RT America is a news organization operating in the United States that is funded at least partly by a foreign government. So is the BBC. So is Deutsche Welle, France24, Al-Jazeera, and numerous other foreign media organizations. It is assumed that they all to a degree reflect the editorial interests of those who pay the bills.

The same is true with other, non-state funded media outlets, of course. It's up to us to factor these things in when we consume media. That's what it means to be a free people.

A core value in a free society is that our own government has zero power over what we read, what we watch, how we think, how we come to interpret current events, the conclusions we draw based on these inputs, and so on. These are private matters over which any government that is not tyrannical should have no sway.

The physician who last June prescribed accused Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock Diazepam (a drug used to make some more hypno-suggestible or "hypnotizable" and induce amnesia)^[1][2], is Dr. Steven P. Winkler of Las Vegas, NV. Winkler is the Chief Medical Officer of Nevada-1 DMAT (Disaster Medical Assistance Team)^[3]. DMATs operate under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security and Winkler is thus what is known as an intermittent federal employee and also serves on a number of professional committees.^[4] NV-1 DMAT is also a division of Nevada's Clark County Emergency Management agency who just prior to the October 1, 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, hosted at least one multi-agency mock-mass casualty terrorism response exercise in Las Vegas.^[5][6] CIA code named "MK-ULTRA" "mind control" programs experimented heavily with amnesia inducing hypnosis, facilitated by certain drugs like Diazepam.^[7]

The federal judge who has been assigned the heavily anticipated Fusion GPS case is close friends with Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, and the two have taught a course together at Georgetown Law School since 1997, raising various conflict of interest questions about the case.

The question at hand in the case is whether the House Intelligence Committee can force Fusion GPS to reveal which journalists it paid to push its phony Russian dossier.

Judge Richard J. Leon, a Senior Judge on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, will now be presiding over the case after the last judge was bizarrely removed from hearing it. As reported by Jon Hall of Free Market Shooter, Leon comes up several times in the leaked Podesta emails.

Tony and John Podesta are facing criminal indictments linked to the ongoing Russian probe, according to sources, which explains why they're shutting down the Podesta Group, one of Washington's most prominent lobbying groups.

Sources tell Infowars that Tony Podesta in particular was told to prepare for indictments because Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's entire case against former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort goes through Podesta, and evidence suggests that Podesta has done everything Manafort is accused of doing, if not more.

"The Podestas might be used as sacrificial lambs for the Democratic Party," radio host Alex Jones said, who was briefed by sources close to the matter.

The Podesta Group is entangled in Mueller's investigation after it was revealed that the lobbying firm was recruited for public relations work in Ukraine by Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, both of whom were accused by Mueller last month of violating foreign lobbying law.

Earlier in the week, we learned that the female Russian attorney whose June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner -- which remains the most (only?) concrete evidence of attempted collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government -- met with the founder of Democratic opposition research firm Fusion GPS on that very same day. Twice. Both before and after the truncated and much-discussed Trump Tower confab. As someone who cut Team Trump very little slack on the Don Jr. emails that preceded their huddle with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the revelations about her schedule on that day strike me as rather suspicious.

Some of Fusion GPS' defenders have argued that the meetings between Veselnitskaya and Glenn Simpson could have been entirely innocent and coincidental, considering that the organization was also working at the time on behalf of a Kremlin project to repeal an American law despised by Vladimir Putin. Let's set aside the dubious nature of Fusion GPS' simultaneous work (a) with the Russian government and (b) with Christopher Steele, an ex-British spy gathering unverified dirt on Donald Trump, some of which came from high-level Russian sources (and whose research we recently discovered was partially financed by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, despite previous denials). Is the "unrelated coincidence" explanation still plausible? It's looking less and less so. Check out this new Reuters report:

The same political research firm that prepared a dossier on Trump campaign ties to Russia had unrelated information on Clinton Foundation donors that a Russian lawyer obtained and offered to President Donald Trump's eldest son last year, three sources familiar with the matter said...The sources told Reuters that the negative information that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya wanted to give to Republican Trump's campaign at a June 2016 meeting in New York had been dug up by Fusion GPS in an unrelated investigation...In an interview with Bloomberg on Monday, Veselnitskaya said she went to the Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr., his brother-in-law Jared Kushner, and top campaign adviser Paul Manafort to show them proof of tax evasion by major Democratic donors...The memo had been prepared by Fusion...

I didn't spend all week writing about the gigantic tremors occurring in the Middle East because I thought it was fun. If I'm even remotely correct in my analysis, the entire world will be affected and shaped for decades to come by what's about to go down in the region. Rather than rehash what I already wrote, I suggest you take a read of the following if you missed them the first time around.

The U.S. and Saudi Arabia Are About to Make More Disastrous and Idiotic Mistakes - Part 1

The U.S. and Saudi Arabia Are About to Make More Disastrous and Idiotic Mistakes - Part 2

There's been a major update since those posts were published. Namely, it appears the government of Lebanon has seen enough and is coming out with its side of the story. As I reported in Part 1, the Saudis immediately claimed Lebanon declared war on it following the obviously staged and forced resignation of Hariri via Saudi Arabia over the weekend. This appears to be a case of classic psychological projection, as in reality, Saudi Arabia appears to have declared war on Lebanon. It straight up kidnapped their Prime Minister.

