But one of the things that has people the most concerned is his endless provoking of Russia.  Every few days it seems like Obama is doing something else to aggravate Russia, and if he wasn’t leaving office in about a week I am sure that the mainstream media would be full of speculation about a possible war.

Lame duck presidents are not supposed to make risky moves like this once a new president has been elected.  On Thursday, we learned that US troops have been permanently deployed to Poland for the very first time. Poland was once a key member of the Warsaw Pact alliance, and the Russians are quite alarmed that US troops will now be stationed so close to the Russian heartland.

And it has also been announced that NATO troops will arrive in Lithuania in late January.  If you will remember, Lithuania was actually part of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. All of a sudden, Russia has become enemy number one.  Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say that Russia is to blame for Clinton’s election loss, and so at the end of December Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats from the country.

That is the sort of thing that you do before a war starts.

As The Washington Post reports, Major General Errol R Schwartz’s departure will come in the midst of the presidential ceremony, classified as a national special security event — and while thousands of his troops are deployed to help protect the nation’s capital during an inauguration he has spent months helping to plan.

Unlike in states, where the governor appoints the National Guard commander, in the District that duty falls to the president. Schwartz said that he has not been told why he was asked to step down. “I’m a soldier,” he said, noting that he was following orders and has no regrets. “I’m a presidential appointee, therefore the president has the power to remove me.”

Is this just another part of Obama's "smooth" transition? Or is something even more sinister at work here, since we already know that anti-Trump activists are planning "the biggest protest in US history" on the day of the inauguration?

“We don’t need everybody to eat insects,” said Robert Nathan Allen, founder and director of Little Herds, an educational nonprofit in Austin, Texas, that promotes the use of insects for human food and animal feed. “The point we really like to highlight with the education is that if only a small percent of people add this to their diet, there’s a huge environmental impact.”

Cricket fans say if only 1 percent of the US population substituted even just 1 percent of their meat consumption with insects, millions of gallons of water in drinking and irrigation would be saved, along with thousands of metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions from machinery and animals.

At least one study finds the claims overstated that crickets are a viable protein source to supplement or replace meat, but bottom line, it generally takes fewer resources to raise and harvest crickets than, say, cattle.

That may seem silly now, and it was definitely a minority view then, but a lot of us understood it. Was a reunited Germany to be feared?

Was there something belligerent and dangerous in the German DNA?

Did they have to be “kept down”?

You know the remark of Lord Ismay — General Hastings “Pug” Ismay, the first secretary-general of NATO: “The purpose of the alliance was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

It has now been about 65 years since he made that remark. And Germany is being called on to rise, militarily, including by the United States. The German public is not objecting. This is a momentous question, or a potentially momentous one… I quote an expert who says, “There is a general sense that there’s a tsunami heading Europe’s way” — and that Germany will have a heavy responsibility to deal with it.

Most of us remember movies such as “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon” that attempted to depict what such a crisis would look like, but up until fairly recently the US government has never seemed to take this kind of threat very seriously. So what has changed? Of all the things that the White House could be focusing on, why this?

And this new report is just the latest in a series of measures that the government has taken over the past couple of years to help prepare us for incoming meteors and asteroids. NASA continues to assure us that no threat is imminent, so why spend so much time, energy and resources on a non-existent crisis?

Early Monday morning, while the US East Coast was pouring coffee, dropping kids off at school, and cursing in traffic, a space rock as big as a 10-storey building slipped past Earth. The asteroid, dubbed 2017 AG13, was discovered only Saturday by the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey, according to an email from Slooh, a company that broadcasts live views of space.

We were very fortunate this time, but the truth is that our planet crosses paths with other giant space rocks on a very regular basis.

