The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) last Thursday filed an amicus brief in the cases filed by San Francisco and Oakland against energy producers, slamming the lawsuits and asking the court for dismissal. The lawsuits seek financial "damages" from energy companies for the risks posed by climate change.

The Northern District Court of California invited the DOJ to provide its expert opinion on the cities' claims and advise on relevant information the court should consider for the case, in which the cities allege that combustion of the companies' products create a public nuisance.

On Friday, The New York Times released a 3,400-word, spectacularly brutal and dishonest hit piece on Jordan Peterson. Its none-too-subtle title: "Jordan Peterson: Custodian Of The Patriarchy."

The author, Nellie Bowles, can't hold back her obvious antipathy for her subject; instead, she lets her sneering condescension drop from every comma. She never lets Peterson spell out an argument; she satisfies her id with every snide aside. It's an extraordinary performance by a person deliberately attempting to misunderstand her subject.

The piece is tailored to Bowles' message: Peterson is a horrifying misogynist. Her evidence of this is that lots of young men listen to Peterson, and that Peterson believes in innate differences between men and women. She then proceeds to snip his comments, surround them with her suggestive perspective, and roll the whole ball of wax into an anti-Peterson grenade.

If the U.S. economy is performing well, then why can't 51 million households in the United States "afford basics like rent and food". A stunning new report that was just put out by the United Way ALICE Project shows that the gap between the wealthy and the poor in this country is perhaps the biggest that it has been in any of our lifetimes. In some of the wealthiest areas of the nation, homes are now selling for up to 100 million dollars, but meanwhile tens of millions of families are barely scraping by from month to month. Many believe that this growing "inequality gap" is setting the stage for major societal problems.

In general, the U.S. economy seems to be performing better than expected so far in 2018, but the ranks of the poor and the working poor just continue to grow. The following comes from CNN...

Nearly 51 million households don't earn enough to afford a monthly budget that includes housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone, according to a study released Thursday by the United Way ALICE Project. That's 43% of households in the United States.

The figure includes the 16.1 million households living in poverty, as well as the 34.7 million families that the United Way has dubbed ALICE - Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. This group makes less than what's needed "to survive in the modern economy."

Gina Haspel has been confirmed as America's new CIA Director, fulfilling her predecessor Mike Pompeo's pledge to turn the CIA into "a much more vicious agency". "Bloody Gina" has reportedly been directly involved in both torturing people and destroying evidence of torture in her long and depraved career, which some say hurts the CIA's reputation.

Others say it just makes it more honest.

The lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering Central Intelligence Agency has done some of the most unspeakably horrific things to human beings that have ever happened in the history of our species. If you think I'm exaggerating, do your own research into into some of the CIA's activities like the Phoenix Program, which used "Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock ('the Bell Telephone Hour') rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the 'water treatment'; the 'airplane' in which the prisoner's arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners," and "The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee's ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages...The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to...both the women's vaginas and men's testicles [to] shock them into submission."

This is what the CIA is. This is what the CIA has always been. This is what Mike Pompeo said he wanted to help make the CIA "much more vicious" than. Appointing Gina Haspel as head of the agency is just putting an honest face on it.


It really couldn't be more fitting that the US now has an actual, literal torturer as the head of the CIA. It also couldn't be more fitting that it has a reality TV star billionaire President, an Iraq-raping Bush-era neoconservative psychopath as National Security Advisor, a former defense industry director as Secretary of Defense, a former Goldman Sachs executive as Secretary Treasurer, and a former Rothschild, Inc. executive as Secretary of Commerce. These positions have always facilitated torture, oppression, war profiteering and Wall Street greed; the only thing that has changed is that they now have a more honest face on them.

The House on Wednesday passed 347-70 a major overhaul to veterans health care, voting to expand their access to private sector care on the government's dime and to bring the Veterans Affairs Department through a process that would close some of its federally run facilities.

The Veterans Affairs Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks (MISSION) Act won widespread support in the lower chamber and will now head to the Senate, where it already has bipartisan backing. The massive bill dealing with multiple areas that have for years proven to be political landmines moved quickly through the House, with House Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., introducing the bill just one month ago. Roe had worked for much of the 115th Congress with Democrats, his counterparts in the Senate, the Trump administration and an array of veterans stakeholders to reach a compromise bill.

