No, those are not the rants of a disheveled malcontent on the street wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and waving an anti-Wall Street placard; that quote is taken from a study, published last year, conducted by two prestigious American Universities, Princeton and Northwestern.

Are Americans so brainwashed and/or stupid that they fail to realize this? No, many are painfully aware of it. But think of the Soviet Union in its fading days some years before it collapsed. But the American leadership is currently deaf, dumb and blind to the mistakes and lessons of history.

The 88-year-old former defense secretary is troubled by the risks of catastrophe from the very weapons he helped develop. Atop his list: a nuclear terror attack in a major US city or a shooting war with Russia that, through miscalculation, turns nuclear. A terrorist attack using a nuclear bomb or improvised nuclear device could happen "any time now - next year or the year after," he said in an interview with reporters earlier this month.

In his book's preface Perry outlines a nuclear terror scenario, which he calls "my nuclear nightmare, born of long and deep experience."

In his scenario, a small group gets its hands on enough uranium to fashion a crude nuclear bomb, flies it undetected to Washington's Dulles International Airport and slips the bomb into a warehouse in the District of Columbia. From there it is loaded onto a delivery truck and a suicide bomber drives it onto Pennsylvania Avenue midway between the Capitol and the White House. When detonated, it kills 80,000 people instantly, including the president. The news media report a message claiming that five more bombs are hidden in five different US cities, and one will be set off each week.

"The danger of a nuclear bomb being detonated in one of our cities is all too real," Perry writes. "And yet, while this catastrophe would result in a hundred times the casualties of 9/11, it is only dimly perceived by the public and not well understood."

On December 8 the Food and Drug Administration approved a new chicken that has been genetically modified to treat a rare and potentially fatal disorder called lysosomal acid lipase deficiency. The chicken, which won’t be available as meat, produces eggs with an enzyme that replaces a faulty human enzyme, addressing the underlying cause of the disease. Add it to the small but growing class of “farmaceuticals,” including drugs made by transgenic goats and rabbits.

In November the FDA approved, for the first time, a genetically engineered animal intended for human consumption. After a 20-year review, the agency gave the green light to the AquAdvantage salmon. The fish is an Atlantic salmon with a gene added from a Chinook salmon that allows it to grow faster with less feed. It makes aquaculture more appealing and could ease pressure on overfished salmon stocks in the wild.

In February the Agriculture Department approved the Arctic Apple, a new variety developed by silencing the genes that cause the fruit to bruise and brown when sliced. Two versions of the apple, the Granny Smith and Golden Delicious, could be in stores by the end of next year

GMOs never looked so harmless. As science advances and consumers become more informed about genetic engineering’s benefits for human health, animal welfare and food safety, the anti-GMO movement will look ever more like an outdated ideological crusade.

Their effective revolt against the banking class, who drove the tiny nation into economic crisis in 2008, is the brightest example yet that the world does not have to be indebted in perpetuity to an austere and criminal wealthy elite. In 2015, 26 Icelandic bankers were sentenced to prison and the government ordered a bank sale to benefit the citizenry.

Inspired by Iceland’s progress, activists in Switzerland are now making an important stand against the banking cartels and have successfully petitioned to bring an initiative to public referendum that would attack the private banks where it matters most: their power to lend money they don’t actually have, and to create money out of thin air.

Scotland Yard cancelled all New Year leave for more than 2,000 armed officers – the first time it has taken such a step – as part of the largest-ever police mobilisation for December 31 festivities. It comes after a “friendly” intelligence agency warned Islamist fanatics may be planning a terror attack in a European city – although there is no specific information to suggest London will be targeted.

Boris Johnson MP, the Mayor of London, exhorted partygoers to “get out there” and “soak up” the atmosphere as the capital prepared for the chimes of Big Ben at midnight. Earlier this week Russian authorities announced that Red Square would be closed to the public, despite being the traditional focus of the country’s festivities to ring the changes. And this evening New Year fireworks and festivities were cancelled in the Belgian capital, Brussels, because of a terror alert.

"For when the hard times come, patriots will recapture control of their national destinies from Brussels bureaucrats to whom no one will ever give loyalty or love.” The column described what was already happening. “Europe is dying. There is not a single nation in all of Europe with a birth rate sufficient to keep its population alive except Muslim Albania.”

What was predicted 14 years ago has come to pass. Migrants into Germany from the Middle and Near East reached 1 million in 2015. EU bribes to the Turks to keep Muslim migrants from crossing over to the Greek islands, thence into the Balkans and Central Europe, are unlikely to stop the flood. My prediction that European “patriots will recapture control of their national destinies” looks even more probable today.

If these trends continue, and they seem to have accelerated in 2015, the idea of a United States of Europe dies, and with it, the EU. And this raises a question about the most successful economic and political union in history — the USA. How does an increasingly multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural United States avoid the fate to which Europe appears to be headed, when there is no identifiable racial or ethnic majority here in 2042?

Undoubtedly there are Syrians who oppose the Syrian government and even Syrians who have taken up arms against the government and in turn, against the Syrian people, but from the beginning (in fact before the beginning) this war has been driven from abroad. Calling it a “civil war” is a misnomer as much as calling those taking up arms “opposition.” It is not a “civil war,” and those fighting the Syrian government are not “opposition.”

Those calling this a civil war and the terrorists fighting the Syrian state “opposition” hope that their audience never wanders too far from their lies to understand the full context of this conflict, the moves made before it even started and where those moves were made from.

