Imperialist demagogues, as well as religious fanatics, are known to live in their grotesque realities. They erect huge sand castles, invent mascots, and bombard the public relentlessly with self-promoting messages.

Those who refuse to listen and believe, those who dare to doubt and resist, are sidelined, starved to death, humiliated or simply liquidated.

Western religions and European/North American brutal colonialist practices are intertwined culturally. Hand in hand, for centuries, they have been destroying our Planet, from corner to corner, on all continents and even on the high seas.

All conquests, all genocides, all plunders have been eternally rationalized, painstakingly justified. Grand bogus concepts of charity, of 'altruism' have been erected. Subjugated nations have always been ruined in the name of some higher principles, in order to save them from themselves. For centuries, the West has portrayed itself as a sacrificial lamb, as a hand chosen by some divine power, as the greatest civilization that is continuously and altruistically liberating the world.

In the West, scribblers and 'scholars' have been paid to soften every barbarity committed by the rulers, soldiers and even common citizens.

The cults of formal learning, of facts and information have been erected. Holed in innumerable officially recognized institutions, the scholars, certified demagogues, researchers and media people have been 'studying' each other, recycling and quoting each other, filling millions of books with essentially the same narrative.

'New' and 'revolutionary' academic discoveries mostly lead to the same old conclusions, to stale intellectual and moral passivity, cowardice and spinelessness.

Endless libraries have been filled with useless volumes, first arriving in print, then later in electronic form. Tens of millions of young and not too young men and women are busy wasting their lives, chasing diplomas, those colorful pieces of paper with the seal of approval, certifying people as fit to serve the Empire and the victorious civilization.

At some point, all major philosophical and existential topics ceased to be discussed, in official academia, in mainstream media, in the film houses, libraries and best selling books.

No one paid any attention. The world simply 'moved forward'.

President Barack Obama will leave the federal government approximately $9,335,000,000,000 deeper in debt than it was when he took office eight years ago, according to data released today by the U.S. Treasury.

The increased debt incurred under Obama equals approximately $75,129 for every person in the United States who had a full-time job in December.

The $9,334,590,089,060.56 that the debt had increased under Obama as of the close of business on Wednesday is far more debt than was accumulated by any previous president. It equals nearly twice as much as the $4,889,100,310,609.44 in additional debt that piled up during the eight years George W. Bush served as president.

When Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, the federal debt was $10,626,877,048,913.08. As of the close of business Wednesday, it was $19,961,467,137,973.64. The final debt number for Thursday, Obama's last full day in office, will not be released until after Donald Trump is sworn in as president on Friday.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 124,248,000 people in the United States with full-time jobs in December. The total federal debt of $19,961,467,137,973 equals approximately $160,658 for each one of those workers. The $9,334,590,089,060.56 that the debt has increased under Obama equals $75,128.69 for each one of those works.

Any comprehensive deal for a genuine reset of relations between a Donald Trump led US and Russia will have to address the three issues that concern the Russians most. These are (1) NATO expansion; (2) anti ballistic missile defence; and (3) the US's regime change policy.

As Donald Trump edges towards the White House and calls for a deal with Russia, it might help him to assess what sort of deal the Russia would be looking for from him.

There is a vast pall of misunderstanding in the West about this subject in large part because Western coverage of Russia over the last decade has been so intense and distorted that it has distorted the understanding of even the most hardheaded of Western policy makers.

What will happen on Inauguration Day?

Anti-Trump protest movements are envisaged alongside a campaign to disrupt.

While there are "genuine protests" - e.g. those led by the Answer Coalition and Workers World - , the main thrust is coming from an "engineered" campaign supported and financed by the Neocons, which is largely intent upon disrupting the inauguration and destabilizing the Trump presidency. Several progressive organizations have nonetheless joined the bandwagon of the #Disruptj20 campaign.

Russia's Constitutional Court has ruled that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decision to order compensation of over $2 billion to former Yukos shareholders violates the Russian constitution and cannot be executed.

"Russia has the right not to fulfill the imposed obligations when this is the only way not to act against the constitution," chairman of the Constitutional Court Valery Zorkin announced on Thursday.

The judge also noted that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) had ordered the compensation to be repaid from the Russian state budget - the same budget which had been hugely underfinanced because of the Yukos tax evasion schemes that had eventually led to the company's dissolution. "This contradicts the constitutional principles of equality and fairness," he said.

At the same time, the court chairman said that the European system for protection of human rights was of fundamental value, and that it would be best if Russian authorities and the European court found a compromise.

The breakdown of relations with Russia is a key foreign policy blunder committed by the Obama administration and it will go down in history as such, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has said.

In fact "US-Russia relations completely fell apart by the end of the second term of the Obama administration," Medvedev said in a Facebook post.

