Maduro has faced months of deadly mass protests by opponents who blame him for an economic crisis and are demanding elections to replace him. International pressure has also grown, with US President Donald Trump even saying this month that the United States reserved the option of military intervention in the Venezuela crisis. Maduro pointedly highlighted his alliance with Russia, which had rejected Trump's recent threat as "unacceptable."

The Venezuelan leader said he wanted to "keep strengthening the military cooperation agreement" between the two countries "for the sovereign defense of Venezuela." Russia recently sold fighter jets and ground to air missiles to Venezuela. "Venezuela has the full and absolute support of Russia," he said, adding that he would soon go to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Of course, the real question that needs to be asked here is simple: “If Assad is killing his own people, why are Syrians running back to him in droves?” Why would people who were being slaughtered by their own government rush back to it at the earliest possible opportunity? Perhaps because they actually prefer to live in Syria than some other country.

Perhaps their government isn’t killing them like Americans are being told they are. It is also important to point out that the rate of return for Syrian refugees has increased directly with the amount of territory liberated by the Syrian government. In other words, as the Syrian government liberates more territory, more Syrians return to their homes in government-controlled territory.

Obviously, if Syrian refugees were fleeing Assad, we would be seeing an increase in refugees. Regardless, it is clear to all who are not being paid to see otherwise that Syrians are returning home because America’s terrorists are losing territory and, thus, they now have the ability to return to their homes under government control.

While alternative media researchers have been pointing this out since the beginning of the conflict, mainstream media now has no choice but to admit that Syrians are willingly returning to the country run by the man these same outlets have attempted to demonize and destroy for six years. Slowly but surely, the mainstream media’s narrative surrounding Syria is unraveling in front of everyone’s eyes.

After enduring the worst natural disaster in American history, New Orleans was given billions of dollars to fix their flood control infrastructure, yet the city government has utterly failed to follow through. And let’s not forget what happened after Katrina. Multiple investigations found that the levees failed due to things like poor design, improper materials, and a lack of maintenance. And everyone knew for decades that one day those levees would fail, yet they kept kicking the can down the road. They’re still kicking the can.

So what really causes a natural disaster? Is it really an act of God, or are people to blame? There’s nothing “natural” about corruption and mismanagement. That’s what’s really responsible for most disasters, and that’s what really caused the flooding in New Orleans in 2005, and in 2017. And it’s not just New Orleans that we see human weakness written all over a natural disaster with massive casualties. Pretty much every time there is an earthquake, a fire, or a storm that kills hundreds or thousands of people, you’ll find that people failed to prevent the preventable. They built unstable buildings and failed to maintain levees.

Or they built homes where they should have never been built. A stone marker in Japan reads, “High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”

The marker was placed near Fukushima, and there are hundreds of them all over Japan that were built by tsunami survivors centuries ago. They’re a warning to future generations, not to build their homes too close to the coastline. The village that resides above this marker was untouched by the Tohoku tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011. The people who lived below it were not so lucky.

In reality, natural disasters are rare. The kinds of disasters that are completely unexpected and kill lots of people who didn’t know they were in danger, only strike once in a blue moon. But man-made disasters, the kinds that are caused by a lack of preparedness, willful ignorance, corruption, and normalcy bias, are very common. They happen every day.

At Monday night's board meeting, the teacher at the center of the controversy spoke out. With emotions high, she addressed a packed house. "I'm so proud of my students, it was never my intent to harm any students but to help them through a difficult situation," she said. The teacher defended her actions to read two children's books about transgenderism including one titled "I am Jazz." She says the books were given to her by a transgender child going through a transition.

"The kindergartners came home very confused, about whether or not you can pick your gender, whether or not they really were a boy or a girl," said England. Parents say besides the books, the transgender student at some point during class also changed clothes and was revealed as her true gender.

And many parents say they feel betrayed and blindsided. "I want her to hear from me as a parent what her gender identity means to her and our family, not from a book that may be controversial," a parent said. "My daughter came home crying and shaking so afraid she could turn into a boy," another parent said.

Soros, a Hungarian-born Jew who has spent a large part of his fortune funding pro-democracy and human rights groups, has repeatedly been targeted by Hungary's right-wing government, in particular over his support for more open immigration. In the latest case, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has backed a campaign in which Soros is singled out as an enemy of the state. "Let's not allow Soros to have the last laugh" say billboards next to a picture of the 86-year-old investor, a campaign that Jewish groups and others say foments anti-Semitism.

Soros, who rarely addresses personal attacks against him, has not commented on the billboards. But Hungarian Jewish groups and Human Rights Watch, an organization partly funded by Soros, have condemned the campaign, saying it "evokes memories of the Nazi posters during the Second World War". Many posters have been defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti, including the words "stinking Jew" written in magic marker.

Knowing there were problems ahead for the Jews, Soros’ father, who was a successful lawyer, bribed a government official to take 14 year old George Soros in and say he was his Christian godson. While hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being shipped off to the death camps, George Soros accompanied his appointed “godfather” around confiscating property from Jews. George admitted it wasn’t difficult at all to take part in taking property from the Jews.

