- The Globalist Elite Fears Peace, Wants War
Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The announced meeting between Trump and Putin has already produced a good result by revealing the hypocrisy of the media and politicians. The meeting has been branded as the greatest danger to humanity, according to the Western globalist elite, because of the danger that “peace could break out between Russia and the United States”.
Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. The following so stretches credulity that sources will have to be cited and an exact quotations given to be believed.
A case in point is the following title:
“Fears growing over the prospect of Trump ‘peace deal’ with Putin”.
The Times does not here fear a military escalation in Ukraine, an armed clash in Syria, a false-flag poisoning in England, or a new Cold War. The Times does not fear a nuclear apocalypse, the end of humanity, the suffering of hundreds of millions of people.
No, one of the most authoritative and respected broadsheets in the world is fearful of the prospect of peace! The Times is afraid that the heads of two nuclear-armed superpowers are able to talk to each other. The Times fears that Putin and Trump will be able to come to some kind of agreement that can help avert the danger of a global catastrophe. These are the times in which we live. And this is the type of media we deal with. The problem with The Times is that it forms public opinion in the worst possible way, confusing, deceiving, and disorienting its readers. It is not by accident the world in which we live is increasingly divorced from logic and rationality.
Even if the outcome of this meeting does not see any substantial progress, the most important thing to be achieved will be the dialogue between the two leaders and the opening of negotiation channels for both sides.
In The Times article, it is assumed that Trump and Putin want to reach an agreement regarding Europe. The insinuation is that Putin is manipulating Trump in order to destabilize Europe. For years now we have been inundated with such fabrications by the media on behalf of their editors and shareholders, all part of the deep state conglomerate. Facts have in fact proven that Putin has always desired a strong and united Europe, looking to integrate Europe into the Eurasian dream. Putin and Xi Jinping would like to see a European Union more resistant to American pressure and able to gain greater independence. The combination of mass migration and sanctions against Russia and Iran, which end up hurting Europeans, opens the way for alternative parties that are not necessarily willing to Washington’s marching orders.
Trump’s focus for the meeting will be to convince Putin to put even more pressure on Europe and Iran, perhaps in exchange for the recognition of Crimea and the ending of sanctions. For Putin and for Russia it is a strategic issue. While sanctions are bad, the top priority for Moscow remains the alliance with Iran, the need to further strengthen relations with European countries, and to defeat terrorism in Syria. Perhaps only a revision of the ABM treaty and the withdrawal of these weapons from Europe would be an interesting offer for Putin. However, reality shows us that the ABM treaty is a pillar of Washington’s military-industrial complex, and that it is also Eastern European countries that want such offensive and defensive systems in their own countries, seeing them as a deterrents against Russia. Are they victims of their own propaganda, or are billions of dollars pouring into their pockets? Either way, it does not really matter. The most important point for Moscow will be the withdrawal of the Aegis Ashore ABM systems as well as military ships with the same Aegis system. But this is not something that Trump will be able to negotiate with his military leaders. For the military-industrial complex, the ABM system, thanks to maintenance, innovation and direct or indirect commissions, is a gravy train that too many interests intend to keep riding.
From the Kremlin’s point of view, the removal of sanctions remains necessary for the restoration of normal relations with the West. But this would be difficult to achieve, given that Moscow would have little to offer Washington in exchange. The strategists at the Pentagon demand a withdrawal from Syria, an end to support for Donbass, and a cessation of relations with Iran. There is simply too much divergence to reach a common position. Moreover, Europe’s sanctions against Russia benefit Washington, as they hurt the Europeans and thereby undermine what is a major trading competitor to the US. The US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) can be looked at in the same light, blocking US allies from doing business with Iran.
Putin will keep faith with his commitments to Syria and with his allies, unwilling to betray his word even for the recognition of Crimea. On the other hand, as already mentioned, the priority remains the removal of the ABM; and while Crimea is already under the control of the Russian Federation, Syria remains an unstable territory that risks propelling Islamist terrorism to Russia’s soft underbelly in the Caucasus. For Moscow, involvement in Syria has always been a matter of national security, and this certainly remains the same now, even with Donald Trump’s unrealistic offers.
It should be kept in mind that Putin is aiming for a medium- to long-term strategy in the Middle East, where Iran, Syria and the entire Shiite arc serves to counter Saudi and Israeli aggression and hegemony. This strange alliance has emerged as the only way to deter war and dial down the heat in the region, because the crazy actions from Netanyahu or Mohammad bin Salman are deterred by a strong Iranian military. Preventing a confrontation between Iran and Saudis/Israelis also means not making Tehran appear weak or isolated. Such considerations seem beyond the strategists in Washington, let alone in Tel Aviv or Riyadh.
While it is difficult to achieve a positive outcome from the meeting between Trump and Putin, it is important that there is a meeting in the first place, contrary to what The Times thinks. The media and the conglomerate of power that revolves around the US deep state fear diplomacy in particular. The same narrative that was proclaimed weeks before and after the meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-un is being repeated with regard to Trump’s meeting with Putin.
Washington bases its power on force, both economic and military. But this power also rests on the posture assumed and image projected. The United States and its deep state considers negotiating with opponents to be wrong and counterproductive. They consider dialogue to be synonymous with weakness, and any concession is interpreted as surrender. This is the result of 70 years of American exceptionalism and 30 years of Unipolarity, has allowed the US the ability to decide unilaterally the fate of others.
