Putin is feeling the pinch of the falling Ruble and falling Oil prices and is starting to lose it and is lashing out at the US.
Hey Vladimir Vladimirovich, if you hadn't decided to invade Ukraine in an unprovoked war of aggression, the US might be helping you right now.
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http://www.businessinsider.com/putin-there-is-no-true-democracy-in-america-2014-10

Vladimir Putin Just Gave One Of The Most Anti-American Speeches Of His Career
ARMIN ROSEN - OCT. 24, 2014, 12:45 PM

Russian President Vladimir Putin just gave one of the most stridently anti-Western speeches of his career, a 40-minute "diatribe ... that was reminiscent of the Cold War," according to Reuters.

Putin was speaking before an "informal group of experts" at a mountain resort outside the former Olympic city of Sochi that included Western specialists critical of his rule. The Russian president held little back rhetorically, blaming the US for military escalations in the former Soviet space and accusing the US and its partners of "pushing [Ukraine] into chaos."

"We did not start this," Putin said before accusing the US of trying to "'remake the whole world' based on its interests" — an accusation often lobbed at Putin's Russia by its foreign critics.

But Putin's speech went beyond critiquing American actions or defending his own. He made several statements that don't really fall within the realm of policy disagreement.
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More at above link

See also
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ruble-hits-new-record-lows-2014-10
http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-will-be-plunged-into-a-recession-if-oil-prices-fall-further-2014-10

If this happens, our economy is in for a very wild expansion and Russia, Venezuela and Iran are in big trouble.

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http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/energy/oil-gas/global-oil-prices-likely-to-touch-to-60/barrel-osama-kamal/articleshow/44882725.cms

MUMBAI: Egypt's former petroleum minister Osama Kamal said global crude oil prices are set to fall drastically, predicting afurther erosion of as much as a third in the coming days. "I expect crude oil prices to touch $60 per barrel. This will impact several economies," said Kamal, who was in Mumbai to address the top Aditya Birla Group executives.

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/44882725.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Nigeria's military says it has agreed a truce with Islamist militant group Boko Haram - and says the schoolgirls the group has abducted will be released.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-29665165

Story developing, more soon...

Their new claims: http://conservativetribune.com/nyt-wmds-in-iraq/ are based on this article: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=1

I've reposted the below as a retort to this information on a number of occasions and sites but I think it is helpful that everyone have ready access to the links and info:


This is a long post but stay with it, its important.

Republicans are trying to claim there were WMD after all in Iraq at the Al Muthanna site. Problem is, there weren't. Here are to links that tell the story. First, the UN Weapons inspectors who visited Iraq prior to the war helped the Iraqis dispose of munitions there. See: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2003/03/18/sites-visited-by-un-weapons-inspectors/

Here are the money quotes:

Dec. 4, 2002

• U.N. inspectors entered the al-Muthanna State Establishment, which once produced chemical and biological agents, and a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which conducts the U.N.'s nuclear inspections, went to the al-Tuwaitha nuclear complex, famous for once being attacked by Israeli warplanes. The reportedly found found shells and mustard gas.

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Feb. 14, 2003:

• On the day chief weapons inspectors were to report to the U.N. Security Council on whether Saddam Hussein is disarming, inspection teams returned to Iraq's al-Muthanna chemical weapons installation, where they have been destroying artillery shells and neutralizing four plastic containers filled with mustard gas. They also visited a mineral water plant.

Feb. 19, 2003:

• UNMOVIC inspectors visited at least 10 sites, including an Al Samoud missile site at Abu Ghraib, northwest of Baghdad. Inspectors have tagged several Al Samoud missiles. They stopped at al-Ma'moun, Ibn al-Haithem and al-Fidaa military compounds around Baghdad. A chemical team went to al-Muthanna site near the city while another team checked a Baghdad vegetable oil factory. Nuclear inspectors searched military compounds at al-Nidaa and al-Zawra. Another team conducted a nuclear survey at Nahrawan, south of the capital.



after the Iraq war, there was a 1500 person Iraq Survey group sent in to scour the country for WMD. Here is ISG report after Iraq war on Al Muthanna: http://goo.gl/qFClAV

and the money quotes from this are:

An exploitation of the facility reconfirmed previous imagery analysis that the site remained inoperable from bombings and UNSCOM compliance, including destruction of equipment and resources, and no significant production capabilities existed. Facilities and bunkers revealed no evidence of production since UNSCOM departed.

and

The entire Al Muthanna mega-facility was the bastion of Iraqi’s chemical weapons development program. During its peak in the late 1980s to early 1990s, it amassed mega-bunkers full of chemical munitions, and provided Iraq with a force multiplier sufficient to counteract Iran’s superior military numbers. Two wars, sanctions and UNSCOM oversight reduced Iraqi’s premier production facility to a stockpile of old damaged and contaminated chemical munitions(sealed in bunkers), a wasteland full of destroyed chemical munitions, razed structures, and unusable war-ravaged facilities. In 1998 Al Tariq State Establishment took over all remaining remnants at Al Muthanna.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/opinion/thomas-friedman-a-pump-war.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Is it just my imagination or is there a global oil war underway pitting the United States and Saudi Arabia on one side against Russia and Iran on the other? One can’t say for sure whether the American-Saudi oil alliance is deliberate or a coincidence of interests, but, if it is explicit, then clearly we’re trying to do to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, exactly what the Americans and Saudis did to the last leaders of the Soviet Union: pump them to death — bankrupt them by bringing down the price of oil to levels below what both Moscow and Tehran need to finance their budgets.