Kroft asked Soros if it bothered him?

Soros: It created no problem at all.

Kroft: No feeling of guilt?

Soros: No.

Why should Israel tread lightly when it comes to this monster who had no feelings of guilt about taking property from fellow Jews during the Holocaust?

According to the NukeMap website, the dropping of the B-83, the largest bomb in the current US arsenal, would kill 1.4 million people in the first 24 hours. A further 3.7 million people would be injured, as the thermal radiation radius reached 13 km. 

Likewise, the "Tsar Bomba" is the largest USSR bomb tested. If this bomb was dropped on New York, it is estimated that it could kill 7.6 million people and injure 4.2 million more. The nuclear fallout could reach an approximate area of 7,880 km on a 15 mph wind, impacting millions more people. 

Both America and Russia's arsenals are regulated by several treaties that place limits on the numbers and kinds of warheads and delivery systems they have.  If either country were to expand their nuclear capacity even further, as Trump and Putin have hinted at, it could shatter these agreements and plunge the world into a new Cold War.

Our figures on nuclear weapons, based on statistics from the Arms Control Association, are mainly estimates because of the secretive nature with which most governments treat information about their arsenals. 

That failed narrative has now been replaced with a new mass hysteria: "a new cultural Civil War is inevitable." In this narrative, America has succumbed to us-versus-them divisions divided by all-or-nothing ideological bright lines. Snap out of it, America: you're being played, just as you were played by the absurd "Russia hacked the election" mania.

The core strategy here is the destruction of any common ground: once the delusion that there is no common ground left has been cemented by relentless mainstream and social media hysteria/propaganda, the populace fragments into echo-chamber fiefdoms of ideological conformity that are easily manipulated by the political-financial power structure.

Once the populace has been fragmented into ideologically divisive camps, controlling the resulting mass of warring mobs is easy. Rather than recognize the commonality of their powerlessness and impoverishment, the fragmented fiefdoms are easily turned on each other: From the point of view of each fragmented fiefdom, the problem isn't structural ie the dominance of extreme concentrations of wealth and power; the "problem" is the other cultural-ideological fiefdoms.

Once the masses accept this false division and the destruction of common ground, their power to reverse the extreme concentrations of wealth and power is shattered. The play is as old as civilization itself: conjure up extremists (paying them when necessary), goad the formation of opposing extremists, then convince the populace that these extremists have been normalized ie your friends and neighbors already belong to one or the other.

This normalization then sets up the relentless demands to choose a side - the classic techniques of misdirection and false choice.

Amazon.com has, for over a decade, extracted obscene profits from the sales of counterfeit products of all kinds. Dietary supplements, Birkenstock sandals, luxury watches and brand-name clothing… it’s all being counterfeited and sold by Amazon.com by the minute. The problem is so bad, in fact, that Jeff Bezos — who also owns the counterfeit news publication known as The Washington Post — has a moral (and perhaps legal) responsibility to stop the mass counterfeiting of retail brands taking place at Amazon.com. Yet he does nothing.

Now, Amazon may have finally crossed the line. The company has been selling counterfeit eclipse viewing glasses that falsely claimed to protect viewers from the eyesight-damaging effects of direct sunlight radiation. It turns out the fake viewing glasses don’t offer the protection they claimed, and potentially thousands of people may suffer permanent eyesight damage — or even blindness — after using these counterfeit products they purchased on Amazon.com.

Now, Amazon has been forced to admit it sold people counterfeit viewing glasses that offer no protection at all. Millions of people have purchased special glasses to safely watch the solar eclipse that’s coming up August 21, but over the weekend Amazon notified some customers that the glasses they bought may not be safe. I smell a class action lawsuit forming. And I wonder if Amazon will ever get serious about halting its ongoing sales of fake products.

According to his calculations, it would cut the S&P 500 Index in half, to 1212, and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average would collapse to 10,837. Paul noted that there's a lot of chaos in Washington right now, with an "unpredictable president" and those who are inclined to "tear him apart" but if the market takes that big of a tumble, he doesn't see it as Trump's fault.

"It's all man-made. It's not the fault of Donald Trump in the last week. If the market crashes tomorrow and we have a great depression, he didn't do it in six months. It took more like six or ten years to cause all these problems that we're facing," he said.

Stocks will try to bounce back on Monday from multiple losing weeks in a row. The Nasdaq just saw its fourth consecutive week of losses. Meanwhile, the Dow & S&P 500's losing streak now sits at two weeks. If Paul's vision is right, the damage is bound to worsen. "I see the foundation of our system built on sand, and a big wind comes along to blow it down," Paul said.

"Even though [the market] looks beautiful — setting new highs, good momentum, and earnings have been coming in strong, [there are] things to worry about," explained the portfolio manager recently on CNBC's "Futures Now." Aside from the rise of passive investing, which James says is creating a "herd mentality" among investors, he also believed that the earnings picture isn't telling the whole story.

"In the 18 months ending in June, we saw companies that had no earnings, they were losing money, outperform those that were making money," said James. He highlighted many stocks' performances this year may not be reflective of their revenues.