Today, in a multipolar world, the dynamics are different and therefore more complex. You cannot always employ a zero-sum mentality, as The Times does. The rest of the world recognizes that a dialogue between Putin and Trump is something positive, but we must not forget that, as in Korea, if diplomacy does not bring significant progress, then the hawks surrounding Trump will again be in the ascendant. The tasks for Rouhani, Putin and Kim Jong-un are complex and quite different from each other, but they share in common the belief that dialogue is the only way to avoid a catastrophic war. But apparently, peace is not the best possible result for everyone.
- Meet The Air Force's $1200 Cup Of Coffee
Meet the Air Force’s $1200 cup of coffee — or more precisely the $1220 coffee cup which keeps breaking, after which the military simply buys more and more cups.
The Air Force’s $1,220 reheating coffee cup. Image source: US Air Force
Some outlets which have reported on the insanely pricey self reheating coffee mug commonly used aboard aerial refueling tankers have presented it as merely a human interest and innovative tech story as the US military is considering cheaper designs using 3-D printers.
However, we doubt American taxpayers will see it that way, as the public has had to foot the bill to the tune of nearly $56,000 over the past three years just to replace the cup’s handle.
A insanely expensive self-heating cup in question on a counter inside a KC-10 Extender at Travis Air Force Base, California. Image source: US Air Force If it sounds too absurd to be true a new Air Force Times report begins as follows:
When a mobility airman drops a cup of coffee aboard an aircraft, the Air Force can be out $1,220.
Since 2016, the replacement cost for some of the service’s coffee mugs, which can reheat coffee and tea on air refueling tankers, has gone up more than $500 per cup, forcing the service to dish out $32,000 this year for just 25 cups, military.com recently reported.
The 60th Aerial Port Squadron at Travis Air Force Base recently revealed that it has spent nearly $56,000 to replace broken hot cups over the past three years. The culprit, they say, is a faulty plastic handle known to break on impact. Each time a handle breaks, the Air Force is forced to order a whole new cup, as replacement parts are no longer made.
So the Air Force charged taxpayers $32,000 this year alone for cups with
solid gold handles“faulty plastic handles” so that pilots can ensure their tea and Folgers get adequately reheated.And we’re not so sure — to use the Air Force Times’ language — that faulty handles are “forcing the service” to have to do anything, much less we can’t figure out how the military is “forced to” shell out tens of thousands for coffee cups.
According to Air Mobility Command officials, the 60th Aerial Port Squadron purchased 10 hot cups for $9,630 in 2016. The price for each cup surged from $693 to $1,220 in 2018, resulting in a cost of $32,000 for 25 cups — a price jump of $527 per cup, the release said. — Military.com
But it is true that the cups have to withstand use in pressurized areas on aircraft such as cargo planes, and must endure turbulence while flying through inclement weather. Still, as Popular Mechanics concludes in what sounds like an ironic understatement, “A self-heating coffee cup is a nice morale-builder for air crews, but it comes at a price.”
Meanwhile in the same report we learn about “$10,000 toilet seat covers” which when combined with $1200 coffee cups “just adds up” — in the words of one government spending watchdog group.
Spokesman for the Project On Government Oversight, Dan Grazier, notes that this kind of obscene excess is hardly new for the Department of Defense, explaining to the Air Force Times, “the root of the problem is intellectual property rights. When the Pentagon makes deals with defense contractors, it rarely demands data rights, allowing contractors to charge heavily for repair and replacement on the systems down the road.”
Once locked into a fat government contract, the suppliers take the DoD to the bank for all they can manage, apparently.
The Air Force is currently seeking alternate ways to replace the faulty handles on the $1200 cups, reportedly considering 3-D printed replacement handles at an estimated cost of 50 cents.
- The War On Curiosity
Authored by Brian Balfour via The Mises Institute,
Last March, protestors at Middlebury College in Vermont sent professor Allison Stanger to the hospital with a neck injury. Stanger’s crime? She had the nerve to ask the protestors to allow the conservative/libertarian author Dr. Charles Murray to speak, and then to engage in a debate after his speech.
According to news accounts, after about 20 minutes of protestors shouting down Murray’s ability to speak, “Professor Stanger then took the microphone and asked the students, ‘Can you just listen for one minute.’ Many in the audience replied, ‘no.’ She added that, ‘I spent a lot of time preparing hard questions.’ Finally, she conceded that, ‘You’re not going to let us speak.’”
Stanger is a liberal professor who chose to combat Murray’s ideas with words, not violence or the heckler’s veto. This was simply unacceptable to the protestors.
After moving to another location on campus, Stanger and Murray were confronted when attempting to leave following their discussion. What followed was minutes of pushing and shoving, and “(w)hen Stanger tried to shield Murray, according to a Middlebury spokesman, a protester grabbed her hair and twisted her neck.” Stanger ended up going to a hospital where she received a neck brace to treat her injuries.
Over the last year and a half, we’ve witnessed a rash of accounts of college campuses being turned into riot zones by Leftist protestors hoping to shut down conservative or libertarian speakers. Middlebury is just one, and far from the worst , of such examples.
These protestors would rather incite violence than listen to a viewpoint that challenges their own.
The War on Curiosity
Why is the Left so afraid of an opposing opinion? How do they justify resorting to violence to shut down a dissenting voice rather than engaging in debate?
One such explanation is the war on curiosity.
This war is engaged by anyone without the faintest interest in learning about political philosophies, economic theories or moral principles that challenge their existing worldview.
Are you a soldier in the war on curiosity?
Take this litmus test:
How do you react when presented with new information or a viewpoint that contradicts your beliefs?
If the revelation stimulates your intellect and makes you thankful for the chance to expand your knowledge and gain a better understanding of an opposing position, you have the gift of curiosity. You welcome the opportunity to challenge your beliefs with this new information, a process that may enable you to more strongly confirm the justness of your belief and sharpen your argument in favor of it. Or, if the new viewpoint is persuasive enough, you alter your belief, owing a debt of gratitude to the one who opened your eyes.