Think about this: four oil producers — Libya, Iraq, Nigeria and Syria — are in turmoil today, and Iran is hobbled by sanctions. Ten years ago, such news would have sent oil prices soaring. But today, the opposite is happening. Global crude oil prices have been falling for weeks, now resting around $88 — after a long stretch at $105 to $110 a barrel.

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The Russians have noticed. How could they not? They’ve seen this play before. The Russian newspaper Pravda published an article on April 3 with the headline, “Obama Wants Saudi Arabia to Destroy Russian Economy.” It said: “There is a precedent [for] such joint action that caused the collapse of the U.S.S.R. In 1985, the Kingdom dramatically increased oil production from 2 million to 10 million barrels per day, dropping the price from $32 to $10 per barrel. [The] U.S.S.R. began selling some batches at an even lower price, about $6 per barrel. Saudi Arabia [did not lose] anything, because when prices fell by 3.5 times [Saudi] production increased fivefold. The planned economy of the Soviet Union was not able to cope with falling export revenues, and this was one of the reasons for the collapse of the U.S.S.R.”

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The price decline is no accident. In an Oct. 3 article in The Times, Stanley Reed noted that the sharp drop in oil prices “was seen as a response to Saudi Arabia’s signaling ... to the markets that it was more interested in maintaining market share than in defending prices. Saudi Aramco, the national oil company, stunned markets by announcing that it was cutting prices by about $1 a barrel to Asia, the crucial growth market for the Persian Gulf producers, as well as by 40 cents a barrel to the United States.” The Times also noted that with America now producing so much more oil and gas, “net oil imports to the United States have fallen since 2007 by 8.7 million barrels a day, ‘roughly equivalent to total Saudi and Nigerian exports,’ according to a recent Citigroup report.”

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If the Obama administration is deliberately doing this with the Saudis, I'm totally in favor of it and I think it is just punishment for Russian actions in Ukraine.

And it helps our economy and it is reversible if Putin cuts out the crap, which might be why we saw some reports of the Russian army pulling back from Ukraine. This probably has Putin worried. Seriously worried.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/15/investing/oil-price-fall-russia-hurt/index.html

In early March when Russia first sent troops into Ukraine, oil was trading comfortably above $100 per barrel. Now, it's around $81, a level not seen in three years.

That's a tough pill for Russia to swallow since the country relies heavily on oil revenues to bankroll its budget -- over half of the government's revenues come from oil and gas.

"We're probably getting closer to the point of pain," said Phil Flynn, an energy analyst at the Price Futures Group. "It's definitely putting the squeeze on their balance sheet."

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The US should be pursuing a renewable energy program as if it is a national security issue, because it is one. Russia and the countries in the Middle East who pursue hostile internal and external policies should be starved of funds. US firms should develop renewable technology and sell it globally.

I'm going to talk a lot in the next two years on my show/blog/FB Page, etc about the folks running for the Republican nomination for President. Each one of them comes across as a combination of corrupt, dishonest and borderline (or completely) sociopathic, and that's before you get into those among them who have been indicted or investigated for corruption. Take this instance of Paul Ryan who it is said will be running in 2016.

Ryan, like many Republicans criticized the Obama stimulus which we now see has been a part of producing such amazing results turning around the economy. Ryan criticized it, then a freedom of information act request discovered he requested no less than four times to get stimulus money for his district and in those requests characterized the stimulus money as being able to be used economically.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/12/paul-ryan-stimulus-funds_n_1962163.html?1350075036

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/04/ebola-zaire-peter-piot-outbreak

'In 1976 I discovered Ebola - now I fear an unimaginable tragedy'
Peter Piot was a researcher at a lab in Antwerp when a pilot brought him a blood sample from a Belgian nun who had fallen mysteriously ill in Zaire

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After Yambuku, you spent the next 30 years of your professional life devoted to combating Aids. But now Ebola has caught up to you again. American scientists fear that hundreds of thousands of people could ultimately become infected. Was such an epidemic to be expected?

No, not at all. On the contrary, I always thought that Ebola, in comparison to Aids or malaria, didn't present much of a problem because the outbreaks were always brief and local. Around June it became clear to me that there was something fundamentally different about this outbreak. At about the same time, the aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières sounded the alarm. We Flemish tend to be rather unemotional, but it was at that point that I began to get really worried.

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There is actually a well-established procedure for curtailing Ebola outbreaks: isolating those infected and closely monitoring those who had contact with them. How could a catastrophe such as the one we are now seeing even happen?

I think it is what people call a perfect storm: when every individual circumstance is a bit worse than normal and they then combine to create a disaster. And with this epidemic there were many factors that were disadvantageous from the very beginning. Some of the countries involved were just emerging from terrible civil wars, many of their doctors had fled and their healthcare systems had collapsed. In all of Liberia, for example, there were only 51 doctors in 2010, and many of them have since died of Ebola.
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More at above link