A defeat for Washington and its NATO partners in Ukraine would be a political disaster for the Western powers. Hence they are getting desperate.

Last week the British media (Telegraph and Guardian) reported allegations that Russia was using chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops and, as if that was not bad enough, the Russian military was also endangering the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe.

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou discusses these reports and concludes that the incidents are false-flag operations orchestrated by Western sponsors of the Ukrainian regime. Kiriakou says it is the CIA that has a notorious track record of engaging in dirty tricks when its operations are going badly.

Some definitions:

• An "account holder" is you, your IRA, your pension plan, your stock and bond investments held at an "account provider" or "intermediary" or "depository institution" such as Merrill Lynch, Schwab, Wells Fargo.
• An "entitlement holder" is the definition of you whose ownership claim to your financial assets has been subordinated to the claims of "secured creditors" of the institution where you have your accounts.

Please do understand that the dispossession of which I write is your dispossession.

Klaus Schwab tells us that in the Great Reset that the World Economic Forum is preparing for us "you will own nothing and you will be happy." Well, we already own nothing. Our bank deposits and stocks and bonds, in the event the depository institution gets into trouble, belong to the depository institution's creditors, not to us. All assets are pooled and serve as collateral whether or not labeled "segregated."

You might remember that during the last financial crisis we were told that there would be no more bail-outs, that in the future there would be bail-ins. A bail-out is when central bank money creation rescues the favored troubled financial institutions. A bail-in is when the depositors' assets are used for the rescues.

Was Tehran's 'symbolic' attack on the Jewish state a victory or a defeat for the future?

The night of April 13-14 was another round of 'shock therapy' for the world as Iran launched a direct attack on Israeli territory. This followed an unjustified strike by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, which resulted in the deaths of 11 diplomats and two high-ranking generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Initially, Israel denied responsibility, but later indirectly admitted to targeting the building under the belief that it served as a military base coordinating Hamas operations. This act clearly violated the Vienna Conventions of 1961 and 1963, which protect diplomatic missions. Typically, such an infringement would lead to the severance of diplomatic ties, but since Iran and Israel have had no such relations and have been on the brink of conflict for decades, Israel's abrupt move can be interpreted as a declaration of war. Faced with this provocation, Iran was put in a very tight spot and felt compelled to act.

Almost two weeks of suspense followed as the world waited for Iran's response, which seemed logically inevitable. Pundits and analysts mostly considered two obvious options that Iran could use: either give a mirror response and hit Israeli territory or one of its diplomatic offices in the region, or use its proxy forces, which are as much of a problem for Israel as Iran itself. But Tehran decided to take a third course, both launching a direct attack and using its allies in the region. This attack made history as it was Iran's first direct assault on Israel. Among other things, it was the most massive drone attack on record, estimated to have involved more than 200 UAVs, as well as 150 cruise missiles, 110 Shahab-3, Sajil-2 and Kheibar surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, and seven Fattah-2 hypersonic cruise missiles. The strikes were launched from multiple locations including Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and the part of Yemen controlled by the Ansar Allah Houthi group.

Since October 7, 2023 it would appear a spontaneous chain of events is leading the Middle East deeper and deeper into conflict. From Israel's ongoing military operations in Gaza to its strikes on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and repeated strikes across Syria (including the recent strike on Iran's embassy in Damascus), to the ongoing US-led confrontation with Yemen in the Red Sea, it would appear that poor diplomacy is failing to prevent escalation and is instead leading to mounting tensions and a growing potential for wider war.

In reality, almost verbatim, US-Israeli diplomacy (or lack thereof) and military operations are following a carefully laid out policy described in the pages of the Brooking Institution's 2009 paper, "Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran."

Washington's Middle East Playbook

The Brookings Institution is a Washington-based think tank funded by both the US government and military, as well as the largest corporate-financier interests across the collective West. Its board of directors and experts are among the most prominent figures in US foreign policy and political circles. What is produced in the institution's papers is far from speculation or commentary, but instead reflects a consensus regarding the direction of US foreign policy.

We can already see that modern states are facing such serious challenges that foreign policy is being subordinated to domestic considerations everywhere. This is true of Western countries, Russia, China, India, and everyone else. Indeed, it highlights what existing academic theories are unable to understand simply because of their methodology.

One of the curious effects of the two world wars of the last century, and in particular of the emergence of incredibly power weapons in the possession of several powers - the mass use of which could lead to the cessation of sentient life on the planet - has been to increase the importance of the foreign policy activities of states in the broad sense. The horror that a military catastrophe would be universal and irreversible in its consequences, which gradually became apparent and finally became firmly rooted in the minds of people, has firmly placed questions of international stability among the first priorities for the public.

In addition, industrial-scale warfare and economic globalization have contributed to the growing importance of issues directly related to external factors. The latter has, to a certain extent, linked the development and even the very existence of any given state to the tasks it undertakes in the international arena. This has especially been true for medium-sized and small countries for which the waters of the modern world are too shark-infested to offer the possibility of a fully independent existence. But even in the case of the great powers, foreign policy issues have become so important over the past century that they are almost on a par with domestic concerns.