On the other hand, if you react with anger, anxiousness or a general feeling of being threatened, you are likely allowing your emotions to snuff out your intellectual curiosity.
“Motivated Ignorance”
Social psychologists, writing in a 2017 LA Times article , described such reactions as “motivated ignorance.” People engaging in motivated ignorance “neither know — nor want to know — what the opposition has to say.”
Indeed, in one study cited by the authors, “people we surveyed said they anticipated getting angry if they were to listen to the other side, and suspected that it might damage their relationship with the person spouting off.”
Those who are not curious close themselves off to other views. Over time, they can’t figure out how any normal human being could possibly think differently than they do on political issues. Sinister motives, or stupidity, must be the only explanation. This is where the nastiness comes in. If one disagrees, surely they must be evil, dumb, racist or transphobic.
And because those who are not curious become convinced the other side is some sort of cartoonish villain, the uncurious feel compelled to not just ignore opposing viewpoints, but to silence them. Nobody should feel the indignity of being exposed to such “hate speech,” they’ll reason.
Using Shaming or Bullying to Silence
Violence is the most extreme and dangerous tactic in the war on curiosity, but far from the only one.
Safe spaces offer protection for those who feel threatened by opposing viewpoints. There are campuses that offer mental health counseling to students who cannot bear “ even the thought of an individual coming to campus” to express non-politically correct views. That the mere thought of someone with opposing views setting foot on your campus can threaten your mental health takes motivated ignorance to the Nth degree.
Public shaming or bullying is another popular tactic. Anyone who disagrees with a Leftist is obviously a racist, or homophobe or a tool of the rich and therefore must be discredited through name-calling. Why bother with debate when mindlessly dismissing other viewpoints as “not worthy” of discussion is so much easier, and empowering? After all, moral authority is valuable currency in the Left’s desire to gain the top slot in our social hierarchy, and demonizing opponents has proven to be a more convenient route than open debate of ideas.
Leftists Tend to be More Uncurious of Opposing Views
To be sure, the war on curiosity is being waged by people of all political stripes. However, Leftists seem to be outgunning their opponents when it comes to motivated ignorance. Indeed, social scientist Jonathan Haidt in his book “ The Righteous Mind” reported on a study which found “clear and consistent” results that “(m)oderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions” when people of varying political bents were tested on how well they understood their ideological opposites.
In other words, Leftists don’t understand their opponents’ views as well as their opponents understand theirs.
When is the last time you heard of a Leftist speaker being shut down by violent protestors?
The Role of Confirmation Bias
Enabling this war is confirmation bias – the strong tendency in us to interpret all new information through the lens of our prior beliefs. Whatever your political philosophy is, you can easily immerse yourself into media outlets, social media and internet content that exclusively reaffirm your convictions. One can comfortably spend hours a day consuming political information without once encountering a differing viewpoint.
Moreover, most Americans can go thru thirteen years of public education, plus four or more years in university, and never be confronted with a viewpoint counter to the orthodox Leftist vision of government as benevolent dispenser of justice.
Lack of exposure to other viewpoints may help explain why so many Leftists can muster no greater argument than “shut up, racist.”
The war on curiosity serves only to dumb down political debate. Non-Leftist viewpoints get silenced, while progressive arguments need never be thoroughly presented because intimidation and name-calling prove much easier and satisfyingly self-righteous. History proves such trends lead to ugly outcomes.
- Home Sales In Westchester Plunge As Wealthy Buyers "Spend More Time With Their Accountants"
It appears the drop in home sales that has afflicted Manhattan and wealthy tri-state-area enclaves like Greenwich, Conn. is spreading to Westchester County, the suburban enclave directly north of the Bronx According to Bloomberg, sales fell 18% in the second quarter compared with a year earlier, marking the fourth straight quarter of declining sales.
Purchases in the northern suburban county — which shoulders the biggest property-tax burden in the U.S. — plunged 18 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, the most since 2011, according to a report Thursday by appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate. It was the fourth consecutive quarter of sales declines.
“We’re seeing buyers take a second to understand the math,” Scott Elwell, Douglas Elliman’s regional manager in charge of Westchester and Connecticut, said in an interview. “They’re spending more time with their accountants and really understanding how this plays out.”
The reason, according to Bloomberg, is that home buyers have been deterred by the county’s high property taxes. Federal rules approved in December set a $10,000 limit on deductions for state and local taxes, which is nearly half the $17,179 average tax paid by Westchester residents in property taxes last year.
The tax wasn’t passed until December, but details about the proposed cap on the SALT deduction surfaced months earlier. Also, the fact that home prices in the area have been rising much more quickly than incomes could have something to do with it. But even in towns like Scarsdale that are traditionally havens for Wall Streeters and other members of the monied elite saw a significant drop in sales. And according to preliminary data
Even before the tax changes, years of rising values were already making Westchester less affordable, said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel. The median price of homes that sold in the three months through June climbed 5 percent from a year earlier to $525,000, according to the report. Prices have increased in all but three quarters since the beginning of 2013.
The drop in transactions is likely to continue. On June 30, there were 8.8 percent fewer Westchester homes in contract than there were on the same day last year, brokerage Houlihan Lawrence said in its own report. The biggest decline was for homes priced from $1.5 million to $1.99 million. Pending deals in that range fell 17 percent to 94.
In Scarsdale, home to many Wall Street executives, completed sales in the first half of the year were down 20 percent to 88 transactions, Houlihan Lawrence said. The median price there dropped 5 percent to $1.57 million. In nearby Mamaroneck, closings rose 25 percent to 127. The median price of those deals dropped 13 percent to $1.19 million.