The United States, Russia and Jordan have reportedly reached an agreement on a ceasefire deal in southern Syria that would include the expulsion of Iranian-backed militias from the border with Israel in the Golan Heights.


Under the agreement apparently inked Saturday, all non-Syrian fighters, including Iranian proxies fighting on behalf of Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime, would be required to leave the border area and eventually Syria, Hebrew media reports said Sunday, citing an American official.

According to similar reports in Channel 10 and Israel Radio, the official did not say how far from the border the militias would be removed or under what time frame. In addition to Iran-backed groups, affiliates of both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, both of which count foreign fighters among their ranks, operate in Syria near the Israeli border.

Ryan Bundy seemed uneasy as he settled into a white leather chair in a private suite at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. As the eldest son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who had become a national figure for his armed standoff with U.S. government agents in April 2014, Ryan had quite a story to tell.

Eight months had passed since Cliven and hundreds of supporters, including heavily armed militia members, faced off against the federal government in a sandy wash under a highway overpass in the Mojave Desert. Now, here in the comforts of the Bellagio, six documentary filmmakers trained bright lights and high-definition cameras on Ryan. They wanted to ask about the standoff. Wearing a cowboy hat, Ryan fidgeted before the cameras. He had told this story before; that wasn't the reason for his nerves. After all, the Bundy confrontation made national news after armed agents with the Bureau of Land Management seized the Bundy family's cattle following a trespassing dispute and the accumulation of more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees. But the Bundys, aided by their armed supporters, beat back the government, forcing agents to release the cattle and retreat.

Images of armed Bundy supporters with high-powered rifles taking on outgunned BLM agents circulated widely on social media. As a result, the Bundys became a household name, lionized by the right as champions of individual liberty and vilified by the left as anti-government extremists.

But something seemed off to Ryan about this interview in the Bellagio. While the family's newfound fame had attracted fresh supporters to their cause, it had also inspired suspicion. With a federal investigation looming, who among these new faces could they really trust?

Among the more recent figures in the Bundy orbit was this mysterious documentary film crew. The director, Charles Johnson, was middle-aged, with a silver goatee, slicked-back hair, and a thick southern accent. His assistant, who identified herself as Anna, was tall and blond. A website for their company, Longbow Productions, listed an address in Nashville, Tennessee, but the Bundys could find no previous examples of their work.

As the cameras recorded, Ryan's skepticism was plain. At times, his right eye rolled back into his head, the result of a childhood accident that paralyzed half of his face, and his gaze shifted to figures outside the shot. "There's been a lot of red flags in the community about Longbow Productions," one of his companions explained to the film crew. "No bullshit, straight talk. ... It's almost like you're trying to make us incriminate ourselves."

A prominent BBC journalist has deleted a tweet in which a senior Conservative MP can be seen complaining about the British media turning a blind eye to the corrupt relationship that has allowed Israel to "buy access" in Westminster.

The tweet was posted by the BBC's Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg on Wednesday while the Scottish journalist was covering the build up to the resignation of Priti Patel. The Secretary of State for International Development had taken part in undisclosed meetings in Israel organised by the powerful Conservative Friends of Israel lobby (CFI) last summer.

Kuenssberg's Twitter posts on the day were full of tweets on the Patel story including comments about Number 10 denying the allegation made by the Jewish Chronicle that Prime Minster Theresa May had been made aware of the 12 meetings Patel had had during her "family holiday" in Israel.

A Q&A with the historian Sir Max Hastings on worrisome parallels with the Great War.

Of all the famous things Mark Twain never actually said, perhaps none is repeated more often and with less justification than "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes." And since the election of Donald Trump as president, history as verse has become a farce: He is Hitler, he is Stalin, he is Mao, he is Caligula, he is Cyrus the Great, he is Pharaoh, he is Joe McCarthy, he is Charles Lindbergh, he is King George III (both the sane and insane versions), he is Julius Caesar, he is Hamlet, he is the Know-Nothing Party, he is Charles Manson, he is Jimmy Carter, he is Andrew Jackson, he is Herbert Hoover, he is Woodrow Wilson, he is -- wait, what: Woodrow Wilson? Seriously?

"Ironically," writes Trygve Throntveit in Time, "Trumpism finds ample historical precedents in the immediate and long-term aftermath of U.S. intervention in World War I." He adds that in pledging to "make the world safe for democracy," Wilson was foreshadowing "Trump's make-America-great-and-safe-first foreign policy."

Hmmm. I'm not sure I'm sold that the 28^th president was the MAGA man of his day. 1 But it's a fresher take than the many uninformed comparisons of Trump to the Republican isolationists who followed Wilson, and thus a contribution to the growing body of journalistic analogies between our present moment and the era of the Great War. You can see the parallels, we are told, in Brexit, the backlash against immigrants in the U.S. and Europe, a radical autocracy in Russia roiling the West with propaganda, the collapse of order in the Middle East, secessionist movements in Europe (Serbia, meet Catalonia), and so on.

So, with this Veterans Day marking the centennial of the final year of the War to End All Wars, I decided to hash out which of these supposed historical echoes make sense, and whether lessons learned 100 years ago can help see us through the fraught present. And I was lucky enough to get to do so with Sir Max Hastings. This eminent British historian, newspaper journalist and TV broadcaster has written 26 books (his first, on the radical America of 1968, when he was 23) including one very relevant to this debate: "Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War" in 2013. So, pin a poppy to your lapel and read this lightly edited transcript of our chat: