Month: December 2018

Following China’s ‘reactions’ to the detention of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, and the ongoing (and escalating) tensions between Washington and Moscow over Crimea among other things, The Guardian reports that Russia has detained a US citizen in Moscow accused of spying.

FSB HQ in Moscow

According to a statement from the FSB security service (Russia’s domestic agency), the American was detained on Friday “while carrying out an act of espionage” and a criminal case has been opened.

“The investigation department of the Federal Security Service of Russia initiated a criminal case against a US citizen under article 276 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The investigation is underway,” the statement continued.

Article 276 is espionage.

The statement identified the American in Russian, using a name that appeared to translate as Paul Whelan. No other details were immediately available.

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow could not immediately be reached for comment.

If found guilty, Whelan faces 10 to 20 years imprisonment, Russia’s state-run news agency TASS reported.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2EXkTbh Tyler Durden

Authored by Martin Sieff via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

It is easy to imagine ridiculous young President Emmanuel Macron of France as his fellow-free trading liberal King Louis XVI. Macron’s extraordinary pretensions to “dignity” and being a “king” far from elevating him have stripped him of all the bogus credibility that the corrupt, servile and stupid mainstream media of Europe and the United States tried to give him.

Far from raising the embattled Fifth Republic to new heights of achievement and success, it is already clear that Le Jeune Macron is destroying it. The contrast with the founder of the Republic, the great and truly regal Charles de Gaulle could not be greater.

The 1.96 meters tall De Gaulle towered over his nation in many ways. Twice he was his country’s literal savior: First as the leader of the Free French Resistance against the Nazis and as President of France from 1944 to 1946. And then returning to power in 1958, De Gaulle saved his nation from disintegration and civil war.

He ended the long ferocious conflict in Algeria, survived at least six assassination plots on his life and rebuilt his nation into the most powerful and prosperous state in Western Europe. He also defied the United States repeatedly, courageously criticized US conduct of the Vietnam War and built a lasting relationship of friendship and understanding with the Soviet Union.

Macron is physically not a small man, standing at 1.78 meters: He only acts and looks that way. Only a year into office, it is now irreversibly clear that young Macron is fated to make a mockery of every great achievement of De Gaulle, Le Vieux, including the Fifth Republic itself.

Ridiculous young Macron has inflicted ruinous new hardships on the long-suffering French people in the name of his global financial masters. He has loyally proved to be Washington’s poodle in petty-minded and destructive attempts to impose yet more economic sanctions on Russia.

Far from withdrawing France from needless ruinous wars in the Arab and Muslim worlds as Le Grand Charles did in Algeria, Macron continues to eagerly support and promote the disastrous Western interventions in Syria and Libya.

The true parallel to Macron is not De Gaulle, who restored the wealth, stability, dignity and pride of his nation but of the hapless, witless, very internationalist and liberal King Louis XVI, last monarch of L’Ancien Regime.

Like Macron Louis was an eager, arrogant and idiotic young technocrat. Like Macron, he was an internationalist revolutionary and a free trader. He supported the American colonies in their successful revolution against the British Empire.

It never occurred to Louis, just as it never occurred to Macron, or his predecessors Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande that supporting revolutionary wars thousands of miles away could ever come back to haunt them at home. But that is exactly what happened. The collapse of ordered societies in Syria and Libya unleashed of millions of immigrants into France and other European nations with dire social consequences.

Louis suffered “blowback” too. American revolutionary Benjamin Franklin set up underground societies in France that within a decade toppled the most powerful kingdom in Europe.

Far from being the reactionary he has been caricatured as for more than 200 years, King Louis was one of the leading fashionable liberals and technocrats of his time. He especially revered English free-market economist Adam Smith, whose book “The Wealth of Nations” was published in 1776 (the same year as the American Revolution). So only a decade later, Louis fatefully signed his own 1786 Eden Free Trade Treaty with neighboring Britain.

As I noted in my own 2012 economic history “That Should Still Be Us”, the treaty proved to be a catastrophe: Cheap industrialized goods from the more advanced British economy flooded into France while the British cannily retained barriers of their own against French agricultural and other exports.

The French economy collapsed. Millions of people were thrown out of work. They and their families starved. Within three years the Great Revolution had exploded and the monarchy was toppled.

Louis, like Macron today, was convinced his advanced economic theories were more important than petty human suffering. It took the French Revolution and the loss, first of his crown and then of his own head to teach him otherwise.

Like Louis, Macron has shown no understanding or sympathy for the sufferings of ordinary people crushed beneath his absurd, unnecessary policies. Like Louis, his mask of liberalism and civilized compassion vanished as soon as his own people dared to disagree with him. Like Louis his only answer now is repression. Like Louis, he does not have a clue.

The Yellow Vest protestors are not going away. The French people are heartedly sick and tired of the 50- percent real unemployment, wide open immigration borders, slashed welfare programs and breakdown of law and order that Macron and the European Union elite has foisted on them., The Latest French Revolution is not over: it is only beginning.

