Marco Rubio is a neocon warmonger through and through, having subscribed to Washington's every foreign power play in recent years.

Of all the people that US President-elect Donald Trump could have picked as America's chief diplomat, he's chosen Marco Rubio, Florida senator and neocon talking-point guzzler.

Guess it sort of makes sense on one level. They need a guy who can talk the same language as the neocon desk jockeys at the State Department. Kind of like an African Grey parrot who can speak English with humans but also bird language with other birds. The bird-brains at State speak mainly neocon, like Rubio. And he could be the MAGA-to-neocon translator for Trump, packaging the 47th president's vision in a way that's palatable enough for them to not spend the entire time trying to regime-change him, like they did last time he was elected.

But how well does Rubio even speak MAGA - the language of Trump's non-interventionist, America First, and pro-peace base? Not very well, if his record is any indication.

Canada and Australia shelve plans for retail CBDCs while the US could soon become the first country to explicitly ban the central bank from issuing a CBDC.

As we warned in May 2022, a financial revolution is quietly sweeping the world (or at least trying to) that has the potential to reconfigure the very nature of money, making it programmable, far more surveillable and centrally controlled. To quote Washington DC-based blogger and analyst NS Lyons, "if not deliberately and carefully constrained in advance by law,... CBDCs have the potential to become even more than a technocratic central planner's dream. They could represent the single greatest expansion of totalitarian power in history."

At the time of writing that post, around 90 countries and currency unions were in the process of exploring a CBDC, according to the Atlantic Council's CBDC tracker. Today, just two and a half years later, that number has increased to 134, representing 98% of global GDP. Around 66 of those countries are in the advanced stage of exploration — development, pilot, or launch.

President-elect Donald Trump said Wednesday that he will nominate Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida as U.S. attorney general.

Gaetz has submitted his resignation from Congress, House Speaker Mike Johnson revealed at a news conference Wednesday evening. The resignation will not take effect until it is announced on the House floor.

Trump, in his Truth Social post announcing Gaetz's selection, wrote that the 42-year-old lawmaker "has distinguished himself in Congress through his focus on achieving desperately needed reform at the Department of Justice."

Gaetz replied on X: "It will be an honor to serve as President Trump's Attorney General!"

The selection is the clearest example yet of how Trump, having sworn off many of his former staffers as "RINOs" — Republicans in Name Only — or enemies of him and his MAGA agenda, is making loyalty a key qualification for his second administration.

A government research center has claimed that the country has enough plutonium to build hundreds of crude warheads.

Ukraine could feasibly raid the country's nuclear reactors to develop crude atomic weapons if the US cuts off military aid, a briefing paper prepared for the Ministry of Defense has advised.

The Times reported on Wednesday that its authors at the National Institute for Strategic Studies believe "creating a simple atomic bomb, as the United States did within the framework of the Manhattan Project, would not be a difficult task 80 years later." The report was published by the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies.

While Ukraine cannot enrich Uranium - a process vital for building modern nuclear weapons, its nine operating nuclear reactors contain an estimated seven tons of plutonium, its authors claimed. This could be used to build bombs similar to the 'Fat Man' device dropped on Nagasaki by the US in 1945.

It's early days yet. However, there are signs that President-elect Trump is moving toward a detente with Russia over Ukraine.

One good sign is that Trump will not invite Mike Pompeo or Nikki Haley to join his cabinet when he is inaugurated as the 47th U.S. president on January 20. Both of these figures were rabid anti-Russia hawks during Trump's previous administration. There were suggestions that Pompeo and Haley might return with senior posts in his second administration. But Trump has announced the pair will not be offered new positions.

Another positive sign is from people close to Trump's inner circle who are letting the Kiev regime know - rudely - that the U.S. military aid spigot is being turned off.

Donald Trump has yet to hold a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to the Kremlin. But both leaders have already expressed a willingness to negotiate a peaceful settlement over the Ukraine conflict.

Another promising sign of potential detente between the United States and Russia is the sheer panic among European leaders. The news of Trump's election last week has caused most European elites to scramble like scared children on hearing "boo!".

President approves date agreed by leading Social Democrats and opposition conservatives.

Germany will hold a snap election on 23 February after an agreement reached on Tuesday morning by parliamentary factions from the leading Social Democrats and the main conservative opposition CDU/CSU.

The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, gave the go-ahead for the new election schedule at a meeting of representatives of the government and the leading opposition in Berlin on Tuesday evening. Steinmeier said in a statement issued by his office that "based on a current assessment" he "considered February 23 as a realistic date for new elections".