The Syrian conflict was borne of organizations created by centers of foreign interests decades ago who have since fought on and off not for the future of the Syrian people, but for a Syria that meshed more conveniently into the foreign global order that created them. The conflict has been fueled by a torrent of weapons, cash, support and even fighters drawn not from among the Syrian people, but from the very centers of these foreign special interests; in Riyadh, Ankara, London, Paris, Brussels and Washington.

For those who have been trying to make sense of the Syrian “civil war” since 2011 with little luck, the explanation is simple, it isn’t a civil war and it never was. Understanding it as a proxy conflict from the very beginning (or even before it began) will give one a clarity in perception that will aid one immeasurably in understanding what the obvious solutions are, but only when they come to this understanding.

Bloomberg Business believes Obama has settled on going around Congress to expand background checks by changing the way current law covers private gun owners who sell guns. This approach allows Obama to kill two birds with one stone by expanding background checks to cover more private sales in a way that will also expand checks to private sellers at gun shows.

Would such an expansion have stopped high profile shootings like the Colorado Springs Halloween attack, the Umpqua Community College attack, the August on-air shooting of a reporter and cameraman in Virginia, or the Lafayette theater attack? No. Because all the gunmen and alleged gunmen in these instances passed background checks for their firearms.

Would such an expansion have stopped the San Bernardino terror attack? No. Because Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik acquired their handguns legally – ie background checks – and their rifles were acquired legally by Enrique Marquez. Yet Obama is determined to expand background checks. Bloomberg Business reports that, “Obama has let it be known from his holiday retreat in Hawaii, through unidentified advisers, that soon after New Years Day” he will circumvent Congress via executive action

Senator Rand Paul (Republican for Kentucky) has introduced legislation to prevent the use of executive actions for gun control by limiting them to “advisory only.” This would require executive gun controls to survive a vote in Congress before taking effect.

This war for control of oil, however, promises to be of a scale that will change world politics in a spectacular and highly destructive manner. It is on one level, a Saudi war to redraw the national borders of the infamous Anglo-French Sykes-Picot carve-up of the bankrupt Ottoman Turkish Empire of 1916.

This new war has as its foolish goal bringing the oil fields and pipeline routes of Iraq and Syria, and perhaps more of the region, under direct Saudi control, with Qatar and Erdogan’s Turkey as Riyadh’s partners in crime. Unfortunately, as in all wars, there will be no winners.

In reality, decades of documented evidence reveal that the Saudis are the primary conduit through which Western cash, weapons, support, and directives flow into mercenary armies of extremists, indoctrinated by Saudi Wahhabism – a politically-motivated perversion of Islam – and sent to execute joint Western-Saudi geopolitical ambitions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and beyond.

For those interested in truly defeating terrorism globally – recognizing the state sponsors of terrorism and excluding them categorically from solving the problem until they are held responsible for creating it in the first place is essential. Saudi Arabia’s announcement was met with skepticism, even ridicule for this very reason. Second, to defeat terrorism globally, those truly interested in investing in such a battle, should do so with those demonstrating a sincere desire to eradicate this scourge.

Globally, millions succumbed to this devastating virus of the brain, spread via Twitter and NUS meetings. Sufferers lurched towards gagging orders and change.org petitions the moment absolutely anything even remotely offended them.

Earlier this month, comic Andrew Lawrence caused online outrage when he tweeted, “Given that about 80% of suicides in the UK last year were committed by men, if feminists truly wanted equality, they'd kill themselves”. To date, a lofty 88 people want the BBC to ban him. Meanwhile, in North Korea, despot Kim Jong-Un has a list of state-approved jokes. As did Adolf Hitler.

In March, attendees at the NUS Women's Conference in Solihull claimed clapping was “intimidating” and “distracting”. The NUS Women's Campaign then tweeted: "Some delegates are requesting that we move to jazz hands rather than clapping, as it's triggering anxiety. Please be mindful!" The prospect of several hundred feminists silently waving their hands caused global astonishment, raising the question: 'What next?'...

Sticking with the same happy-go-lucky conference, certain tinpot despots at the Solihull meet issued a Zero Tolerance Statement that banned heterosexual men from “cross-dressing as a mode of fancy dress” not because they look horrible, but because it is "a pillory of trans people”. Confusingly, gay fellas were still allowed to dress as drag queens, as it is an “exploration of queer identity”.

None of this trillion dollars taken from us is spent to keep us safe, despite what politicians say. In fact, this great rip-off actually makes us less safe and more vulnerable to a terrorist attack thanks to resentment overseas at our interventions and to the blowback it produces. The money is spent to maintain existing conflicts and to create new areas of conflict overseas that in turn feeds the demands for more military spending. It is an endless cycle of theft and deceit.

Billions were spent not long ago overthrowing an elected government in Ukraine and provoking Russia. A new Cold War is a bonanza for the military industrial complex, the pro-war think tanks, and the politicians. NATO is on the move in Eastern Europe, placing heavy weapons right on Russia’s border and then blaming the Russians when they complain about the rising militarism. NATO military exercises on Russia’s border have increased and become more confrontational.

In the Middle East, more billions have been spent attempting to overthrow the secular government of Syria over the past five years. The big winners in this grand scheme have been the Islamist extremists, who are funded directly and indirectly by the US and its allies. NATO is planning to go back into Libya, an admission that its 2011 “liberation” of that country has been a disaster.

In Asia, the US Empire challenges and provokes China, sending military ships and aircraft into territory China claims in the South China Sea. How much will they continue to escalate before China gets fed up? The more money sent to the Pentagon and other parts of the Washington war apparatus, the more danger we are in.