The Russian Foreign Ministry slammed in its statement on Wednesday Australian authorities' accusations that Russia was responsible for the ongoing "tragic events in Ukraine, including the crash of the Malaysian passenger jet" as unacceptable and ungrounded.

"On the whole, It seems that burdened by their own oversized ambitions, some members of the current Australian government have completely lost an adequate picture of the developments in Ukraine and around it," the statement said.


"They keep making absurd statements that the humanitarian convoy to help civilians in the south-east of Ukraine can be used as a pretext for Russia's 'armed invasion' of the neighbouring country," the ministry said.

"Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has gone farther than others in making irresponsible innuendoes against our country even though one would think that her position presupposes building bridges between countries, not destroying them," the ministry said.

Now that Hillary the hawk has been fully un-caged, thanks to her interview with former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg, the flak is flying. Moveon.org is trying to clip her wings and the Obama fan club is outraged. Of course, if she were running for Prime Minister of Israel - Peter Beinart dubbed her "the Israeli government's best spokesman" for sounding even more hardline than Bibi on Gaza - her path to power might be a bit easier: but, alas, America is an entirely different country, one capable of war-weariness, and anti-interventionist sentiments are at an all-time high.

In the course of her interview with Goldberg she went on about how we should've armed the Syrian rebels - the same rebels who are now wreaking devastation in Iraq - because we might have "vetted" them and somehow transformed them into Jeffersonian democrats. And she went on to blast the President's relative aversion to military intervention - relative, that is, to her own proclivity for armed "humanitarianism": "'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle," Hillary scolded.

You could almost hear interviewer Goldberg's gasp of pure delight at this little bon mot, but Hillary's presumed constituency wasn't exactly thrilled:

"MoveOn.org issued a stark warning to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in response to her not-so-subtle knock on President Barack Obama's foreign policy approach.

"In a statement on Tuesday Ilya Sheyman, the executive director of MoveOn Political Action, said that Clinton or 'any other person thinking about seeking the Democratic nomination in 2016, should think long and hard before embracing the same policies advocated by right-wing war hawks that got America into Iraq in the first place and helped set the stage for Iraq's troubles.'"

On the other side of the barricades, the powerful interventionist faction of the Democratic party establishment was over the moon:"Josh Block, president of the Israel Project, said it is 'important' to see a Democratic leader laying out a worldview 'that recognizes the role of our values and very real threats and trends facing the U.S. and our allies today.'

''It struck me as the reemergence of common sense in Democratic foreign policy after a period of drift and indecision,' Block added."

This presentation focuses on the myriad ways in which the powers-that-be in the United States have been systematically dumbing down Americans as a society for a very long time - all by meticulously calculated design. Originally the term dumbing down was used as a slang expression in 1933 by film screenwriters to mean "revising [the script] so as to appeal to those of lower education or intelligence."

The most obvious example of how Americans have been dumbed down is through this nation's failed public education system. At one time not that long ago America reigned supreme as a leading model for the rest of the world providing the best quality free public K-12 education system on the planet. But over the last many decades while much of the rest of the world has been passing us by, it seems an insidious federal agenda has been implemented to condition and brainwash a population of mindless, robotic citizenry that simply does what it's told, and of course the brainwashing commences early in America's schools.

But prior to delving into the many ways we've been duped and dumbed down through the years, a cold hard look at the devastating result seems very much in order here. With doom and gloom warnings of impending collapse, the US economy is floundering still mired in recession, emaciated and cut off from life support, as a consequence of waging too many wars around the world (be they the longest running costly defeats in US history or the fast rising dirty little Special Ops wars secretly raging on every corner of the globe or Obama's personal favorite, state sponsored terrorism from drone-filled skies). As a pawn to the military industrial complex, the US government has chosen permanent war over its own people. This treasonous decision has decimated the middle class and created a college educated indentured class struggling in heavy debt to find any means to stay afloat. With an outsourced, now vanished manufacturing base, upward mobility and the American dream have become tragic casualties of modern life, now a sad, nostalgic bygone reminder of the once greatness of America.

