If you've read any pulp science fiction and fantasy — and I have, though not for decades — you know all about the Dark Empire.

The Dark Empire is that distant but mighty star empire which swoops down on the peaceful settlers of the planet Zipperdork 3 and suborns them to its plans for galaxy-wide conquest.

Or, in heroic fantasies, the Dark Empire inhabits the chaotic land of Dystopia from which it dispatches hordes of spell-flinging calvary to overrun the peaceful kingdom of Dragonsbane and enslave the heir to the throne inside a tower well secured by charms, demons, and bureaucrats.

The variations are endless. What's inevitable, though it may take several thousand pages, is that a few plucky starship captains will discover the lost super weapons of the ancient Vleen race and char-broil the empire's neutronium-plated space fleet.

Or, a ragged slave boy will find the magic sword Phallusia in the lost city of Oxnard and fulfill an ancient prophecy by slicing the Dark Empire's cavalry into flank steaks. And acquire the throne of Dragonsbane in the meantime, plus an interesting scar.

Whatever. If you've seen a Star Wars movie, or a Lord of the Rings flick, or a barbarian movie starring a professional bodybuilder, you've pretty much got it.

The thing is, the thing that really bothers me, is that nobody ever fills in the back-story for the Dark Empire.

Sure, the Dark Empire can field fleets of star destroyers and hordes of well-equipped warriors. But who builds the starships? Who joins the army? Where did these people go to school? Who raises the food? You can't conquer the galaxy, or even the trackless wastes of Dragsonbane, without a complete civilization to support you.

So, somewhere there must be a Dark Empire homeland. And no doubt you will find there the Dark Empire Missiles and Space Corporation, the First Bank of the Dark Empire, the Dark Empire Unified School District, Dark Empire Mall, and the Dark Empire Parks and Recreation Ministry. There are festivals and patriotic holidays, a Dark Empire Football League, and certified public accountants.

A couple of US planes and a navy destroyer approached several Iranian warships in the Gulf of Aden on Monday, Iranian Fars News Agency reported, citing a report released by an Iranian TV channel.

Fars called the incident "a provocation," citing the fact that the US warship and planes ignored the internationally set 5-mile distance that navy fleets of different countries have to keep from each other.

As the US ship and planes approached the warships of the 34th Iranian fleet, they received a warning from an Iranian destroyer. After that the Americans changed their direction, Fars reported.

Police officers are more likely to be struck by lightning than be held financially accountable for their actions.—Law professor Joanna C. Schwartz (paraphrased)

"In a democratic society," observed Oakland police chief Sean Whent, "people have a say in how they are policed."

Unfortunately, if you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is never held accountable for violating your rights and his oath of office to serve and protect, never forced to make amends, never told that what he did was wrong, and never made to change his modus operandi, then you don't live in a constitutional republic.

You live in a police state.

It doesn't even matter that "crime is at historic lows and most cities are safer than they have been in generations, for residents and officers alike," as the New York Times reports.

What matters is whether you're going to make it through a police confrontation alive and with your health and freedoms intact. For a growing number of Americans, those confrontations do not end well.

As David O. Brown, the Dallas chief of police, noted: "Sometimes it seems like our young officers want to get into an athletic event with people they want to arrest. They have a 'don't retreat' mentality. They feel like they're warriors and they can't back down when someone is running from them, no matter how minor the underlying crime is."

Making matters worse, in the cop culture that is America today, the Bill of Rights doesn't amount to much. Unless, that is, it's the Law Enforcement Officers' Bill of Rights (LEOBoR), which protects police officers from being subjected to the kinds of debilitating indignities heaped upon the average citizen.

Most Americans, oblivious about their own rights, aren't even aware that police officers have their own Bill of Rights. Yet at the same time that our own protections against government abuses have been reduced to little more than historic window dressing, 14 states have already adopted LEOBoRs—written by police unions and being considered by many more states and Congress—which provides police officers accused of a crime with special due process rights and privileges not afforded to the average citizen.

Several days ago, I came across a news report of two videos released by the Ukrainian Informational Resistance channel on YouTube on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union in WWII.

The first video features a 'ded' (meaning, in Russian, an old man or grandfather). He is a Soviet veteran dressed in military uniform, decorated with WWII honours. He is looking at himself in a mirror, preparing for a Victory Day (May 9) anniversary march. A phone rings. It's his grandson calling, a young Ukrainian army conscript who, as the viewer can guess from the video, is serving in eastern Ukraine, in the so-called 'Anti-Terrorist Operation' of the Kyiv government and army. Like the grandfather depicted, the grandson is wearing a Red Star in the left pocket of his shirt, close to his heart. The young soldier congratulates his grandfather on Victory Day. And his grandfather answers with words that are totally implausible for a veteran of the Soviet army: "Glory to Ukraine".

