Given a series of recent speeches by leading US officials and actions, the question must be frankly posed: Has Washington gone collectively looney tunes? Even as the governments of the EU are moving to buck US pressures and ease the sanctions, the Obama Administration seems intent on marching in the direction of a nuclear confrontation with Russia. As the ancient Greek expression puts it, "Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad..." The following recent developments fit that pattern quite nicely, thank you.

On June 5, Ashton Carter, the neo-conservative Obama Defense Secretary gave clear indications he is prepared to be far more provocative against Russia than his fired predecessor, Chuck Hagel. Carter convened a special meeting in Stuttgart, Germany of two dozen US military leaders and US Ambassadors in Europe at the headquarters of US European Command. He told them, "We have something that has taken a sad turn recently, which is Russia."

That in itself was not so notable as were the reports that the neo-con US Defense Secretary, "Ash"—that is his nickname, appropriately enough—Carter discussed at the Stuttgart meeting returning US short-range nuclear missiles to European NATO countries to target Russia.

On June 7, just two days after Carter's Stuttgart remarks, UK Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, told the press that the UK might again place American nuclear missiles on British soil because of what he termed "heightened tensions" with Russia. The Foreign Secretary said there were "worrying signs" about the increased activity of Russian forces and that the UK would "consider the pros and cons of taking US intermediate-range weapons."

Switzerland is providing only limited information about rich tax evaders who have stashed about €80 billion from cash-strapped Greece, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said in an interview with Swiss state broadcaster SRF.

"Sometimes we know that someone has taken money away from Greece. But we do not know in what city or which bank it is located in Switzerland. We know too little to be able to locate the black money,"Varoufakis told the Rundschau program on SRF on Wednesday.

It is impossible to obtain the information from Swiss authorities, he added.

Athens is working on a plan to give tax evaders the opportunity to voluntarily disclose themselves, and make them invest in Greek economy. The evaders would pay a 22 percent penalty in such a case.

If you have yet to listen to last Sunday's Behind the Headlines interview with James and JoAnne Moriarty on Libya, I urge you to do so. While Sott.net carried numerous reports on the U.S.-sponsored destruction of Libya, the Moriartys' first-hand account not only reveals new details you've probably not heard anywhere else; it paints a picture that brings the stark reality home in a way that just reading reports and analyses cannot. The reality of what happened (and is still happening) in Libya is worse than we can possibly imagine.

The Moriartys were in Libya at the time of the 'uprising' and 'revolt', and the Western coalition's 'subsequent' invasion (the two were really the same thing). They saw it all first-hand. They engaged in a fact-finding mission, documenting atrocities. They were captured by Al Qaeda (i.e. the U.S.'s 'rebel allies'), interrogated and threatened with being chopped up and burned. But they managed to get out of the country with their lives and tell the story of what they saw. It is nothing like we have heard from the mainstream media.

The so-called uprising was not spontaneous. It was planned in advance. The 'rebels' were nothing of the sort. They were Western-trained, Western-financed, and Western-supported terrorists: Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, Ansar al-Sharia, the same people that would soon move over to Syria and Mali, and later become 'ISIS'. Within days, these mercenaries had already created a Bank of International Settlements-approved private Central Bank and Libya's substantial wealth (the country was debt-free), in the form of cash deposits and precious metals, was looted.

Thousands died in the first days of the indiscriminate slaughter carried out by coalition forces under the ruse of establishing a "no fly zone". The media's job was to blame atrocities on Gaddafi. In fact, the atrocities were committed by 'our guys': rape, torture, murder, decapitation, burning alive, skinning flesh, cannibalism - if you've heard about it in horror movies, it happened in Libya in the name of Western freedom and democracy. All the hallmarks of ISIS that so terrify the world today were endorsed and supported by our own governments in order to destroy Libya and prevent it from becoming a viable African alternative to Western death culture. American 'democracy' in action.

Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with President of the United States of America Barack Obama.

In particular, the two leaders discussed the Ukrainian crisis and the fulfilment of the Minsk Agreements. The Presidents agreed that US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin will be in contact to discuss implementation of these agreements.


Significant attention was given to a set of issues pertaining to counter-terrorism efforts, particularly the spread of the Islamic State's influence in the Middle East. Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama agreed to instruct Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry to hold a meeting to discuss this issue.

In addition, the presidents of Russia and the United States had an extensive discussion of current issues in bilateral relations. They also engaged in a detailed exchange of opinions concerning the situation in Syria and touched on settling the issue of the Iranian nuclear program.

The US has been tightening its containment noose around Eurasia's multipolar anchors over the past few years, having notably succeeded in wooing Myanmar away from China in 2011 and transforming Ukraine into a geopolitical enemy of Russia in 2014.

