Erdogan's March Moscow Visit To Include S-400 Talks

The Kremlin has confirmed that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will visit Moscow in March for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other bilateral meetings.

Earlier, Russian and Turkish media reported that the talks would include a meeting of the high-level bilateral cooperation council that will include negotiations on the possible purchase by Turkey of Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile systems.

Russia is reported to have reached an agreement to deploy the S-400 to China and India. Other potential buyers include Armenia, Belarus, Egypt, Iran, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam.

Talks are also expected to include further progress on improving relations, the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and the global fight against terrorism.

Russia and Turkey have supported opposing sides in the Syrian war, but their ties have improved substantially after being badly strained when Turkish jets shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian border in November 2015.

Credit to rferl.org
http://www.rferl.org/a/erdogan-putin-moscow-visit-s-400/28329389.html

Jim Willie Warns Dollar Headed For Dustbin of History!

Here's How The Deep State Is Trying To Lead Trump Into A Nuclear War

Via Daniel Lang of SHTFplan.com,

Before Donald trump took office, he promised to rebuild the US military by diverting a lot more funding into the armed forces. And when he made that promise, he wasn’t just talking about our conventional forces. He also proposed expanding America’s nuclear capability; a position he recently reiterated in an interview with Reuters. He stated that “It would be wonderful, a dream would be that no country would have nukes, but if countries are going to have nukes, we’re going to be at the top of the pack.”

If Trump is really going to reinvigorate our nuclear program (a decision that many experts fear could spark another arms race), then he needs to be very careful about who he listens to. That’s because some of the high ranking officials in our government have some certifiably insane ideas on what a nuclear arsenal should look like. Recently a Pentagon panel known as The Defense Science Board, told the Trump administration that they need to remake our nuclear arsenal into a force that is capable of engaging in a “limited” nuclear war.

According to the report, “The Defense Science Board … urges the president to consider altering existing and planned U.S. armaments to achieve a greater number of lower-yield weapons that could provide a ‘tailored nuclear option for limited use.’”

The strategy behind limited nuclear use sounds deceptively simple. You need to escalate a conflict just enough to end it.

As the theory goes, using low-yield nuclear weapons against an adversary’s conventional forces will demonstrate that you mean serious business and might be crazy enough to launch an all out nuclear attack. This will cause the enemy to “blink” and ultimately back down, rather than risk global thermonuclear war or continue conventional hostilities.

There’s only one problem with the idea of engaging in a limited nuclear war. It simply can’t be done. Any limited nuclear war would eventually lead to a full scale nuclear war.

The lynchpin of a limited nuclear war is the tactical nuke. These are nuclear weapons that have a much smaller yield than a strategic nuke. Whereas a strategic nuke might have a yield of half a megaton or more, a tactical nuke is usually somewhere in the ballpark with the atomic weapons that we used on Japan, but usually smaller than that. They’re for use on the battlefield, possibly within close proximity to friendly forces. And there’s a reason why our government has been slowly phasing them out for decades. Just because they make a smaller crater, doesn’t mean they make a smaller impact.

When you use a tactical nuke, you’re still using a nuke. It doesn’t matter that it’s not large enough to destroy an entire city (though some of them can). By using them, you’re telling the enemy that you’re willing to use nukes.You’re saying that you’re willing to rain radioactive fallout on their territory. You’re willing to engage in total war.

The only appropriate response to that is escalation. The enemy has to show you that they can do the same thing. In war, both parties aren’t thinking “gee, how the heck do I get out of this?” They’re thinking, “how do I win” and “how do I get back at the other guy” and “how do I teach my enemy a lesson he won’t forget.” Limited nuclear war doctrine doesn’t burn the bridge between conventional war and full on nuclear holocaust. It builds that bridge.

This should be common sense. All you have to do is imagine what would happen if Russia dropped a relatively small, 10 kiloton nuke on an American military base in Europe. Would the US government respond with capitulation? Nobody in their right mind believes that.

And let’s pretend for a moment that a limited nuclear war is possible. What would that do? It would normalize nuclear warfare. It would make nukes a viable option in every single war. Every conflict would leave behind a trail of radioactive fallout and mass civilian casualties.

Hopefully brighter minds will prevail, because whoever is proposing this notion of limited nuclear conflict, needs to change out their dress uniform for a freaking straight jacket.

Credit to Zero Hedge

American Society Being Pushed Toward Breaking Point By Secret, Deep State Occult Elite

BYMICHAEL LAITMAN

If business people such as Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank must apologize for their conservative views for fear of losing business, this is not liberalism and certainly not pluralism. This is tyranny.

