Russian Official Cancels U.S. Visit, Saying ‘Second American Civil War’ Is Underway

Activists and protesters gesture at a man wearing a confederate flag before a Ku Klux Klan rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, July 8, 2017. Such clashes in the same city would turn deadly one month later when a white supremacist killed a protester with his vehicles, sparking nationwide tensions only further stoked by President Donald Trump’s polarizing response. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images )

 

Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s Roscosmos State Space Corporation, who served as deputy prime minister until May 2017, said Thursday that rising tensions between Republicans and Democrats were leading to a breakdown of U.S. society. This included the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), one of many federal agencies affected by a government shutdown due to an inability for the rival U.S. parties to agree on funding for a border wall proposed by President Donald Trump.

“I think that America is actually engulfed by its second civil war now,” Rogozin told the Rossiya-24 TV channel, as translated by the state-run Tass Russian News Agency.

Russia and the Solecism of Power

For it is the solecism of power, to think to command the end, and yet not to endure the mean.     
Francis Bacon, Of Empire (1625)

Introduction

Nearly every discussion about Russia raises three questions: Who is to blame?  What is to be done?  And where is Russia heading?  This paper focuses on the third question, though the other two cannot be ignored entirely. 

The REAL Russia Scandal

MELISSA BARREIRO/TRUMPET

 

Is Vladimir Putin trying to strengthen the Trump presidency—or weaken it?

Claims that United States President Donald Trump secretly cooperated with Russia to steal the 2016 United States presidential election have been making headlines for over a year. New allegations seem to come out every week, but none of them are backed up by proof against the president.

WikiLeaks published 19,252 e-mails hacked from the accounts of seven key Democratic National Committee staff members on July 22, 2016. These staff members are chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chief executive officer Amy Dacey, chief financial officer Brad Marshall, communications director Luis Miranda, press secretary Mark Paustenbach, broadcast media director Pablo Manriquez and finance director Jordan Kaplan.

The e-mails revealed that under Schultz’s leadership, key officials within the Democratic Party worked to sabotage the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders so Hillary Clinton would win the party nomination. Many Sanders supporters were outraged. Schultz apologized and resigned in disgrace.

The REAL Russia Scandal

 

Vladimir Putin is sowing division within the United States to keep America from becoming the next energy superpower.

Insults fly after EU ultimatum to Poland

Kaczynski with Law and Justice prime minister Beata Szydlo in parliament (Photo: pis.org.pl)

 

The Polish government has accused the European Commission of “arrogance” and of “playing God” in a dispute on judicial reform.

Wednesday’s (26 July) barrage of reactions came after the Commission, earlier the same day, gave Poland one month to address concerns on political interference in the judiciary amid threats of an unprecedented EU voting penalty.

Our New War Party

What is transpiring now in the House of Representatives in the setting of the House Intelligence Committee is truly astounding. The Pontificatorium that is now “examining” “Russian Active Interference with the 2016 presidential election” has raised irony to the power of ten. FBI Director James Comey cautioned the members of the committee that he would be unable to comment on the details of any ongoing investigations that may involve classified material. And yet he has no problem with overstepping his self-limited description as a law enforcement official by offering astute foreign policy opinions such as “Putin hated Hillary Clinton so much.” The Intelligence Committee proceedings have descended into political theater, shamelessly top billed by Democrat Adam Schiff in his opening remarks replete with innuendo, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and “possibilities” of “coincidences” all designed to indict the Trump administration as a coconspirator with Putin’s Russia in defeating Hillary Clinton.

U.S. Air Force deploys WC-135 nuclear sniffer aircraft to UK as spike of radioactive Iodine levels is detected in Europe

A follow-up from yesterday’s post:

 

 

The USAF WC-135C Constant Phoenix might be investigating a spike in radioactive levels in Norway. Someone speculates the release of this radionuclide could be the effect of a Russian nuclear test.

On Feb. 17, 2017, U.S. Air Force WC-135C Constant Phoenix Nuclear explosion “sniffer,” serial number 62-3582, using radio callsign “Cobra 55” deployed to RAF Mildenhall, UK.

As we have already reported the WC-135 is a derivative of the Boeing C-135 transport and support plane. Two of these aircraft are in service today out of the ten examples operated since 1963. The aircraft are flown by flight crews from the 45th Reconnaissance Squadron from Offutt Air Force Base while mission crews are staffed by Detachment 1 from the Air Force Technical Applications Center.