Macron has ignored the ominous lessons of history. Now he is doomed to repeat them.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2Qe1i8S Tyler Durden

EU Parliament has progressed down the wormhole of diversity and emerged with a new mandate; MEPs are now encouraged to use gender-neutral language so as not to offend esteemed non-male colleagues, as reported by The Telegraph. 

According to a guidebook sent to members of parliament, words such as “mankind” and “manpower” are to be replaced with gender-neutral terms such as “humanity” and “staff.”

Officials and MEPs in the parliament, which has seats in Brussels and Strasbourg, have been sent a guidebook on using gender-neutral language in communications, EU legislation and interpretation. It calls on them to avoid the “generic use of man”.  

“Gender-neutral or gender-inclusive language is more than a matter of political correctness,” the guidebook reads, “Language powerfully reflects and influences attitudes, behaviour and perceptions.”

“Political leaders” should be preferred to “statesmen” and items should be called “artificial” or “synthetic” rather than “man-made”. –Telegraph

The term “businessman” or “businesswoman” are now out, according to the guidelines – which recommends “businessperson.” 

The guidebook notes that while the new language isn’t “binding,” it is recommended. 

“The use in many languages of the word ‘man’ in a wide range of idiomatic expressions which refer to both men and women, such as manpower, layman, man-made, statesmen, committee of wise men, should be discouraged,” reads the pamphlet. 

“With increased awareness, such expressions can usually be made gender-neutral.” 

The parliament’s secretariat described the guidebook’s aim as promoting non-sexist, inclusive and fair language and “aims to avoid phrasings that could be seen as conveying prejudice, discrimination, degrading remarks or implying that a certain gender or social gender represents the norm”. –Telegraph

Lee Rotherham of the Red Cell think tank sums it up: “We should expect as much from an organisation that is so nervous about offending people it puts non-existent bridges on its bank notes,” referring to how euro notes include fake architecture to avoid accusations of favoritism. 

Last year European Parliament published a similar pamphlet to help MEPs avoid accusations of sexual harassment – which recommended avoiding pinching or rubbing up against staff.

What’s wrong with these people?

via RSS http://bit.ly/2F1bKPC Tyler Durden

Submitted by Uzay Bulut

• American Pastor Andrew Brunson and American-Canadian evangelist David Byle are among many Christian clerics who have fallen victim to Turkey’s aversion to Christianity. According to Claire Evans, regional manager of the organization International Christian Concern, “Turkey is making it increasingly clear that there is no room for Christianity, even though the constitution states otherwise.”

• Today, only around 0.2% of Turkey’s population of nearly 80 million is Christian. The 1913-1923 Christian genocide across Ottoman Turkey and the 1955 anti-Greek pogrom in Istanbul are some of the most important events that largely led to the destruction of the country’s ancient Christian community. Yet, still today in Turkey, Christian missionaries and citizens continue to be oppressed.

• “One issue that differentiates Turkey from the rest of the world is that our national identity is primarily shaped by religious identity. What makes a Turk a Turk is not so much due to ethnicity, or the language people speak, but is primarily about being Muslim… A large majority of Turkish people think there is nothing in ‎their history that they should be ashamed of. [They] don’t feel close to Europe or to the Middle East; they basically feel close to only themselves… one striking fact is that we [asked] if everybody would be a Turk, would the world be a better place, and Turks gave a very high rating. No self-criticism whatsoever.” — Professor Ali Çarkoğlu of Koç University, who conducted a survey on nationalism with Professor Ersin Kalaycıoğlu of Sabancı University.

The day after American pastor Andrew Brunson was released from Turkish prison, another Christian who had been living for nearly two decades in the country was detained by Turkish authorities, and told that he had two weeks to leave the country — without his wife and three children. The American-Canadian evangelist, David Byle, not only suffered several detentions and interrogations over the years, but he had been targeted for deportation on three occasions. Each time, he was saved by court rulings. This time, however, he was unable to prevent banishment, and left the country after two days in a detention center.

When he tried to return to his family in Turkey on November 20, he was denied re-entry. According to Claire Evans, regional manager of the organization International Christian Concern:

“Turkey is making it increasingly clear that there is no room for Christianity, even though the constitution states otherwise. It is no coincidence that Turkey decided to initiate this process the day after Brunson’s release from prison and that, in doing so, the authorities ignored a court order. We must keep the Byle family in our prayers during this period of difficult separation.”

Brunson and Byle are among many Christian clerics who have fallen victim to Turkey’s aversion to Christianity. In its annual Human Rights Violations Reports, published since 2009, Turkey’s Association of Protestant Churches details Turkey’s systematic discrimination against Protestants, including verbal and physical attacks; nor does the Turkish government recognize the Protestant community as a “legal entity,” denying it the right to freely establish and maintain places of worship.

Turkey’s Protestants cannot open their own schools or train their own clerics, forcing them to rely on support of foreign church leaders. Still, several foreign religious workers and church members have been denied entry into Turkey, refused residence permits or deported.

Although missionary activities are not illegal according to the Turkish criminal code, both foreign pastors and Turkish citizens who convert to Christianity nevertheless are treated as pariahs by authorities and much of the public. It is no wonder that this is the case, given the years of anti-Christian “reports” by state institutions that shape government policy.

