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Senate Approves NATO Membership for Sweden and Finland

The Senate voted to ratify requests from Finland and Sweden to join NATO in an effort to combat Russian aggression following the invasion of Ukraine.

The measure, needing 67 votes in the 100-member Senate, passed 95-1, with one voting present. The proposal drew broad bipartisan support and the backing of both party leaders.

“Our NATO alliance is the bedrock that has guaranteed democracy in the Western world since the end of World War II,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “This strengthens NATO even further and is particularly needed in light of recent Russian aggression.”

Some Republicans who voted no argued that the United States would be called on to defend the two new vulnerable NATO members at a time when it should scale back its presence in Europe to prepare for escalating tension with China. (Read more from “Senate Approves NATO Membership for Sweden and Finland” HERE)

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Who Is the ‘Merchant of Death’ Arms Dealer Biden Offered Russia in Prisoner Swap?

Stashed away in a federal penitentiary deep in the bowels of Illinois sits a notorious Russian arms dealer named Viktor Bout, a man the Biden administration is rumored to be eyeing as a bargaining chip to procure the release of two American prisoners.

Bout has gone by many names over the years, such as the “Merchant of Death” and “Sanctions Buster” — titles he earned for his alleged ruthless and savvy arms dealing from Eastern Europe into Africa and the Middle East following the collapse of the Soviet Union. His black market exploits inspired the Nicolas Cage flick Lord of War and ultimately led to his arrest in 2008 for conspiring to kill Americans.

“All that remains is for the U.S. government to have the courage to admit the obvious — get what we can for Viktor Bout,” Bout’s lawyer Steve Zissou said, per the Washington Post. “The alternative should be obvious — no Americans will be exchanged unless Viktor Bout is sent home along with them.”

The Kremlin has long called for Bout’s release since he was first detained by authorities in Thailand back in 2008 upon the request of the United States. And now, there are two U.S. nationals being held in Russia, Paul Whelan and Brittney Griner, whom the Biden administration has been keen to set free.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Wednesday that the U.S. offered a “significant proposal” for their release — a proposition CNN reported to be Bout’s release in a prisoner swap, as had long been rumored. (Read more from “Who Is the ‘Merchant of Death’ Arms Dealer Biden Offered Russia in Prisoner Swap?” HERE)

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McDonald’s Revenue Takes Hit After Russia Exit

McDonald’s exit from Russia in April sparked a revenue drop at the fast-food giant despite US sales that were goosed by higher prices amid surging inflation.

The company’s overall revenue dipped 3% to $5.8 billion in the second quarter largely because McDonald’s closed its company-owned eateries in Russia and Ukraine after the war broke out. Profits fell by nearly half due to a $1.2 billion charge related to the sale of the Russian business, the company said Tuesday.

Russia was one of the company’s largest international markets, with McDonald’s reporting that it owned 84% of its 847 restaurants in the country.

At the same time, menu price increases fueled a 9.7% increase in global comparable sales including a 3.7% increase in the US but excluding stores that were exited in Russia. (Read more from “McDonald’s Revenue Takes Hit After Russia Exit” HERE)

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Another Catastrophic Biden Failure: Russia Rolling in Cash Due to Ukraine War, Sanctions

Despite repeated assurances from President Biden and other Western leaders that “the toughest economic sanctions in history” would cripple Russia’s economy and starve its war machine, that hasn’t happened. Russia’s current account, which measures global trade in goods and services, was strong in the second quarter of this year when its trade surplus rose to a record $70.1 billion. The ruble, too, has exhibited remarkable resiliency, ranking as the strongest performing currency so far this year, rising to its highest level against the euro since 2015 and making major gains against the dollar.

What accounts for Putin’s bulging coffers? The simple answer: high commodity prices and Russia’s continued ability to export oil, gas, grain, and even gold to non-Western countries.

The economic picture isn’t as rosy for the countries sanctioning Russia. Europe is struggling to meet its energy needs, driving up inflation and forcing countries at the vanguard of the green movement to backpedal. Germany, for example, whose minister of economic affairs and climate action comes from the Green Party, was forced to reactivate seventeen coal-fired power plants it previously had shut down. President Biden, with inflation sitting at a forty-year high, recently begged Saudi Arabia’s leaders—a regime it had been shunning—to come to the rescue by pumping more crude to help bring down gas prices and ease the inflationary pressure high fuel prices are placing on other goods.