While the reasons why cashed strapped millennials aren’t buying are obvious (they don’t have any money), maybe wealthy people who have an understanding of how markets work aren’t buying because they think that they might be able to get a better deal if they wait a year or two. And they might be right, especially if Republicans retain control of Congress in November, which would greatly reduce the likelihood that the Trump tax cuts will be repealed.
- "Thanos Did Nothing Wrong"? 1000s Embrace The Population-Control Philosophy Of Marvel's Most-Twisted Super-Villain
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
“Thanos did nothing wrong” has become one of the most common mantras on the Internet in recent days, and it just sparked one of the biggest events in Reddit history, but most people still don’t understand what all of the commotion is about. So let me try to break it down very simply.
In the most recent Avengers movie, the story centers around a super-villain named Thanos that intends to wipe out half of all life in the universe. He does not want to do this just to be evil, but rather his plan is to get population growth under control so that those that remain will be able to enjoy happy, sustainable lives.
If that sounds uncomfortably close to something that you have heard before, that is because it is. Population control is a major theme on the radical left, and many of them truly believe that humanity’s population must be greatly reduced “to stop global warming” and “to save the planet”. In the film, Thanos truly believes that he is doing the right thing, but since he is the villain everyone in the audience is theoretically supposed to be rooting for him to be defeated. But instead of being universally hated, Thanos has become the big breakout star from this movie. Large numbers of people are insisting that “Thanos did nothing wrong” and are embracing his population control philosophy.
Of course population control is not exactly a new idea. It was one of the main reasons why ancient civilizations conducted human sacrifice rituals, and several centuries ago it was given a more modern spin by Thomas Malthus. So the truth is that the philosophy that Thanos is promoting is simply “repackaged” for a new generation, and this is a point that G. Shane Morris made in an article earlier this year…
“Infinity War” casts its big baddie as a champion of yet another progressive pet cause: Population control. Thanos, who has teased audiences with sinister grins and cryptic statements in years of after-credit scenes, has finally revealed his true motive: He wants to wipe out half the galaxy’s population to make sure the other half has plenty to eat.
We watch during his obligatory villain speech as Thanos explains why he needs the power of the Infinity Stones: to teleport from planet to planet, killing billions in order to defuse the population bomb that desolated his home world. He does so on the assumption that Thomas Malthus first propounded: that each species has limited resources at its disposal, and the only way to keep from exhausting them is to check population growth.
The movie has been out for several months now, but the debate about Thanos has really heated up in recent days. July 9th was one of the biggest days in Reddit history, and it was because of a “mass culling” on the r/ThanosDidNothingWrongsubreddit. This “mass culling” was actually called for by members of the subreddit in order to “honor” Thanos. The following comes from Business Insider…
Like the “Avengers: Infinity War” villain himself, the Thanos subreddit r/ThanosDidNothingWrong sought perfect balance among its more than 700,000 members, up from the 200,000 subscribers it had last week.
The online community began banning over 300,000 of its members at 5:00 PM PDT sharp on Monday, in a purge that was actually planned weeks in advance — a purge that was, indeed, instigated by its own members, who cheered the culling as honoring their hero, Thanos.
Originally, the moderators of the subreddit were hesitant when the idea was first suggested. Back on June 29th, one of them asked, “You seriously want us to ban half of the subreddit?”
The members of the subreddit kept insisting, and the idea quickly became viral. Once word got out that there would actually be a “mass culling”, membership in the subreddit climbed to more than 700,000…
Thus the great project was born. The moderators of r/ThanosDidNothingWrong had to get permission from Reddit admins to go through with the ban, and then they had to automate the process. As word of the upcoming ban spread, hundreds of thousands of Reddit users flocked to join r/ThanosDidNothingWrong just so they’d have a chance to get ousted. By the time ban day rolled around, over 700,000 users had subscribed — making the culling by far the largest “dusting,” or mass ban, in Reddit history.
And this event got so big that even some high profile members of the Avengers movie team got directly involved…
When the process began late Sunday night, it was making headlines. Infinity War directors the Russo brothers even took part in the exercise, with Anthony Russo joining in the sub’s preliminary festivities. The ban process was also live-streamed on Reddit’s official Twitch account — and none other than Thanos himself, an inexplicably shirtless Josh Brolin, was on hand to snap the ban into existence.
I understand that a lot of young people are just having fun with this, but ultimately population control is not something that we ever want to celebrate.
There really are global elitists that consider “human overpopulation” to be a “plague” on the planet that needs to be dealt with. They are truly convinced that climate change is the number one threat that the globe is facing, and they have identified human population growth as the primary driver of climate change.
And so they really do want to reduce the population in order to “save the planet”. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “46 Population Control Quotes That Show How Badly The Elite Want To Wipe Us All Out”.
About 50 years ago, Paul Ehrlich wrote a book entitled “The Population Bomb” in which he breathlessly warned about what would happen during the decades to come if humanity’s population continued to grow.
Well, humanity’s population did continue to grow, and none of his prognostications turned out to be accurate.
But now the same philosophy has been rebranded and repackaged for a new generation, and young people are eating it up.
When a substantial portion of the population decides that the solution to our problems is to get rid of large numbers of people, that sets the stage for mass genocide. We have seen this happen before in human history, and it must not happen again.
- Neocons Panic As Trump-Putin Meeting Could Mark Close Of Syrian Proxy War
When multiple op-ed pieces appear in the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and the CFR-owned Foreign Affairs authored by neocons simultaneously pleading with Trump Don’t Get Out of Syria(!) all within the same week, this is typically an indicator that the president is about to do something good.