For example:

• In 2001, after receiving a report from Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT), the National Security Council (MGK) declared Christian missionary activities a “security threat” and stated that “required precautions should be taken against [their] divisive and destructive activities.”

• In 2004, the Ankara Chamber of Commerce (ATO) issued a report claiming that “missionary activities provoke ethnic and religious separationist aspirations and target the unitary structure of the state.”

• In 2005, State Minister Mehmet Aydın said: “We think that [Christian] missionary activities aim to destroy the historical, religious, national and cultural unity… it is seen as an extremely planned movement with political goals.”

• In 2006, the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) published in a monthly journal a report referring to Christian missionaries as a “threat” and emphasized that legal regulations needed to be made to prevent their activities. That same year, Ali Bardakoğlu, then-head of Diyanet (the government-funded Directorate of Religious Affairs), said in televised comments that it is “Diyanet’s duty to warn the people about missionaries and other movements that threaten society.”

• In 2007, Niyazi Güney, a Justice Ministry official, said that “missionaries are even more dangerous than terrorist organizations.”

Such public denunciations of Christian missionaries have had concrete and devastating consequences.

In 2006, for instance, a Protestant church leader named Kamil Kıroğlu, a Muslim convert to Christianity, was beaten unconscious by five men, one of whom shouted, “Deny Jesus or I will kill you now,” and another yelled, “We don’t want Christians in this country!”

Also in 2006, Father Andrea Santoro, a 61-year-old Roman Catholic priest, was murdered while praying in the Santa Maria Church in Trabzon. Five months later, a 74-year-old priest, Father Pierre François René Brunissen, was stabbed and wounded in Samsun. The perpetrator said that he had committed the act against the priest to protest “his missionary activities.”

In April 2007, three Christians were tortured to death in the Zirve Bible Publishing House massacre. In November of the same year, an Assyrian priest, Edip Daniel Savcı, was kidnapped. One month later, a Catholic priest, Adriano Franchini, was stabbed and wounded during a Sunday church service. The priest reportedly had been “accused of missionary activities” by some websites.

In June 2010, Bishop Luigi Padovese, Apostolic Vicar of Anatolia, was murdered by his driver, who shouted, “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest”) as he slit the priest’s throat. At his trial, the murderer said that the bishop was a “false messiah,” then twice in the courtroom he loudly recited the adhan (Islamic call to prayer).

Despite its current tiny and disintegrating presence in Turkey, Christianity has a long history in Asia Minor (part of contemporary Turkey), the birthplace of numerous apostles and saints, among them Paul, Luke, Ephrem, Polycarp, Timothy, Nicholas and Ignatius. Many events recorded in the Bible took place in that area. The indigenous peoples of the land — Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks — are among the first nations to embrace the Christian faith.

The first seven Ecumenical Councils were also held in the area that today is Turkey. It was in Antioch (Antakya) where the followers of Jesus were called “Christians” for the first time in history and where St. Peter established one of the earliest churches. Edessa (Urfa in southeast Turkey) was an early center of the Assyrian (Syriac) Orthodox Church. The ancient Greek city of Byzantium (a.k.a. Constantinople — the current Istanbul) was a hub of Christianity and the Hagia Sophia, built there in the 6th century, was the largest church in the world — until Ottoman Turks invaded the city in 1453 and converted the church into a mosque. Since then, Christians in the region have been under Muslim domination.

Today, only around 0.2% of Turkey’s population of nearly 80 million is Christian. The 1913-1923 Christian genocide across Ottoman Turkey and the 1955 anti-Greek pogrom in Istanbul are some of the most important events that largely led to the destruction of the country’s ancient Christian community. Yet, still today — even after Turkey joined the Council of Europe in 1949 and NATO in 1952 — Christian missionaries and citizens continue to be oppressed in Turkey.

There seem to be two reasons for this. The first has to do with Islam’s view of kafirs (“infidels”). As Dr. Bill Warner, director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam (CSPI), explains:

“The Koranic doctrine about kafirs says they are hated and are Satan’s friends. Kafirs can be robbed, killed, tortured, raped, mocked, cursed, condemned and plotted against.”

Warner also describes the destruction of Greek Christian civilization in Anatolia:

“[T]he process of annihilation took centuries. Some people think that when Islam invaded, the Kafirs had the choice of conversion or death. No, absolutely not. Sharia law was put into place and the Christian dhimmis continued to have their ‘protected’ status as People of the Book who lived under the Sharia law. The dhimmi paid heavy taxes, could not testify in court, hold a position of authority over Muslims and was humiliated by social rules. A dhimmi had to step aside for the Muslim, offer him his seat, could not carry a weapon and defer to a Muslim in every way. In all matters of society the dhimmi had to yield to the Muslim. Over the centuries, the degradation, lack of rights and the dhimmi tax caused the Christian to convert. It is the Sharia that destroys the dhimmis.”