The administration of Barack Obama has proven to be "short-sighted on such an important and complex issue as relations with Russia."

This, despite Moscow and Washington having earlier managed to actually develop a functioning cooperation on some of the world's major issues and challenges, Medvedev said.

"Our countries signed a nuclear weapons reduction treaty, and Russia and the United States played a leading role in resolving the controversy surrounding the Iranian nuclear program," the Prime Minister recalled.

Those two notable achievements gave "hope" to the Russian leadership that both states would establish good relations despite the "different" approaches to various international processes and problems.

However, that did not happen, Medvedev laments.

Former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, serving prison time for a financial crime stemming from a child sex abuse scandal, has filed a lawsuit seeking the return of $1.7 million in hush money the disgraced politician admitted paying to one of his accusers.

The filing was made in response to a breach-of-contract case the unidentified man brought last year claiming Hastert paid only about half of the $3.5 million he had privately promised as compensation for decades of pain and suffering his misconduct had caused.

In Hastert's countersuit, filed on Wednesday in Kendall County Circuit Court in Illinois, he acknowledged paying $1.7 million to the accuser from 2010 and 2014 to buy his silence, but said their verbal agreement was not enforceable.

Hastert also argued the plaintiff himself engaged in a breach of contract by disclosing details of the allegations he made against the former lawmaker.

"To the extent any contract existed between plaintiff and defendant, plaintiff breached that contract," the filing said. "Plaintiff's breach of conduct resulted in damages to defendant, and plaintiff is accordingly required to return $1.7 million."

President Barack Obama's last press conference was a success, but only if you consider journalistic incompetence worthy of praise.

During the one-hour affair, Obama answered questions ranging from the commutation of whistleblower Chelsea Manning's sentence to personal queries concerning his and First Lady Michelle Obama's approach when talking to their daughters about the 2016 election — not quite a hard-hitting last inquiry for an outgoing president who, as the Los Angeles Times recently noted, managed to keep U.S. military forces "at war for all eight years of [his] tenure."

But despite the media's toothless strategy — showing the established press doesn't understand its own role in a free society — the outgoing president made at least one admission most of the media has also ignored.

Around the eight-minute mark of the press conference, Obama says he hasn't "commented on WikiLeaks generally," and that the "conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the [Democratic National Committee] DNC e-mails that were leaked."

To Craig Murray, an author, broadcaster, and human rights activist, Obama's comment clarified that the U.S. government has "no evidence of how WikiLeaks got the DNC material."

As the nation prepares for the peaceful transfer of power on Inauguration Day, CNN is dreaming up scenarios whereby the Obama administration can keep power if President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence were blown up as they prepared to take to oath of office.

On the Wednesday, January 18 broadcast of CNN's The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer aired a segment with a chyron featuring the headline "Developing Now." During that "developing" segment, Blitzer and correspondent Brian Todd discussed what would happen if the unthinkable occurred on January 20.

Blitzer introduced the segment, saying, "What if an incoming president and his immediate successors were wiped out on day one?" and from there, CNN contributor Brian Todd took over to outline the line of succession if an attack blew up the inaugural dais, killing both Trump and Pence.

The upshot was that in the case of both heads of state being killed, the Secretary of State would take over. Currently that man is Secretary of State John Kerry, But in case some objected because his office would also end as of noon on Inauguration Day, then it would be the Speaker of the House — Republican Paul Ryan — or even Obama's Under Secretary for Political Affairs Tom Shannon.

The report also noted that the designated survivor appointed by the Obama administration could also become president in the case of a disaster. So, in CNN's analysis, most of the people who would take over in the worst-case scenario would keep the Obama administration in power, at least indirectly.


So while most of the country is looking to enjoy the day's events and waiting expectantly to hear what our new president will have to say for his first address as our leader, CNN is wondering what will happen if he is assassinated. Perhaps CNN is still stuck in anger, the second stage of grief.

The head of Russia's Institute of Contemporary Economics has announced the start of the New Russia political movement, which will attempt to re-format the management of the state and fight economic recession through major reforms.

In comments with RIA Novosti, Nikita Isayev noted that in his opinion Russia needs "new faces, new approaches and a comprehensive and familiar ideology" and the New Russia movement will fulfill these demands through changes in the political elite and corps of experts.

"Our people are already starting to work in federal and municipal power bodies. These are new faces, not yet made popular through PR, guys who are used to work instead of idle talking," Isayev said.

However, the economist told reporters that the movement's registration had just started and did not name even an approximate date for its official launch.

When asked about the general political and economic course of the new movement, Isayev answered that he intended to implement his own 'New NEP' policy in which NEP stands for "national economic policy" (the abbreviation is a nod to the New Economic Policy - the partial return to private entrepreneurship allowed by Bolsheviks in 1920s to facilitate the restoration of the country devastated by the Civil War).