Trump is set to meet with Putin one-on-one this coming Monday in Helsinki after a contentious NATO summit and a sufficiently awkward visit with Theresa May, and mainstream pundits’ heads are exploding.
The Post’s Josh Rogin warns, Trump and Putin may be about to make a terrible deal on Syria, and Susan Rice suddenly emerges from obscurity and irrelevance to say in the Times that Trump Must Not Capitulate to Putin while urging the administration not to “prematurely withdraw United States forces [from Syria], thus thus ceding total victory to Russia, Mr. Assad and Iran.” From North Korea to Afghanistan to Syria to Ukraine, Rice advises the typical regime change script of “harsh additional sanctions” anywhere the dictates of Washington are not strictly adhered to.
Similarly, Eli Lake links together the main regime change wars begun under Obama while lamenting their potential winding down as a result of Putin and Trump meeting as indicative of living in “some alternate universe”. “The price of Russian cooperation in Syria cannot be U.S. capitulation on Crimea,” Lake writes, and further calls such a possibility “the most dangerous possible outcome.”
The Kagan-led neocon think tank ISW, meanwhile, is outraged(!) the administration appears to lack “the will to use” America’s military might to counter Assad, Iran, and Russia, saying “the United States should invest now in building leverage for future decisive action.”
And then there’s Senator Lindsey Graham’s meltdown on Twitter this week in reaction to both the Syrian Army victoriously raising the national flag over Daraa and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling President Vladimir Putin during a summit that Israel has no problem with Assad staying, so long as Israel can preserve “freedom of action” if attacked.
In a significant change of posture toward Damascus, Netanyahu told reporters in Moscow, “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights.”
This was enough to send Graham’s head spinning: “Radical Sunni groups will say – correctly – that Assad is a proxy of Iran and the Ayatollah. It means the Syrian war never ends and ISIS comes back,” he said in a strange twist of logic that gives credence to the arguments of terror groups.
Israel’s Haaretz newspaper featured Sen. Graham’s reaction:
‘Without Assad’s blessing, the flags of Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard would not be on Israel’s front door,’ Graham tweets in response to Netanyahu claiming Israel has no problem with Assad.
As Trump readies for Putin summit, saying “He’s not my enemy,” interventionistas are raging:
Senator @LindseyGrahamSC continues his Twitter storm against the Netanyahu-Putin meeting https://t.co/MAjs8VA30Y
— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) July 12, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
#Putin is not our friend nor merely a competitor. Putin is our enemy—not b/c we wish it so, but b/c he has chosen to be. He chose to invade Ukraine & annex Crimea. He chose to help Assad slaughter Syrians. He chose to attack our election & undermine democracies around the world.
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) July 12, 2018
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In the past months there’s been widespread reporting on a “secret” deal brokered between Russia, Israel, and Syria, which reportedly involves the Syrian Army agreeing to keep Iranian forces away from the ongoing successful campaign along the Israeli and Jordanian borders, especially the contested Golan Heights.
Netanyahu now says, fresh off his Moscow visit, that Putin agreed to restrain Iran in Syria, but that ultimately Assad will take back all of Syria. The New York Times reports this hugely significant acknowledgement and surprising change of tune from the Israeli PM:
Israel, he said, did not object to President Bashar al-Assad’s regaining control over all of Syria, a vital Russian objective, and Russia had pushed Iranian and allied Shiite forces “tens of kilometers” away from the Israeli border.
The NYT continues:
But a commitment to keep Iranian forces tens of kilometers from Israel was a far cry from ejecting them completely from Syria, which Mr. Netanyahu has been lobbying Mr. Putin to do. And even that commitment was not confirmed by Russian officials.
…So a willingness to accept Mr. Assad’s resumption of control over all of Syria is no small concession, said Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence who now heads the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
“Nobody can these days destabilize the Assad regime,” he said. “The only one who can do it is Israel. And the Russians know that very well. So to get a commitment from Israel not to destabilize Syria is something that Russia will value very much.”
The neocon pundits’ last hope for military intervention in Syria has remained Netanyahu, and to see him fold must feel like a swift unexpected punch in the stomach, but more crucially the Syrian diplomatic cards have fallen in place just days before Monday’s Trump-Putin meeting.
President Assad has long vowed to liberate “every inch” of sovereign Syrian territory, something which but two years ago appeared impossible, yet which now looks increasingly inevitable. Should the Trump-Putin summit result in a green light that ensures Moscow and Damascus remain in the driver’s seat and set the terms for Syria’s stabilization, we could be witnessing the final diplomatic chapter in this dark seven-year long proxy war.
However, Trump continues to be urged from various corners of the beltway foreign policy establishment to salvage and preserve what he can of the open-ended US troop presence in eastern Syria: the US must “preserve its interests in the conflict, namely… constraining Iranian influence in the country” as one Foreign Policy essay argues.
For months now, Trump has talked of US military withdrawal from the country — which the Pentagon in public statements has put at over some 2000 troops — a proposal which hawks within his administration have pushed back against every time.
And then there’s the clearly observable pattern that seems to repeat whenever the administration announces it is poised to pull out of Syria. Indeed it seems to occur every time the Syrian Army is on a trajectory of overwhelming victory: an ill-timed and strategically nonsensical mass chemical attack on civilians supposedly ordered by Assad — inevitably giving the West an open door for military intervention, new rounds of crippling sanctions, and yet more international media condemnation heaped on Damascus.
Precisely this scenario occurred just days after President Trump declared in the last week of March of this year that he wanted a complete US military pullout from Syria. What then immediately followed was the April 7 “chemical attack” provocation in Douma — just the thing that brought Trump’s planned pullout to a grinding halt, instead resulting tomahawk missiles unleashed on Damascus.