Centuries later — in spite of the fact that the Turkish constitution is not based on Sharia law — the thinking and behavior of most Turks are still largely Islamic. According to Professor Ali Çarkoğlu of Koç University, who conducted a survey on nationalism with Professor Ersin Kalaycıoğlu of Sabancı University:

“One issue that differentiates Turkey from the rest of the world is that our national identity is primarily shaped by religious identity. What makes a Turk a Turk is not so much due to ethnicity, or the language people speak, but is primarily about being Muslim… A large majority of Turkish people think there is nothing in ‎their history that they should be ashamed of. [They] don’t feel close to Europe or to the Middle East; they basically feel close to only themselves. This global identity is something strange to Turkish mind. Turks are Turks and one striking fact is that we [asked] if everybody would be a Turk, would the world be a better place, and Turks gave a very high rating. No self-criticism whatsoever.”

The other reason for Christian persecution in Turkey appears to be a widespread fear — bordering on paranoia — that Christians aim, through proselytizing, to take back the lands of Turkey that they used to possess before the Turkish conquest. A 2001 report by the National Intelligence Organization (MIT), for instance, claims that “missionaries refer to Pontos [an ancient Greek land] in the Black Sea area, Yazidism, the Chaldean [church] and Christian Kurds in southeast Turkey, Armenians in eastern Turkey and the ancient Christian lands in the Aegean region and in Istanbul to impress people and win them over.”

In addition, the 2004 Turkish army report alleges that 10% of the entire population of Turkey will be Christian by the year 2020.

Ironically, before the 1913-1923 Christian genocide, the population of the territory that is now Turkey was about 14 million, approximately one third (4.5 million) of which was Christian. The genocide largely emptied the Ottoman Empire and current Turkey of its Christian population, creating an almost entirely Muslim country.

Despite this criminal history, many Turks still target Christians unapologetically. Many public figures — including politicians, academics, police and labor unions — demonize missionaries, accusing them of engaging in “separatist,” “menacing,” “aggressive,” “destructive” and “terrorist” activities.

These people seem to be engaging in projection, as it is Islamic jihadists who have violently invaded and taken over foreign lands and turned non-Muslims into slaves or second-class subjects of their empire — something that many Turks proudly endorse and glorify in their own history. The official website of the Turkish Armed Forces, for instance, proudly dates the establishment of the Turkish military to “209 BC, during the Great Hun Empire,” whose rulers and soldiers, historian Joshua J. Mark writes, “brought death and devastation wherever they went,” including Europe. The Turkish army, a member of NATO, also boasts about Turks having “subjugated and dominated numerous peoples, nations, and states over a wide-ranging geography extending from Asia to Europe, and Africa.”

Put in this context, from Turkey’s point of view, the persecution of pastors Brunson and Byle makes perfect sense.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2GJbIO6 Tyler Durden

As the Yellow Vest demonstrations lose steam as the movement enters its seventh week, French President Emmanuel Macron is offering still more concessions to the demonstrators as he attempts to revive his moribund approval rating, which has sunk to just above 20%.

After his government promised tax cuts that will blow out the French budget deficit and urged French companies to pay year-end bonuses to their employees, effectively a call to bribe them into calming down, Macron said that he’s planning to crack down on executives who have avoided paying taxes in France. Extra scrutiny will be applied to executives of companies of which the French government owns a stake.

The French government is scrutinizing the tax situation of business leaders and will take measures to force them to pay their taxes in France if necessary, Budget Minister Gerald Darmanin told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper. Pre

“Heads of listed businesses or businesses in which the state has a stake must absolutely be French tax residents,” Darmanin said in the interview.

According to Bloomberg,  the decision is Macron’s latest attempt to quell the Yellow Vests demonstrators’ anger, more than one month after he abandoned his plans to hike gas taxes, a move he tried to spin as a concession to environmentalists (who were subsequently angered by his decision to back down).

But the people of France saw these proposed tax hikes as just another sign that Macron was placing a disproportionate share of the French state’s tax burden on the common people, and allowing the wealthy to walk free (after taking office, he scrapped a wealth tax in a move that was seen as a betrayal by many of those who voted for him).

After tax cuts take effect in the new year, Macron has also promised a dialogue about inequality and the high cost of living in France.

France’s budget minister said efforts to make executives pay tax in France should encourage more “civic” behavior. However, ramping up taxes on the wealthy might be more difficult than the French government is making it believe (which is one reason Macron has resisted reimposing the wealth tax). 

But making all executives pay tax in France will not be simple as it could require renegotiating tax conventions.

“It would take years and we aren’t necessarily in a position of force to impose our views,” Olivier Grenon-Andrieu, head of wealth advisory firm Equance, told Le Journal du Dimanche.

Still, whether any of this will help boost Macron’s popularity remains to be seen: So far, his approval rating has only continued to sag, offering an opening to the nationalists whom he defeated during his presidential victory.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2EY1Iy2 Tyler Durden

Authored by Andrew Sullivan via New York Mag’s Intelligencer,

The question before us is a relatively simple one: What would be the criteria for removing our remaining troops from the Iraqi, Syrian, and more general Middle Eastern conflicts? Or, for that matter, from Afghanistan, where we have been trapped for more than 17 long years of still open-ended occupation?

If the answer to that question is that only when each of these countries is a healthy pro-American democracy, and Islamist terrorism has ceased to be an “enduring” threat to the West, then the answer, as the old Bob Mankoff joke has it, is “How about never — is never good for you?”