The measure this week also won the official backing of the White House, which put out a statement saying the bill would "strengthen the VA's ability to deliver timely, high-quality healthcare in its own facilities, while ensuring seamless integration with community care providers." President Trump personally praised the bill in a tweet, saying the Senate should act within the next two weeks.

The Defenders Day Ball is just another example of the Russian love for tradition. Russia is the embodiment of the high ideals that the West formerly displayed in times past.

The following clip taken from Russian nightly news with transcript below shows just another example of high society in Russia

"American democracy as we know it is entering it's twilight years"

In an apparent swipe at U.S. President Donald Trump, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday decried what he called "a growing crisis in ethics and integrity" in American public life.

"If our leaders seek to conceal the truth or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom," Tillerson said in a graduation address at the Virginia Military Institute.

Tillerson, who was fired by Trump in March after little more than a year on the job, did not mention the U.S. president by name during his address to cadets at the school in Lexington, Virginia. But he warned that a crisis involving truthfulness and integrity is threatening U.S. democracy.

"When we as people, a free people, go wobbly on the truth, even on what may seem the most trivial of matters, we go wobbly on America," Tillerson said. "If we do not as Americans confront the crisis of ethics and integrity in our society, and among our leaders in both public and private sector - and regrettably at times even the nonprofit sector - then American democracy as we know it is entering its twilight years," he said.

Julian Assange appears to be painfully close to being unceremoniously thrown out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London. If that happens, the consequences for journalism, for freedom of speech, and for press freedom, will resound around the world for a very long time. It is very unwise for anyone who values truth and freedom to underestimate the repercussions of this.

In essence, Assange is not different from any journalist working for a major paper or news channel. The difference is he published what they will not because they want to stay in power. The Washington Post today would never do an investigation such as Watergate, and that's where WikiLeaks came in.

It filled a void left by the media that betrayed their own history and their own field. Betrayed the countless journalists throughout history, and today, who risked their lives and limbs, and far too often lost them, to tell the truth about what powers that be do when they think nobody's looking or listening.

Julian is not wanted because he's a spy, or even because he published a number of documents whose publication was inconvenient for certain people. He is wanted because he is so damn smart, which makes him very good and terribly effective at what he does. He's on a most wanted list not for what he's already published, but for what he might yet publish in the future.

In a stiff pushback against claims the administration's immigration policies are inhumane, the White House today said that the nation is choking on the 10.7 million legal immigrants and refugees allowed in over the past 10 years that are in addition to the 11.3 million illegals here.

"Our expansive humanitarian-based, family-based, and lottery-based immigration system fails to consider the needs of American workers and taxpayers, who have been burdened by decades of low-skilled immigration that has suppressed wages, fueled unemployment, and strained federal resources," said the White House.

It cited reports that many come here and end up on taxpayer funded welfare.

"Census data shows that current U.S. immigration policy admits large numbers of individuals who struggle to become financially independent and instead rely on a vast array of government benefits paid for by U.S. taxpayers. For instance, roughly half of all immigrant-headed households use one or more welfare program," said the statement.

It provided staggering numbers of legal immigration under former President Barack Obama.

The number of "lawful permanent residents," totaled 1,761,927 from fiscal 2008 to 2017. The White House said that is "a population of foreign nationals that is larger than the entire population of Philadelphia."

The Kurdish-language Hawar news quoted the military command council of Manbij as saying that a meeting was held between an official delegation of the US-led coalition forces' command center and a number of Kurdish commanders in Manbij.

The meeting on the political and security situation of Manbij was held in the presence of William Urback, a representative of the US state department, Commander of the US-led coalition General Jimmy Gerrard, Commander of the Kurdish forces in Manbij Mohammad Mostafa, Spokesman for Manbij's military council affiliated to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) Sharfan Darwish and Deputy Commander of Manbij military council Ibrahim Banawi.

It added that the US forces have underlined their continued presence in cooperation with the Manbij military council until they prevail control over the entire region.