Should Trump and Putin ultimately come to a lasting settlement on the Syria issue which results in US troop withdrawal from Syria, will the international proxy war come to a close?
Or will we witness yet another last minute “mass casualty event” or other other provocation that pulls the US, Israel, and Russia into yet deeper direct military confrontation?
- The Exorbitant Cost Of Getting Ahead In Life
Authored by Michael Scott via SafeHaven.com,
Some 84 percent of Americans claim that a higher education is a very or extremely important factor for getting ahead in life, according to the National Center for public policy and Higher Education.
So, it’s worth the exorbitant cost, but not everyone can pay, and outsized costs in the U.S. are giving much of the rest of the developed world the higher education advantage.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), people with a Bachelor’s Degree earn around 64 percent more per week than those with a high school diploma, and around 40 percent more than those with an Associate’s Degree. In turn, those with an Associate’s degree earn around 17 percent more than those with a high school diploma.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York says that college graduates overall earn 80 percent more than those without a degree.
There’s also job security to consider.
Individuals with college degrees have a lower average unemployment rates than those with only high school educations. Among people aged 25 and over, the lowest unemployment rates occur in those with the highest degrees.
From this perspective, it’s no surprise that students are willing to bite the bullet and take on a ton of debt to finance education.
About three-fourths of students who attend four-year colleges graduate with loan debt. And this number is up from about half of students three decades ago.
The average student loan debt for Class of 2017 graduates was $39,400, up 6 percent from the previous year. Over 44 million Americans now hold over $1.5 trillion in student loan debt, according to Student Loan Hero.
According to College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2017–2018 school year was $34,740 at private colleges, $9,970 for state residents at public colleges, and $25,620 for out-of-state residents attending public universities.
The U.S. is one of the most expensive places to go obtain a higher education, but there are pricier venues, too.
If you want a free higher education, try Europe—specifically Germany and Sweden. Denmark, too, doles out an allowance of about $900 a month to students to cover their living expenses. But don’t try to study in the UK on the cheap. The UK is the most expensive country in Europe, with college tuition coming in at an average of $12,414.
In Australia, graduates don’t pay anything on their loans until they earn about $40,000 a year, and then they only pay between 4 percent and 8 percent of their income, which is automatically deducted from their bank accounts, reducing the chances of default.
For Japan—a country that sees more than half of its population go to college—the highly respected University of Tokyo only costs about $4,700 a year for undergraduates, thanks to government subsidies. The Japanese government spends almost $8,750 a year per student because it sees the massive value in having a highly educated citizenry.
For Americans, while student loans may still be a good investment overall, the idea of taking a lifetime to pay off the debt may become increasingly unattractive. And it’s only going to get worse, according to JPMorgan, which predicts that by 2035 the cost of attending a four-year private college will top $487,000.
- "Dealers Are Taking Control" – Baltimore Murder Rate Soars As Police Ease Up On Stops
When Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at a gathering of police officials back in May that “if you want crime to go up, let the ACLU run the police department,” he may have had a point. While opponents of “aggressive” police tactics like stop and frisk and other “broken windows”-type policing have complain about the injustice faced by minorities who they say are disproportionately and unfairly targeted by police, the city of Baltimore is demonstrating what happens when police dial back stops for minor violations like street-level drug dealing and other “everyday violations.”
According to USA Today, since the death of Freddie Gray and the arrest of several officers who were charged with murder for allegedly playing a role in his death (he died handcuffed in the back of a police van after reportedly breaking his neck) police in Baltimore have “stopped noticing” small crimes and minor violations. The officers who were charged were acquitted, but the incident ended their careers, and the Baltimore Police Department faced a 2016 Department of Justice investigation that found the city’s police routinely violated the constitutional rights of the city’s residents. More than 150 people have been killed in the city already this year, compared with 342 last year, which was the city’s deadliest on record.
Unsurprisingly, shootings soared…
…Leading to a spike in murders that has transformed Baltimore into America’s deadliest city.
Just before a wave of violence turned Baltimore into the nation’s deadliest big city, a curious thing happened to its police force: officers suddenly seemed to stop noticing crime.
Police officers reported seeing fewer drug dealers on street corners. They encountered fewer people who had open arrest warrants.
Police questioned fewer people on the street. They stopped fewer cars.
In the space of just a few days in spring 2015 – as Baltimore faced a wave of rioting after Freddie Gray, a black man, died from injuries he suffered in the back of a police van – officers in nearly every part of the city appeared to turn a blind eye to everyday violations. They still answered calls for help. But the number of potential violations they reported seeing themselves dropped by nearly half. It has largely stayed that way ever since.
“What officers are doing is they’re just driving looking forward. They’ve got horse blinders on,” says Kevin Forrester, a retired Baltimore detective.
The surge of shootings and killings that followed has left Baltimore easily the deadliest large city in the United States. Its murder rate reached an all-time high last year; 342 people were killed. The number of shootings in some neighborhoods has more than tripled. One man was shot to death steps from a police station. Another was killed driving in a funeral procession.
Police records show officers respond to calls as fast as ever, if not more quickly. The only drop has been in what police call “on-views” – when an officer witnesses a potential violation and stops the perpetrator (like when somebody is stopped for speeding). Between 2014 and 2017, the number of suspected narcotics offense stops dropped by 30%, and the number of people reported with outstanding warrants dropped by 50%. But Baltimore Police Commissioner Gary Tuggle, who took command in May, also blamed a shortage of patrol officers
Police officials acknowledge the change. “In all candor, officers are not as aggressive as they once were, pre-2015. It’s just that fact,” says acting Police Commissioner Gary Tuggle, who took command of Baltimore’s police force in May.