A little over a week ago, Bill O’Reilly of The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News slammed the twisted reporting of the deportation of illegal immigrants who were convicted felons, showing how the media portrayed them as innocent “maids, moms, and shopkeepers.” He said that this exemplifies how the media coverage of President Trump is beyond biased; it is “blatant dishonesty.” Mr. O’Reilly, whose program is “routinely the highest-rated show of the three major US 24-hour cable news television channels,” concluded the item declaring, “There is a radical element [the radical left] in this country that wants to destroy it. If this continues, there will be a breaking point.”

As harsh as this threat sounds, judging by the relentless attempts of the Democrats to sabotage Trump’s efforts to man key positions, the media’s slew of warped and made up stories purporting to prove the president’s incompetence, through the army of on-the-ground agitators that Obama’s Organizing for Action has dispatched in order to disruptevery town-hall meeting in the country and create the pretense that the nation is with the Democrats, it seems that there is indeed a war against the president on multiple fronts.

It is not a question of policy; it is a question of identity. Donald Trump recently deported 680 convicted criminals, and the media was up in arms over the deportation of “innocent people,” as they called them. Where was the media when Obama, to whom immigrants referred as “Deporter-in-Chief,” drove out 2.5 million people during his tenure, the majority of whom were without any criminal record? And where was the outcry when it became known that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, sold one fifth of US uranium to Russia, and that she and her husband, Bill Clinton, personally profited from the deal?

The media were silent because Obama and Clinton were the guardians of power for a small ruling elite that wants to dominate the US. A president who does not comply with their dictates does not serve their interests and there is no telling what they will do to remove him from office. For now, they are using a bogus, humanistic agenda such as caring for the immigrants and backing the Obamacare program to promote their goal of ousting Trump, but there is no reason to believe that they will stop there.

The Necessity of Diversity
Liberalism in itself is a noble idea. Following World War II, numerous countries in the West adopted the Liberal agenda as a “vaccine” against fascism and Nazism. However, a society cannot be vital and vibrant unless many different views vie against one another and in the process become polished and refined. When all the parties understand that diversity of views creates vitality, they strengthen their society and increase its ability to cope with changes.

Our own Jewish tradition encourages diversity and debate as a means to enhance social cohesion. Martin Buber wrote in Nation and World: “It is not neutrality that we need, but rather cohesion, cohesion of mutual responsibility. We are not required to blur the boundaries among the factions, circles, and parties, but rather share a recognition of the common reality and to share the test of mutual responsibility.” Likewise, the great Rav Kook wrote (Orot Hakodesh), “Near the end of days, the quality of unity will surface in the nation… This quality is immersed in pool of strife and discord, but its content is paved with love and wondrous unity.”

For generations, Jewish leaders taught their disciples that conflict of views is a means for finding the ideal solution and strengthening social cohesion. The Talmud writes that “A father and son who engage in Torah become each other’s enemies, yet they do not move from there until they return to loving one another” (Kidushin 30b). The Zohar, too, writes (Aharei Mot), “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to also sit together. These are the friends as they sit together, and are not separated from each other. At first, they seem like people at war, wishing to kill one another. Then they return to being in brotherly love. …And you, the friends who are here, as you were in fondness and love before, henceforth you will also not part … And by your merit there will be peace in the world.”

The Inevitable Evil
Yet, the American society has denied the legitimacy of “other parties,” as Buber put it. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” said British Liberal MP Sir John Dalberg-Acton. Liberalism has been the sole “legitimate” agenda for decades now, but instead of using it to create a vibrant arena of views that invigorate one another, it has become a stifling mechanism by which anyone who contradicts what the media deems true is shamed and bullied. If business people such as Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank feel that they must apologize for stating their honest, very mildly conservative views for fear of losing business, this is no longer liberalism and certainly not pluralism. This is tyranny. Beneath a guise of free speech, America has become a fascist country, where only one view is permitted.

But if “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” then this is to be expected. “The inclination of man's heart is evil from his youth” (Gen 8:21) is not merely a verse from the Torah. It is who we all are. This is why rulers need the media to monitor them, and why the media needs to be kept genuinely free and pluralistic.

This is not the situation in America. Neoliberalism, which has destroyed Europe through immigration, and nearly destroyed the US by eliminating its middle class, has been the sole ruling agenda in the US for decades. It serves the interests of the small elite group of magnates who control the American economy, the media, and thereby the government, all the way up to the White House. They determine what is reported and what is not, who is defamed and who is glorified. By controlling the media, they have dominated public discourse, public opinion, and have avoided criticism. This is ingenious, but deadly to society.

Their best interest is not the best interest of the American people. They aspire for world domination. Through proxies such as Obama and Clinton, they “removed” Arab leaders such as Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Bashar Assad, destroyed their countries, and created an influx of migrants into Europe. It is not that these Middle Eastern tyrants are or ever were anything to admire, but if you look at Iraq, Libya, and Syria today, would it not have been better for their people if their tyrants had remained in place, rather than the ruin, death, hunger, and terrorism that is their daily reality today?

