US policy paper reveals desire for construction of full-scale extraterritorial army to invade Syria. Such an army is being built in Iraq and Turkey and it's called "ISIS."

The corporate-financier funded and directed policy think tank, the Brookings Institution, has served as one of several prominent forums documenting and disseminating US foreign policy. It would host in part the architects of the so-called "surge" during the nearly decade-spanning US occupation of Iraq, as well as battle plans for waging a covert war against Iran now well under way.

Part of this covert war against Iran involved the arming and backing of listed terrorist groups, and in particular, the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) which has killed US servicemen, American civilians, as well as countless innocent Iranians over the decades. Among those signing their name to this plan found within Brookings' "Which Path to Persia?" report, was Kenneth Pollack. Now, in efforts to overthrow the government of Syria, also a stated and integral part of undermining, isolating, and destroying Iran, Pollack has revealed another element of the plan - to create a full-scale proxy military force outside of Syria, then subsequently invading and occupying Syria with it.

Introduction:

Why is the Ukrainian Government, which the U.S. supports, bombing the pro-Russian residents who live in Ukraine's own southeast?

Why is the American Government, which aims to oust Syria's leader Bashar al-Assad, bombing his main enemy, ISIS?

This report will document that both bombings are different parts of the same Obama-initiated business-operation, in which the American aristocracy, Saudi aristocracy, and Qatari aristocracy, work together, to grab dominance over supplying energy to the world's biggest energy-market, Europe, away from Russia, which currently is by far Europe's largest energy-supplier.

Here are the actual percentage-figures on that: Russia supplies 38% of it, #2 Norway (the only European nation among the top 15) supplies 18%, and all other countries collectively supply a grand total of 44%. That's it; that's all -- in the world's largest energy-market, Russia is the lone giant. But U.S. President Obama's team are working hard to change that, to do a huge favor for the royals of Saudi Arabia and of Qatar, and yank that business for them. (Unfortunately, the residents in southeastern Ukraine are being bombed and driven out to become refugees in Russia, as an essential part of this operation to choke off Russia's gas-supply into Europe and transfer that business mainly to those royals. This objective against Russia and for those royals is considered to be far more important than its many thousands of victims are, and no one in the Obama Administration has provided any indication -- at least publicly -- that tears have been shed there for the residents in southeast Ukraine who have been mass-murdered and for the roughly million of them who have fled to refuge and safety in Russia to escape being bombed by the America's new client-state, the Ukrainian Government.)

Obama has initiated, and is leading, this international aristocratic team, consisting of the U.S. aristocracy and mainly two Sunni Moslem aristocracies -- the Saudi and the Qatari royal families -- to choke off Russia's economic lifeblood from those European energy sales, and to transfer lots of this business, via new oil and gas pipeline contracts and new international trade-deals, over to the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Those royals, in turn, are assisting Obama in the overthrow of the key Russia-allied leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, who has performed an indispensable role for Russia in blocking any such massive expansion of Saudi and Qatari energy-traffic into Europe, and who has thus been a vital protector of Russia's dominance in the European energy-market.

America's aristocracy would be benefited in many ways from this changeover to Europe's increasing dependence upon those Sunni Moslem nations, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have long been allied with U.S. oil companies, and away from the Shiite Moslem nation of Iran, and from Iran's key backer, Russia.

The most important way that America's aristocrats would benefit from the deal would be the continuance, for the indefinite future, of the U.S. dollar's role as the international reserve currency, in which energy and energy-futures are traded. The Sunni nations are committed to continued dominance of the dollar, and Wall Street depends on that continuance. It's also one of the reasons the U.S. Treasury's sales of U.S. Federal debt around the world have been as successful as they have been. This also provides essential support to the U.S. Federal Reserve, and especially to the six Wall Street banks that do virtually all of the derivatives trading.

Furthermore, Obama's effort to force the European Union to weaken their anti-global-warming standards so as to allow European imports of oil from the exceptionally carbon-gas-generating Athabasca Canada tar sands -- which are approximately 40% owned by America's Koch brothers, the rest owned by other U.S. and allied oil companies -- would likewise reduce Europe's current dependency upon Russian energy sources, at the same time as it would directly benefit U.S. energy-producers. Obama has been working hard for those oil companies to become enabled to sell such oil into Europe, turning the screws on Europe to weaken those standards.