Or consider what a shocked Lieutenant General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. of the Marines, the incoming commander of Central Command opined after hearing the news of Trump’s withdrawal of 7,000 troops from Afghanistan yesterday:

“If we left precipitously right now, I do not believe [the Afghan forces] would be able to successfully defend their country. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. I think that one of the things that would actually provide the most damage to them would be if we put a timeline on it and we said we were going out at a certain point in time.”

Get that? After 17 years, we’ve gotten nowhere, like every single occupier before us. But for that reason, we have to stay. These commanders have been singing this tune year after year for 17 years of occupation, and secretaries of Defense have kept agreeing with them. Trump gave them one last surge of troops — violating his own campaign promise — and we got nowhere one more time. It is getting close to insane.

Neoconservatism, it seems, never dies. It just mutates constantly to find new ways to intervene, to perpetuate forever wars, to send more young Americans to die in countries that don’t want them amid populations that try to kill them. If you want the most recent proof of that, look at Yemen, where the Saudi policy of mass civilian deaths in a Sunni war on Shiites is backed by American arms and U.S. It’s also backed by American troops on the ground — in a secret war conducted by Green Berets that was concealed from Congress. There is no conceivable threat to the U.S. from the Houthi rebels in Yemen; and there was no prior congressional approval. Did you even know we had ground troops deployed there?

The same for liberal internationalism, which also never seems to die, however many catastrophes it spawns. There’s always an impending “massacre” somewhere to justify intervention, which is why we have been dutifully told that withdrawing from Syria would lead to a “slaughter” of the Kurds. Remember the massacre that gave Hillary Clinton a chance to launch another Middle Eastern war in Libya? How many more innocents were slaughtered after we toppled Qaddafi than those in danger before? And all because Clinton refused to learn a single thing from Iraq. (If Clinton had actually won in 2016, we would probably have far more troops occupying Syria today, and be digging in for the long haul, and we’d probably have even more troops in yet another doomed surge in Afghanistan. That goes some way to explaining why Clinton has a massive 31/62 negative approval rating in the latest, Democrat-friendly Quinnipiac poll, much worse than even Trump.)

So it was not surprising that the usual suspects — the people who brought you the Iraq War — blanketed the mainstream media these past couple of days with the usual threats and bluffs and bluster, and that the mainstream media amplified their message. Jake Tapper reported yesterday that “senior officials across the administration agree that the president’s decision-by-tweet will recklessly put American and allied lives in danger around the world, take the pressure off of ISIS allowing them to reconstitute, and hand a strategic victory to our Syrian, Iranian, and Russian adversaries … It’s a mistake of colossal proportions and the president fails to see how it will endanger our country.”

Sorry, but I also fail to see how it will endanger the United States. I’ve heard these arguments so many times before — and I used them myself, to my eternal shame, before the Iraq catastrophe. But unlike most of the authors of that catastrophe, I learned my lesson. I simply do not believe that the West has the knowledge, the will, or the ability to shape the extremely complicated and endlessly vicious politics of the Middle East. And I defy anyone to show otherwise. It’s an unwinnable game of whack-a-mole. If we haven’t learned that by now, after spending $6 trillion so far in this forever war on terror, and wreaking chaos and havoc across the region, we never will. Of course, there is a moral case for not destroying a country and then walking away. But ending a conflict that began in 2003? Isn’t 15 yearsenough? That’s three times as long as the war against Hitler.

And what if the Syrian nightmare does become owned by Russia? Getting another imperial power to live with that albatross seems to me rather shrewd, does it not? (I’d be happy to see Russian troops reoccupy Afghanistan for that matter. An occupation of that imperial graveyard might do to Putin’s regime what it did to the Soviet Union.) And why, oh why, do we care if Iran wants to champion Shiite forces in Syria and Iraq? The U.S. has no national interest in the outcome of a Sunni-Shiite war, as long as neither side wins. We did very well by staying out of the Iran-Iraq war all those years ago, did we not? And when we did get involved, via Iran-Contra, it was a disaster.

As for Israel — which is, of course, the real motivation for most neoconservative dreams of controlling the Middle East — it can surely defend itself at this point. Israel has massive military, technological, intelligence, and economic advantages over its neighbors, and, unlike Iran, also has nuclear weapons, refuses to admit it, and will not sign (again unlike Iran) the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. And the Israelis need U.S. troops to occupy the Middle East permanently as well? Why? It’s high time the U.S. called their bluff.

But Washington never learns this lesson, cannot relinquish the imperial temptation, even as it has bankrupted us, killed and maimed thousands of young Americans, and turned us into a country that commits war crimes. If you want to understand why we have a resurgence of populism and why a patently unfit person like Trump became president, it’s because most Americans know when their government refuses to do what its people want.