. . . The combination of sanctions and war disrupted energy and grain supplies, creating an economic opportunity that Russia has exploited. Indeed, according to the Helsinki-based Center for Energy and Clean Air, Moscow earned $100 billion in revenue from oil, gas, and coal sales in the first three months of the war alone.

While the Biden administration was drawing down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to increase available supplies and lower gasoline prices—plunging America’s emergency reserve to its lowest level since the mid-1980s—Russia’s oil exports had bounced back to pre-war levels by May. (Read more from “Another Catastrophic Biden Failure: Russia Rolling in Cash Due to Ukraine War, Sanctions” HERE)

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Putin Pulling Russia From ISS, Cutting One of Last Remaining Ties With U.S.

Russia on Tuesday announced its impending withdrawal from the International Space Station (ISS), severing one of its few remaining ties to the U.S. and several other nations.

The move was announced in a statement by Roscosmos, the Russian government’s agency responsible for space travel and research. The nation’s plan is to withdraw its cosmonauts from the ISS “after 2024” and commence building its own orbital station. It appeared to be another instance of Russia’s increasing isolation on the world stage following the invasion of Ukraine.

“I think that by that time we will start putting together a Russian orbital station,” Roscosmos chief Yuri Borisov said during a recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to the Moscow Times. “Of course, we will fulfill all our obligations to our partners, but the decision to leave this station after 2024 has been made.” (Read more from “Putin Pulling Russia From ISS, Cutting One of Last Remaining Ties With U.S.” HERE)

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UN Chief: New Ukraine-Russia Deal Is a ‘Beacon on the Black Sea’ for Food Crisis

Ukraine and Russia have agreed a deal that would allow the resumption of vital grain exports from Ukrainian Black Sea ports, a major diplomatic breakthrough aimed at easing a global food crisis sparked by the war, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Friday.

Ministers from both countries signed an agreement brokered by the United Nations and Turkey in Istanbul.

The breakthrough followed months of negotiations, and promises to unblock ports on the Black Sea to allow the safe passage of grain and oilseeds — some of Ukraine’s most important exports.

Russia has so far been blocking maritime access to those ports, meaning that millions of tons of Ukrainian grain has not been exported to the many countries that rely on it. (Read more from “UN Chief: New Ukraine-Russia Deal Is a ‘Beacon on the Black Sea’ for Food Crisis” HERE)

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It Is Only a Nano-Second to Armageddon

The U.S. Government’s “Nuclear Primacy” meta-strategy says that there are “acceptable” levels of destruction of America in a nuclear war against Russia and/or China, so long as America “comes out on top” globally, at the end.

Brian Berletic walks us through the Rand Corporation’s plan for the Pentagon to attack China during the narrow window until 2025 and perhaps 2030 (3 to 8 years from today) when the US is assumed to still have superiority capable of winning a war that is “unlikely” (undefined and little more than a wishful assumption) to go nuclear. In other words, the assumption on which Washington’s planned military attack on China rests is that China will accept defeat rather than use nuclear weapons.

Would a sane government start a war on such a risky assumption?

There are two other highly risky assumptions in the Pentagon’s war plans. One is that the US can dominate the seas from which via airplanes or missiles the US can cause destruction to Chinese industry and social infrastructure. Apparently no attention has been paid to long-range Chinese missiles that make US carrier fleets obsolete.

The other risky assumption is that Russia stays out of it. Considering the confusion in the Kremlin, the inability of the Russian government to give up hope of peaceful cooperation with the West, and the inability of the Kremlin to regard the neoconservative doctrine of US hegemony over the world as anything but a fantasy, and most certainly not an operative doctrine, it is possible that the Kremlin would strand aside and watch a US/China war.

The Kremlin misses many opportunities, but it is difficult to believe that Putin would be so stupid as to not gang up with China on the US. In which case the US is history.

You can read Berletic’s analysis.

As for the Pentagon’s concern for Americans in the event that the assumption that Washington can conquer China without nuclear weapons being used is mistaken, if such weapons are employed, “the U.S. Government’s ‘Nuclear Primacy’ meta-strategy says that there are ‘acceptable’ levels of destruction of America in a nuclear war against Russia and/or China, so long as America ‘comes out on top’ globally.”

The Pentagon’s doctrine doesn’t say how many American cities and how many millions of Americans are among the “acceptable levels of destruction.” But it is enough to show that Americans are regarded as canon fodder by their rulers.