And, finally, the extension of U.S. fracking technology into Ukraine, and perhaps ultimately even into some EU nations, where it has been strongly resisted by the residents, might likewise boost American oil firms and reduce the enormous flow of European cash into Russian Government coffers to pay for Russian gas (which doesn't even require fracking).

In other words, the wars in both Syria and Ukraine are being fought basically in order to grab the European energy market, away from Russia, somewhat in the same way (though far more violently) as Iran's share of that market was previously grabbed away by means of the U.S.-led sanctions against Iran. The current bombing campaigns in both Syria and Ukraine are directed specifically against Iran's chief ally, Russia.

First, will be discussed here the bombing-campaign against Iran's and Russia's ally Assad in Syria; then against the residents of the ethnic-Russian areas of Ukraine, where Western oil companies want to frack.

A meteor five times brighter than a full moon lit up the skies above Texas over the weekend, officials said Monday. Residents across Texas reported seeing the streaking fireball at around 8:45 p.m. Saturday. The American Meteor Society, a group that tracks fireball sightings, said it had received more than 300 reports from witnesses in the Lone Star State. "This was definitely what we call a 'fireball,' which by definition is a meteor brighter than the planet Venus," Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, told CNN. "This was a very bright event." So bright that it was picked up on a NASA camera more than 500 miles away in the New Mexico mountains, Cooke said, "which makes it extremely unusual."

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all - the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus - the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others. - Simone Weil, French philosopher and political activist

It's no coincidence that during the same week in which the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Yates v. United States, a case in which a Florida fisherman is being threatened with 20 years' jail time for throwing fish that were too small back into the water, Florida police arrested a 90-year-old man twice for violating an ordinance that prohibits feeding the homeless in public.

Both cases fall under the umbrella of overcriminalization, that phenomenon in which everything is rendered illegal and everyone becomes a lawbreaker. As I make clear in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, this is what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.

John Yates, a commercial fisherman, was written up in 2007 by a state fish and wildlife officer who noticed that among Yates' haul of red grouper, 72 were apparently under the 20-inch minimum legal minimum. Yates, ordered to bring the fish to shore as evidence of his violation of the federal statute on undersized catches, returned to shore with only 69 grouper in the crate designated for evidence. A crew member later confessed that, on orders from Yates, the crew had thrown the undersized grouper overboard and replaced them with larger fish. Unfortunately, they were three fish short. Sensing a bait-and-switch, prosecutors refused to let Yates off the hook quite so easily. Unfortunately, in prosecuting him for the undersized fish under a law aimed at financial crimes, government officials opened up a can of worms.

Arnold Abbott, 90 years old and the founder of a nonprofit that feeds the homeless, is facing a fine of $1000 and up to four months in jail for violating a city ordinance that makes it a crime to feed the homeless in public. Under the city's ordinance, clearly aimed at discouraging the feeding of the homeless in public, organizations seeking to do so must provide portable toilets, be 500 feet away from each other, 500 feet from residential properties, and are limited to having only one group carry out such a function per city block. Abbott has been feeding the homeless on a public beach in Ft. Lauderdale every Wednesday evening for the past 23 years. On November 2, 2014, moments after handing out his third meal of the day, police reportedly approached the nonagenarian and ordered him to "'drop that plate right now,' as if I were carrying a weapon," recalls Abbott. Abbott was arrested and fined. Three days later, Abbott was at it again, and arrested again.

We all know the disappointment of turning up too late to grab our Egg McMuffin in the morning. However the realisation proved a little too much for a pair of women at a US chain of McDonald's.

The pair began a frenzied attack on workers, picking up tables and chairs and throwing them around the room while ranting and raving.

Baffled customers looked on as the women screamed and swore at them while hurling furniture around the restaurant.

The Russian leader delivers an important foreign policy address we should consider. The Times botches it badly.

Give me a sec to count. In my lifetime the Soviet Union and latterly the Russian Federation have had nine leaders. Stalin's death elevated Malenkov and then Khrushchev, and the banishing of Khrushchev led to Brezhnev. Then came a pair of forgettables, then Gorbachev and on to the ever-inebriated Yeltsin (whom one wants dearly to forget). For 15 years, counting the Dmitry Medvedev interval, Vladimir Putin has held the wheel of the Russian bus.

