Wayne Madsen

The Los Angeles-class submarine USS Annapolis breaks
through three feet of ice while participating in Ice Exercise
(ICEX 2009) in the Arctic Ocean (Photo credit: WMC)

Although President Obama's «pivot to Asia» is receiving media attention, his little-known push to establish American hegemony over the rapidly melting Arctic polar zone has gone largely unnoticed. Using three NATO allies, all of them monarchies, Obama is trying to establish a U.S.-led condominium of the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark over the Arctic, conspicuously leaving Russia out of the equation. Obama’s military and intelligence push into the Arctic could be taken from the pages of the 1960s Cold War thriller by Alistair MacLean, «Ice Station Zebra», With the depletion of the Arctic ice pack opening up formerly non-navigable Arctic maritime zones to shipping, Obama and his Wall Street handlers are eyeing the Arctic as America’s new region for natural resource exploitation. And, as always, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence Community are ready to act as the centurions for the investment bankers and hedge fund tycoons.

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s Arctic Strategy was unveiled in Halifax in November 2013. Hagel said the Pentagon’s «Arctic Strategy» is centered upon the U.S. bolstering its military capabilities in the Arctic region with the opening of new sea lanes for natural resource «exploration».

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Konrad Kreft & Clara Weiss

Skoropadskyi with officers of the Hetman

Part one - The roots of Ukrainian nationalism

The Western media is seeking to downplay the prominent role of fascists in the new Ukrainian government. Several of the regime’s ministries are headed by members of the far-right Svoboda party, and the militias of the neo-fascist Right Sector are active in violently repressing resistance in the east of the country.

Both Svoboda and Right Sector played a crucial role in the February 22 coup in Kiev, which was strongly backed by Berlin and Washington. This is no coincidence. The close collaboration of Germany and the US with Ukrainian fascists has a long history, reaching back over the last hundred years.

In contrast to many other European countries, there has never been a strong bourgeois national movement in Ukraine. Ukraine has been divided between Poland and Russia since the late Middle Ages. After the carve-up of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century, Ukraine became part of the Russian Empire. Only a section of what is now western Ukraine was integrated into the Hapsburg Empire.

The weakness of the Ukrainian national movement was due on the one hand to the country’s economic backwardness and lack of a strong middle class. Significant industrialisation occurred only in the era of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, a large proportion of the urban population consisted of Russians, Germans and Jews, while the rural population was mainly Ukrainian.

When bourgeois forces finally erected a Ukrainian nation-state, following the 1917 February Revolution’s overthrow of the tsar in Russia, they were immediately confronted with a revolutionary working class. The Bolsheviks, who seized power in Russia in October, received powerful support from the workers of Ukraine. Ever since then, bourgeois nationalism in Ukraine has been characterised by virulent anti-communism, pogroms against revolutionary workers and Jews, and attempts to win the support of imperialist powers.

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Stephen Lendman

America OKs mass murder. It permits flouting rule of law principles, norms and standards. America is a terror state. Criminality continues on an unprecedented scale.

Permanent war is official US policy. One country after another is ravaged and destroyed. Millions of corpses attest to America's barbarity. No nation in world history matches it. Obama exceeds the worst of his predecessors. He's a war criminal multiple times over.

Advancing America's imperium matters most. US hegemonic ambitions risk global war. So does its rage for full spectrum dominance over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary. International laws, treaties, conventions, standards and norms don't matter. Washington rules alone apply. Might v. right reflects them.

Obama's proxy war on Syria rages without end. Events in Ukraine reflect US-led NATO's drive East. Co-opting it into the Atlantic Alliance ensures encroaching on Russia's entire Western flank. US military strength on its borders cuts it off from Europe. Marginalizing, isolating and weakening it at the same time.

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John W. Whitehead

They try to "sell" the plan to all...In an unsuccessful effort
to educate people to uniform views, "planners" establish a
giant propaganda machine — which coming dictator will
find handy. (The Road to Serfdom as a Comic Book)

“To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury.”—Benjamin Tucker, 19th century advocate of American individualist anarchism

The State Department wants $400,000 to purchase a fiberglass sculpture of a camel looking at a needle for its new embassy in Pakistan. They’ve already spent their allotted $630,000 to increase the number of “likes” and fans on their Facebook and Twitter pages. The NATO ambassador for the U.S. needs $700,000 for landscaping and gardening, the National Science Foundation would like $700,000 to put on a theatrical production about climate change, and the Senate staffers need $1.9 million for lifestyle coaching. Also, Yale University researchers could really use $384,000 so they can study the odd cork-screw shape of a duck’s penis.