The GOP members of the House want to hold Biden's Homeland Security Secretary account for border crisis

House Republicans walked over their impeachment articles against Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate on Tuesday in a dramatic show of disapproval for the Homeland Security secretary.

The handover immediately triggers a constitutional process that will force the Senate to decide the fate of the embattled border chief.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., with a slight smirk on her face, walked alongside Homeland Chair Mark Green, R-Tenn., and nine other Republican impeachment managers during the short ceremonial march to the Senate.

Mayorkas is the first Cabinet secretary in nearly 150 years to be impeached. Republicans voted to oust him from his position in February for facilitating the southern border crisis.

It was a little past midnight on Friday, and Israel's Supreme Command Post was racing to complete as many strikes as possible in the final hours before a cease-fire with the Palestinian militant group Hamas was to take effect at 2 a.m.

On a wall covered with huge screens, a three-dimensional diagram of a high-rise building with one of its apartments marked in red popped up. On another screen, a live video from the air circled above a building in Gaza that looked a lot like the one in the diagram.

This room is the nerve center of a bunker dubbed the "Fortress of Zion," a new Israeli Army command post deep underground beneath its headquarters in the heart of Tel Aviv. It is designed to command the kind of high-tech air wars that have supplanted ground invasions fought by tanks and infantry battalions.

Russian-born IT entrepreneur Pavel Durov says he was "pressured" by the FBI during his stays in America

The US government wanted a so-called 'backdoor' in to Telegram in order to potentially spy on its users, the social media platform's founder Pavel Durov has said in an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson.

The attention from the FBI was one of the reasons Durov dropped the idea of setting up the company in San Francisco, he said.

Born in St. Petersburg, Durov first founded VK, Russia's answer to Facebook, together with his mathematician brother Nikolay. The brothers later developed the Telegram messaging service and social media platform, which describes itself as one of the safest and best-protected communication tools available.

A Holy of the Holies was shattered in the Holy Land as Iran staged a quite measured, heavily choreographed response to the Israeli terror attack against its consulate/ambassador residence in Damascus, a de facto evisceration of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic immunity.

This game-changer will directly interfere on how the Anglo-American system manages its simultaneous conflagration with Russia, China and Iran - three top BRICS members.

The key problem is escalations are already built in - and will be hard to remove. The Total Cancel War against Russia; the genocide in Gaza - with its explicit policy masterfully decoded by Prof. Michael Hudson; and the decoupling/shaping the terrain against China won't simply vanish - as all communication bridges with the Global Majority keep being torched.

Yet the Iranian message indeed establishes a "New Equation" - as Tehran christened it, and prefigures many other surprises to come from West Asia.

Iran wanted to - and did send - a clear message. New equation: if the biblical psychopathic entity keeps attacking Iranian interests, from henceforth it will be counter-attacked inside Israel. All that in a matter of "seconds" - as the Security Council in Tehran has already cleared all the procedures.

Escalation though seems inevitable. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak: "Netanyahu is influenced by his [fundamentalist] political partners to go into an escalation so he can hold onto power and accelerate the coming of the Messiah."

Compare it to Iranian President Raisi: "The smallest act against Tehran's interests will be met with a massive, extensive, and painful response against all its operations."

The Iranian defeat of the US-Israeli missile defense architecture has global security consequences.
The world's attention has, rightfully so, been focused on the fallout from Iran's retaliatory strike against Israel on April 13-14, 2024. Iran's purpose in launching the attack was to establish a deterrence posture designed to put Israel and the United States on notice that any attack against Iran, whether on Iranian soil or on the territory of other nations, would trigger a retaliation which would inflict more damage on the attacker than the attacker could hope to inflict on Iran. To achieve this result, Iran had to prove itself capable of overcoming the ballistic missile defense systems of both Israel and the United States which were deployed in and around Israel at the time of the attack. This Iran was able to accomplish, with at least nine missiles striking two Israeli air bases that fell under the protective umbrella of the Israeli-US missile defense shield.

The Iranian deterrence posture has implications that reach far beyond the environs of Israel or the Middle East. By defeating the US-Israeli missile defense shield, Iran exposed the notion of US missile defense supremacy that serves as the heart of US force protection models used when projecting military power on a global scale. The US defensive posture vis-à-vis Russia, China, and North Korea hinges on assumptions made regarding the efficacy of US ballistic missile defense capabilities. By successfully attacking Israeli air bases which had the benefit of the full range of US anti-ballistic missile technology, Iran exposed the vulnerability of the US missile defense shield to modern missile technologies involving maneuverable warheads, decoys, and hypersonic speed. US bases in Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East once thought to be well-protected, have suddenly been revealed to be vulnerable to hostile attack. So, too, are US Navy ships operating at sea.