The RAND Corporation, a highly influential elite national security think tank funded directly by the Pentagon, has published a landmark report stating that prolonging the proxy war is actively harming the US and its allies and warning Washington that it should avoid “a protracted conflict” in Ukraine.

By Felix Livshitz

The report has an unequivocal title, “Avoiding a long war: US policy and the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” which provides a strong indication as to its contents. 

... “Bradley is not a (expletive) tank,” James Cunny wrote on Twitter. “I take personal offense, most of my career I was a dismount, but also did crew, it is NOT a (expletive) tank.” 

Others took shots at news reports, particularly those produced by journalists who don’t regularly cover the military.

“If media folks would hire just a handful of the thousands of combat veterans out there from 20 years of war you won’t have this problem,” J.R. Salzman tweeted.

The United States of America was founded as an answer to the tyranny of abusive power from a leadership that everyone was required to be loyal to at all costs. Rebelling against the most powerful empire on Earth was a very risky proposition, and the Founders of the American nation had no ambition to create a tyrant nation themselves.

With all the woke navel-gazing that an increasingly illiterate and ignorant American populace is being drawn into, these same people seem to be unaware that their government (who “takes care of them”) is acting as World Tyrant on the geopolitical stage.

BY Seraphim Hanisch

Notebooks that US President Joe Biden kept during his time as vice president were among the items seized by the FBI during a search of his home last week, as part of a probe into his mishandling of classified documents, a person familiar with the investigation told NBC.

Despite not being marked as classified, the notebooks were taken because they contain writing related to Biden’s official business within the Obama administration, including details of diplomatic contacts, the broadcaster reported on Saturday.

The notebooks were a mix of records on personal and official topics, the source said, adding that pages with no sensitive data could also be considered state property under the Presidential Records Act, as they relate to the activities of the government.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is "nervous" about the probability of the US defaulting on its debt which could translate into nothing short of a "catastrophe" for the nation, as she told American reporters during her Africa trip.

Speaking to US journalists on January 28, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen described a picture of forthcoming doom in case GOP-led House Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling without hesitation this summer.

"Of course, it makes me nervous," Yellen said. "It would be devastating. It's a catastrophe." According to the Treasury secretary, the US will face a "financial crisis" and "recession" in the event of a default.

The New Silk Roads, or BRI, as well as the integration efforts of BRICS+, the SCO and the EAEU will be on the forefront of Chinese policy.

Liu He studied economics at Renmin University in China and got a Master’s from Harvard. Since 2018, he’s one of China’s Vice Premiers – along with Han Zheng, Sun Chunlan, and Hu Chunhua. He’s a Director of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission and heads the China Financial Stability and Development Committee. Anyone around the world who wants to know what will drive China’s economy in the Year of the Rabbit must pay attention to Liu He.

BY PEPE ESCOBAR

On the 5th anniversary of his death, we republish one of Parry’s many prescient articles on Ukraine, this one on the risks of ignoring the 2014 coup, the neo-Nazis’s role and the war against coup resisters in the east.

By Robert Parry
Special to Consortium News
April 16, 2014

They lied. They went to war under false pretences. They killed. They destroyed a country.

They write about their right to do the things they did and blame "intelligence" that got it wrong - though they were lying about everything - and, in a well-oiled threesome speil, they say they would do it all again...

They STILL take us for fools.

SEE: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/11276 

In January 2003, the then American leader gave a speech to Congress which signaled his intention to attack Iraq

IF YOU’RE YOUNG AND IDEALISTIC, YOU SHOULD HATE YOUR GOVERNMENT. WHETHER RUSSIAN, FRENCH, AMERICAN OR BRITISH, YOUR GOVERNMENT IS THERE TO ANNOY YOU. I AM POLITE. 

AND YOUR PARENTS! YOU LOVED THEM UNTIL THEY HAVE MADE YOUR LIFE A MISERY ON THE DAY YOUR MUM ADVISED YOU AGAINST HAVING YOUR BELLY BUTTON PIERCED, BECAUSE OF THIS AND THAT GERM. BEAUT! READ WHATSERNAME (OF THE VICAR OF DIBLEY’S FAME) BORING BOOK WITH NORA IN IT TO CONFIRM THIS... 

SO, THERE ARE WEBSITES DEDICATED TO TURN PEACEFUL YOUTH INTO LITTLE REBELLIOUS STINKING THINKERS. I SAY STINKING THINKERS, AND NOT PHILOSOPHERS, BECAUSE UNTIL ONE REACHES A CERTAIN LEVEL OF UNDERSTANDING WHICH IS NEVER PASSED A CERTAIN AGE, LIFE IS A MIRAGE WITH RASP (I MEAN RAP) MUSIC AND BORING DANCING GIRLS.

AND AS A YOUNG RUSSIAN REBEL (ACTIVIST) YOU LOVE NATO.

Tens of thousands of Italians have signed a petition protesting Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s planned address at a Eurovision-style song contest. Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini told reporters that the event “should remain the festival of Italian song and nothing else.”

The petition, which blames the Ukrainian conflict on NATO and on Kiev’s “brutal repression” of Russian-speakers in Donbass, has gained around 33,000 signatures, Reuters reported on Friday morning.

It calls on the organizers of the Sanremo Music Festival – a Eurovision-style contest held every year since the 1950s – to withdraw their invitation to Zelensky, who is set to speak via video link on the final night of the contest on February 11. 

The editor of [the] website (CONSORTIUM NEWS) is part of a secret list created by the organization Hamilton 68 that was fed to major media and Congress to identify so-called “Russian accounts” that were “sowing discord” in the United States. 

The list of 644 Twitter accounts was shared with Twitter executives who were unable to prove any links to Russia, reported Matt Taibbi in his latest installment of the Twitter Files on Friday. 

ONE COULD BE CONFUSED BY THE CLIMATE CHANGE DENIALISTS' VIEWS. ON ONE HAND, SOME DENIALIST CONSERVATIVES CLAIM THAT CLIMATE CHANGE IS A PLOT NECESSARILY DESIGNED TO KEEP POPULATIONS UNDER CONTROL, AND ON THE OTHER HAND THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS A FALLACY THAT SHOULD BE IGNORED. 

THIS IS A PLOT TO CONFUSE THE ISSUES WHICH IS IRRELEVANT IN REGARD TO THE PROCESS.

The West should have clamped down on Russia at the start of the Ukraine crisis nine years ago rather than waiting for large-scale hostilities to break out in 2022, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed on Thursday.

Speaking to Ukraine’s Rada TV Channel, Johnson said such a punishment “would have been serious, but we did nothing,” referring to the 2014 events in Donbass and Crimea.

At the time, a Western-backed coup in Kiev prompted a popular revolt in eastern Ukraine and led to the Crimean peninsula seceding from Ukraine and voting to join Russia.

The fact that the US, Germany and several other countries announced they would be supplying Ukraine with main battle tanks doesn’t mean NATO is at war with Moscow, the French Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday. The comments from Quai d’Orsay come after the controversial speech by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in the European Parliament earlier this week. 

“We are not at war with Russia and none of our partners are,” ministry spokeswoman Anne-Claire Legendre said on Thursday, according to AFP. “The delivery of military equipment... does not constitute co-belligerence.”