There are at least three good reasons why considering a nuclear option would be foolhardy for Germany. For starters, Germany has repeatedly renounced it, first in 1969 by signing (and later ratifying) the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and then in 1990 by signing the so-called Two Plus Four Treaty, which paved the way for German reunification.

Casting doubt on these commitments would severely damage Germany’s reputation and reliability worldwide. Germany would call into question the credibility of NATO’s nuclear deterrence, and thus the alliance itself, along with the entire nuclear non-proliferation regime.

It is worth noting that since its creation in 1949, NATO has been one of the world’s most successful instruments of proliferation prevention. Not a single NATO member state – apart from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France – has found it necessary to acquire nuclear weapons of its own.

Many have been waiting for it to happen for several years, and some people out there are convinced that it is never going to come at all.  Of course the truth is that we are in perhaps the largest stock market bubble that our nation has ever seen, and all other large stock market bubbles have always ended with a major price collapse.  So whether it happens immediately or it takes a little while longer, it is inevitable that stock prices will eventually return to their long-term averages.

Doug Ramsey, the chief investment officer at Leuthold Group, is one of those that is sounding the alarm.  Unlike price to earnings ratios, price to sales ratios are very hard to manipulate, and he has pointed out that price to sales ratios are higher than we have ever witnessed before. As I have said before, stock prices need to fall by 40 or 50 percent just to get into a neighborhood where they will begin to make sense again.

If you take an honest look at the numbers, there is no debate that we are in far worse shape than we were just before the financial crisis of 2008.  Our debt levels are much higher, stock prices are way more inflated, and financial institutions have become even more reckless.  None of the long-term problems that plagued us back in 2008 have been fixed.  Instead, the current system was patched up and all of the bubbles were re-inflated.  Unfortunately, our attention spans are so short these days, and for most people 2008 seems like ancient history at this point.

But without a doubt a much worse crisis than 2008 is on the way, and most people are going to be absolutely blind-sided by it.

Speaking in a panel discussion on Israel’s i24NEWS, Klein reminded viewers about Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, which he argued paved the way for Hamas’s takeover and the use of the coastal enclave to attack Israel. He warned that any future withdrawal from the strategic West Bank, which borders central Israel, would result in a similar security nightmare for the Jewish state. “[Then-Prime Minister] Arial Sharon pledged that if Israel evacuates the Gaza Strip then the world would understand if the Jewish state needed to go in and defend itself,” Klein stated. He continued:

“So, don’t forget that while we see this rocket war aimed at Israeli civilian population centers in part because of the Gaza evacuation, we are now talking about the continued so-called land for peace formula and for some sort of creation ultimately of a Palestinian state in the West bank. In Judea and Samaria. Bordering Israel’s International Airport. Gaza wouldn’t have to aim at Ben Gurion Airport. From the West Bank, you can very easily lob a very short range Qassam rocket or less at Ben Gurion.”

“So, let’s keep in mind the disaster, the war that Israel is facing right now in Gaza when we continue to talk about the so-called peace process even though there doesn’t seem to be a peace partner not just in Gaza but in the West Bank with Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah. Any way you look at it, there is no Palestinian leadership that can take over any strategic territory, whether evacuated or in a so-called peace deal.”

Citing sources from inside Facebook, The New York Times reported on the process that led to Jones’ suspension. “The situation was volatile enough that Mr Zuckerberg got personally engaged, according to two people involved in Facebook’s handling of the accounts.”

The rest of the Times’ article is a flurry of contradictions. It simultaneously calls fears of censorship “overblown” while acknowledging that users of the platforms must now “tip-toe around” controversial topics to avoid being banned. At the same time, the piece grudgingly admits that “both fans and critics of Infowars can probably agree that a system in which one executive can decide to shut off a news organization’s access to a large portion of its audience is hardly ideal.”

Markets reacted negatively and the currency, the rand, has continued to plummet over the last week.  This is because the plan has invited comparisons with the chaotic land reform programme across the Limpopo River in neighbouring Zimbabwe, which saw scenes of violent evictions of mainly white farmers.

A man wearing a T-shirt of the right-wing Freedom Front Plus party said that his Afrikaner people had been farming in the Western Cape for the past 300 years.  "When my forefathers came, they found no-one but the Khoi and the San. My people got what they have in this country not by theft, not by genocide, but by fair means."  Some land owners threatened war to defend their farms and their opponents vowed to respond in kind.