With the US the biggest debtor nation on earth, Americans are drowning in debt as hopelessly trapped collateral damage from a rapidly sinking, overextended Empire desperate to remain the sole global superpower even if it means death to the whole human race. At home the hapless American population has become increasingly the victim of its own government's tyranny and oppression under the constant roving eyeball of criminal surveillance and a brutal militarized security state, leaving its citizens defenseless without any security, liberty, freedom or place to hide. After centuries of carefully orchestrated design, oligarchs of the banking cabal have finally gotten what they've been plotting and scheming, globally enforced austerity and impoverishment reducing life in America and around the world to near Third World status, and absolute control. The oligarchs are counting on a dumbed down population too busy addicted to their video games or watching sports or Kim Kardashian's latest wardrobe malfunction to even notice that a longtime oligarch eugenics plan is already well underway.

Anti-Russian Western sanctions have produced little effect on the country's arms trade, the state arms exporter said. Russia imports few arms from Western countries, while traditional markets for Russian weapons export haven't joined the sanctions.

"The sanctions didn't affect our arms markets. They are traditional, and we still have them. The purchases of our arms will not go down," Igor Sevastyanov, deputy head of Rosoboronexport told journalists on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Sevastyanov's boss Anatoly Isaikin said that Rosoboronexport expects arms sales to foreign buyers to remain steady until 2016. Russia sold $13 billion worth of weapons in 2013, with about 37 percent of that in aircraft, 26 percent going to air defense systems, 21 percent to tanks and other army weapons, and 12 percent to naval sales.

The sanctions could affect Russian military cooperation with Europe, but that would have marginal effect, according to Sevastyanov.

"I thought I was losing my capacity to be shocked -- but events in Missouri over just the last couple of hours have crossed a frightening line, one that makes me pray that this assault on fundamental American values is just the aberration of one rudderless Heartland community, and not the first symptoms of nation gone mad with high-tech weaponry to keep its own citizens in line." - Journalist Will Bunch

The difference between what happened in Boston in the wake of the Boston Marathon explosion and what is happening now in Ferguson, Missouri, is not in the government's response but in the community's response.

This is what happens when you ignore the warning signs.

This is what happens when you fail to take alarm at the first experiment on your liberties.

This is what happens when you fail to challenge injustice and government overreach until the prison doors clang shut behind you.

Consider that it was just a little over a year ago that the city of Boston was locked down while police carried out a military-style manhunt for the suspects in the Boston Marathon explosion. At the time, Americans welcomed the city-wide lockdown, the routine invasion of their privacy, and the dismantling of every constitutional right intended to serve as a bulwark against government abuses.

Fast forward 14 months, and Americans are shocked at the tactics being employed to quell citizen unrest in Ferguson, Missouri - a massive SWAT team, an armored personnel carrier, men in camouflage pointing heavy artillery at the crowd, smoke bombs and tear gas - where residents are outraged and in the streets in response to a recent police shooting of one of their own: a young, unarmed college-bound black teenager who had the misfortune of being in the wrong time at the wrong place.

Here's the problem, though, as I explain in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, in the American police state that now surrounds us, every time and every place is the wrong time and the wrong place, especially if you still believe you have the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty by a court of law.

In the American police state, there is no longer such a thing as innocence. We are all potentially guilty, all potential criminals, all suspects waiting to be accused of a crime.

Why is this happening?

By analyzing CIA documents from earlier days, we can understand the programs of the Agency and its government cousins.

Given the fact that the CIA's umbrella research program, MKULTRA, went completely dark in 1962, and given the technological advances that have been made in the intervening years, we can draw inferences about present-day covert ops.

Document: May 20, 1975; sent by CIA Inspector General, Donald F. Chamberlain, to the Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby.

Subject: CIA activities at Fort Detrick, Maryland [in the 1952 period].

Fort Detrick was the center of US government chem/bio warfare research.

Here is the opening quote from the document:

"In early 1952, CIA effected an agreement with the Army Chemical Corp for the performance of certain research and development work by the Army Chemical Corp at the laboratory facilities of Special Operations Division, Army Biological Laboratories, Frederick, Maryland."

