steps to “hit the ground running.” One of those obvious steps discussed in earlier columns was to fire CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde, the primary figures responsible for creating one of the largest censorship systems in history. He did so within minutes of taking over and their removal constitutes as singular advances in the cause...

The Ukraine war has intensified the old energy conflict between Russia and the US. The ultimate result of this struggle is uncertain but US main allies, i.e., Europe, are not expected to perform well. Fossil fuels (coal, crude oil and natural gas) are the main sources of world energy providing 80 percent of the world’s consumption. In Europe, and despite long-dated political, social and media initiatives in favour of green energy, in 2021 fossil fuels sourced 70.6 percent of total energy...

It’s not unusual, in fact is typical, for presidents to ditch campaign promises. One such promise Joe Biden made on the campaign trail was a “no first use” of nuclear weapons. That was then, this is now. “The Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy rejected limits on using nuclear weapons long championed by arms control advocates and in the past by President Joe Biden,” Bloomberg reports: Citing burgeoning threats from China and Russia, the Defense Department said in the document released...

I fully realize that when it comes to Ukraine, one is supposed to focus exclusively on Russia’s invasion and not on what the Pentagon did to gin up the crisis, a crisis that has gotten us perilously close to a world-destroying nuclear war with Russia.  Nonetheless, the Pentagon’s role in this crisis needs to be emphasized, over and over again, just as the Pentagon’s role in ginning up the Cuban Missile Crisis also needs to be emphasized, over and over again. Yes, what I am emphasizing is the...

‘Russian spy among the guest lecturers of a Budapest elite college? ’The question mark at the end of this headline above a recent article in an English-language Hungarian media outlet, Daily News Hungary, is an excellent example of the vigorous dishonesty practiced by journalists around the world, both in major national newspapers, including Dutch ones, as well as in minor media like this Hungarian one. Gideon van Meijeren caught a mendacious Dutch journalist red-handed this week but they are...

“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — They Live  All is not as it seems. There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media. This is the premise of John...

As the astute author Hunter S. Thompson noted, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Weird is indisputably the condition in Great Britain, where Liz Truss, an arguably empty and talentless prime minister, is out—and was, it seemed for a moment, very nearly replaced by her vacuous predecessor, Boris Johnson. Weirdness, however, is not foreign to American politics. An indicator of just how weird Washington is becoming is the apparent interest in General (ret.) David Petraeus’s recent...

It’s been more than obvious since April 2020 that lockdowns were far too costly for individuals and society and could never earn a rational public-health defense. And the evidence was rolling in from one year later that the vaccine mandates were similarly indefensible. Both tactics had in common the enormous use of state coercion that flew in the face of every principle of civilized government. As we are constantly told, both people and government were panicked, and needlessly so. As it turns...

Josef Stalin’s top henchman famously said, “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” What it meant was that Soviet justice was about politics, not the rule of law. First decide who, for political reasons, is to be punished, and then the state will provide the crimes for which he will be charged.This dark era of politicized “justice” has returned with former Trump campaign advisor Steve Bannon’s recent sentence to four months in jail for “contempt of Congress” over his refusal to appear...

There is an interesting development out of a case in Louisiana where a federal judge has ruled that Dr. Anthony Fauci and White House officials must testify in a case alleging a backchannel for censorship on social media. The complaint in Schmitt v. Biden, No. 3:22-cv-1213 in the District Court for the Western District of Louisiana alleges that Facebook and Twitter coordinated their censorship programs with government officials. I have previously written about what some of us view as a...

If one reads the news with an uncritical eye, he or she would more than likely believe Vladimir Putin intends to nuke Ukraine. Of course, Putin never said he would use nukes in Ukraine, only if his country faces an existential threat, undoubtedly the same policy followed the USG. The lies and hysteria spread by the corporate war propaganda media have resulted in frightening millions of people in Europe and America. The fear campaign went so far as to insinuate there will be a nuclear attack...

The Biden administration is reportedly considering opening a national security review of Elon Musk's business ventures which could see the plutocrat's purchase of Twitter blocked by the White House, in part because Musk is perceived as having an "increasingly Russia-friendly stance." Bloomberg reports: Biden administration officials are discussing whether the US should subject some of Elon Musk’s ventures to national security reviews, including the deal for Twitter Inc. and SpaceX’s Starlink...

On Oct. 20, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention handed another huge gift to Big Pharma: In a little-publicized meeting, the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted to recommend adding the Covid vaccine to the childhood and adolescent immunization schedule. This makes the Covid vaccine market vast and indefinite—exposing children to unnecessary risks while shielding drug companies from liability. Throughout the pandemic, the CDC and the Food and Drug...

The most obvious explanation to the mysterious air dash of the UK Defence Minister Ben Wallace to Washington on Tuesday could be that he was canvassing for the support of the Biden Administration for his pitch to succeed Liz Truss as Britain’s next prime minister. But another plausible explanation can be that the secret, hurried trip marked a defining moment in the conflict in Ukraine, which is showing all signs of turning into a full-fledged war.  To be sure, the Biden team cannot but be...

The west is advancing the claim that Putin is distributing Viagra to his soldiers so that they can more effectively rape Ukrainians, which was a ridiculous propaganda narrative the first time the west used it to manufacture consent for regime change in Libya. In a Thursday interview with the French government-owned news agency AFP, a Mauritian-British official from the United Nations named Pramila Patten claimed that Russia has a "military strategy" of mass rape in Ukraine and that Russian...