If the people driving the “liberal” agenda in Europe maintain control over their governments, it will not be long before Europe accepts Sharia law. As this sad story of a forced child marriage shows, this is already happening, but it will spread much faster if they succeed.

And what they have done to Europe, they will continue in America: This same group will allow unchecked influx of migrants into the US, who will drain the already overstretched welfare system, create an impossible conflict of cultures and faiths, which will result in extremism and subsequent bloodshed on both sides. And all this will be done in the name of liberal thinking, pluralism, humanism, and democracy.

On the Side of Correction
It may appear as though I am in complete support of President Trump and against the Democratic Party. In truth, I have no personal affinity for any particular person or agenda. I do have great affinity for diversity above which people can connect since diversity keeps society cohesive, agile, and healthy, and keeps the country strong. At the moment, President Trump represents this view quite well, and the Democratic Party, with its undisputed monarch Barack Hussein Obama, absolutely does not.

I regard Trump’s victory as a sign that the American society is still alive and kicking. It gives me hope that it will also be able to go through the necessary sobering up without bloodshed and without dragging the world into another war. If Clinton had been elected, there is no doubt that war would have erupted. Russia, America, and Europe were already making preparations on the ground. Now, at least there is a chance for peace and the correction of society.

But to correct society, all parties will need to learn from the Jewish tradition—that “love covers all crimes” (Prov 10:12). Rav Yehuda Ashlag, author of the Sulam (Ladder) commentary on The Book of Zohar, wrote in his essay, “The Freedom”: “Just as people’s faces differ, so their views differ. Therefore, society is cautioned to preserve the freedom of expression of the individual. Each individual should maintain his integrity, and the contradiction and oppositeness between people should remain forever, to forever secure the progress of the free society.” Liberals would do well to listen to their own “coreligionist” Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times who wrote, “We progressives could take a brief break from attacking the other side and more broadly incorporate values that we supposedly cherish—like diversity—in our own dominions.”

At the moment, Trump cannot end the war with the media and the Democrats because he is not the one waging it. For things to calm down, the media and the Democratic Party must decide that the best interest of their country comes before that of their party, or even that of their financiers. If this war does not stop, then either the media will be severely restricted going forward and American democracy will be hampered, or the next leader America’s political right sends forward will likely be one who will truly galvanize the conservatives in America, and “there will be a breaking point,” as O’Reilly put it.



Credit to Jpost

Google is recording everything you search and say

(Natural News) Google could have a record of everything you have said around it for years, and you can listen to it yourself.

The company quietly records many of the conversations that people have around its products.

The feature works as a way of letting people search with their voice, and storing those recordings presumably lets Google improve its language recognition tools as well as the results that it gives to people.

(Article by Andrew Griffin, republished in part from Independent.co.uk)

But it also comes with an easy way of listening to and deleting all of the information that it collects. That’s done through a special page that brings together the information that Google has on you.

It’s found by heading to Google’s history page and looking at the long list of recordings. The company has a specific audio page and another for activity on the web, which will show you everywhere Google has a record of you being on the internet.

The new portal was introduced in June 2015 and so has been active for the last year – meaning that it is now probably full of various things you have said, which you thought might have been in private.

The recordings can function as a kind of diary, reminding you of the various places and situations that you and your phone have been in. But it’s also a reminder of just how much information is collected about you, and how intimate that information can be.

You’ll see more if you’ve an Android phone, which can be activated at any time just by saying “OK, Google”. But you may well also have recordings on there whatever devices you’ve interacted with Google using.

On the page, you can listen through all of the recordings. You can also see information about how the sound was recorded – whether it was through the Google app or elsewhere – as well as any transcription of what was said if Google has turned it into text successfully.

But perhaps the most useful – and least cringe-inducing – reason to visit the page is to delete everything from there, should you so wish. That can be done either by selecting specific recordings or deleting everything in one go.

To delete particular files, you can click the check box on the left and then move back to the top of the page and select “delete”. To get rid of everything, you can press the “More” button, select “Delete options” and then “Advanced” and click through.

The easiest way to stop Google recording everything is to turn off the virtual assistant and never to use voice search. But that solution also gets at the central problem of much privacy and data use today – doing so cuts off one of the most useful things about having an Android phone or using Google search.

Read more at: Independent.co.uk

Credit to Natural News

Retail Apocalypse Gains Momentum As David Stockman Warns ‘Everything Will Grind To A Halt’ After March 15th

J.C. Penney and Family Christian Stores are the latest retail giants to announce widespread store closings. As you will see below, J.C. Penney plans to close between 130 and 140 stores, and Family Christian is closing all of their 240 stores. In recent months the stock market has been absolutely soaring, and so most people have simply assumed that the “real economy” must be doing well. But that is not the case at all. In fact, the retail apocalypse that I have been documenting for quite some time appears to be gaining momentum.