In the face of these American asymmetrical advances, Russia and China have opted to make game-changing peninsular pivots as a means of escaping the strategic traps being set, with Moscow moving to the Balkans and Beijing being beckoned towards Indochina. Their effort to sidestep the containment wall being built around them places both theaters, the Balkans and Indochina, front and center in the US' upcoming destabilization campaigns.

This article examines the historical-strategic lead-up to the present situation and explains the necessity of Russia and China's respective peninsular pivots.

Rising up from the center of Beijing, not far from the Temple of Heaven, is the loudest voice in the wild east of the Chinese stock market.

It's neither a bank nor a brokerage -- it's the headquarters of Xinhua News Agency, long considered the "throat and tongue" of the Chinese government.

With the heady exuberance over Chinese stocks starting to fade, sowing fears of worse to come, investors are scouring state media for clues to the Communist Party's thinking.

As the globalists' vision for a one world totalitarian government unfolds in rapid sequence of their long plotted New World Order, a parallel process is also quietly unfurling in the covert formation of a globalized international military fighting force. The US Joint Special Operations Command Forces have built a notorious reputation as death squads known for conducting middle of the night raids, murdering entire families in the process along with detaining targeted suspects in both Iraq and Afghanistan and now all over the world.

Because Special Forces by their very nature are highly secretive and virtually unaccountable to everyone, including our own government, we never hear much about this global elite killer machine. The only exceptions are the contradictory renditions of how the Navy Seals took out Osama bin Laden, or glossy film renditions glorifying Special Forces exploits as recruitment propaganda commercials, now all closely monitored, controlled and censored by the US military. In fact, the FBI, the CIA and Pentagon all have liaison handlers assigned to Hollywood just to make sure the shady truth about them never gets to the big screen audience. Sadly the film industry has degenerated into joining the lowly ranks of mainstream media as mere gov.whore-corp propagandists. Truth is now the enemy.

U.S District Court Judge George O'Toole has officially sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death. Tsarnaev is to be executed at the Federal Prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

At the end of the hearing, US District Judge George A. O'Toole Jr. sentenced Tsarnaev to death on six of the 30 charges he was convicted of, and gave him consecutive life sentences for some of his other crimes. O'Toole was bound by the jury's decision to sentence Tsarnaev to death — a sentence that is subject to an automatic appeal.

The jury condemned Tsarnaev to death specifically for the bomb he placed that killed two people — not for a separate bomb his older brother placed.

O'Toole, in his remarks before he issued the sentence, told Tsarnaev he will be remembered solely for his "evil." (Boston Globe, June 24, 2015)

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a war-prone institution that poses the biggest threat to world peace. Since the disappearance of the Soviet Union, which turns out to be the greatest disaster for the stability of the international system, NATO expansionism and aggression is rampant. Although NATO was established to contain the Soviet Union, in reality, however, it has always been a complacent vehicle for U. S. hegemony.

After the Soviet break-up, NATO's illegal expansion in Eastern Europe was relatively successful as long as Russia kept quiet. President Vladimir Putin's speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, more accurately a gathering of Western war-hawks, should have rung the warning bells in the West. Explicitly, Putin scorched the U. S. for its policy and warned of NATO's expansionism eastward and the deployment of a missile defense shield that was directed at Russia.

Despite Putin's admonition and the disaster NATO has created in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, parts of Africa and the Ukraine, this military alliance seems to have learned nothing from its mistakes in the past. The voracity for world domination by the U. S. Empire seems insatiable. It doesn't make any difference who sits in the White House. U. S. Presidents differ only in nuances.

Worse than any disease or even leprosy, anyone spouting Austrian economics or even "common sense" (almost extinct today) has been shoved into the outcast corner by the mass delusional majority. Over the last few years, "theory after theory" has become fact after FACT after FACT! There can no longer be any question, conspiracy to delude and defraud has run rampant and is a day to day operation in the Western world.

Originally my thought was to write this piece about and around the perfect response, "but you do agree the government is bankrupt, right?". I say this because almost anyone (in the U.S.), no matter what age, sex, religion, race or financial status will generally agree with this. For those who don't agree, it is better to leave well enough alone, this is a subset living in their own delusional world.

For those who do agree "the government is broke", they are broken down into basic subsets. There are those who "get it" fully. There are those who know the government is broke but don't really understand what it means or the ramifications (they can't connect the dots). Another group are those who agree and know in the back of their mind this is true ...but they don't REALLY believe it because they simply cannot ..."it's too awful to comprehend". Then, we have another group, probably the largest of all, those who agree but think it really doesn't matter. They may also believe no financial crisis will ever occur because "the government will never let it happen". Let's talk about this group next.