In the second video, an elderly lady, a grandmother (a 'babushka'), is dressed in a jacket, also bedecked with the insignia of the Great Patriotic War (as World War Two was termed in the Soviet Union and remains so in present-day Russia). She is sitting at a table with tea service set out, looking at a photo in an album. In the photo are five nurses, five combat friends who had served together in the fields of the Great Patriotic War. A telephone rings. It is a granddaughter phoning from the corridor of a hospital. She is dressed in a white uniform. On her wrist is a blue and yellow elastic band, the colors of the Ukrainian national flag. She calls to congratulate her grandmother on Victory Day. And the grandmother answers, again, in words unimaginable for a Soviet veteran: "Glory to the heroes". After these words, the video switches to the granddaughter rushing to a gurney on which a modern "hero", a soldier, who, as the viewer can guess, was wounded in the 'ATO', is being transported somewhere.

Both videos are in Russian, accompanied by Ukrainian subtitles. They were made by a "leading agency of the Ukrainian advertisement market", TABASCO, and by a "leading film production company" in Ukraine, Limelite Studio. The film studio says it allocated "colossal" resources to shoot these videos. Both companies absorbed the costs of production so as not to charge the Ukrainian state for these patriotic public awareness clips. The general producer of Limelite Studio, Vladimir Yatsenko, explains that the entire film crew declined to be paid any royalties. "I am glad that there are so many patriots in our country, ready to do all they can for the victory of Ukraine", said Yatsenko.

We Can't Rein In the Banks If We Can't Pull Our Money Out of Them

Martin Armstrong summarizes the headway being made to ban cash and argues that the goal of those pushing a cashless society is to prevent bank runs ... and increase their control:

The central banks are ... planning drastic restrictions on cash itself. They see moving to electronic money will first eliminate the underground economy, but secondly, they believe it will even prevent a banking crisis. This idea of eliminating cash was first floated as the normal trial balloon to see how the people take it. It was first launched by Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Willem Buiter, the chief economist at Citigroup. Their claims have been widely hailed and their papers are now the foundation for the new age of Economic Totalitarianism that confronts us. Rogoff and Buiter have laid the ground work for the end of much of our freedom and will one day will be considered the new Marx with hindsight. They sit in their lofty offices but do not have real world practical experience beyond theory. Considerations of their arguments have shown how governments can seize all economic power are destroy cash in the process eliminating all rights. Physical paper money provides the check against negative interest rates for if they become too great, people will simply withdraw their funds and hoard cash. Furthermore, paper currency allows for bank runs. Eliminate paper currency and what you end up with is the elimination of the ability to demand to withdraw funds from a bank.

***

After the Saudis allegedly halted their air campaign against Yemen's Houthi rebels on April 21 (allegedly because it promptly resumed the very next day to almost no public announcement), the Yemen civil war and the "skirmishes" by Houthi rebels along the border with the world's biggest oil exporter were quickly forgotten. Until this morning, when the Saudi press and social media has been overrun with reports that the Saudi city of Najran was shelled by Houthi mortars, an attack which Saudi advisor to the armed forces Ahmed Asiri said "will not pass without a response".

From Al Riyadh, google translated:

Najran saw Tuesday afternoon fall of several mortar shells at different locations within the city, and according to sources «Riyadh», the number was 6 shells, targeting some civilian sites, government buildings and One landed on the housing guard compound for the memorization of the first Koran fifth Secondary School for Girls Schools hospitality district .
...
«Riyadh» attended some of those sites to monitor these explosions that caused a power outage in a number of districts of Najran city, and met with some of the citizens who have expressed their support with the leadership to deter Alhothin and ousted president rebels, saying they will not be intimidated by such random shells, said the compound guard citizen Yahya Dahmha I was surprised by the fall of the shell at my house in the compound and praise be to Allah that the home and the school was empty and I was on my way to bring up my daughter from high school, pointing out that this work will not scare them away and that the confidence of citizens in the state has no limits.

For his part, Brigadier corner Ahmed Asiri coalition spokesman and adviser forces confirmed in the defense minister's office that the militia al-Huthi targeted the border areas in Najran mortar, and said that what happened today is part of the chaos experienced by the militia al-Huthi, and that the situation now in Najran safe and the armed forces doing their job on the border to counter the attacks Huthi stressing that the work of today will not pass without a response.

