Vladimir Putin is a few years younger than I am. Like me he spent several years in Germany. Like me he lost an elder brother to diphtheria (his during the Nazi siege of Leningrad, mine just after the second world war). His mother, despite her extreme suffering under the Nazi oppression of Russia did not hate German soldiers. My father, a prisoner of war for 5 years and often put in German "revenge camps" in chains and fed on bread and water, did his best to understand the suffering of Germans under a vile dictatorship and liked visiting Germany after the war. He encouraged me to learn and study German, as I am sure, from what we know, Putin's mother would have done.

Five of Putin's father's brothers died in the second world war. I lost a grandfather and a great uncle. Neither Putin nor I would speak German fluently today had our families instilled a hatred of the former foe. But that does not mean that Putin, like myself, does not grasp the very serious threat posed today by that same combination of European and American corporatism and German Eastward expansion which caused that war.

Nor are we blind to the remarkable similarities between the extent of "German EU's" territory today and that occupied by Nazi Germany in the 1940s.

Remember Tony Blair? "He's like a gag reflex" says Jonathan Pie. "He may not go to prison but he's definitely going to hell." As usual, Pie nails it, pulling no punches. Blair is responsible for more than 500,000 deaths. Yet, lying psychopath that he is, he has the gall to call Corbyn "dangerous".

With Washington undertaking the greatest military expansion in world history, oblivious to the global ramifications of its sheer arrogance and audacity, the time is ripe for Russia to make a symbolic gesture in America's backyard.

At the time of this writing, three US B-52 Stratofortress Bombers have just departed from a US airbase in North Dakota, en route to the Baltic States where they will participate in a NATO war game that goes by the cuddly codename 'Saber Strike'. This two-week gang bang will involve 10,000 troops from 13 NATO countries, as well as several coveted candidates for future membership, like Sweden and Finland.

If you think Russia is comfortable with these annual war dances, you're probably watching too much Western television.

But this reckless provocation on Russia's doorstep is just a little sampling of the US-led military adventures now happening across Eastern Europe, which are directly responsible for dragging bilateral relations between Moscow and Washington to their worst levels since maybe forever.

Last month, for example, President Putin commented on the US missile defense system that has just gone live in nearby Romania.

"At the moment the interceptor missiles... have a range of 500 kilometers, soon this will go up to 1,000 kilometers, and worse than that, they can be rearmed with 2,400 km-range offensive missiles... and it can be done by simply switching the software, so that even the Romanians themselves won't know," Putin told reporters during a two-day visit to Greece.

The road to Raqqa, capital of the phony ISIS/ISIL/Daesh "Caliphate", will continue to be a riddle wrapped inside an enigma at least until the US Presidential elections. Let's examine why.

The loose combo known as Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by the Kurdish YPG alongside its women's brigade, the YPJ, are trying to advance against Daesh north and now also west of Raqqa.

The key target is Tabqa, west of Raqqa. Tabqa is crucial because it links Raqqa with Daesh positions near Aleppo — where an embryonic Mother of All Battles is gearing up. Conquering Taqba itself will be no mean feat as it implies the SDF forces crossing the Euphrates River, which happens to be a red line imposed by Turkey's Sultan Erdogan.

Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party's rigged convention. The great counter revolution had begun.

The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When Janis Joplin sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose", she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America's victims in faraway places.

"We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom. Now don't you forget it." So said a National Parks Service guide as I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He was addressing a school party of young teenagers in bright orange T-shirts. As if by rote, he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.

The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own lives. A friend of mine, a marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam, was often asked, "Which side did you fight on?"

NATO's invasion of Moldova foiled thanks to coordinated actions of many nations' patriots

It's hard to overestimate the value of planning in advance, especially when it comes to getting reservations in popular restaurants and invading countries by military force.

In the week of the May 9th Victory Day two significant failures took place each one remarkable in its own way. Each event went completely unreported by the Western corporate and government media, but was discussed on Social Media.