Of all these figures only Stalin, and only in his post-"Uncle Joe" years, has been vilified to the extent of the current Russian leader. The question is obvious and I hope not too complicated: Why?

There are always plenty of answers floating around. I take almost all of them to lie somewhere between misguided and malevolent by intent, but I will get to this in a minute. In as few words as I can manage, here is my thought: Putin has fallen drastically afoul of Washington - and his war is with Washington more than the Europeans - because those in deep slumber do not like to be awakened.

Protests against mass surveillance, govt austerity and social injustice have taken to the streets in over 400 cities worldwide. Dubbed the Million Mask March, the third annual act of mass civil disobedience was organized by the activist group Anonymous.

United in face and values, hiding behind the stylised Anonymous masks popularized by V for Vendetta movie, activists flocked the streets in the UK, China, and the US, just to name a few.

Some of the biggest protests were seen in London where hundreds of activists engaged in a tense and prolonged stand-off with police in and around the Parliament Square. At least ten people were arrested following scuffles on charges of assaulting police officers and different public order offences.

Fasten your seat belts: the information war already unleashed against Russia is bound to expand to Brazil, India and China.

Brazil, Russia, India and China, as it's widely known, are the top four members of the BRICS group of emerging powers, which also includes South Africa and will incorporate other Global South nations in the near future. The BRICS immensely annoy Washington - and its Think Tankland - as they embody the concerted Global South push towards a multipolar world.

Bottles of Crimean champagne could be bet that the US response to such a process couldn't be but a sort of total information war - not dissimilar in spirit to the NSA's deep state Total Information Awareness (TIA), a crucial element of the Pentagon's Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine. The BRICS are seen as a major threat - so to counteract them implies domination of the information grid.

Vladimir Davydov, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Latin America, was spot on when he remarked, "The current situation shows that there are attempts to suppress not only Russia but also the BRICS given that the global role of this association has only intensified."

Russia demonization has quickly escalated in the US from sanctions related to Ukraine to Putin as the "new Hitler" and the resurrection of the time-tested Cold War scare "The Russians are coming".

In the case of Brazil the information war already started way before the reelection of President Dilma Rousseff. As much as Wall Street and its local comprador elites were doing everything to tank what they define as a "statist" economy, Dilma was also personally demonized.

Not so far-fetched steps in the near future might include sanctions on China because of its "aggressive" position in the South China Sea, or Hong Kong, or Tibet; sanctions on India because of Kashmir; sanctions on Brazil because of human rights violations or excess deforestation. Selected Indian diplomats, off the record, deplore that the first BRICS nation to buckle under pressure will be India.

As the BRICS are the de facto key bricks in building a more democratic, inclusive global system of international relations and financial system - there are no others in the market - at least they seem to be alert enough. If they are not, each nation is bound to be knocked out one by one.

Georgy Toloraya, executive director of the Russian National Committee on BRICS Research, points out that at least there's "more and more communication taking place through BRICS channels today."

Brazilians, for instance, are particularly interested in investment cooperation. The BRICS Development Bank will be a reality in 2015. And a Russian team is preparing a detailed report on the future prospects of BRICS cooperation bound to be discussed in-depth in Beijing in over a week, concomitant to the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit.

Most people in the English-speaking parts of the world missed Putin's speech at the Valdai conference in Sochi a few days ago, and, chances are, those of you who have heard of the speech didn't get a chance to read it, and missed its importance. (For your convenience, I am pasting in the full transcript of his speech below.) Western media did their best to ignore it or to twist its meaning. Regardless of what you think or don't think of Putin (like the sun and the moon, he does not exist for you to cultivate an opinion) this is probably the most important political speech since Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech of March 5, 1946.

In this speech, Putin abruptly changed the rules of the game. Previously, the game of international politics was played as follows: politicians made public pronouncements, for the sake of maintaining a pleasant fiction of national sovereignty, but they were strictly for show and had nothing to do with the substance of international politics; in the meantime, they engaged in secret back-room negotiations, in which the actual deals were hammered out. Previously, Putin tried to play this game, expecting only that Russia be treated as an equal. But these hopes have been dashed, and at this conference he declared the game to be over, explicitly violating Western taboo by speaking directly to the people over the heads of elite clans and political leaders.