The nation's attention turned to Oregon this week when a group calling itself Citizens for Constitutional Freedom seized control of part of a federal wildlife refuge. The citizens were protesting the harsh sentences given to members of the Hammond ranching family. The Hammonds were accused of allowing fires set on their property to spread onto federal land.

The Hammonds were prosecuted under a federal terrorism statute. This may seem odd, but many prosecutors are stretching the definition of terrorism in order to, as was the case here, apply the mandatory minimum sentences or otherwise violate defendants' constitutional rights. The first judge to hear the case refused to grant the government's sentencing request, saying his conscience was shocked by the thought of applying the mandatory minimums to the Hammonds. Fortunately for the government, it was able to appeal the decision to judges whose consciences were not shocked by draconian sentences.

When it comes to Texas' relationship with the Federal government, the word "rocky" comes to mind. And nobody embodies said rockiness better than Texas governor Greg Abbott, who recently made headlines after announcing that irrelevant of D.C.'s demands, Texas would refuse to accept any Syrian refugees.

This followed his announcement earlier this summer 2015 when fears over nebulous Federal intentions with operation "Jade Helm" were running high, that "to address concerns that Texas citizens and to ensure that Texas communities remain safe, secure, and informed about military procedures occurring in their vicinity, I am directing the state guard to monitor Operation Jade Helm 15."

Prior to this, Abbott was again in the news back in June when he signed a bill into law that would allow Texas to build a gold and silver bullion depository, which would allow Texas to repatriate $1 billion worth of bullion from the New York Fed to the new facility once completed.

In short: the Federal government and the state of Texas have been on collision course of many months, one which culminated on Friday when Abbott called for a Constitutional Convention of states, spearheaded by Texas, and which would amend the U.S. Constitution to wrest power from a federal government "run amok."

Al-Qaeda has pledged to take revenge against Saudi Arabia by saying the Gulf state will pay for executing dozens of the terrorist group's members, and promised to "deal" with the kingdom.

Al-Qaeda's Yemeni branch and its North African affiliate called the mass executions, staged by Saudi Arabia on January 2, "a foolish act" - adding that the kingdom had disregarded previous warnings from the group and vowing to "avenge" the "blood of their brothers," AFP reports.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb called the executions a New Year "gift" to "Crusaders," apparently referring to Saudi Arabia's Western allies in a statement posted on social media.

I was surprised to learn that many Turkish people on social media have been supporting Turkey's President Erdoğan's actions and stance, whether it concerned the unlawful downing of a Russian jet, its cruel treatment of Kurdish civilians living in Turkey, or its oil dealings with terrorists. Some of them even go as far as rooting for a come-back of the Ottoman Empire. But how many of them know about the real recent history of the Late Ottoman Empire, and the many innocent people who died during that time?

"[Professor of Modern History] Christian Gerlach ... claims that societies like the ones in the Late Ottoman Empire or in Nazi Germany are characterized by mass violence against numerous political, religious or ethnic groups instead of only one."
- Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer

As the quote above suggests, the Young Turk era (1906-1918) of the late Ottoman Empire bore a lot of similarities to Hitler's Germany. In Late Ottoman Genocides, historians Schaller and Zimmerer write: "A new generation of historians working on World War II and the German war of extermination in Eastern Europe have ... shown that the Nazis' "struggle for Lebensraum" was not only directed against the Jews - though they held an out-standing position as ultimate arch enemies in Hitler's ideology - but also affected Poles, Russians, Roma and several other groups." In similar fashion, the Late Ottoman Empire, in its desire to create a homogenous empire consisting of only Turks, set out to exterminate different non-Turkish groups: Assyrians, Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds, among others.

The Young Turks leaders' systematic policy of violent 'turkification' first targeted the Greeks: "More than 100,000 Ottoman Greeks were expelled from the Aegean and Thrace to create living space for Muslim refugees who had themselves been brutally driven away from Crete and the Balkans. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks were deported from the coastal regions to the interior due to alleged strategic reasons during the war. Finally the anti-Greek campaign of the Young Turks found its continuation in [Turkey's first President] Mustafa Kemal's expulsion of the Ottoman Greeks. The burning of Smyrna [known today as İzmir, Turkey] and the slaughter of its Christian inhabitants in 1922 marked the symbolic end of Greek presence in Turkey." The massacres and forced deportations had cost the lives of up to one million Greeks.

Approximately 300,000 Assyrians residing in the Ottoman Empire were murdered; their villages were burned, and churches were destroyed. The number of Armenians who were targeted by the Young Turks' policy in 1915 however exceeded that of the others, with up to 1.5 million Armenians meeting their death by either being burned alive - sometimes in groups of only women and children - or dying from starvation and fatigue on the death marches leading to the Syrian desert. While some Kurds joined Ottoman soldiers in murdering, raping and looting Armenians, some Kurdish groups such as the Alevis from Dersim [today Tunceli Provence, Turkey] gave refuge to Armenians. As a result, they too were not exempted from the Young Turks' brutality. During World War I, up to 700,000 Kurds - including the perpetrators - were forcibly removed with approximately half of the displaced perishing.