J.C. Penney is not in as rough shape as Sears is just yet, but it is definitely on a similar trajectory. In the end, they are both headed for bankruptcy. That is why it wasn’t too much of a surprise when J.C. Penney announced that they are getting rid of about 6,000 workers and closing at least 130 stores…

J.C. Penney (JCP) plans to close 130 to 140 stores and offer buyouts to 6,000 workers as the department-store industry sags in competition with online sellers and nimble niche retailers.

The company said Friday that it would shutter 13% to 14% of its locations and introduce new goods and services aimed at the shifting preferences of its customer base.

Meanwhile, many observers were quite surprised when Family Christian Stores decided to fold up shop for good. They were known as the largest Christian retailer on the entire planet, but now after 85 years they are going out of business forever…

Family Christian, which bills itself as the “world’s largest retailer of Christian-themed merchandise,” announced Thursday it is closing after 85 years.

The non-profit company, employing more than 3,000 people in 240 stores in 36 states, said in a brief statement that the retailer had been facing declining sales since filing for bankruptcy protection in 2015 and had no choice but to shut down.

These two announcements are part of larger trend that we have been witnessing all over the country. As I have documented previously, Macy’s announced that it would be closing 100 stores earlier this year, and about the same time Sears said that it would be closing another 150 stores.

Back in 2010, Sears had a staggering 3,555 stores.

Before their recent announcement, Sears was down to 1,503 stores, and now this latest round of cuts will leave them with somewhere around 1,350.

Of course it won’t be too long before Sears has zero stores, and my regular readers know that I have been talking about the demise of Sears for a very long time.

The cold, hard truth of the matter is that the “real economy” is a total mess, and that is one of the primary reasons why these ridiculous stock market valuations that we are seeing right now are not sustainable.

One expert that agrees with my assessment is former Reagan Administration White House Budget Director David Stockman. In a recent interview, he explained why he believes that “everything will grind to a halt” after March 15th…

Stockman, who wrote a book titled “Trumped” predicting a Trump victory in 2016, says, “I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance in the hot place that’s going to happen. This is delusional. This is the greatest suckers’ rally of all time. It is based on pure hopium and not any analysis at all as what it will take to push through a big tax cut. Donald Trump is in a trap. Today the debt is $20 trillion. It’s 106% of GDP. . . .Trump is inheriting a built-in deficit of $10 trillion over the next decade under current policies that are built in. Yet, he wants more defense spending, not less. He wants drastic sweeping tax cuts for corporations and individuals. He wants to spend more money on border security and law enforcement. He’s going to do more for the veterans. He wants this big trillion dollar infrastructure program. You put all that together and it’s madness. It doesn’t even begin to add up, and it won’t happen when you are struggling with the $10 trillion of debt that’s coming down the pike and the $20 trillion that’s already on the books.”

Then, Stockman drops this bomb and says:

“I think what people are missing is this date, March 15^th2017. That’s the day that this debt ceiling holiday that Obama and Boehner put together right before the last election in October of 2015. That holiday expires. The debt ceiling will freeze in at $20 trillion. It will then be law. It will be a hard stop. The Treasury will have roughly $200 billion in cash. We are burning cash at a $75 billion a month rate. By summer, they will be out of cash. Then we will be in the mother of all debt ceiling crises. Everything will grind to a halt. I think we will have a government shutdown. There will not be Obama Care repeal and replace. There will be no tax cut. There will be no infrastructure stimulus. There will be just one giant fiscal bloodbath over a debt ceiling that has to be increased and no one wants to vote for.”

In that same interview, Stockman also predicted that “markets will easily correct by 20% and probably a lot more“, and he noted the glaring disconnect between current stock prices and how the U.S. economy is actually performing…

“The S&P 500 has been trading at 26 times earnings while earnings have been dropping for the past six or seven quarters. There is no booming recovery coming. There is going to be a recession and there will be no stimulus baton to bail it out. That is the new fact that neither Trump nor the Wall Street gamblers remotely understand.”

It is very difficult to argue with Stockman on this.

There are some people out there that seem to think that Donald Trump can miraculously turn the U.S. economy around just because he is Donald Trump.

It doesn’t work that way.

We are 20 trillion dollars in debt, and we are currently adding about a trillion dollars a year to that total. There is no possible way that Trump can cut taxes, increase military spending, build a border wall, spend much more on veterans and spend an extra trillion dollars on rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure.

We are flat broke as a nation and there simply is not money available to do everything that Donald Trump wants to do.

So we shall see what happens after March 15th.  Unfortunately, I happen to agree with Stockman that economic reality is about to come knocking and Trump and his supporters are about to get a very rude wake up call.

Credit to Economic Collapse