[The followings is an excerpt. Look for a full version of this investigation in the June release of my new book: "Scott Humor: Rumors, Speculations and Investigations of the First Hybrid War"]

In the following three weeks after the incident with the USS Florida, while Russia was preparing for Victory Day celebrations and all eyes were on Moscow, attention of Ukrainians was fully concentrated on the visit of Victoria Nuland to Kiev on April 26th allegedly to discuss the implementation of the Minsk II Agreement and the future elections in Donetsk and Lugansk republics. Since the day when President Putin said that the republics can have their elections anytime they want, the question of these elections ceased to be a subject of blackmail toward the Kremlin. It appeared that the true reason for Nuland's visit could be located to the west of Kiev, rather than the east.

Just recently, Robert D. Kaplan, a former Stratfor's Chief Geopolitical Analyst, and currently a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) has published a book "In Europe's Shadow" where he lays out a plan to reunite Romania with "its lost province of Moldova."

"The qualifications for president seem to be that one is willing to commit mass murder one minute and hand presidential medals of freedom to other war criminals in the next. One need only apply if one has very loose, flexible, or non-existent morality."—Author and activist Cindy Sheehan

Long gone are the days when the path to the White House was open to anyone who met the Constitution's bare minimum requirements of being a natural born citizen, a resident of the United States for 14 years, and 35 years of age or older.

Today's presidential hopefuls must jump through a series of hoops aimed at selecting the candidates best suited to serve the interests of the American police state. Candidates who are anti-war, anti-militarization, anti-Big Money, pro-Constitution, pro-individual freedom and unabashed advocates for the citizenry need not apply.

The carefully crafted spectacle of the presidential election with its nail-biting primaries, mud-slinging debates, caucuses, super-delegates, popular votes and electoral colleges has become a fool-proof exercise in how to persuade a gullible citizenry into believing that their votes matter.

Yet no matter how many Americans go to the polls on November 8, "we the people" will not be selecting the nation's next president.

While voters might care about where a candidate stands on healthcare, Social Security, abortion and immigration—hot-button issues that are guaranteed to stir up the masses, secure campaign contributions and turn any election into a circus free-for-all—those aren't the issues that will decide the outcome of this presidential election.

What decides elections are money and power.

We've been hoodwinked into believing that our votes count, that we live in a democracy, that elections make a difference, that it matters whether we vote Republican or Democrat, and that our elected officials are looking out for our best interests. Truth be told, we live in an oligarchy, and politicians represent only the profit motives of the corporate state, whose leaders know all too well that there is no discernible difference between red and blue politics, because there is only one color that matters in politics—green.

As much as the Republicans and Democrats like to act as if there's a huge difference between them and their policies, they are part of the same big, brawling, noisy, semi-incestuous clan. Watch them interact at social events—hugging and kissing and nudging and joking and hobnobbing with each other—and it quickly becomes clear that they are not sworn enemies but partners in crime, united in a common goal, which is to maintain the status quo.

The powers-that-be will not allow anyone to be elected to the White House who does not answer to them.

Who are the powers-that-be, you might ask?

I've been talking with a lot of my friends recently — in private where they felt comfortable letting their guard down — about the dirty little secret no one is supposed to talk about.

The shame people feel when they can't find a job...

...or pay their bills.

...or go to the dentist.

...or that they have to move back in with their parents.

...or they can't afford to have children.

We are supposed to pretend, in this stupendously individualist culture, that it is our fault. The buck stops here. I am responsible for my failings in life.

Charity says a diet low in refined carbohydrates but high in healthy fats is the best way to prevent weight gain and aid weight loss

After a big announcement on May 16, 2016, The Intercept made 166 documents available to the public. At this rate, it will take an estimated 600 years to read all of the documents! I would like to ask The Intercept, 'Where's the beef?'

Last updated on May 16, 2016, Pierre Omidyar's The Intercept released its first data dump of the Snowden NSA files. For a long time, I wondered why the Snowden files weren't available to us like the WikiLeaks files were. After all, the information could further research on US "asymmetric warfare." I wanted to search them just as I had done with WikiLeaks. And then, perhaps it was fate that gave me a partial answer: I used Wikileaks documents for my dissertation and was forced to scrub every WikiLeaks reference in order to get my dissertation published and receive my Ph.D.

You see, in its zeal to crack the whip on whistle blowers revealing the government's multitudinous dirty dealings and to deter even more acts of conscience from potential whistle blowers, the Obama Administration chose to prosecute and imprison journalist Barrett Brown who had merely republished via hyperlinks some of the same WikiLeaks sources found in my dissertation.