Weekend reading ...

from some of the many good sources for alternate media.
 
Robert Parry at ConsortiumNews:
Hillary Clinton’s Very Bad Night

Exclusive: The magnitude of Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire drubbing has establishment Democrats wringing their hands as it dawns on them that no candidate in modern U.S. political history has bounced back from a 22-point loss in that first-in-the-nation primary to win the White House, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s stunning 22-point loss to Sen. Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire is even more devastating when looked at in the context of the modern history of this first-in-the-nation primary: No one has ever lost by such a margin and gone on to win the presidency.

Among Democrats, no one who lost by even half that margin in New Hampshire has recovered to win the party’s nomination. In 2008, Barack Obama lost to Hillary Clinton by 2.6 percentage points; in 1992, Bill Clinton lost to Paul Tsongas by 8.4 percentage points; in 1984, Walter Mondale lost to Gary Hart by 9.4 percentage points; in 1972, George McGovern lost to Edmund Muskie by 9.3 percentage points.

In two of those cases, New Hampshire did favor.....

Prof Tim Andersen at GlobalResearch
How a war is lost is a serious and dangerous business.
 After Henry Kissinger helped sabotage the 1968 Paris peace talks, for domestic political reasons, the War in Vietnam raged for another seven years. In the end Washington’s loss was more humiliating, and millions more lives were destroyed.

The Geneva process over Syria is in many respects different, because it is a charade. The NATO and Gulf monarchy sponsors pretend to support Syrian ‘opposition’ groups and pretend to fight the same extremist groups they created.

Yet the dangers are very real because the Saudis and Turkey might react unpredictably, faced with the failure of their five year project to carve up Syria. Both countries have threatened to invade Syria, to defend their ‘assets’ from inevitable defeat from the powerful alliance Syria has forged with Russia, Iran, Iraq and the better party of Lebanon.
It should be clear by now that every single anti-government armed group in Syria has been created by Washington and its allies. Several senior US officials have admitted the fact. Regime change has always been the goal. Nevertheless, the charade of a ‘War on ISIS’ goes on, with a compliant western media unwilling to point out that ‘the emperor has no clothes’.....



The Saker at his blog:
The situation with Turkey is rapidly getting out of control:
 not only have the Turks conducted artillery strikes across the Syrian border, Turkey has refused to comply with its obligations under the Open Skies Treaty and refused to let a Russian surveillance aircraft overfly Turkey.  The Russian military has now declared that it had detected signs of Turkish preparations for an invasion.    The Turkish refusal to abide by the Open Skies Treaty is an extremely worrisome development, especially when combined with the Russian warnings about the preparation for an invasion of Syria, and the Russians are not mincing their words:.....

Wayne Madsen at Strategic Culture:
US and Israeli Plan to Dominate UN

... The only way for the United Nations to dig itself out from under the repressive jackboot of Washington and its co-conspirators in Jerusalem is for the Russian sphere and the non-aligned movement to see more of the de facto independent countries in their respective domains gain membership in the world body. That can start with UN membership for the self-declared countries of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, recognized by at least four current members of the UN. There should also be pressure to recognize the independence of and admit to the UN as full members Palestine and the Holy See, both official UN observer states. In order to represent the interests of Orthodox Christianity, the Republic of Mount Athos, a monastic republic within Greece that has semi-autonomous status, should be admitted to the UN to protect, along with the Holy See, the interests of Christians around the world. It would also help the plight of Christians to admit the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which currently has guest status at the UN; the Coptic government-in-exile of Egypt; and the Principality of the Pontinha in the Atlantic, a self-proclaimed successor state to the realm of the Knights Templar.

Governments-in-exile that should be permitted to join the UN include those of Biafra, Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, West Papua, Cabinda, Republic of Serbian Krajina, the Republic of Ambazonia, the Koma Civakên Kurdistan (Kurdish state in eastern Turkey), South Yemen, the Republic of Azawad, the Republic of South Maluku, Chagos Islanders-in-exile, the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam, Lakotah Sioux Nation, the government of the Kingdom of Hawai’i, and the Ukrainian Salvation Committee. These governments have «special scores» to settle with the United States, Israel, and many of their UN allies.....

Currently, the UN represents only special interests of multinational corporations and a few vocal pressure movements such as those beholden to Israel and George Soros’s varied non-governmental organizations like the Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Organization of Migration. The UN must open its doors to other members in order to truly represent the peoples of the world. Opening the doors of the UN would provide some counterbalance to the newest delegations from Montenegro, Timor-Leste, and South Sudan who cannot spend enough time licking Uncle Sam’s boots.