Tuggle blames a shortage of patrol officers and the fallout from a blistering 2016 Justice Department investigation that found the city’s police regularly violated residents’ constitutional rights and prompted new limits on how officers there carry out what had once been routine parts of their job. At the same time, he says, police have focused more of their energy on gun crime and less on smaller infractions.
“We don’t want officers going out, grabbing people out of corners, beating them up and putting them in jail,” Tuggle says. “We want officers engaging folks at every level. And if somebody needs to be arrested, arrest them. But we also want officers to be smart about how they do that.”
The change has left a perception among some police officers that people in the city are free to do as they please. And among criminals, says Mahogany Gaines, whose brother, Dontais, was found shot to death inside his apartment in October.
“These people don’t realize that you’re leaving people fatherless and motherless,” Gaines says. “I feel like they think they’re untouchable.”
A pastor in West Baltimore spoke with USA Today about the rise in violence. He described a city where residents are becoming afraid to leave their homes. Criminals have taken over, and crews are setting up drug-dealing operations on corners across the city.
At least 41 people have been shot near his church. He described how a new drug corner recently set up shop on the corner across the street, and nearly got into a gun battle with another crew working nearby.
On a sticky morning in May, the Rev. Rodney Hudson slips on a black “Sermonator” T-shirt and walks down the street from his west Baltimore church, a gray stone edifice two blocks from where police arrested Gray. A few days earlier, a drug crew from another neighborhood set up camp on the corner across the street. Hudson says the dealers nearly got into a gunfight with the crew that usually works across from the elementary school down the block.
Since Gray’s death, at least 41 people have been shot within a short walk of Hudson’s church.
“Drug dealers are taking control of the corners and the police’s hands are tied,” Hudson says. “We have a community that is afraid.”
Two blocks away, Mayor Catherine Pugh and a knot of city officials are under a tent on an empty lot to break ground for a group of new townhouses. Police officers linger on the streets, and a helicopter swirls overhead. But three blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue, drug crews still appear to be at work. Shouts of “hard body” – one of the drug cocktails on offer – ring clearly. Another man shouts a warning as Hudson and a reporter approach.
Drug dealers have worked Baltimore’s street corners for decades. But Hudson says it has been years since he has seen so many young men selling so brazenly in so many places. Dealers, he says, “are taking advantage” of a newly timid police force.
At least 150 people have been killed in Baltimore this year.
To be sure, the investigation did expose some legitimate corruption, including incidences of officers planting drugs and other evidence. Police Commission Darryl De Sousa resigned in May after federal prosecutors charged him with failing to pay his income taxes.
This year, eight officers in an elite anti-gun unit were convicted in a corruption scandal that included robbing drug dealers and carrying out illegal stops and searches. One officer testified that a supervisor told them to carry replica guns they could plant on suspects. Another officer was indicted in January after footage from his body camera showed him acting out finding drugs in an alley. The city’s new police commissioner, Darryl De Sousa, resigned in May after federal prosecutors charged him with failing to pay his income taxes.
But with the wave of protest and anti-police threats, officers absorbed the message that they shouldn’t take unnecessary risks when making stops. And that affect isn’t limited to Baltimore. Nearly three-quarters of the officers who responded to a Pew Research Center survey incidents like the Gray killing had left them less willing to stop and question people who seem suspicious. Others said the incidents had made stopping people harder. Meanwhile, civil rights advocates have accusing police of laying back on enforcement as a means of retaliating.
“What it says is that if you complain about the way the police do our job, maybe we’ll just lay back and not do it as hard,” says Jeffery Robinson, a deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, which had advocated for an overhaul of police agencies in Baltimore and elsewhere. “If it’s true, if that’s what officers are doing, they should be fired.”
Another criminologist pointed out that police are largely doing as the public asked: They’re lessening the racial disparity in the number of people they stop and the number of police-involved shootings and complaints.
“The cops are being less proactive at the same time violence is going up,” says Peter Moskos, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor and former Baltimore officer who reviewed USA TODAY’s data and analysis. “Cops are doing as requested: lessening racial disparity, lessening complaints, lessening police-involved shootings. All those numbers are just great right now, and if those are your metrics of success, we’re winning. The message has clearly gotten out to not commit unnecessary policing.”
[…]
Anthony Barksdale, a retired Baltimore police commander, says the message to officers was unmistakable.
“These guys have family members who tell them ‘Don’t go to work and chase people for a city that doesn’t care about you,'” he says. “If I’m riding down the street and I see an incident, I see it, but you know what? It’s not worth it. That’s what these cops are thinking.”
Of course, this information probably won’t stop the millions of leftists who insist that all police departments are purveyors of “systemic racism” and that “broken windows”-style policing policies – where police in America’s cities are empowered to make more stops, not fewer – inevitably lead to racially motivated stops. Maybe the murder rate will need to move a little higher for them to understand how these policies have been a major contributor to the massive drop in America’s rate of violent crime over the past 25 years. Or maybe, because many of them live in rich, all-white enclaves, the problem of urban crime will never truly register.
- The Media's Brazen Dishonesty About North Korean Nuclear Violations
Authored by Gareth Porter via The American Conservative,
Press irresponsibly relies on single-source report to accuse Kim of breaking an agreement he never made…
In late June and early July, NBC News, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal published stories that appeared at first glance to shed a lurid light on Donald Trump’s flirtation with Kim Jong-un. They contained satellite imagery showing that North Korea was making rapid upgrades to its nuclear weapons complex at Yongbyon and expanding its missile production program just as Trump and Kim were getting chummy at their Singapore summit.
