Thursday 25th of April 2024
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crazy, mad, insane, nuts and dangerous psycho...

insane

Insanity, craziness, or madness is a spectrum of behaviors characterized by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns. Insanity may manifest as violations of societal norms, including a person becoming a danger to themselves or others, though not all such acts are considered insanity; likewise, not all acts showing indifference toward societal norms are acts of insanity. In modern usage, insanity is most commonly encountered as an informal unscientific term denoting mental instability, or in the narrow legal context of the insanity defense. In the medical profession the term is now avoided in favor of diagnoses of specific psychiatric diseases; the presence of delusions or hallucinations is broadly referred to as psychosis.[1] When discussing psychiatric illness in general terms, "psychopathology" is considered a preferred descriptor.

read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insanity

 

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The scraggy flee-bag shares his itches with the dogs of war...

 

 

So the brash, big-mouth tycoon in the White House with an outsized ego has finally unleashed the dogs of war in Syria.

Invoking God and the suffering of “little babies”, the supposed US Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump ordered the bombing of Syria with cruise missiles launched from warships in the Mediterranean.

A Syrian airbase was destroyed, along with several casualties, and civilians reportedly among the dead.


This was while Trump was digesting a dinner of steak and carrots in his Florida beach resort on Thursday night.

Trump has styled himself as a hard-nosed and “unpredictable” American president.

The bitter irony here is that everything Trump is doing in his latest act of illegal war is actually so predictable.

The US political establishment – driven as it always is by the imperative need of waging wars to shore up its crumby capitalist economy – has been baying for all-out deployment in Syria for the past six years.

Since Washington instigated its criminal regime-change operation against the sovereign government of Syria in March 2011, the hawkish establishment was never quite satisfied with the strategy of using proxy terror groups to do the dirty work. Direct military intervention to topple the Syrian state has always been on the cards as the preferred method.


The Deep State establishment – or the War Party comprising both Republicans and Democrats in hock to the military-intelligence apparatus – thought they would get their way with the election of warmonger Hillary Clinton last November. Alas, the surprise election of Trump to the presidency temporarily upset their militarist agenda.

But the advent of Trump to the White House was only a hitch for the powers-that-be. The relentless Deep State-driven media witch-hunt against Trump over ridiculous allegations of being a Russian puppet has evidently prevailed. 

Trump, the self-declared “outsider” has been forced to prove that he is an “insider”, an obedient poodle to the American war Rottweiler – if he wants to stay in office and see out the next four years without being impeached.

In order to survive the pressure over “Russian stooge” allegations, Trump is throwing some meat to the US War Party by giving them their long-sought-after direct military intervention in Syria.

Trump’s order to blast Syria with 59 cruise missiles is a brazen act of war that makes a mockery of international law. Russia and some other independent nations have denounced the US “act of aggression against a sovereign state”.

The fact that Russian forces were stationed at the targeted airbase at Shayrat – but were reportedly unscathed – is a shocking sign of how reckless the latest American military action is. If Russian personnel had been killed, then that would potentially be cause for a full-scale war between two nuclear powers.


Mary Ellen O’Connell, a US-based law scholar at University of Notre Dame, Indiana, was quoted by the Guardian saying there was “zero legal basis” for Trump’s missile attack. She said it was an unfounded act of aggression.

Even some members of the US Congress have questioned Trump’s unilateral action as being unconstitutional since he did not receive authorization from Congress, as required by American law.

But these are piffling, academic concerns when it comes to how the US always behaves. International law is only a selective rhetorical device for a rogue state that considers itself above the law.

As Russian military spokesman Igor Konashenkov remarked, the US has been waging wars regardless of international law for decades based on concocted pretexts, as in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), and now Syria.


Trump has finally bought into the US war agenda in Syria – despite mouthing off against such an intervention as far back as 2013 – in order to keep his seat in the Oval Office. The intense media pressure from the witch-hunt over Russia has seen to that, in part.

The next prop in the whole despicable drama was Trump’s gullibility over the latest false flag involving chemical weapons in Syria earlier this week.

Anyone with a bit of wit can see that the CIA-trained and Turkish, Saudi-supplied terrorist proxies carried out the massacre of civilians from their own toxic arsenal. The CIA-trained bandits tried the same deadly stunt back in August 2013 when they gassed hundreds of children near Damascus and videoed the horror for Western media dissemination.

The same profane ploy was used again this week in the town of Khan Sheikhoun, in Syria’s northern Idlib province.

The truth is simple: the Syrian army does not have chemical weapons, after they were destroyed as part of a Russian-brokered decommissioning deal back in 2013. The only party to have access to such weapons are the Western, Turkish and Saudi-backed terror groups.

Like the propaganda service they are, the Western mainstream media then dutifully blasted the “news” that the Syrian air force dropped chemical weapons on Khan Sheikhoun – willingly and unquestioningly using the images and video supplied by “activists” affiliated with the jihadist terror groups.


