By Claire Bernish

Lithuania — Time after time, the Washington Post churns out fake stories intimating that Russia acted aggressively against the United States, but the articles — from branding over 200 independent media organizations as Russian propagandists, to asserting Russian hackers penetrated Vermont’s power grid — contained zero evidence to back the assertions.

“Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say,” the Post declared in the headline of its article, since fully retracted — after wrongly warping public perception — for being Fake News.

Parroted relentlessly by additional corporate outlets, the Post’s viral articles fed equally vapid claims from the Obama administration that Russia somehow poses an imminent threat — both to the U.S. and NATO allies along the Russian border.

However, with all of these empty allegations of Russian aggression, even the chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Petr Pavel, denounced the hysteria, stating, “It is not the aim of NATO to create a military barrier against broad-scale Russian aggression because such aggression is not on the agenda and no intelligence assessment suggests such a thing.”

Nevertheless, President Obama has quietly deployed dozens of additional special forces to bolster defense in Lithuania, who ostensibly feels threatened by continued “Russian aggression” after the country ‘took over’ Crimea.

“The United States was the first to offer additional safety assurance measures to the Baltic countries following the deterioration of the security situation in the region after the annexation of the Crimea,” said Asta Galdikaite, Lithuanian Defence Ministry spokeswoman, as cited by theExpress.

“US Special Operations Forces presence in Lithuania is one of the deterrents” to thwart aggressive moves by Moscow, she added.

But what the U.S. and allied nations have cited as a military threat from Russia — the deployment of nuclear-capable missile systems to Kaliningrad, which borders Lithuania, in November — more accurately constituted President Vladimir Putin’s defensive response to the rapidly increasing NATO presence along its border with Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland.

“They’re scared to death of Russia,” head of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, Gen. Raymond T. Thomas, said of the small militaries of the Baltic States, for the New York Times. “They are very open about that. They’re desperate for our leadership,” he continued, adding, “Do the Russians know we’re here? Yes.”

According to the Times,

In response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the clandestine war in eastern Ukraine, as well as Moscow’s heightened military force on patrol off the coasts of the Baltics and Western Europe, the United States and its NATO allies have bolstered their own military exercises in recent years, and this spring will send battalions of 800 to 1,200 troops to each of the three Baltic States and Poland.

Moscow has repeatedly warned the rapidly amassing NATO troop presence along Russia’s borders constitutes a direct threat to its sovereignty — and Putin cautioned this could merit a military response.

“If someone threatens our territories, it means that we will have to aim our armed forces accordingly at the territories from where the threat is coming,” he asserted in a press statement in mid-2016. “How else could it be? It is NATO that’s approaching our borders, it’s not like we are moving anywhere.”

However, that admonishment went unheeded by Western nations, and, as The Free Thought Projectpreviously reported,

Tangibly tempting fate just over a week later, NATO announced the tripling of its 13,000-strong Response Force along member states’ Russian borders to at least 40,000 troops next year — as well as the formation of a new Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, also called Spearhead Force, of an additional 5,000 combat-ready troops.

With diplomatic relations between the Kremlin and White House sinking to a nadir unprecedented since the time of the original Cold War, deploying an ever-mushrooming number of troops to provoke Russia in the name of defending NATO allies is needlessly playing with fire.

Amid the aforementioned and as-yet unproven allegations The Russians hacked systems of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, Obama announced the U.S. would impose sanctions against Russia and expel 35 diplomats.

Thus the world held its breath to see if Moscow would respond in kind — or possibly react militarily — but, despite irate promises from Russian officials for the expulsion of U.S. diplomats, Putin coolly declined diplomatic tit-for-tat.

While Russia and NATO officials might have known these dozens of commandos had been surreptitiously inserted into the military mix in Lithuania, the news has only now been made public knowledge.

Whether or not President-elect Donald Trump will continue increasing U.S. troop numbers in support of this particular NATO operation remains unknown, as he previously expressed ambivalence toward the Baltic states.

Just weeks remain for the outgoing, apparently Russophobic Obama administration — plenty of time for the Washington Post and the rest of corporate media to continue slanting public perception of the situation to fit the U.S.-backed NATO agenda that amounts to aggression against Russia.

Claire Bernish writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.

(activistpost.com)

The legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado has led to some interesting developments in the war on drugs. According to a video segment on Fox News, seizures of marijuana flowing out of Colorado into neighboring states has risen from 58 in 2008, to 394 in 2015. This indicates Colorado has unwittingly become an exporter of legal weed, found to be illegal in many adjoining states.

Sitting in for Fox News’ Shepherd Smith, Gregg Jarrett asked FNC reporter Alicia Acuna if neighboring states were fighting a losing battle. Acuna responded by saying 8 states already have recreational marijuana, and another couple dozen states have some form of medical marijuana at work. Mason Tvert, of the Marijuana Policy Project, told FNC, “If anything, what’s happening is no different than it was before. People are still using marijuana, it’s just that they’re more likely to be using marijuana that didn’t come from a Mexican drug cartel.”

According to FNC and University of San Diego professor David Shirk, that fact has now been confirmed. It seems, as marijuana proponents asserted, the Mexican cartels are getting out of the illegal marijuana trade. Shirk says the cartels are turning their backs on marijuana in favor of other “more predatory criminal activities” such as, “kidnapping, extortion, larceny…stealing petroleum from petroleum lines,” Shirk stated.

FNC reported what proponents have been saying for years. If you make marijuana legal, the illegal, criminal elements, such as Mexican drug cartels, will find other means to sustain their income. However, it is important to note that the reason these cartels exist in the first place is because of the drug war. Attempting to claim we need the war on drugs to keep the cartels from kidnapping people is like saying we need people to murder each other so police can have a job to do.

Had drugs not been illegal in the US, the cartels would have been extremely hard pressed to amass the money and power they now have. Rest assured, however, that kidnapping and larceny are not nearly as sustainable as the drug industry as it is much easier for politicians to look the other way on drug smuggling than it is for them to ignore children being stolen from parents. That’s why, rather than kidnap people, the Mexican cartels are still capitalizing on the American drug war.

One such way the Mexican drug cartels have reportedly upped the ante is to produce a drug which is much more addictive than just heroin alone. They mix heroin with Carfentanil, which “is a synthetic opioid so strong that just a few granules the size of grains of table salt can be lethal. Since mid-August, roughly 300 people in at least four states have overdosed on heroin linked to Carfentanil and the less powerful compound fentanyl,” Time reports.

If heroin were decriminalized in the US, overdoses would plummet and so would its use. This is not an assertion, it is fact.

One positive coming out of Colorado’s legalization of marijuana is the fact that the drug task forces which were previously engaged in going after marijuana, can now turn their attentions to going after the organized criminal element such as the cartels, which have no regard for the patient seeking medicine for whatever ails them.

FNC concluded their marijuana segment by saying President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have a problem with medicinal marijuana but added he does not approve of recreational marijuana. Whether or not Trump will allow the continuation of progress in the legalization of marijuana is yet to be seen. Certainly, Colorado will put up a fight if the newly named Attorney General Jeff Sessions seeks to overturn CO’s legal weed business as it’s now providing millions of dollars to help fund the educational system in that state.

The FNC segment confirms what TFTP has been saying for months now, legal weed does more to stop the cartels than the official war on drugs. As we reported to you in March, “in the past seven years (seizures of marijuana at the Mexican-American border have dropped) from 4 million pounds in 2009, to just 1.5 million pounds last year.”

Jack Burns writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.

Image Credit: TheAntiMedia.org

(activistpost.com)