And it’s worth pointing out that in the last three consecutive presidential elections, the winners explicitly vowed to get us out of Iraq and/or Afghanistan — let alone Syria — and defeated their interventionist opponents. Obama was elected and reelected to end the Iraq occupation, and was then sucked back in by the exact same arguments we are hearing today. Trump was even more adamant in ending imperial overreach, but after two years, guess what? We are still in Syria and we have more troops in Afghanistan (and are currently conducting an air campaign there as ferocious as any in the past) and we have — more than ever before — jumped into the eternal Sunni-Shiite war by supporting the Saudi royal dictatorship. In the Syrian case, there is no constitutional defense at all: no congressional authorization whatever. And if there had been a congressional vote to start a new war in Syria, does anyone believe it would have passed?

But what’s astonishing this time is how the Democrats and much of the liberal Establishment now supports an unending occupation of yet another Middle Eastern country. David Sanger’s New York Times “analysis” is a perfect distillation of such thinking. It contains not a sentence about the costs of long-term occupation of the Middle East or the endless failures in Afghanistan. It reads as if the Iraq War never happened. It even regards non-interventionism as “a contrarian’s view of American military power.” That’s how impenetrable the Establishment bubble is! Then Sanger actually repackages the George W. Bush doctrine that “we fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here,” as if it were the key lessoned learned from the Iraq War! Here’s Sanger’s actual paraphrase:

“deployed forces are key to stopping terrorists before they reach American shores.”

Just let that sink in.

According to the New York Times, the lesson of the Iraq War is that we need to intervene more in the Middle East, not less. Seriously.

The Syrian occupation is not a minor thing. The Washington Post reported a week ago, long before Trump’s tweet, that “US troops will now stay in Syria indefinitely, controlling a third of the country, and facing peril on many fronts.” A third of an entire country! How many Americans knew or know this? Very, very few. I didn’t. And this was not designed to fight ISIS. It was explicitly defended as part of a long-term pushback on Iranian and Russian influence in the region. It seems to me that this kind of shift in rationale — again with no congressional approval — is almost a definition of mission creep. We should not be asking why Trump has decided to nip this in the bud, following his clear and popular mandate to get us out of the region. We should be asking how on earth did the Establishment find a way to occupy yet another Middle Eastern country without any democratic buy-in at all. At least there was a congressional debate before the Iraq War and a robust public discussion. This time, they have launched a new war, occupied a third of another country, changed the rationale so they stay for ever, and tried to hide it!

The resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is the icing on this blood-drenched cake. Yes, Mattis was a vital obstacle to some of Trump’s criminal and impulsive tendencies. In his resignation letter, he cited the need to sustain alliances across the world, and the need to constrain Russia. Fair enough. But it is telling, is it not, that he didn’t resign when Trump told NATO that Article 5 was effectively void; he didn’t resign when Trump launched his bizarre love-in with Kim Jong-un; he didn’t quit after the disastrous G7 meeting this year, or after the staggering Helsinki press conference; he didn’t quit when Trump openly tried to break up the European Union; he didn’t quit when Trump moved to change his plans on transgender troops by fiat; he didn’t resign when his Afghan surge failed yet again; and he didn’t resign when Trump ordered 5,000 troops to the Mexican border as a political stunt. He quit when he was told to end a failing, forever war and an indefinite occupation of yet another country. That’s the red line: any retrenchment of the ever-expanding American empire.

Yes, Trump’s foreign policy is a chaotic, incoherent, dangerous mess. Yes, he is clearly and manifestly unfit for office, and should have been removed a long time ago. Charting a new course in a war should never be done without proper consultation with allies and the top brass. (Trump did, of course, consult with Netanyahu and Erdogan.) U.S. troops, fighting these unwinnable wars, deserve to hear of a change in course from their commanders, not Twitter. There are always debates to be had over the specific timing and pace of withdrawal. I’m alarmed by the absence of any adviser who doesn’t want a war with Iran, and predicted that at some point, the wannabe tyrant would throw all the sane people out of the nest. There is no defense of this deranged form of decision-making from a clearly psychologically disturbed person.

But I find Trump’s persistence in following his electoral mandate against so much Establishment pressure in this particular respect to be rather admirable. There comes a point when a president has to say no to the neo-imperial blob, to cut bait in wars that have become ends in themselves, generating the very problems they were launched to resolve. There is never a good time to do this. There wasn’t in Vietnam and there isn’t in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Sometimes, you just have to do it. I wish Obama had been able to. But he got trapped in agonizing rationalizations of the indefensible, paid too much respect to the architects of failure (not to speak of torture), and thereby failed after eight long years to fulfill his core campaign promise to disengage from these quagmires. Maybe it takes an impulsive, dangerous nutjob like Trump to finally do it, to end the wars the American people want to end. And that, I think, is less an indictment of him than of those who let this madness go on for so long.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2AlfFmA Tyler Durden

The cryptocurrency mania that drove the price of a bitcoin to $20,000 last year has come and gone, leaving a legion of deeply disappointed marginal buyers in its wake. But anybody who still believes in the long-term promise of crypto – and is looking to pick up some coins on the cheap – should try their luck at a crypto puzzle.

What’s a crypto puzzle? Put simply, it’s a burgeoning genre of artwork where viewers race against one another to solve a puzzle embedded in the picture. Whoever wins is rewarded with a purse of crypto.

