Citizens Stock News

Are Warnings About "Imminent Russian Invasion Of Ukraine" Any More Than A Deep-State Intel Operation? Via StrategicMacro.com, I think what is happening overall is brinkmanship by a number of parties , which is not uncommon in geopolitics, and it is unlikely anything significant happens. But lets discuss the interests of different parties in each state: Ukrainian interests There are interest groups in Ukraine that want Nord Stream 2 sanctioned as it going live in June 2022 would end $3bn of transit revenues that the Ukraine government gets. The oligarchs in the Ukraine owe a lot of their wealth to milking the state budgets. Then there are Neo-Nazi militias that were folded into the military without much re-education who dream of taking Donbass region back and like to wear WWII Galician division insignia. So we had a Ukraine forces build up last Feb/ March then a climb down (NS2 was supposed to go live last summer but a German court said the legal structure was not compliant and needed to be changed and then re-approved) now is the last gamble before it goes live.

Ex-CIA Officer Asks: What Happens When America Experiences Real War With A Superpower? Authored by Michael G. Merhige via The Libertarian Institute, During my first years as a young CIA officer in Vietnam from 1965-67, I went to school (so to speak) and received the real education of my life. I learned about my government, its politicians, and military leaders. I learned about the lies, the high explosive and chemical bombings, our superior fire power, villages bombed and burned , the payoffs we made to our ranking Vietnamese allies and the reasons for our losing the war. The enemy fought to unite their country and expel foreign domination. The US fought because of corrupt leadership and our losses were a mere fraction being fought on the enemys turf with our superior fire power, money and material support. They fought for a cause. We fought for no justifiable reason. They won. We did not. AP image: Napalm strike near US troops on patrol in South Vietnam, 1966. Remember the body bags displayed on the tarmacs of our returning dead from Vietnam?

TEHRAN: Iran on Sunday put on trial the alleged leader of a US-based "terrorist group" accused of being behind a deadly mosque bombing in 2008, the judiciary said. Iran-born Jamshid Sharmahd, 66, who is also a German national and a US resident, is charged with spreading "corruption on earth", one of the most severe charges in the Islamic republic, and which carries the death penalty. "The trial of Jamshid Sharmahd, the leader of the Tondar terrorist group, was held in public this morning," the Judiciary''s Mizan Online agency said. Sharmahd is "accused of corruption on earth by planning and directing terrorist acts," it added, citing the indictment. It includes "the bombing of a mosque in Shiraz (southern Iran) on April 12, 2008, which killed 14 people and injured approximately 300 others." Sharmahd appeared in court dressed in blue-striped prisoners'' pyjamas. Iran, which does not recognise dual nationality for citizens, announced his arrest in August 2020 in a "complex operation", without specifying how, where or when he was seized.

The Tangled Tale Of NATO Expansion At The Heart Of The Ukraine Crisis Authored by Joe Lauria via Consortium News The U.S. response to winning the Cold War set the stage for the current crisis with Russia T he end of the Cold War with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union two years later presented the United States with a choice: triumphalism or reconciliation. There was hope of a peace dividend because the fortune spent on armaments for so long could now be spent on domestic needs. The Warsaw Pact dissolved and there was hope that its counterpart, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, would also pass into history. Rather its expansion has become a flashpoint in the current standoff over Ukraine. To assent to the reunification of Germany, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ultimately agreed to a proposal from then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker that a reunited Germany would be part of NATO but the military alliance would not move one inch to the east, that is, absorb any of the former Warsaw Pact nations into NATO.

Greenwald: Pressure Campaign To Remove Joe Rogan From Spotify Reveals Liberal Religion Of Censorship Authored by Glenn Greenwald , American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by "liberals, I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party ). Joe Rogan interviews Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Aug. 6, 2019, roughly six months before he endorsed the Vermont independent for president. For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of "hate speech to mean "views that make us uncomfortable, and then demand that such hateful views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely , that the First Amendment''s guarantee of free speech does not protect hate speech." Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.

Abu Zubaydah has been held by the US without charge for 20 years. His own words and images depict the relentless and illegal abuse he has suffered

Calls mount for release of full Senate report on the US torture of Abu Zubaydah to counter a narrative too many Americans still believe that torture works

Amazon Is No Longer The ''New New Thing'' Doesn''t It Look Tired? Authored by Bill Blain via MorningPorridge.com, The four most dangerous words in politics; doesnt she look tired? Dismiss FOMO and Speculation! The markets will focus on fundamentals in 2022 which means taking a long hard look at everything we think we know, and figuring out what aint necessarily so. Amazon is a case in point just how deep is its moat, and what might revelations of an internal toxic culture do to its price? Oh, these markets. Desist from fear. The ying of a Hawkish Fed is balanced by yang of Teslas record results (or maybe its the other way round!). Worry not about the in, out, whirl-it-all-about sharp spikey vol lines on the index charts. No one can predict the madness of crowds in periods of turmoil, or guess how the stock market voting machine is going to weight the votes each day. What I can tell you is; a) as the markets underlying base shifts, the crowds mood is changing, b) this is a critical moment to be making long term calls about assets and investments, and c) do so before the market makes these decisions for you This is the time to understand exactly how the game has changed from 2021 to 2022: Focused value plays are replacing optimistic FOMO speculative crack-fuelled hype.

Sperry: What Did Clinton Know And When Did She Know It? The Russiagate Evidence Builds Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClearInvestigations, As indictments and new court filings indicate that Special Counsel John Durham is investigating Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign for feeding false reports to the FBI to incriminate Donald Trump and his advisers as Kremlin agents, Clintons role in the burgeoning scandal remains elusive. What did she know and when did she know it? Top officials involved in her campaign have repeatedly claimed, some under oath, that they and the candidate were unaware of the foundation of their disinformation campaign: the 35-page collection of now debunked claims of Trump/Russia collusion known as the Steele dossier. Even though her campaign helped pay for the dossier, they claim she only read it after BuzzFeed News published it in 2017. But court documents, behind-the-scenes video footage and recently surfaced evidence reveal that Clinton and her top campaign advisers were much more involved in the more than $1 million operation to dredge up dirt on Trump and Russia than they have let on.

Greenwald: The Neocons'' Primary War Tactic - Branding Opponents Of US Intervention As Traitors Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com , One of the most bizarre but important dynamics of Trump-era U.S. politics is that the most fanatical war-hungry neocons, who shaped Bush/Cheney militarism, have become the most popular pundits and thought leaders in American liberalism. They have not changed in the slightest — they are employing the same tactics they have always invoked, and for the same causes — but they have correctly perceived that their agenda is better served by migrating back to the Democratic Party which originally spawned their bloodthirsty ideology. Former Bush White House speechwriter David Frum speaks to MSNBC''s Joe Scarborough about Russia, Nov. 30, 2021 The excuse offered by Democrats for their embrace of neocons — we did it only as a temporary coalition of convenience to oppose Trump — is false for many reasons. This unholy alliance pre-dated Trump. In 2014 — long before anyone envisioned Trump descending down an escalator on his path to the White House — the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn wrote a New York Times op-ed entitled “The Next Act of the Neocons.” He predicted, correctly as it turned out, that “the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.” The corporate media outlets consumed most voraciously by liberals are filled to the brim with war-loving neocons.