In a statement about the layoffs, Element Electronics executives said the announcement is due to Trump’s tariffs on imported Chinese goods, writing, “the layoff and closure is a result of the new tariffs that were recently and unexpectedly imposed on many goods imported from China, including the key television components used in our assembly operations in Winnsboro.”

The only problem with the media’s claim? This “last major TV factory,” as Time Magazine described Element Electronics, makes its products in China and only assembles some of its television sets in South Carolina.

Israeli leaders, and the Israeli public, are beyond frustrated — even though the US-funded Iron Dome system has destroyed many of the rockets. Some are calling for Hamas leaders to be targeted. Many want Hamas itself to be crushed once and for all. If Israel wants to destroy Hamas, and liberate the Gaza Strip from its iron-fisted Islamist rule — now more than a decade old — there will never be a better time.

President Donald Trump is the most pro-Israel leader the United States has ever produced, and his team of Middle East negotiators are so frustrated with Palestinian intransigence that they have called for cutting economic aid to Gaza. If Israel were to undertake a tough ground assault, with Hamas hiding behind civilians in hospitals and in booby-trapped buildings, it would — finally — have a friend in the White House who would withstand international pressure and allow it to fight until victory.

The billionaire banker pointed to the US-China trade war and the Eurozone crisis as the key problems putting economic order at risk, and the lack of a "common approach" - a reference to the gradual unwind of globalization in the wake of President Trump - that has made "co-operation today much more difficult":

"In 9/11 and in the 2008 financial crisis, the powers of the world worked together with a common approach. Co-operation today is proving much more difficult. This puts at risk the post-war economic and security order."

It wasn't clear if he was referring to the post-war fiat standard that emerged once FDR devalued the dollar relative to gold, and then fixed a price for the yellow metal, a tenuous link that was subsequently destroyed by Nixon who finally took the US off the gold standard, or the primacy of the dollar which emerged as the world's reserve currency after the end of WWII, but whenever one of the people who profited handsomely from the "post war world order" warns it may be on its last legs, it may be time to worry.

As private companies, tech giants are under no legal obligation to uphold the First Amendment, or any other rights of the American people, for that matter. But as the world of tech increasingly becomes the only world people seem to want to live in, this raises substantial questions about the amount of power these companies hold and whether they should be held to a higher legal standard regarding free speech.

By controlling what people can and cannot see, hear or say, companies like Facebook are indirectly influencing the way people feel and think. But now, that power doesn’t just extend to what people see in their newsfeed, as the tech giants of the world now see fit to flat-out silence anyone who disagrees with their views, or criticizes their lobbyists. Indeed, as Breitbart recently revealed, InfoWars wasn’t censored for violating the arbitrary and inane rules of engagement for social media — InfoWars was taken down because liberal media talking heads at CNN and Democrat politicians begged them to censor the site.

In the new world of technology, politicians and left-wing journalists are lobbying Silicon Valley behind closed doors to silence their competition. To make matters worse, the Democratic politicians who call upon Big Tech to censor anyone who disagrees with them turn around and call conservatives “conspiracy theorists” for calling out their acts of censorship.

This is what it truly means to be Orwellian, the Left is all but calling their censorship “freedom.”

In a recent statement picked up by Breitbart.com, Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center declared the move a “dangerous cliff,” emphasizing that YouTube, Apple, Facebook, Spotify, and many others have been co-opted into capitulating to the fascistic demands of fake news outlets like CNN.

Even though he doesn’t personally support Alex Jones, nor does he believe him to be a true conservative, Bozell says that it’s absolutely wrong for distributors of online content to blanket-ban him from their platforms. These flagrant censorship tactics, he says, highlight a “disturbing trend” towards totalitarianism and the complete elimination of free speech.

The socialist candidate argued that Americans who balk at the cost of single-payer health care need to look at the hidden costs of maintaining the current, mostly-private system. In the US, worker illness and injury costs employers $225.8 billion annually, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Ocasio-Cortez went on to slam her critics in the GOP for funding President Trump’s tax cuts, and the country’s foreign wars, while neglecting healthcare and education spending. “When it comes to tax cuts for bills and unlimited war," she said, "we seem to invent that money very easily.”

Ocasio-Cortez is optimistic. Medicare-for-all is being seriously talked about by several major Democrat favorites for the 2020 election, as is government-funded college tuition, abolishing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and a $15 federal minimum wage, all positions to the left of the Democratic establishment.