American analyst Brian Berletic says the US will never make a lasting deal with Iran because it wants to rule the world

The world was much smaller when Alexander ruled it. Neither Napoleon nor Hitler sought to rule the world and nor did England, which was contented to rule  a quarter of it, but America does.

This is from Brian Berletic today and yesterday. He has become my favourite analyst along with former Ambassador Chas Freeman and Professor Jeffrey Sachs. He underestimates the power of Israel and the Israel lobby. Just as we now know Kim Il Sung manipulated Stalin and Ho Chi Minh manipulated Soviet Russia more than the other way around, Netanyahu most certainly manipulated US presidents. As Bill Clinton said after talking to him 'Who's the f-ing superpower here?

China is trying to build faster than the United States can destroy.

The US hypothetically seeking a constructive role among nations rather than seeking dominance over them is for a nation that wants to be stable. The current US strategy is driven by a desire to be supreme. Historically, when a great power chooses supremacy over stability, the transition to a new international order usually happens through a major crisis - like a world war - rather than a “grand bargain.

People never read for pleasure so much as today

A study published in the journal iScience by researchers at the University of Florida and UCL found that daily reading for pleasure in the US fell by over 40% between 2003 and 2023. Reading encompassed books, magazines and newspapers in print, e-book or audio formats but not newspapers and magazines online. 

Probably the figures or other Western countries are similar. Romanians are more bookish though.

Max Blumenthal says at least $2.8 billion has been made by investors with White House inside knowledge

Max Blumenthal says at least $2.8 billion have been made by insider trading based on insider information about posts by Trump on Truth Social. 

$2.8 billion is serious money. Who made the money? Anonymous trading accounts. 

Questions are asked about the role of Barak Ravid, a former Israeli spy who writes for Axios and regularly breaks stories that move markets.

America was always a very corrupt country. It had become much more corrupt in the quarter century before he came to power (think the Clintons, the invasion of Iraq) but Trump has further immeasurably corrupted America and the corruption spreads beyond America.

On the other hand, I am still pleased he won in 2016. 

Had Hillary won she said her top priority would have been regime change in Syria. 

It was the fall of Assad that led to the attack on a weakened Iran. 

Seen on X

People can easily argue that Palestine is irrelevant to Britain (they’re wrong, on multiple levels, of course) but Palestine is the moral test of the world.

It is the centre of everything. How you react, who you defend, and who you abandon is the supreme litmus test of humanity.

The Decline of the American Empire

If only Trump had won in 2020 his second term might have resembled his first. 

I am sure had he been in the White House Russia would not have invaded Ukraine.

World war would therefore not have become a  danger. 

I imagine, though it's impossible to know, that he would not have attacked Venezuela, killed people in boats on the high sea, prepared an invasion of Cuba or demanded Greenland and Canada. 

He would not have deteriorated mentally in office. 

I don't know whether he would have launched an attack on Iran, which he did for what reasons he never made clear but on  a sugar high after Venezuela. I doubt it but nobody knows.  

As it is he seems to have achieved something that seemed impossible: to be as bad as or worse than George W Bush and Biden.

But there are very good reasons why he won the White House twice and those reasons strongly suggest that America is in decline. 

A dog called Lucy

There's a clip on X posted by Rami Abdu, the founder of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor,  of a purported French aid worker saying: “We found a mass grave in Gaza containing 300 bodies. Small children were killed with their hands tied behind their backs".  

At the Nasser Hospital in 2024 a mass grave was discovered with over 300 bodies after an Israeli raid. Israelis blamed Hamas.

Mr Abdu seems to like Hamas. In 2024 he posted in Arabic before deleting the post that, "the world does not deserve these fighters" referring to Hamas fighters.  

It's a point of view, one that might get him 14 years in prison if he repeated it in the United Kingdom. 

He was one of the sources for the New York Times story about dogs being trained by Israeli guards to sodomise prisoners.

That story caused outrage from the Israeli government and many American supporters of Israel.  

The stories of Hamas gang rapes on October 7 in the New York Times were shown by Max Blumenthal to be lies and the New York Times took the allegations off its site without retracting them. Hardly anyone noticed and people continue to talk about the rapes.

People believe what they want to believe but the Western media tell their readers little about alleged Israeli atrocities and spend much ink complaining when a singer leads a chant of "Def Def to the IDF' ar a pop concert. 

Meanwhile the warm hearted Israeli public is angry about an Israeli settler beating a dog called Lucy.

Quotations

He knew that the causes of hatred and mainsprings of popularity are determined by the price of food.
Lucan, Pharsalia 3.55-56 (translated by J.D. Duff)

The Financial Times is an important part of MI6 Information Operations. These stories are not the byproduct of an editorial board of journalists, but a psychological operations team working out of Vauxhall. I saw it firsthand in 1998 with Operation Mass Appeal. 

Scott Ritter

Chay Bowes

@BowesChay

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23m

A new record has been reached on Mount Everest- 274 people have reached the summit in a single day. How long before the Starbucks and McDonald's open?

Brian Berletic today

The US isn't trying to open the Strait of Hormuz - it is literally blockading it and perpetuating a war that ensures insecurity around it indefinitely.

The US is engaged in a controlled demolition of Middle East energy exports and a large part of the global economy.

It is playing games to manage prices and markets as it does so - NOT trying to find a way "out" of consequences everyone in Washington knew about before launching the most recent war of aggression.

The US simply doesn't want things to collapse overnight - just like it managed Europe's decoupling from Russian energy (which is still taking place).

Theories otherwise are based entirely on believing US statements at face value, as if the US is in the habit of telling the truth especially when things are going poorly?

All while the US feigns seeking peace with Iran and Russia, it continues preparing its proxies in the Asia-Pacific for war with China.

After 80 years of false analogies with Hitler the shoe finally fits

Pascal Lottaz reposted

Trita Parsi

@tparsi

It is difficult to fathom how people can commit truly evil acts, such as genocide and the murder of children. What is even more difficult to comprehend, is others ENJOYING and CELEBRATING images of those evil acts. But that is what you get in Israel now, with parties of people watching and cheering videos of Israel blowing up villages in Southern Lebanon.

Here is the clip.

I remember Israelis paid to watch scenes in Gaza by telescope

The inhumanity of the USA is comparable with that of the Israelis. The New York Times reports today that the Pentagon tested an experimental PRISM missile packed with 180,000 tungsten pellets on an Iranian sports hall killing 21 girls who were playing volleyball.

The American empire has its origin with Pearl Harbor and bases its legitimacy on its defeat of Hitler's Germany, Japan and much later Communist Russia, though the USSR fell apart for internal reasons.

Now, as happens to all empires even imperial China, America in trouble.

It is abandoning its heroic myth (I use the word myth to mean a sacred narrative that defines a society's core values, rather than a story that's untrue).

This is a huge mistake and sign of how decadent it is.

Hypocrisy is vice's tribute to virtue (Rochefoucauld), after all.

Without it man cannot bear too much reality (to adapt TS Eliot).

The USA didn't really have the moral high ground very much after 1991 but people, especially in the rich countries that were American clients, thought it did.

Though I remember the Daily Telegraph saying under Clinton that US foreign policy made the USA resemble the armed wing of Oxfam (a British charity that gives money to starving people).

That ain't so bad, but that was in the last century.

Do I have any readers who regret that the USA has not won its unprovoked war against Iran?

Not many, I imagine.

I expect I have some who hope who hope the USA succeeds in doing whatever it is trying to do to China.

The habit of siding with America is hard for some to break.