Though the phenomenon first emerged in 2014, when @coin_artist, the pseudonym of Marguerite deCourcelle, created Dark Wallet Puzzle, the first known cryptopuzzle, Business Week claimed in a recent feature about the trend that cryptopuzzles are still thriving – with buyers even paying hefty sums for pieces even after they have been solved.

Marguerite deCourcelle lives at the peculiar intersection of Bitcoin and art. Under the pseudonym @coin_artist, she’s credited with inventing the crypto-art puzzle, a genre of images hiding complicated ciphers that reward the first solver with a walletful of virtual currency. The most famous of these is an @coin_artist oil pastel from 2015 called Torched H34R7S, the final work in a series known as The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto. Depicting a ­turtledove, chess pieces, and a ­phoenix surrounded by flames, the painting incorporates symbolic references to Bitcoin’s creator, as well as to Shakespeare and deCourcelle’s personal life. An anonymous person solved the riddle in 2018, unlocking 5 Bitcoins, at the time worth about $50,000.

DeCourcelle started the Bitcoin-art-puzzle phenomenon in 2014 with Dark Wallet Puzzle, a painting of two leading crypto anarchists that hides a key. It led to a 3.4-Bitcoin reward. “I created it after realizing that without a third party litigating how money moves, that money could be ‘pulled out’ of anything,” she says.

The result is a strange amalgam of the crypto and art-world universes, as crypto puzzles are beginning to “enter the mainstream through galleries, museums, international exhibitions, and even video games.” In a way, winning crypto purses from solving these visual puzzles isn’t that much different than the process of crypto mining – the only difference is that humans are solving the puzzles and not computers.

The Whitney Museum of American Art is planning to display its first crypto puzzle next spring. Until recently, most hidden-crypto-key artworks had been known only to nerdy collectors, their images circulated on websites such as Reddit and BitcoinTalk. Now they’re starting to enter the mainstream through galleries, museums, international exhibitions, and even video games. Many of the puzzles are also getting a bit easier to solve, giving more people a chance to crack the code and claim the coins. Some collectors are buying the art even after the puzzle has been solved and the ­digital currency extracted.

This spring artist Andy Bauch showcased “New Money,” a collection of mosaics, at the Castelli Art Space in Los Angeles. The patterns in the pieces, which were made of thousands of Lego blocks and included a 4-by-9-foot horizontal triptych, contained clues to troves of Bitcoin and other ­cryptocurrencies. “How seemingly arbitrary art prices are, and seeing crypto prices fluctuating wildly, I was curious,” Bauch says. “Will the ­cryptocurrency I put in this art appreciate? Will the art itself appreciate regardless of the cryptocurrency?” Three of his works have sold – one of them for $14,000 – though the virtual coins hidden within one had already been taken before the show began. Per the unspoken rules of the ­crypto-art crowd, Bauch had posted photos of the works online, where anyone could view them and try to ­decipher their riddles.

The pieces are also getting some high-­profile attention from the art world. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York plans to show a 16-millimeter film by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy that offers clues to a Bitcoin address. The first solver will be named as one of the official donors of the piece, a distinction that can be resold or traded. At Bitcoin Art (r)evolution in Paris this fall, some 1,000 visitors in the course of a week viewed 40 works from @coin_artist and others, organizer Pascal Boyart says. He plans to embed crypto-art puzzles in his murals in the city’s streets.

As the genre gains prominence in the mainstream art world, DeCourcelle is finding new ways to monetize the concept, including digital puzzles that resemble video games and selling pieces to collectors who are looking to own a piece of crypto history.

DeCourcelle, who has an art degree from Eastern Oregon University, made the final piece of The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto series when she found herself suddenly single and parenting two small children, living in a rented room at a friend’s house with no steady means of support. She spent four months working at night, during her boys’ naptimes, and between freelance projects to finish the painting, for which she’d already pledged 3.5 of her own Bitcoins in prize money. She survived in the meantime by selling the original Dark Wallet Puzzle painting for 10 Bitcoins, or about $3,000 at the time.

“I just wanted a piece of that history,” says buyer Brooke Royse-Mallers, a Bitcoin investor and avid crypto-puzzle-solver. “The history of Bitcoin’s evolution and my evolution with it, I guess. That painting helped me learn more about the technology without being a coder.”

Though most crypto puzzles aren’t worth much, DeCourcelle says she’s been offered as much as $1 million for her work over the years. That should give remaining crypto entrepreneurs hope: If they’re dissatisfied with the retail price, they can try packaging it with a visual puzzle to boost the price.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2SodPZe Tyler Durden

A Swiss national who follows an “extremist ideology” has been arrested in connection with the murder of two Scandinavian women on Morocco – one of whom was beheaded in a graphic film. 

The arrested individual is also suspected of “involvement in recruiting Moroccan and sub-Saharan nationals to carry out terrorist plots in Morocco against foreign targets and security forces in order to take hold of their service weapons,” according to the Central Bureau for Judicial Investigations (BCIJ), adding that the man also held a Spanish nationality along with residency in Morocco.

Maren Ueland, 28, of Norway and Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, of Denmark were murdered while backpacking in the High Atlas mountains of Morocco. Both girls were stabbed multiple times, while one of them was beheaded on video. 