I promise this is no belated April Fools’ joke. These are actual line items paid for by American taxpayers, whose tax dollars continue to be wasted on extravagant, unnecessary items that serve no greater purpose than to fatten the wallets of corporations and feed political graft (such as the $1 million bus stop, complete with heated benches and sidewalks which can only shelter 15 people and provides little protection from rain, snow, or the sun).

Case in point: despite the fact that we have 46 million Americans living at or below the poverty line, 16 million children living in households without adequate access to food, and at least 900,000 veterans relying on food stamps, enormous sums continue to be doled out for presidential vacations ($16 million for trips to Africa and Hawaii), overtime fraud at the Department of Homeland Security (nearly $9 million in improper overtime claims, and that’s just in six of the DHS’ many offices), and Hollywood movie productions ($10 million was spent by the Army National Guard on Superman movie tie-ins aimed at increasing awareness about the National Guard).

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Stephen Lendman

A secretive neo-nazi military organization reported linked to NATO
played a decisive role in targeted sniper attacks and violence that led
to the collapse of the elected government. (F. William Engdahl)

Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet confirmed it. On February 25 , he and EU foreign policy Catherine Ashton spoke. They were monitored. They didn't know it at the time. Their discussion was leaked. Paet talked to Ashton after returning from Kiev, he said. "At the time, (he) was already in Estonia," he added. On Wednesday, he held a press conference. He issued a statement saying Euromaidan killings demand an independent investigation.

Estonia's Foreign Ministry confirmed the leaked phone call's authenticity. "We reject the claim that Paet was giving an assessment of the opposition's involvement in the violence," it stressed.

It's impossible reinterpreting what he meant. He only commented on what he heard in Kiev. He spilled the beans. Intentionally or not, he confirmed what's been independently believed all along. Ukraine's legitimate President Viktor Yanukovych was wrongfully blamed. He had nothing to do with Euromaidan killings. The operation was a classic false flag. It was staged to blame him. It's now exposed.

Cui bono matters most. Yanukovych's involvement had everything to lose and nothing to gain. Catherine Ashton's spokesperson, Maja Kocijancic, was silent. "(W)e don't comment on leaked phone conversations," she said.

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Stephen Lendman

Britain, America and Israel are likeminded. They're rogue states. They're axis of evil partners. They operate ruthlessly. They mock democratic values. They trash rule of law principles. They tolerate no one challenging their lawlessness. They vilify them. They imprison some. They do so to threaten others. Most often they harass. They do it no-holds-barred.

The Government Accountability Project (GAP) calls itself "the nation's leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization." Jesselyn Radack is a prominent human rights lawyer/whistleblower. She's GAP's National Security & Human Rights director. She's involved mainly with national security and intelligence community whistleblowers. She focuses on torture, lawless surveillance, secrecy and political discrimination.

She represented former senior NSA official Thomas Drake. He won awards for truth-telling and intelligence integrity. On April 15, 2010, he was wrongfully indicted. Obama prosecutors did so under the 1917 Espionage Act. He faced multiple charges. They included willful retention of classified information, obstruction of justice and making false statements. He leaked information on lawless NSA spying. He exposed agency waste, fraud and abuse. He performed a vital public service. He deserved praise, not prosecution. In May 2011, 60 Minutes featured his case.

He was lucky. In early June, Obama's Justice Department dropped all charges. They did so in return for his pleading guilty to a misdemeanor too minor to matter. He got one year probation. He agreed to perform community service.

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Stephen Lendman

On February 6, the XXII Olympic Winter Games began. A geopolitically tense atmosphere prevails. Security is extremely tight. It's prioritized for good reason. Terrorist attacks are possible. Don't discount potential Washington shenanigans. Perhaps raining on Putin's parade is planned. Obama may want him embarrassed. False flags are a longstanding US tradition. Will Sochi be Washington's next target? The fullness of time will tell.

It's a virtual armed camp. Measures in place are unprecedented. Around $2 billion was spent on security. Ahead of February 6, around 23,000 personnel assured proper measures were in place as planned. Tens of thousands of police officers are deployed. They're backed by helicopters, drones, gunboats, submarines, and 70,000 Russian troops. Hundreds of Cossacks are involved. They'll check IDs. They'll detain suspects.