"I live in Tayr Filsey, not Madaya, and I am fine." - Marianna Mazeh; 'Starving Syria child' revealed as south Lebanon girl (article below)

This is a brief post with the intent of merely alerting people to the latest campaign to demonize the Syrian government and army, and also at the same time to depict the terrorists inhabiting Madaya as somehow noble or in the right... as somehow not the human shielding terrorists that they in fact are. Madaya is the new Yarmouk. [See this post regarding the lies and propanda that were put forth in the exact same manipulative manner on Yarmouk previously. I will be writing an update on Yarmouk, which I visited in December 2015, soon.]

See also this RT report, which includes: "Just passed by first aid trucks bound for #madaya. Water&flour. Judging by lack of markings, this is #syria govt aid ...Another fully loadef #syria govt food aid truck going in to #madaya. Looks like rice or flour. ..."

One of the more encouraging (?) developments in Acceptable American Discourse over the last five years or so has been the gradual acceptance, even among Serious Media Outlets, that American voters no longer have any real control over their own government, and more broadly, their collective destiny.

In April 2014, Princeton University published a study which found that "economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

On Saturday, the Saudi Arabian government beheaded 47 people, one of whom was prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a senior opposition figure. He and the others were all killed for their charges of "undermining the national security" of the kingdom.

Immediately following the beheadings, countries across the globe - except for the United States - denounced the barbaric move.

Rightfully outraged with the beheadings, Shiite Muslims in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Bahrain angrily condemned the executions, and Iranian protesters stormed the Saudi embassy in Tehran.

These inhumane acts of murder on the part of the Saudis have forced the hands of those who sell them weapons and on Monday, Germany became the first country to question their arms trade deal.

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution." — Aldous Huxley

There's a man who contacts me several times a week to disagree with my assessments of the American police state. According to this self-avowed Pollyanna who is tired of hearing "bad news," the country is doing just fine, the government's intentions are honorable, anyone in authority should be blindly obeyed, those individuals who are being arrested, shot and imprisoned must have done something to deserve such treatment, and if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't care whether the government is spying on you.

In other words, this man trusts the government with his life, his loved ones and his property, and anyone who doesn't feel the same should move elsewhere.

It's tempting to write this man off as dangerously deluded, treacherously naïve, and clueless to the point of civic incompetence. However, he is not alone in his goose-stepping, comfort-loving, TV-watching, insulated-from-reality devotion to the alternate universe constructed for us by the Corporate State with its government propaganda, pseudo-patriotism and contrived political divisions.

While only 1 in 5 Americans claim to trust the government to do what is right, the majority of the people are not quite ready to ditch the American experiment in liberty. Or at least they're not quite ready to ditch the government with which they have been saddled.

As The Washington Post concludes, "Americans hate government, but they like what it does." Indeed, kvetching aside, Americans want the government to keep providing institutionalized comforts such as Social Security, public schools, and unemployment benefits, fighting alleged terrorists and illegal immigrants, defending the nation from domestic and foreign threats, and maintaining the national infrastructure. And it doesn't matter that the government has shown itself to be corrupt, abusive, hostile to citizens who disagree, wasteful and unconcerned about the plight of the average American.

For the moment, Americans are continuing to play by the government's rules. Indeed, Americans may not approve the jobs being done by their elected leaders, and they may have little to no access to those same representatives, but they remain committed to the political process, so much so that they are working themselves into a frenzy over the upcoming presidential election, with contributions to the various candidates nearing $500 million.

Yet as Barack Obama's tenure in the White House shows, no matter how much hope and change were promised, what we've ended up with is not only more of the same, but something worse: an invasive, authoritarian surveillance state armed and ready to eliminate any opposition.

The state of our nation under Obama has become more bureaucratic, more debt-ridden, more violent, more militarized, more fascist, more lawless, more invasive, more corrupt, more untrustworthy, more mired in war, and more unresponsive to the wishes and needs of the electorate. Most of all, the government, already diabolical and manipulative to the nth degree, has mastered the art of "do what I say and not what I do" hypocrisy.

Russian military aircraft hit 1097 terrorists targets in Syria and conducted 311 sorties since the beginning of 2016, the Russian General Staff announced.

Russian combat aircraft carried out over 300 missions in Syria since the beginning of 2016, hitting about 1,100 terrorist targets in ten provinces, the Russian General Staff said Monday.

Terrorist groups operating in Syria continue to receive reinforcements coming through Turkey, despite all efforts by the global community the Russian General Staff announced.

"Russian jets are striking the terrorists' strongholds in Syria. We have conducted 311 sorties and destroyed at least 1,097 targets in the provinces of Aleppo, Latakia, Homs, Damascus, Deir-er-Zor, Hasakah, Daraa and Raqqa," Rudskoy said.

The UK government has been warned with legal action over its sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, with legal experts accusing Britain of being in breach of national, EU and international law by supplying British-made weapons and military equipment to the Gulf kingdom.

Lawyers acting on behalf of the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) have stepped up legal proceedings against the government, accusing officials in London of failing in its legal duty to prevent and condemn breaches of international humanitarian law.

In a legal letter, CAAT experts warned that a failure to halt current arms export contracts to Saudi Arabia, along with the decision to continue granting new export licenses for weapons, is unlawful, as the weapons could be used in the Saudi-led coalition's military campaign in Yemen.