A few months ago, French President Francois Hollande marched on the streets of Paris shouting "Je Suis Charlie," but today he is visiting Saudi Arabia that sponsors global terrorism and where Wahhabism is the official religion, Boulevard Voltaire's columnist Yannik Chauvin said.

French President Francois Hollande refused to attend the Moscow Victory Day Parade on May 9, citing Russia's alleged involvement in the Ukrainian crisis.

On March 26, without much fanfare or attention from U.S. media, the Spanish government ended freedom of assembly. In the face of popular opposition (80 percent of Spaniards oppose it), the upper house passed the Citizens' Security Law. Under the provision, which goes into effect on July 1, police will have the discretionary ability to hand out fines up to $650,000 to "unauthorized" demonstrators who protest near a transport hub or nuclear power plant. They will be allowed to issue fines of up to $30,000 for taking pictures of police during protest, failing to show police ID, or just gathering in an unauthorized way near government buildings.

The law doesn't technically outlaw protest, but it's hard to see what difference that makes in practice. Imagine if the NYPD, without judicial oversight, could give $650,000 fines to every Black Lives Matter protester participating in a die-in at Grand Central. Never mind that they could never pay: Would anyone have come back day after day, racking up millions of dollars more in fines?

Spain is only the latest "democracy" to consign freedom of assembly to the dustbin. While earlier eras of protest and riot sometimes wrested concessions from the state, today the government's default response is to implement increasingly draconian laws against the public exercise of democracy. It raises the question: How many rights must be abrogated before a liberal democracy becomes a police state?

The Israeli group Breaking the Silence issued a report this morning containing testimony from Israeli soldiers about the savagery and criminality committed by the Israeli military during the attack on Gaza last summer. The Independent has a good article describing the report's findings: "The Israeli military deliberately pounded civilian areas in the Gaza Strip with incessant fire of inaccurate ordinance" and "was at best indifferent about casualties among the Palestinian population." At best.

This should surprise nobody who paid any attention to the brutal Israeli destruction of Gaza or, for that matter, countless Israeli attacks before that. The U.N. has said that 7 out of 10 people killed by the Israelis were civilians, "including 1,462 civilians, among them 495 children and 253 women"; video of Israelis killing four Gazan boys as they played on a beach sickened anyone decent.

Nonetheless, reading the accounts from these Israeli soldiers is revolting and important in equal parts. It shines considerable light on the reality of what Israeli loyalists have long hailed as "the most moral army in the world," one unfairly held to a difference standard that ignores their great "restraint."

The Intercept has chosen some selected, representative excerpts from the report, with the rank of the testifying soldier indicated (each one was granted anonymity by the report's organizers). This is the savage occupying force known as the Israeli Defense Forces:

"Whoever you see there, you kill"

Staff Sargent, Armored Corps:

[A]fter 48 hours during which no one shoots at you and they're like ghosts, unseen, their presence unfelt - except once in a while the sound of one shot fired over the course of an entire day - you come to realize the situation is under control. And that's when my difficulty there started, because the formal rules of engagement - I don't know if for all soldiers - were, "Anything still there is as good as dead. Anything you see moving in the neighborhoods you're in is not supposed to be there. The [Palestinian] civilians know they are not supposed to be there. Therefore whoever you see there, you kill. . . .

The commander [gave that order]. "Anything you see in the neighborhoods you're in, anything within a reasonable distance, say between zero and 200 meters - is dead on the spot. No authorization needed." We asked him: "I see someone walking in the street, do I shoot him?" He said yes.

Did the commander discuss what happens if you run into civilians or uninvolved people?

There are none. The working assumption states - and I want to stress that this is a quote of sorts: that anyone located in an IDF area, in areas the IDF took over - is not [considered] a civilian. That is the working assumption. We entered Gaza with that in mind, and with an insane amount of firepower.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has defended Germany's intelligence agency following allegations it helped the US spy on European companies. She says she will fully cooperate with a parliamentary investigation and provide "all the details" it needs.

Chancellor Merkel was speaking for the first time publically about the accusations that Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency helped the National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdrop on some of Europe's top firms.

She said it was imperative the BND continued to work with the NSA and the US to help in the fight against international terrorism. However, she also added that it was not acceptable for friendly nations to spy on each other.

"This ability to carry out its duties in the face of international terrorism threats is done in cooperation with other intelligence agencies, and that includes first and foremost the NSA," Merkel told journalists in Berlin.

"Intelligence agencies are working to ensure the public's safety and the German government will do everything it can to ensure that it can carry out its job," the German chancellor added.