When US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley stood up in front of the Security Council holding photographs of dying children – purportedly from poisonous gas – she was role-playing for the false flag.

As with the general Western media response, Haley’s display had the unmistakable air of choreography. It was 2003 all over again, when then Secretary of State Colin Powell lied to the Security Council about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, while brandishing dud vials of “lethal chemicals”.

It is not clear whether Trump or his ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley are merely gullible or something more sinister, such as willing accomplices in a charade.

But the upshot is this: Trump is acting like an obedient poodle going along with the Machiavellian American power system. Invoking God and suffering babies is just a shallow moral cover for his complicity in another US criminal act – in a countless list of such crimes down through history.

There is something fitting about Trump’s background as a real estate billionaire. That business is all about shafting people, cheating to stay ahead, or selling overinflated assets.


Trump himself is one such overinflated “asset”. All his past talk about “America first”, “forgotten workers”, “draining the swamp” and lashing out against his predecessor Barack Obama over “reckless wars in the Middle East” – is all just cheap hokum.

To save his political skin and no doubt lucrative future business opportunities for his dynasty, Trump has donned the cap of Commander-in-Chief and is groveling before the American war machine.

He is handing over an “official” license for war in Syria that the American Deep State has been craving for years.

It is a measure of how crazed and obscene the American political system is. The message is: no matter which way the electorate votes, the warmongers in the Pentagon and their corporate masters get the result they want. Which is war. Even if that risks a world war with Russia.

 

That’s how American capitalism works. And Trump is nothing but a poodle willing to jump through the hoops, roll over and lick the boots of the criminal masters.

read more: https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201704071052423296-poodle-trump-runs-with-dogs-of-war/

nothing to do with humanitarian relief...

Contrary to the way it has been framed, the Trump administration’s bombing of a Syrian military base has virtually nothing to do with humanitarian relief. Hurling 50 Tomahawk missiles at a single military base does not fundamentally undermine the Assad regime’s ability to harm its own people, and it has zero chance of altering the military and political realities on the ground. It is merely a symbolic gesture intended to deter further use of chemical weapons.

The problem with this rationale, from a humanitarian perspective, is that by last week the Assad regime had killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians with conventional weapons. On Tuesday, it reportedly killed about 75 people with chemical weapons. If saving Syrians from regime violence is the justification, this is a wholly irrational way to go about doing it.

There is no indication, as of yet, that the Trump administration is even operating under the premise that it needs legal authorization. Trump did not inform Congress of this elective bombing mission, much less ask for authorization, as the Constitution requires. Some members of Congress, including Sens. Tim Kaine, Rand Paul, and Ben Cardin, have made somewhat hollow demands that Trump seek congressional approval and legal authorization. Others, such as Sen. John McCain, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and Sen. Chuck Schumer, seem all too eager to embrace the fiction that the president has the legal right to use military force at his own whim.

Furthermore, as Harvard law professor and former legal counsel to the George W. Bush administration Jack Goldsmith wrote in 2013, when it looked like President Obama was on the cusp of ordering a similar strike against Assad, international law prohibits the use of force without UN Security Council approval, unless in self-defense. The use of chemical weapons is a war crime, but so is bombing another country in violation of the UN Charter.

Put simply, Trump’s decision to attack the Syrian regime has no legal authority and little chance of actually mitigating the suffering of Syrians caught in the civil war. In fact, there is no U.S. military solution to the Syrian conflict. The options that do exist risk exacerbating regional insecurity and humanitarian strife and would require a massive commitment in blood and treasure that the American people seem unprepared to tolerate.

The key now is to see whether Trump will be able to resist the temptation to escalate and avoid the kind of mission creep that has sucked the United States into hopeless Middle East quagmires in the past. Trump administration officials have already begun to imply that removing Assad is an evolving administration goal now. And Trump’s own party is already lobbying for expanding the mission to regime change. Sen. Marco Rubio has called on the administration to increase support for rebels and coordinate with regional Sunni allies “to create alternatives to the Assad regime.”

A more paradigmatic example of mission creep would be hard to invent. If Washington does pursue regime change, it will pit the United States against Syria’s two main allies, Iran and Russia, and create a power vacuum in Syria that jihadist groups are best positioned to fill. In other words, every plausible near-term consequence of regime change would have catastrophic implications for U.S. security and regional stability.

Donald Trump has been president for only 77 days, and he has already violatedrepeated campaign pledges to avoid wars of choice in the Middle East and, specifically, to stay out of the Syrian civil war. The American people should take note that Trump governs as he tweets: irrationally, inconsistently, and without concern for the likely adverse consequences.  

John Glaser is associate director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/bombing-syria-doesnt-pro...

See also:

Q&A: trump has committed A MAJOR WAR CRIME...

"beautiful babies"...