There’s a reason Bilderberg Group attendee Jeff Bezos’ cute little voice-activated gizmos have been priced so extremely cheaply… to get them into as many houses as possible as quickly as possible. No one has been able to explain to me how these aren’t creepy big brother spy devices to get sheeple (who have been conveniently programmed by watching years of Jetsons cartoons as a kid to think anything futuristic is cool with no potential drawbacks) on the smart grid Internet of Things… no matter how obvious the Orwellian nightmare warning signs are.

Recently it came out that police can retrieve the voice data from anyone’s Echo. And if people honestly believe that thing is only recording voice commands and not every ambient conversation or even sound happening within range, then I’m going to have to go get a thesaurus because the words gullible and naïve just simply aren’t going to cut it here.

Now it has come out that Alexa, the Amazon voice assistant that “lives” inside the Echo, is ordering stuff people didn’t even want. Recently six-year-old Dallas resident Brooke Neitzel asked Alexa the super vague, “Can you play dollhouse with me and get me a dollhouse?” So Alexa didn’t just order the Neitzel’s a dollhouse, it ordered them a $170 KidKraft Sparkle mansion dollhouse, along with four pounds of sugar cookies (which the kid also admittedly “talked to Alexa” about). Alexa apparently has expensive taste, go figure.

The Huffington Post cheerfully reported that Brooke’s family is now “whispering more around Alexa”. Great. So they paid to place a low-level AI in their house that they are now forced to whisper around? No, that doesn’t sound creepy at all. Welcome to the future. If things are already this screwed up, I think I’ll take a pass on those flying cars, thanks.

Major retail chains such as Sears and Macy’s are closing stores and laying off workers, but I didn’t think that Wal-Mart would be feeling the pain as well.  Unfortunately, that is precisely what is happening.  USA Today is reporting that approximately 1,000 jobs will be cut at Wal-Mart’s corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas by the end of this month… Walmart’s plan to lay off of hundreds of employees is the latest ripple in a wave of job cuts and store closures that are roiling the retail industry.

The world’s largest retailer is cutting roughly 1,000 jobs at its corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, later this month, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak about it. The company is saying that these cuts are necessary because Wal-Mart is always “looking for ways to operate more efficiently and effectively”.  But something doesn’t smell right here.  You don’t get rid of 1,000 employees at your corporate headquarters if everything is just fine.

Meanwhile, there are signs of trouble out on the west coast as well.  The Los Angeles Times is reporting that there is going to be a new round of engineering job cuts at Boeing… Boeing Co has internally announced a new round of employee buyouts for engineers companywide, including in Southern California, and warned that layoff notices will follow later this month to engineers in Washington state, where the company has a large presence. Management did not cite a target for the number of projected job cuts.

Legba Carrefour, an organizer for DisruptJ20, told Reuters Wednesday that her group planned predawn blockades and disruptions during the evening inaugural balls on top of the protests during the actual inauguration. It was then made clear that this is not about peacefully protesting but rather part of a larger attempt to literally steal the election.

“Some 300 DisruptJ20 volunteers will work to mobilize demonstrators for a series of protests the group has dubbed the ‘Festival of Resistance’,” reported Reuters. “We are not in favor of a peaceful transition of power, and we need to stop it,” Carrefour continued. “I can safely say that some groups are likely planning actions that might result in arrest scenarios”.

The group has posted a manifesto on their website that also reveals that they are planning widespread civil disobedience and possible illegal actions. Calling on “all people of conscience” to shut down the event, the group's website even indicates that they believe they may be able to stop Trump’s ascension to the presidency all together.

Amazingly, DisruptJ20 is not the only hard left group openly planning what seems to be mass riots, as another radical group, backed by former terrorist Bill Ayers, is also planning a massive disruption. The group includes leftist activists, entertainers, artists, professors, writers, and at least one known terrorist and has launched what amounts to a sort of soft coup attempt in America with their release of a full page New York Times ad and accompanying website that lays out a concrete plan to prevent Donald Trump from ever taking office. In other words, this is a direct attempt to steal the election from both Trump and the American people.