You see, the only importance in the ruling neoconservative doctrine is US hegemony, not your life. For the neocons, as long as America rules over a wasteland devoid of life, we have won. Neocons are truly insane people, and they are in control of US foreign and military policy.

That should scare you and wake you up. But it won’t. The young can’t stop scrolling their cell phones long enough to have any idea of the reality around them. They already live in a virtual world, disconnected from all reality. Older Americans say they have heard fears of nuclear war all their lives and it is never going to happen because there can be no winners. This is a very unsophisticated understanding, especially in the face of a US war doctrine that says Washington can win a nuclear war as long as it doesn’t wait beyond 2025 or 2030.

Eric Zuesse, stimulated by Berletic, writes that Washington intends to conquer both China and Russia. The opening battlefield of WW III is the war Washington arranged in Ukraine. There is no doubt in my mind that the Russian military is very formidable and is capable of sweeping through NATO in an instant. The problem for Russia is in the Kremlin where hesitancy and confusion rule. The Kremlin is unable to get its mind around the fact that Washington is insane. Putin actually thought that Washington would accept Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine as it was limited to the protection of the Donbass Russians. Putin and his foreign minister are so insouciant that they believed Washington would allow them to conduct a limited operation confined to cleansing Donbass of Ukrainian Nazis.

How does the world’s most predominant military power make such a mistake? The only answer I can come up with is that America’s brainwashing of the Russian intellectual class during the Yeltsin years has made Russian leadership, deaf, dumb, and blind. One is tempted to add stupid. Russia’s leaders–Putin, Lavrov–correctly describe the situation, but they cannot bring themselves to do anything about it. Talk is plentiful but action is rare. Apparently the Kremlin is going to continue to sell the energy to NATO countries so that NATO can continue the war on Russia. To paraphrase Alain de Lille in the 11th century, not sovereignty now, but money is all. This appears to hold for Russia.

Zuesse who is as as honest as a leftlwinger can be, is not always reliable. The left have their own myths about Reagan, and here is Zuesse’s statement of one of them:

“I have documented that the plan by America’s Government was instead to fool Russia’s Government [Gorbachev] to believe that America ended the Cold War on our side at the same time when Russia ended its side of the Cold War in 1991, but that the U.S. Government was actually planning instead to surround Russia by increasing NATO, right up to Russia’s borders.

I suppose the truth of Zuesse’s statement depends on who is the US government. Is it the President or the neoconservatives and the military/security complex?

If the government is the President as the representative of the people, I know for a fact that President Reagan’s intent was to end, not win, the cold war.

He told us this over and over. He formed a top secret presidential committee with authority over the CIA in order to have independent opinion of the CIA’s assertion that the US would lose an arms race if used to bring Russia with her broken economy to the negotiating table. Reagan’s plan was that once his supply-side policy had eliminated America’s stagflation, America’s restored economy would bury Russia’s broken and unrepairable economy in an arms race. The point of the threatened arms race was to bring Gorbachev to the negotiation table to end the Cold War, not to win an arms race.

We investigated the CIA’s documents and reported to President Reagan that it was a case of the CIA protecting its budget and its power. If Reagan dismantled the Cold War, without an enemy the CIA’a budget along with that of the Military Security Complex’s budget would be defenseless at their high levels.

Ronald Reagan was an outsider to the Republican Establishment, represented at that time by George H. W. Bush, vice president and former director of the CIA. Reagan was seen as a challenge to the Republican Establishment’s control of the Republican Party. Eight years of Reagan followed by eight years of Jack Kemp meant the end of the Republican Establishment that serves organized interests. Political parties are concerned with power and control, not with the national interest. Here was Reagan, and his few supporters in his administration, challenging the power and profit of the vested interests for the sake of world peace.

The American media, whores to the CIA, started on us. But it didn’t fit. The narrative wasn’t yet constructed. James Baker, the principal operative of George H. W. Bush, admitted that he promised Gorbachev no movement east of NATO. But there is no written signed document, so the story was changed by later Washington administrations.

Zuesse misses the true story, because he succumbs to ideology and is unable to understand that Reagan, like Trump, was an outsider who brought hope that the political system could be restored to the people’s control.

The American media and the American leftwing made sure that this did not happen.

Consequently, we now face nuclear Armageddon. It is only a tick away unless Putin decides to surrender.