The graphic images of the youngest victims of the recent sarin attack on Khan Sheikoun, Syria, apparently prompted President Donald Trump to have a change of heart about the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. "I will tell you that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me—big impact," Trump said in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday. "My attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much." In a statement last night, after he gave orders to strike the Syrian air base from which the chemical weapon attack originated, Trump said, "Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack."

Yet the Trump who fired 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria out of professed humanitarian concerns is the same one who not so long ago insisted he could look Syrian children "in the face and say, 'You can't come here.'" A week into his presidency, he signed an executive order that would indefinitely ban Syrians, even beautiful babies, from seeking refuge in the United States.

The irony of Trump's sudden flare-up of compassion is not lost on the human rights advocates who have been pushing back against Trump's attempt to shut out Syrians. "This would be a great opportunity for the president to reconsider his previous statements and to think about the fact that these refugees are fleeing precisely the type of violence we are seeing this week in Syria," says Jennifer Sime, a senior vice president of the International Rescue Committee's United States programs. Trump's newfound humanitarian concerns, Sime says, provides an opportunity "to reconsider the travel ban, to reconsider the cap on the total number of refugees who can enter this country, to reconsider the suspension on refugee resettlement in the United States, and to make our country again a welcoming country for refugees."

read more:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/04/trump-refugees-syria-chemica...

the rebels have more chemical weapons in stock...

The US-led international coalition has pulled back on air raids in Syria after last week’s cruise missile attack against a government airbase, citing the need for caution in view of potential responses from Damascus and Moscow which has so far been absent.

US President Donald Trump blamed the “Syrian regime” for the April 4 chemical attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Shaykhun in the Idlib province, which reportedly involved sarin gas. Two days later, two US Navy destroyers fired 59 cruise missiles at the Shayrat airfield, operated by government forces.

“We have made adjustments to our operations to account for the potential tensions that resulted from the strikes that were conducted because of the Syrian regime’s chemical attack,” Colonel John Dorrian, spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, told the Pentagon press corps on Wednesday.

“But make no mistake, we do plan on continuing our operations and we do continue to look for ways to accelerate them,” he added.

Yesterday, US-led anti-ISIS Coalition struck only 4 times (much less than average day before strike on regime) - all near Tabqah. pic.twitter.com/Rfg9Dmy6Z4

— Samuel Oakford (@samueloakford) April 12, 2017

 

Offensive operations against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in Syria were scaled back over concerns that Syria or Russia might retaliate, US Central Command (CENTCOM) said earlier this week. So far, however, there have been no incidents.

Over the past week, the coalition carried out only 123 air strikes around Raqqa, the self-proclaimed IS “capital” in eastern Syria. More than 7,800 strikes were conducted in March, according to the Pentagon.

“It’s just appropriate to make sure that you’re taking appropriate measures to account for that,” said Dorrian. “We don’t want to be reckless and we don’t want to have some type of incident that would cause a miscalculation, or some type of unintended incident.”

Dorrian added that the Pentagon did “account for the fact that the strikes against the Syrian regime chemical capability did increase tensions there,” but confirmed that neither Syrian nor Russian forces have made any threatening moves against US or coalition planes or troops.

"The intent is to get back as quickly as possible to our normal operations and as fast a pace as we can manage,”Dorrian added.

Moscow has rejected US claims that the Syrian government was responsible for the chemical attack, noting that Damascus has accounted for all the components at ten of its chemical weapons sites under the terms of a 2013 deal struck with the US and Russia and verified by the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

It is unknown what happened to the stockpiles at two sites controlled by the rebels, however, according to Russian General Staff spokesman, Colonel-General Sergey Rudskoy.

Russia has long doubted the effectiveness of the US-led coalition in fighting IS, pointing to the terrorist group’s continued advances in the field until the intervention of Russian aerospace forces in September 2015.

“The coalition set up by the Obama administration did almost nothing to achieve its stated objective,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday, speaking in Moscow after meeting with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

“It had not fought consistently against Al-Nusra or ISIS until the Russian air forces were deployed in Syria,” Lavrov added, referring to militants affiliated with Al-Qaeda, which he said the West was nurturing as a tool for “regime change” in Damascus.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/384544-coalition-isis-strikes-syria/

rubbish kills more people than the MOAB...

At least 16 people, including four children, have died after a huge rubbish dump collapsed on to their homes in Sri Lanka.

The 300ft-high (91m) pile had shifted after floods and a fire, and subsequently collapsed on Friday.

At least 40 homes on the edge of the dump were destroyed, with four children aged between 11 and 15 killed.

There had been concerns over the safety of the site in Colombo, with residents demanding it be cleared.

The AFP news agency said about 800 tonnes of waste were added to the Meethotamulla dump every day, and that the government had planned to remove it.

Emergency officials told the BBC that up to 20 people may remain buried in their houses, with the Sri Lankan army now co-ordinating the recovery.

One disaster emergency official told AFP the death toll would have been higher had many people not left their homes after the fire at the dump, hours before the collapse.

Last month, a landslide at a rubbish dump in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, killed at least 113 people.

Read more:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39607218