General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No, I don't think I do, sir, no.

General Jack D. Ripper: He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; 1968

While it may no longer be our precious bodily fluids under attack by the big bad Rooskies and their ever-scheming leadership, it is clearly our political system that is in the Kremlin's crosshairs.

However detached from reality such an interpretation might seem to a clear-headed American, that is precisely the notion that Hillary Clinton and her gaggle of political guinea worms have endlessly droned on about. Listening to the Clinton campaign, and its public relations employees masquerading as corporate media journalists, one would think that World War Three had already begun on the battlefield of US electoral politics.

"Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria."

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Why the Arabs don't want us in Syria, Politico

The conflict in Syria is not a war in the conventional sense of the word. It is a regime change operation, just like Libya and Iraq were regime change operations.

The main driver of the conflict is the country that's toppled more than 50 sovereign governments since the end of World War 2. (See: Bill Blum here.) We're talking about the United States of course.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has lashed out at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for comparing those who oppose Israel's settlement policy in the West Bank to advocates of "ethnic cleansing."

"I am disturbed by a recent statement by Israel's Prime Minister portraying those who oppose settlement expansion as supporters of ethnic cleansing," Ban Ki-moon said in a statement, published on the official UN website, referring to a video message posted on Netanyahu's Facebook account last Friday.

Calling Netanyahu's remarks "unacceptable and outrageous," he also stressed that the international community "universally views the expansion of settlements as an obstacle to peace."

Frantic European diplomatic activity has as The Duran predicted prevented a slide into war following the attempted Ukrainian attack on Crimea. However a political settlement of the Ukrainian conflict remains as distant as ever.

In the immediate aftermath of the Crimean incident I speculated that it was unlikely to trigger renewed fighting despite the deterioration of the situation in the Donbass. I said that the Western powers would work hard to prevent the situation sliding into a war which Ukraine would lose and which would expose their sanctions policy as a bluff

So it has proved. Not only have the Western powers failed to make any strong statements of support for Kiev over the Crimean incident, but Putin's decision to call off the scheduled Normandy Four meeting he was due to hold with Merkel, Hollande and Poroshenko at the G20 summit in Hangzhou alarmed the Europeans - just as I said it would - and has stirred them into diplomatic action.

On his official Facebook page yesterday, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu posted a speech in English. The concept here is so novel, that the text merits full presentation:

"I'm sure many of you have heard the claim that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, are an obstacle to peace. I've always been perplexed by this notion. Because no one would seriously claim that the nearly two million Arabs living inside Israel, that they are an obstacle to peace. That's because they aren't. On the contrary. Israel's diversity shows its openness and readiness for peace.

Yet the Palestinian leadership actually demands a Palestinian state with ONE precondition: No Jews.

There's a phrase for that: it's called ethnic cleansing. And this demand is OUTRAGEOUS. It's even more outrageous, that the world doesn't find this outrageous. Some otherwise enlightened countries even promote this outrage. Ask yourself this: would you accept ethnic cleansing in your state? A territory without Jews, without Hispanics, without blacks?

Since when is bigotry a foundation for peace? At This moment, Jewish school children in Judea and Samaria are playing in sandboxes with their friends. Does their presence make peace impossible? I don't think so. I think what makes peace impossible is intolerance of others. Societies that respect all the people are the ones that pursue peace. Societies that demand ethnic cleansing don't pursue peace.

I envision a middle east where young Arabs and young Jews learn together, work together, live together, side by side, in peace. Our region needs more tolerance, not less. So the next time you hear someone say that Jews can't live somewhere, let alone in their ancestral homeland, take a moment to think of the implications. Ethnic cleansing for peace is absurd. It's about time somebody said it. I just did."

So, someone hacked WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency). As expected, the Russians are blamed. But that's not the issue. Just like the DNC hacks, the issue isn't who did the hack; the issue is the content of the leaks. In a nutshell, America's greatest and bestest athletes have been doping for years. Big surprise. But they've been doping legally. Yep, you heard that right. They got a doctor's note that says they can dope. That's probably all our regular readers need to know in order to grok the heart of the matter, but for new and casual readers, we'll expand a bit.

Self-described "international hack team" 'Fancy Bear' says they stand for fair play and clean sport. On their website, they state:

We announce the start of #OpOlympics. We are going to tell you how Olympic medals are won. We hacked World Anti-Doping Agency databases and we were shocked with what we saw.

We will start with the U.S. team which has disgraced its name by tainted victories. We will also disclose exclusive information about other national Olympic teams later. Wait for sensational proof of famous athletes taking doping substances any time soon.

Their first hack revealed that American athletes like Simone Biles, Serena and Venus Williams all took banned substances for years. But The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency says it's all cool, "the athletes have done nothing wrong", because they had "therapeutic use" exemptions for these banned substances because of undisclosed medical conditions (those fields are marked "confidential" in the documents).

At the end of August, a meeting of Muslim clerics and scholars convened in the Chechen capital of Grozny to forge a consensus on the subject of 'who constitutes a Sunni.'

Sunnism, the 200 or so Sunni clerics from Egypt, South Africa, India, Europe, Turkey, Jordan, Yemen, Russia warned, "has undergone a dangerous deformation in the wake of efforts by extremists to void its sense in order to take it over and reduce it to their perception."

The Muslim world is currently under a siege of terror, led by a deviant strain that claims religious authority and kills in the name of Islam. So the Grozny participants had gathered, by invitation of the Chechen president, to make "a radical change in order to re-establish the true meaning of Sunnism."

If their final communique was any indicator, the group of distinguished scholars had a very particular message for the Muslim world: Wahhabism - and its associated takfirism - are no longer welcome within the Sunni fold.

At least 500 Islamic State fanatics are hiding in Germany, ready to strike at any moment, a minister has warned.

Interior minister Thomas de Maiziere revealed there were at lease 520 potential "attackers" waiting to strike with a further 360 "relevant" people known to authorities.

The harrowing warning comes after the country saw a spate of terror attacks including two Islamic State-inspired killings in July.

Construction of the controversial Hinkley Point C nuclear power station will go ahead after 'new safeguards' for national security were established amid speculation Britain is bowing to Chinese pressure.

Prime Minister Theresa May has given the green light to Britain's first nuclear power station in two decades, which will be jointly financed by French and Chinese energy firms.

Ministers said the agreement comes with new conditions which will give the government greater oversight and prevent investors from selling off their shares without permission.

The project, which was first touted in 2007, has split opinions, with critics raising concerns about allowing foreign governments to own critical infrastructure.

Brainwashing can be most effectively accomplished through subtle — preferably imperceptible — repetition and reinforcement of ideas. Targets of efficacious brainwashing campaigns will never realize the tactic being used — unless someone provides clear evidence of the perpetrator's methods.

On that note, consider the captive audience cable television and mainstream, corporate news outlets have at their disposal — when a big story hits headlines, the American public sits for hours, glued to nonstop coverage and overanalysis of every detail.

This week being no exception, when Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton fainted after an early exit from a 9/11 memorial ceremony in New York City, conservative mainstream media scrambled to theorize on the ever-deepening questions surrounding her health.

Qualifying to head the empire, after all, would ostensibly require a person in their physical prime.