The US today is much more divided than in 1860. The Democrats regard white people as racists and barriers to social justice and the rule of the oppressed blacks and sexually perverse. Throughout the media and educational systems white Americans are demonized more than Jews were in Nazi Germany. Once white Americans become a minority, which is the principle goal of the Democrat Party, their fate will be the same as the French in The Camp of the Saints.

The Republicans are helpless. Their goal is to make America great again, which plays into the neoconservatives’ agenda of US hegemony.

To deal with the challenges America faces requires awareness of the facts, but facts are no longer politically correct. They don’t fit the narratives and, therefore, are untrue and dismissed as misinformation.

In my lifetime I have watched my country descend into degeneracy, ignorance, and evil. The nation into which I was born does not exist except as a geographical location. (For more from the author of “It Is Only a Nano-Second to Armageddon” please click HERE)

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Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House. Visit his website.

Permission to reprint Dr. Roberts’ columns does not imply that Dr. Roberts endorses the websites or media organizations that republish his columns or that he approves of the content of the websites, media outlets or books that republish his columns

Photo credit: Radical protester burning american flag by Marco Verch under Creative Commons 2.0

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Bears Eat Star Athlete, Rich Tourist Couple After Helicopter Crash In Rugged Wilderness

A wealthy couple and their pilot were tragically mauled and eaten by wild bears after their helicopter crashed in the Russian wilderness last week.

Zoya Kaygorodova and Sergey Kolesnyak, a couple in their 30s, were on a pricey tour of the Russian Far East, flying high above the Kamchatka peninsula on the Sea of Okhotsk when the helicopter flown by famous Russian biathlete Igor Malinovsky went down. Authorities said the chopper ran into bad weather.

“The missing aircraft was found by a passing helicopter on the afternoon of July 17 near the Semyachik pass, 13 kilometers from the Uzon volcano,” the Russian Emergencies Ministry said in a statement. “Unfortunately, no one survived the crash.”

European news reports say the wreckage and three mangled bodies were recovered near Kamchatka, Newsweek reported Tuesday.

Malinovsky, just 25 years old and a five-time world junior biathlon champion, reportedly lost communication due to the bad weather conditions shortly before the chopper crashed. Russian media said Malinovsky was from the Kamchatka region. (Read more from “Bears Eat Star Athlete, Rich Tourist Couple After Helicopter Crash in Rugged Wilderness” HERE)

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Russian Lawmakers Blame Losses on Experimental Ukrainian Super-Soldiers

Russia on Monday outrageously claimed that its massive army has failed to deliver Ukraine to President Vladimir Putin because it is fighting against experimental super-soldiers, turned into “cruel killing machines” by US studies.

Two Russian lawmakers told reporters this week that the Kremlin is investigating the blood of Ukrainian prisoners of war, and has found “evidence” of experimentation, Russian outlet Kommersant reported.

Russian Senator Konstantin Kosachev told the outlet that the blood of Ukrainian prisoners contained traces of pathogens he claimed were “atypical” for Ukraine.

Kosachev claimed this was evidence of “experiments” being conducted on Ukrainian servicemen.

IrIrina Yarovaya, deputy chair of the State Duma, took the claims further, and said the supposed experiments were focused on the creation of more vicious soldiers. (Read more from “Russian Lawmakers Blame Losses on Experimental Ukrainian Super-Soldiers” HERE)

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Russia in ‘Holy War’ in Ukraine Against ‘Satanic’ West, LGBT (VIDEO)

Apti Alaudinov, the commander of Chechen forces fighting for Russia, praised Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, calling it a “holy war” against the “Satanic” values of Europe and the United States as well as the LGBTQ community.

Alaudinov made the remarks during a recent segment of Russia’s state-run Russia-1 television channel. A clip of his remarks were shared to Twitter on Sunday by Julia Davis, a columnist for The Daily Beast and creator of the Russian Media Monitor. Chechnya, where Alaudinov hails from, is a Republic of Russia under the jurisdiction of Moscow.

In his comments, the Chechen commander praised Putin for standing up against the West and NATO, describing them as evil. He praised the Russian president for preventing LGBTQ rights from advancing in their country, contending that the fight in Ukraine was a war against the marginalized community.

(Read more from “Russia in ‘Holy War’ in Ukraine Against ‘Satanic’ West, LGBT (VIDEO)” HERE)

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