Gilbert Doctorow at ConsortiumNews
A Look at Ukraine’s Dark Side
Exclusive: Americans have been carefully shielded from the ugly underbelly of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising in 2014 that overthrew the elected president and installed a U.S.-backed, fiercely anti-Russian regime which has unleashed armed neo-Nazis. But a French documentary has dared to expose this grim reality, as Gilbert Doctorow describes.

By Gilbert Doctorow
A new French documentary depicts a long-denied truth – that Ukraine is in the grip of extreme right-wing nationalists who seek to impose what the British scholar Richard Sakwa has called a monist view of nationhood, one which does not accept minorities or heterogeneity. Rainbow politics is not what the Maidan uprising was all about.

Like the Communism which held power in Ukraine before 1992, this new extreme nationalism can impose its will only by violence or the threat of violence. It is by definition the antithesis of European values of tolerance and multiculturalism.
This intimidation is what Paul Moreira’s Canal+ documentary, “Ukraine: The Masks of Revolution,” shows us graphically, frame by frame. That this repression happens to take place under ....

Finian Cunningham at InformationClearingHouse
The North Korean state is routinely mocked in the West for engaging in hyperbole and bombast. Ironically, the Western reaction to its latest satellite launch is a carnival of knee-jerk hysteria and hyperbole. But all the bluster has conveniently given Washington an opportunity to proceed with its global missile shield plans. That is far more destabilizing to international security than any alleged North Korean violation.

In an interview this week on CBS, US President Obama repeated denunciations of North Korea’s rocket launch into outer space last Sunday, which Pyongyang claimed was for the purpose of putting an observation satellite into orbit.

Obama said: «I think we have been concerned about North Korea’s behavior for a while. This is an authoritarian regime. It’s provocative. It has repeatedly violated UN resolutions, tested and produced nuclear weapons and now they are trying to perfect their missile launch system».

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond lambasted North Korea, saying its actions «continue to present a threat to regional and international security».

Within hours of the satellite launch by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), the US and its South Korean ally unveiled their plans to install the Pentagon’s....

Paul Craig Roberts at his blog:
President Kennedy and His Brother Robert Kennedy Were Murdered By The Military-Security Complex
Presstitute Media, such as the UK Telegraph, spend a lot of energy debunking exposes of government conspiracies. For example, the thousands of highrise architects, structural engineers, physicists, nano-chemists, demolition experts, first responders, military and civilian pilots, and former government officials who have provided vast evidence that the official story of 9/11 is a made-up fairy tale at odds with all evidence and the laws of physics are dismissed by presstitutes as “conspiracy theorists.”

Similarly, those, such as James W. Douglass, who have proven beyond all doubt that President John F. Kennedy was not assassinated by Oswald but by his own paranoid anti-communist military-security complex, are dismissed as conspiracy theorists.

The 9/11 Commission Report and the Warren Commission Report were cover-ups. VP Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives he sponsored needed a “new Pearl Harbor” in order to begin their military assaults on the Middle Eastern countries that had independent foreign policies instead of being US/Israeli vassals. 9/11 was their orchestrated “new Pearl Harbor,” and this fact had to be covered up when 9/11 families persisted in their demands for an investigation and could not be bought off for large sums of money.

Similarly, the Warren Commission had no choice but to cover up that a popular American president, John F. Kennedy, had been murdered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the Secret Service, because he was believed by paranoid anti-communists to be “soft on communism” and thereby a threat ....

From AntiMedia:
Here’s Everything You Need to Know About Henry Kissinger
At the February 11 Democratic Debate, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton had a spirited exchange about an unlikely topic: the 92-year old former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Sanders berated Clinton for saying that she appreciated the foreign policy mentoring she got from Henry Kissinger. “I happen to believe,” said Sanders, “that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.”

In one of Sanders’ rare outbursts of enmity, he added, “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger. And in fact, Kissinger’s actions in Cambodia, when the United States bombed that country, overthrew Prince Sihanouk, created the instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to come in, who then butchered some three million innocent people, was one of the worst genocides in the history of the world. So count me in as somebody who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger.”
Clinton went on to defend Kissinger, using the example of China. “His opening up China and his ongoing relationships with the leaders of China is an incredibly useful relationship for the United States of America,” she insisted.

Sanders responded that Kissinger scared Americans about communist China, then opened up trade so U.S. corporations could dump American workers and hire exploited, repressed Chinese....