Russia in 2030

It has become increasingly clear that Russia is on the inexorable path toward restoring its territory on the old map of the USSR. Whether Moscow will be able to achieve such a grandiose scheme to recreate another Soviet Union-size Rodina has been traditionally believed to depend on the strength and willingness of NATO and Europe to counter such Russian ambition. The assumption is that if the counterthrusts from the West are robust enough, Moscow will fail in its attempt, otherwise Russia’s territorial map will look like the Soviet Union in 2030.

This dichotomy of thrust and counterthrust by Russia on the one side and the West on the other is for the most part inadequate largely because there is also another crucial factor in deciding the outcome of Russia’s territorial expansion, namely, China and its own territorial ambition that goes against Russia’s objectives in much of Central and East Asia.

In a World Full of Enemies, America Can Only See One at a Time

 

On this day in 1991, Russian General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev did something many in the West thought would never happen: He announced that the Soviet Union would be dissolved. While this event helped bring an end to America’s longtime enemy, it did not bring an end to the spread of communism. The United States put the blinders on and moved forward. But now, less than three decades later, Russia is led by a man whose aim is to restore the Soviet Empire. Yet no one in America is ringing the alarm bells. On today’s show, Stephen Flurry discusses how America’s ignorance of its enemies is bringing down this once great nation.

Europe Hopes for Clinton Win for More Deals With Iran

Europe Hopes for Clinton Win for More Deals With Iran

 

After a year of disappointment, European businesses are hoping a victory for Hillary Clinton in the U.S. election next week may help break the logjam that has prevented large-scale Western investments in Iran since the opening of its economy.

• While no one in Europe is predicting a flurry of new deals should Clinton defeat her Republican rival Donald Trump on Nov. 8
• A win for the Democrat would remove some of the political clouds hanging over last year’s nuclear deal between Iran and world powers.
• Business groups say this could help fuel a more aggressive push into the Iranian market in 2017, especially in the second half of the year, if a Clinton victory is followed by the re-election of moderate Iranian President Hassan Rouhani next May.

Russia ‘to revive the KGB’ after Putin wins biggest majority

Russia plans effectively to revive the KGB under a massive shake-up of its security forces, a respected business daily has reported.

A State Security Ministry, or MGB, would be created from the current Federal Security Service (FSB) , and would incorporate the foreign intelligence service (SVR) and the state guard service (FSO), under the plans. It would be handed all-encompassing powers once possessed by the KGB, the Kommersant newspaper said, citing security service sources.

Russia Building New Underground Nuclear Command Posts

U.S. intelligence detects dozens of hardened bunkers for leaders

Russia is building large numbers of underground nuclear command bunkers in the latest sign Moscow is moving ahead with a major strategic forces modernization program.

U.S. intelligence officials said construction has been underway for several years on “dozens” of underground bunkers in Moscow and around the country.

Disclosure of the underground command bunkers comes as Army Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of U.S. European Command, warned recently that Russia has adopted a nuclear use doctrine he called “alarming.”

Russia Expands Foreign Intelligence Service

 

Growth over past decade coincides with rise in global espionage operations

Russia has aggressively expanded its Foreign Intelligence Service operation over the past decade, according to recent satellite imagery that provides evidence of Moscow’s efforts to wage clandestine operations across Europe and in the United States.

The satellite imagery, which was compiled in a recent report on Russia’s global intelligence operation, shows that Moscow added several new buildings and structures to its intelligence headquarters, known as SVR, from 2007 to 2016, a period that saw a dramatic rise in Russian espionage operations, experts said.

Lenin: Crush, Smash the Police

In The State and Revolution, V. I. Lenin elaborates on Marx’s demonic ravings about a violent revolution to create a state of “armed workers” that will itself “begin to wither away.” Madness. Beginning with the first Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union under Lenin, all such revolutions have only created monstrous dictatorships, which, far from withering away, have slaughtered millions and millions of their own and other peoples all over Planet Earth.

Did five more die in Dallas last night?

Lenin saw police as the front line of the enemy — the enemy, of course, being existing society, which had to be destroyed.

…at a certain stage in the development of democracy, it first welds together the class that wages a revolutionary struggle against capitalism — the proletariat — and enables it to crush, smash to smithereens, wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois, even the republican-bourgeois, state machine — the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy — and to substitute for it a more democratic state machine, but a state machine nevertheless, in the shape of the armed masses of workers who develop into a militia in which the entire population takes part.

New ARMS RACE: Germany AND Russia vow to boost defence spending as Europe militarises

Germany’s defence minister with German troops (Getty)

 

ANGELA Merkel and Vladimir Putin have separately announced plans to increase military spending as Europe looks to equip itself for war.

Both leaders said their respective armies would be bolstered in the coming years, setting the continent on course for a new arms race.

President Putin declared the Kremlin must boost its combat readiness to counter expansion by Nato towards Russia’s borders.