And here is a key quote about a research project:

"Adaptation and testing of a non-discernible microbioinoculator (device for clandestine inoculation with BW/CW [biowarfare/chemicalwarfare] agents) to determine compatibility with various materials to assure that the microbioinoculator cannot be identified structurally or easily detected upon a detailed autopsy..."

A startling new political science study concludes that corporate interests and mega wealthy individuals control U.S. policy to such a degree that "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

The startling study, titled "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," is slated to appear in an upcoming issue of Perspectives on Politics and was authored by Princeton University Professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Professor Benjamin Page. An early draft can be found here.

Noted American University Historian Allan J. Lichtman, who highlighted the piece in a Tuesday article published in The Hill, calls Gilens and Page's research "shattering" and says their scholarship "should be a loud wake-up call to the vast majority of Americans who are bypassed by their government."

The statistical research looked at public attitudes on nearly 1,800 policy issues and determined that government almost always ignores the opinions of average citizens and adopts the policy preferences of monied business interests when shaping the contours of U.S. laws.

The study's findings align with recent trends, where corporate elites have aggressively pursued pro-amnesty policies despite the fact that, according to the most recent Reuters poll, 70% of Americans believe illegal immigrants "threaten traditional U.S. beliefs and customs," and 63% believe "immigrants place a burden on the economy."

Fresh off a trip to India and Australia, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel addressed a group of Marines in San Diego, California Tuesday, and may have delivered a line that will show up in Republican campaign ads this election cycle. After updating the troops on some issues in the Pacific region and the Middle East, Hagel took questions from some of the Marines and gave a stark assessment of the global security situation: "The world is exploding all over." The remark came in response to a question about the Obama administration's realignment of the military towards the Asia-Pacific theater:

Q: Good afternoon, sir. My question is that, given that the administration's primary focus is on the Pacific theater, how has all of the issues popping up in the world today, Russia, Iraq, Africa, the rest of the theaters pretty much affected that current mission? And how do you foresee that affecting the mission in the future?

SEC. HAGEL: Thank you. That's a -- go ahead, sit down -- that's a question I got often when I was in India and Australia. And the trip I just came from was my sixth trip to the Asia Pacific area in the last year-and-a-half. I've got four planned this calendar year. And so I get that question all the time. It's a legitimate question for the very reasons you asked.

The world is exploding all over. And so is the United States going to continue to have the resources, the capabilities, the leadership, the bandwidth to continue with the rebalance toward the Asia Pacific? And the answer is yes.

Hagel went on say that, despite the rebalancing towards the Pacific, the US will not be "retreating" from any threats elsewhere in the world.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warns that public disclosure of a Senate report on the agency's torture methods will trigger violent street protests in the Middle East, endangering US embassies and personnel.

"The Mideast is a tinderbox right now and this could be the spark that ignites quite a fire," a US intelligence official who was briefed on the findings told Yahoo News.

That concern was echoed Friday by a former top US intelligence official. "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out if you release a report like this at a time when terrorism is surging all over the Mideast you are handing the other side a recruitment tool," John McLaughlin, a former CIA deputy director, told Yahoo News. "It's blindingly obvious."

A Russian convoy of 262 trucks packed with humanitarian aid is approaching the Ukrainian border amid fears that it might escalate the already tense situation in the war-ravaged east of the country.

The aid convoy was expected on Wednesday at the volatile Ukraine's border where pro-Russian forces and Ukrainian troops are engaged in fierce battles.

Russian media say some 2,000 tons of aid, from baby food to sleeping bags, was en route to east Ukraine, where some 1,300 people have been killed in fighting between pro-Russians and government forces.

Ukraine, however, on Tuesday pledged to deny entry to the Russian convoy, saying the mission could be a ploy to help pro-Kremlin forces.

"We will not consider the possibility of any movement of the Russian column on the territory of Ukraine," Deputy Head of Ukraine's Presidential Administration Valeriy Chaly said on Tuesday.