Sochi's proximity to the North Caucasus raised concerns. Islamist jihadists named it a target. They're US assets. They're used strategically. Washington used likeminded ones against Soviet Russia in Afghanistan. Libya was targeted this way. They comprise America's anti-Syrian proxy death squads.

Russia raised concerns after December Volgograd bombings killed 34 people. Were Washington's dirty hands involved? Is something similar planned for Sochi? Hegemons operate this way. America is by far the worst.

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Andy May

This document is meant to explain the accompanying poster and expand on the poster’s content. Some references to the images and data shown in the poster are on the poster and others are in the bibliography. I’ve done my best to verify the accuracy of the content by checking multiple sources. When references had different dates for the same event, I chose the most commonly cited date or the date from the most prestigious sources. I considered dates from articles in Nature, Science, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and Steven Mithen’s book 2 to be the most reliable.

Click here for a full sized print (3000 pixels wide, suitable for printing) or choose the PDF below.

Younger Dryas to Present Time Line (PDF)

The heart of the poster (above) is a time line that shows the significant documented events in human civilization over the last 18,000 years and documented climatic changes over the same period.

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David Stockwell

As CO2 climate models falter and even the IPCC backs off its estimates, it just may be that a radical shift in thinking is looming. Wouldn't it be funny if it was the sun all along?

Remember Thomas Kuhn and his paradigm shift? According to his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, theories change only when anomalous observations stress the ”dominant paradigm” to the point that it becomes untenable. Until then, failure of a result to conform to the prevailing paradigm is not seen as refuting the dominant theory, but explained away as a mistake of the researchers, errors in the data, within the range of uncertainty, and so on. Only at the point of crisis does science become open to a new paradigm. So, does Kuhn inform the current climate debate, help identify important information or an alternative paradigm?

Climate models can be seen as encapsulating the dominant theory, even though they are composed of many different theories regarding land, the ocean and atmosphere. Despite their differences they are also similar in many ways, sharing terminology such as the ‘radiative kernel’. Lets agree, for the purpose of argument, that the dominant AGW paradigm is of global temperature’s high sensitivity to CO2 doubling, resulting in an increase of around 3°C, which appears to be about the central estimate of the climate models.

Does the 15-year ‘pause’ in global temperatures stress this theory? Certainly to some, the stress has already reached a ‘crisis’; while to others the divergence can be explained away by natural variation, uncertainty, and errors in the data.

Do failed models and their predictions of increasing extreme events, like hurricanes, droughts and floods, stress the climate models? Possibly not. From a physical perspective, these phenomena lie at the boundaries of the theory. Hurricanes, droughts and floods are ‘higher order’ statistics — extremes not climate averages. Surface temperature is only a part of the greater global climate system. Because anomalous behavior at the margins can be discarded without sacrificing the main theory, their power to confirm or reject the dominant paradigm is somewhat limited.

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Philip Jones

"Communitarianism is a collectivist philosophy that explicitly rejects individualism. It does not merely relegate individualism to a subordinate position, but is openly hostile to it. It is an ideology of 'civic society' which is nothing less than one version of Post-Marxist collectivism which wants privileges for certain wealthy and influential organized groups, and in consequence, a renewed feudalization of society." - Václav Klaus.

Communitarianist Ideology

The European Union is a major aspect of the `New World Order` and the so called `sustainable development` movement. The main objective of the Federal European State to be, is absolute social, personal and economic control in a collectivist and corporatist society. The philosophy behind the EU is a strange mixture of Capitalism and Communism - a form of Euro Marxism which owes much of its dogma to the Pre World War II Italian Marxist Philosopher, Antonio Gramsci.. The nearest ideology to that practiced by the EU is something called `Communitarianism`, or what Tony Blair called the 'Third Way'..

We are talking of a dialectical trap here, with Corporate money funding Socialism as Thesis, ideological Socialism as Antithesis and Communitarianism or the `new imperium` as Synthesis. Money grabs and concentrates power, whilst State Socialism promises the total redistribution of ownership and wealth. This contradiction provides an almost irresistible dynamic.

Communitarians want to create a post-modern, post-democratic feudal society run by a small number of rich and powerful people with everyone else working as peasants. In order to achieve their objectives they must destroy the middle class and the nation state. Can anyone deny that their goals are firmly on course?

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