On Sunday a former British-Russian double agent and his daughter were seriously injured in a mysterious incident in Salisbury, England. The British government says that both were hurt due to “exposure to a nerve agent”. Speculative media reports talk of Sarin and VX, two deadly nerve-agents used in military chemical weapons. Anonymous officials strongly hint that ‘Russia did it’. New reports though point to a deep connection between the case and the anti-Trump/anti-Russia propaganda drive run by the Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton election campaign. Sergei Skripal once was a colonel in a Russian military intelligence service. In the early 1990s he was recruited by … Continue reading →

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In the Parkland high school shooting in South Florida, just a few miles from my home, we saw the extremes of human fortitude in the persons of Coach Aaron Feis and Deputy Scot Peterson. Peterson, a trained security professional, stayed outside while a shooting was in progress in the area he was hired to defend. Feis, a man not charged with the safety of others, protected them with his body at the expense of his own life. I have thought about the idea of courage often; my writings on disaster preparedness presuppose that a certain amount is necessary to be resilient in the face of adversity. Yet, can … Continue reading →

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The United States of America spends something like $80 billion annually on intelligence gathering and analysis. When the CIA was founded by the National Security Act in 1947 the intention was to create a mechanism that would warn about an imminent threat. The memory of Pearl Harbor in 1941, when Japan attacked the U.S. naval base was still fresh, and the legislation was popularized by the slogan “no more Pearl Harbors.” In spite of the dedication of considerable resources and manpower, there have been some major intelligence failures in the past seventy years, starting with the inability to anticipate the … Continue reading →

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George W. Bush abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that Richard Nixon had negotiated, Putin responded with a buildup of the offensive missiles he put on display last week. The U.S. helped to instigate the Maidan Square coup that dumped over the elected pro-Russian government in Ukraine. To prevent the loss of his Sebastopol naval base on the Black Sea, Putin countered by annexing the Crimean Peninsula. After peaceful protests in Syria were put down by Bashar Assad, we sent arms to Syrian rebels to overthrow the Damascus regime. Seeing his last naval base in the Med, Tartus, imperiled, Putin came … Continue reading →

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Stockholm, Sweden: 63-year-old Daniel Cuevas Zuniga was peddling home after his night shift.  He stopped to pick up an object that he thought was a toy: It was an M-75 hand grenade. Manufactured in great numbers for the Yugoslav national army, and then seized by paramilitaries during the civil war in the 1990s, the grenades are packed with plastic explosives and 3,000 steel balls, well suited for attacks on enemy trenches and bunkers. So reports the New York Times.  Zuniga died; his wife, Wanna, peddling ahead of him was also blown off of her bicycle, shrapnel penetrating her body.  Trying to crawl back to … Continue reading →

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Big Conservatism, or the Big Con, having long ago fused with the GOP, embodies its vision in the Republican Party platform.  One of the planks of the latter is the Big Con’s “pro-life” position on abortion. Now, the most fundamental reason for opposing abortion is that it consists in the killing of an innocent, defenseless human being, a yet-to-be-born child.  This being so, the circumstances in which a child in the womb is conceived are about as morally relevant to the fate of that child as are the circumstances surrounding the conception of the reader of this essay morally relevant … Continue reading →

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[Excerpted from What Has Government Done to Our Money?] To understand the current monetary chaos, it is necessary to trace briefly the international monetary developments of the 20th century, and to see how each set of unsound inflationist interventions has collapsed of its own inherent problems, only to set the stage for another round of interventions. The 20th-century history of the world monetary order can be divided into nine phases. Let us examine each in turn. Phase I: The Classical Gold Standard, 1815–1914 We can look back upon the “classical” gold standard, the Western world of the 19th and early 20th … Continue reading →

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By Dr. Mercola Late last year, Internet Brands, a company under the global investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR & Co.) umbrella, announced its acquisition of WebMD Holdings. Purchase price: $2.8 billion.1,2,3 The company also bought the wellness company Nature’s Bounty Co. last year,4 and already owns a number of other health-related internet brands, including DentalPlans.com, eHealthForum.com, HealthBoards.com, AltMD.com and FitDay.com.5 And, since WebMD owns Medscape and MedicineNet.com, these sites now belong to KKR’s Internet Brands as well.6 Internet Brands’ CEO Bob Brisco told Forbes:7 “WebMD and Medscape are the market leaders in online health with unparalleled reach to consumers and health care … Continue reading →

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Driving a simulated car – as in a game – is becoming more and more like driving an actual car – in reality. At least in terms of the inputs. The car in the game is steered remotely, via a gamepad. You accelerate and brake the car the same way. Soon real cars will be accelerated and braked the same way. Many already are, at least as far as acceleration. They have drive-by-wire throttle control. Your foot does not actually control the acceleration of the vehicle. A computer controls the acceleration of the vehicle. It assesses data it receives from sensors that are connected to the accelerator … Continue reading →

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