Reducing US Military Spending Always Meets With Resistance; Increasing It Never Does

Last year Senator Bernie Sanders led a public push to reduce the insanely bloated US military budget by a paltry ten percent. His push splatted headfirst against a bipartisan solid steel wall which shut him down definitively.

Sanders’ bill was killed in the Senate by a vote of 23 to 77, with half of Senate Democrats stepping up to help Republicans stomp it dead. It’s companion bill in the House of Representatives was killed by a margin of 93 to 324, with a majority of House Democrats (92 to 139) voting nay.

Contrast those numbers with those who voted to approve Trump’s $741 billion military budget this past December. The House voted to approve the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) budget by a margin of 335 to 78, 195 of those yes votes coming from the Democratic side of the aisle. The Senate passed that same budget by 84 to 13. This was a substantial increase from the previous year’s budget, a trend which has remained unbroken for years.

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Google and the CIA: How Independent Are Multinational Giants?

How independent are the largest corporations in the world? It is often portrayed that companies such as Google are simply private corporations that have very few connections to the establishment. Yet, as It turns out, there are endless connections between many corporate giants and the military-intelligence complex.

We got a glimpse into this relationship back in 2016, when the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, who, at the time, was Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc, became the head of a new innovation board at the Pentagon. Later that year, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, joined the same board at the Pentagon.

Google and DARPA

The ties between Google and US government agencies run much deeper than this, however. The relationship started even before the tech company was founded in the late 1990s. In 1994, the US government launched the Digital Library Initiative (DLI). This initiative awarded research grants to various university projects, mostly those who focused on developments in the early and emerging internet, with the overarching aim of this initiative being the creation of a global digital library.

Multiple organizations were involved in selecting projects for DLI funds. Three of these organizations were the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is the arm of the US Department of Defense that funds and develops emerging technologies.

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Special Operations Command Hires Diversity and Inclusion Chief Who Posted Anti-Trump Memes

United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has hired as its first “chief of diversity and inclusion” a person who posted anti-Trump memes on his Facebook page, including one that compared the former president to Adolf Hitler.

After his hire was announced, some of Torres-Estrada’s apparent social media posts began circulating.

A Facebook account appearing to belong to Torres-Estrada posted on June 2, 2020: “Here I leave this and slowly retire (to continue working from home)…” along with a meme of then-President Donald Trump, holding up a bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church after Black Lives Matter protesters set fire to it, next to a photo of Hitler.

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Military and spy agencies accused of stiff-arming investigators on UFO sightings

The truth may be out there. But don’t expect the feds to share what they know anytime soon on the recent spate of UFO sightings.

Some military and spy agencies are blocking or simply ignoring the effort to catalog what they have on “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” according to multiple current and former government officials. And as a result, the Biden administration will likely delay a much-anticipated public report to Congress.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the director of national intelligence to work with the Defense Department to provide a public accounting by June 25 on unexplained sightings of advanced aircraft and drones that have been reported by military personnel or captured by radar, satellites and other surveillance systems.

The request came after revelations in 2017 that the Pentagon was researching a series of unexplained intrusions into military airspace, including high-performance vehicles captured on video stalking Navy ships.

But those advising the investigations are advocating for significantly more time and resources to retrieve information from agencies that in some cases have shown reluctance, if not outright resistance, to sharing classified information. And they worry that without high-level involvement, it will be difficult to compel agencies to release what they have.

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US Military Ordered “Clandestine Burning” of Toxic Chemicals in Poor Neighborhoods

New research conducted by environmental justice scholars at Vermont’s Bennington College reveals that between 2016 and 2020, the U.S. military oversaw the “clandestine burning” of more than 20 million pounds of Aqueous Fire Fighting Foam in low-income communities around the country—even though there is no evidence that incineration destroys the toxic “forever chemicals” that make up the foam and are linked to a range of cancers, developmental disorders, immune dysfunction, and infertility.

“In defiance of common sense and environmental expertise, the Department of Defense (DOD) has enlisted poor communities across the U.S. as unwilling test subjects in its toxic experiment with burning AFFF,” David Bond, associate director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College, said (pdf) in a statement earlier this week.

Noting that scientists, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and even Pentagon officials have warned that “burning AFFF is an unproven method and dangerous mix that threatens the health of millions of Americans,” Bond characterized the decision of the military to dump huge stockpiles of AFFF and AFFF wastewater into “a handful of habitually negligent incinerators” as a “harebrained” operation as well as a manifestation of environmental injustice.

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Former Director of National Intelligence Hints at Revelatory UFO Report

In a recent interview with Fox News, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe shared insights on the UFO phenomenon and suggested that a forthcoming government report on the subject could contain significant revelations. His intriguing comments were made during a conversation with Maria Bartiromo this past Friday evening. Positing that the former Trump administration official saw “the most intelligence than anybody has seen other than the president,” the host noted that the government is required to issue a report on UFOs to the public later this year and asked Ratcliffe if such strange objects have been seen.

Although he chuckled when Bartiromo initially broached the topic, the former DNI offered a serious response, saying that the government has “lots of reports about what we call ‘unidentified aerial phenomena.'” He went on to confirm that the government will be issuing a proverbial UFO report in a few months and claimed that he “wanted to get this information out and declassified before I left office,” but was unable to pull off such a feat. “Frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public,” Ratcliffe said, explaining that these reports come from “Navy or Air Force pilots or have been picked up by satellite imagery.”

These puzzling objects, he revealed, “engage in actions that are difficult to explain,” move in a manner seemingly impossible by our current technology, and “exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.” Ratcliffe revealed that there are “quite a few of those” incidents on record and postulated that information on these cases is “being gathered and will be put out in a way that the American people will see.” As for what could be behind these inexplicable sightings, he indicated that “when we see these things, we always look for a plausible explanation,” citing weather effects or potential foreign technology, but conceded that “there are instances where we don’t have good explanations for what we have seen.”

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From Soft Liberalism to Iron-Fisted Leftism in Today’s U.S. Military

We were instructed that there is a Taliban-like threat in the United States called “domestic terrorism.” These terrorists are characterized in part by “anti-government,” “anti-authority” or “abortion-related” extremism and various “supremacist” ideas. None of these terms are defined. The Marine Corps entrusts the government’s HR department to figure that out.

Reporting requirements are key. Do you suspect someone supports an “extremist ideology?” Alert the chain of command. Have you heard a Marine express “contempt toward officials?” Notify the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Don’t handle anything on your own. Just rat them out. After all, “service is a privilege” and it’d be a shame to lose that privilege for failing to do your part to stamp out “extremists.” One PowerPoint slide posed this imperative in stark terms: “Do you want to be a Marine or do you want to be part of an organization that sows disunity and hate. You cannot have divided loyalties.”

Where did all this come from? Soft liberalism has taken root in the military over several decades. These alarming trends are already well documented in James Hasson’s book Stand Down: How Social Justice Warriors Are Sabotaging America’s Military. But in the wake of President Joe Biden‘s election—and more precipitously since the January 6 “insurrection”—bureaucratic progressivism has hardened into iron-fisted wokeism.

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