In fact, those media outlets were selling journalistic snake oil. By misrepresenting the diplomatic context of the images they were hyping, the press launched a false narrative around the Trump-Kim summit and the negotiations therein.
The headline of the June 27 NBC News story revealed the network’s political agenda on the Trump-Kim negotiations. “If North Korea is denuclearizing,” it asked, “why is it expanding a nuclear research center?” The piece warned that North Korea “continues to make improvements to a major nuclear facility, raising questions about President Donald Trump’s claim that Kim Jong Un has agreed to disarm, independent experts tell NBC News.”
CNN’s coverage of the same story was even more sensationalist, declaring that there were “troubling signs” that North Korea was making “improvements” to its nuclear facilities, some of which it said had been carried out after the Trump-Kim summit. It pointed to a facility that had produced plutonium in the past and recently undergone an upgrade, despite Kim’s alleged promise to Trump to draw down his nuclear arsenal. CNN commentator Max Boot cleverly spelled out the supposed implication: “If you were about to demolish your house, would you be remodeling the kitchen?”
But in their determination to push hardline opposition to the negotiations, these stories either ignored or sought to discredit the careful caveat accompanying the original source on which they were based – the analysis of satellite images published on the website 38 North on June 21.
The three analysts who had written that the satellite images “indicated that improvements to the infrastructure at North Korea’s Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center are continuing at a rapid pace” also cautioned that this work “should not be seen as having any relationship to North Korea’s pledge to denuclearize.”
If the authors’ point was not clear enough, Joel Wit, the founder of 38 North, who helped negotiate the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea and then worked on its implementation for several years, explained to NBC News:
“What you have is a commitment to denuclearize—we don’t have the deal yet, we just have a general commitment.”
Wit added that he didn’t “find it surprising at all” that work at Yongbyon was continuing.
In a briefing for journalists by telephone on Monday, Wit was even more vigorous in denouncing the stories that had hyped the article on 38 North.
“I really disagree with the media narrative,” Wit said.
“The Singapore summit declaration didn’t mean North Korea would stop its activities in the nuclear and missile area right away.”
He recalled the fact that, during negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviets over arms control, “both sides continued to build weapons until the agreement was completed.”
Determined to salvage its political line on the Trump-Kim talks, NBC News turned to Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, who has insisted all along that North Korea won’t give up its nuclear weapons.
“We have never had a deal,” Lewis said. “The North Koreans never offered to give up their nuclear weapons. Never. Not once.”
Lewis had apparently forgotten that the October 2005 Six Party joint statement included language that the DPRK had “committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons….”
Another witness NBC found to support its view was James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who declared, “If [the North Koreans] were serious about unilaterally disarming, of course they would have stopped work at Yongbyon.” That was true but misleading, because North Korea has always been unambiguously clear that its offer of denuclearization is conditional on reciprocal steps by the United States.
On July 1, a few days after those stories appeared, the Wall Street Journal headlined, “New satellite imagery indicates Pyongyang is pushing ahead with weapons programs even as it pursues dialogue with Washington.” The lead paragraph called it a “major expansion of a key missile-manufacturing plant.”
But the shock effect of the story itself was hardly seismic. It turns out that the images of a North Korean solid-fuel missile manufacturing facility at Hamhung showed that new buildings had been added beginning in the early spring, after Kim Jong-un had called for more production of solid-fuel rocket engines and warhead tips last August. The construction of the exterior of some buildings was completed “around the time” of the Trump-Kim summit meeting, according to the analysts at the James Martin Center of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
So the most Pyongyang could be accused of was going ahead with a previously planned expansion while it was just beginning to hold talks with the United States.
The satellite images were analyzed by Jeffrey Lewis, the director whom had just been quoted by NBC in support of its viewpoint that North Korea had no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons. So it is no surprise that the Martin Center’s David Schmerler, who also participated in the analysis of the images, told the Journal, “The expansion of production infrastructure for North Korea’s solid missile infrastructure probably suggests that Kim Jong Un does not intend to abandon his nuclear and missile programs.”
But when this writer spoke with Schmerler last week, he admitted that the evidence of Kim’s intentions regarding nuclear and missile programs is much less clear. I asked him if he was sure that North Korea would refuse to give up its ICBM program as part of a broader agreement with the Trump administration. “I’m not sure,” Schmerler responded, adding, “They haven’t really said they’re willing to give up ICBM program.” That is true, but they haven’t rejected that possibility either—presumably because the answer will depend on what commitments Trump is willing to make to the DPRK.
These stories of supposed North Korean betrayal by NBC, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal are egregious cases of distorting news by pushing a predetermined policy line. But those news outlets, far from being outliers, are merely reflecting the norms of the entire corporate news system.
The stories of how North Korea is now violating an imaginary pledge by Kim to Trump in Singapore are even more outrageous, because big media had previously peddled the opposite line: that Kim at the Singapore Summit made no firm commitment to give up his nuclear weapons and that the “agreement” in Singapore was the weakest of any thus far.
That claim, which blithely ignored the fundamental distinction between a brief summit meeting statement and past formal agreements with North Korea that took months to reach, was a media maneuver of unparalleled brazenness. And big media have since topped that feat of journalistic legerdemain by claiming that North Korea has demonstrated bad faith by failing to halt all nuclear and missile-related activities.
A media complex so determined to discredit negotiations with North Korea and so unfettered by political-diplomatic reality seriously threatens the ability of the United States to deliver on any agreement with Pyongyang. That means alternative media must make more aggressive efforts to challenge the corporate press’s coverage.
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