The statement followed a meeting between Steinmeier, who is head of state, the CDU leader Friedrich Merz and Rolf Mutzenich, parliamentary group leader of the SPD. Also present were two members of the Greens.

It is hoped it will bring clarity after days of infighting and speculation prompted by the collapse of Germany's three-way coalition government last week.

In one of the biggest comebacks since Lazarus, the 45th US president will also be the 47th

It seems that humanity has managed to turn back the clock to 2016. The sense of déjà vu that haunted me throughout November 6 was too strong: the US presidential election once again didn't go according to plan, sociologists are scratching their heads in bewilderment because all their predictions have failed, American liberals are crying, internet trolls are gloating, Western Europeans are tense, and Russians are jubilant. At the center of it all is Donald Trump, president-elect again, preparing to turn the world upside down. For real this time.

The election results clearly showed that Americans were fed up with the old establishment and the strange progressive ideas of which Kamala Harris was an ambassador. The false public image created by the Democratic Party's 'political technology' apparatus didn't help her either. While Kamala was buying up celebrities and giving scripted interviews to loyal journalists under the watchful eye of her PR team, Trump was standing behind the fryer at McDonald's, driving around Wisconsin in a garbage truck and chatting amicably with blogger Joe Rogan on his podcast. This eventually resonated with the nation, and for most, he was a more acceptable figure.

Well, it's over...or is it? Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States backed by a GOP controlled Senate and possibly even a majority in the House of Representatives. And one should not discount the advantage derived from having a largely conservative Supreme Court, but much depends on who Trump appoints to key cabinet positions, a weakness in the first Trump presidency as he tended to select ideologues rather than candidates with relevant knowledge or experience. One hopes, for example, that neither the usual claque of neocons nor establishment characters like Mike Pompeo or Tom Cotton, who have been mentioned as possible candidates for Secretary of Defense, will appear on anyone's list for high office.

During the lead-up to the presidential campaign, Trump sometimes referred to himself as the most popular politician in Israel, including a conceit that if he were able to run for office in that country he would be able to get elected to the highest offices without any problem. That was, at least in Donald's mind, an expression of gratitude for how he had done so much for Israel in 2016-2020, including moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, accepting the annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, providing political cover for Israeli actions, and a declaration that the US would not do anything to interfere with military and police actions connected to Israeli settlement expansion on the nominally Palestinian West Bank. Israel also appreciated Trump's appointment of his lawyer David Friedman as US Ambassador. Friedman proved to be a full time apologist for Israel, not representing or defending American interests. In the recent presidential campaign, Trump spoke frequently to Jewish Republican groups and declared himself to be Israel's best friend and supporter among US politicians.

The screams of babies as buildings collapse in Gaza. Terrified parents carrying the remains of their children away in plastic carrier bags. These scenes - altogether too familiar today - come enabled by German-American tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his company, Palantir, whose software uses AI and big data to help the Israeli military surveil, target and slaughter hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. It is also used by ICE, the FBI and U.S. law enforcement to destroy privacy, to attack whistleblowers, and to turn the Orwellian concept of "pre-crime" (identifying and tracking potential subversives before they commit any offense) into a reality.

The Silicon Valley oligarch has deep ties to the CIA and the military-industrial complex and is one of the Republican Party's most powerful backers. Already one of the world's most influential individuals, if Donald Trump wins in November, Thiel has set himself up to become a "shadow president," wielding gigantic power over us all. This is his story.

No matter how bad you think Covid policies were, they were intended to be worse.

Consider the vaccine passports alone. Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The plan was to enforce this with a vaccine passport. It broke. Once the news leaked that the shot didn't stop infection or transmission, the planners lost public support and the scheme collapsed.

It was undoubtedly planned to be permanent and nationwide if not worldwide. Instead, the scheme had to be dialed back.

Features of the CDC's edicts did incredible damage. It imposed the rent moratorium. It decreed the ridiculous "six feet of distance" and mask mandates. It forced Plexiglas as the interface for commercial transactions. It implied that mail-in balloting must be the norm, which probably flipped the election. It delayed the reopening as long as possible. It was sadistic.

Even with all that, worse was planned. On July 26, 2020, with the George Floyd riots having finally settled down, the CDC issued a plan for establishing nationwide quarantine camps:

People were to be isolated, given only food and some cleaning supplies. They would be banned from participating in any religious services. The plan included contingencies for preventing suicide.

There were no provisions made for any legal appeals or even the right to legal counsel.