Nineteen other men are under arrest in connection with the case, including four primary suspects who can be heard pledging allegiance to the Islamic State and its leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. That said, police and domestic intelligence spokesman Boubker Sbik has described the men as “lone wolves,” and that “the crime was not coordinated with Islamic State.” 

As we reported on Friday, the men gloated over the graphic murders, while images of the killing were posted to the Facebook page of Ueland’s mother, and the video was sent via Private Message to Ms. Jesperson’s friends, according to the Daily Mail. 

The clip, in which a suspected ISIS terrorist shouts ‘it’s Allah’s will‘, was also sent to friends of Ms Jespersen via ‘private messenger’, it has been claimed.

It has since been revealed that horrific images of the slain tourists have been posted on the Facebook page of Ms Ueland’s mother Irene. Some Moroccans bizarrely posted the images in a misguided bid to express sympathy along with calls for the killers to be executed. 

Earlier, it was claimed that footage itself had been sent to friends of Ms Jespersen. While it is not clear exactly who sent them the footage, there will be strong suspicions it would have been from warped ISIS sympathisers. –Daily Mail

Jespersen and Ueland had been studying outdoor activities at the University of Southeastern Norway and had taken a month-long holiday in Morocco on December 9. They traveled to North Africa’s highest peak, Mount Toubkal, where they camped until they encountered the killers. Both of their bodies were found in their tent, while the graphic beheading video quickly went viral. 

In the aftermath of the slayings, Swedish state broadcaster SVT outraged viewers after they ran an article claiming that the gruesome ISIS-inspired murder of two Scandinavian girls in Morocco “had nothing to do with Islam,” before warning Swedes that sharing the beheading video could result in up to four years of imprisonment. 

via RSS http://bit.ly/2RjWvav Tyler Durden

Submitted by Amir Taheri of the Gatestone Institute

As the year 2018 draws to a close, what are the trends that it highlighted in political life?

The first trend represents a growing global disaffection with international organizations to the benefit of the traditional nation-state. Supporters of the status quo regard that trend as an upsurge of populism and judge it as a setback for human progress whatever that means.

Today it is not the United Nations alone that is reduced to a backseat driver on key issues of international life. Its many tentacles, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, too, have been reduced to a shadow of their past glory. In the 1990s, the two outfits held sway on the economies of more than 80 countries across the globe with a mixture of ideology and credit injection. Today, however, they are reduced to cheer-leading or name-calling from the ringside.

The European Union, too, is clearly on the decline. Despite Pollyannish talk of creating a European army and closer ties among member states, the EU has lost much of its original appeal and faces fissiparous challenges of which the so-called Brexit is one early example. I believe that the only way for the EU to survive, let alone prosper, is to recast itself as a club of nation-states rather than a substitute for them.

Less than a decade ago, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the German Pope Benedict XVI claimed that the nation-state was dead and that in Europe at least, the way to salvation was a revival of Christianity as a cultural bond if not as a traditional faith.

However, the trend towards decline has also affected almost all Christian churches, especially where and when they tried to cast themselves as political actors.

A similar decline could be seen in all other international groupings ranging from the African Union to the Organization of the American States, and passing by the Arab League, the Russian-led Eurasian bloc, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the South American Mercosur.

Another significant trend concerns the virtual collapse of almost all political parties across the globe. Even in the United States and Great Britain, which have the oldest and most solidly established tradition of party politics, the system has been severely shaken.

In the US the Democrat Party has morphed into a hodgepodge of groups from crypto-Marxists to bleeding-heart liberals held together by little more than their common hatred for President Donald J Trump. For its part, the Republican Party, first shaken by the so-called Tea Party, has been reduced to second fiddle for the Trumpist “revolution”.

In Great Britain, Brexit has divided the two main parties, Conservative and Labour, into three factions that could, in time, morph into separate parties. For at least two centuries, Britain’s power was mainly based on the stability of its institutions and the ability of its political elite to meet every challenge with a firm attachment to the rule of law plus moderation. All that edifice has been shaken by Brexit.

In France and Italy, insurrectionary parties have wrested power away from the traditional ones. In France, the Gaullist and Socialist parties that governed the country for seven decades have been pushed to the sidelines by the République En Marche movement of Emmanuel Macron which, in turn, is now shaken by the “Yellow Vests” insurrectionary outfit.

In Italy, too, all traditional parties, have been driven off stage by populist groupings of both left and right.
In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland(AFD) has cut across the left-right divide to win a leading role in national politics. Even a well-established regional party such as Christian Social Union (CSU) is now in decline in its home-base of Bavaria.

Within the year now ending, a number of mostly new parties forced their ways into the center of power in several European countries notably Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Holland and Sweden.

Interestingly, the more ideological a party is, the more vulnerable it is to the current trend of decline in party politics. This is why virtually all Communist and nationalist parties have either disappeared or been reduced to a shadow of their past glory.

Separatist parties, including in the Basque country and Catalonia in Spain, have achieved nothing but an upsurge of chauvinism within the ethnic Castilian majority.

Another trend that took shape in 2018 concerns the emergence of single-issue politics, replacing debate on large overarching policies, as the norm in many countries.

Once again, Brexit in Britain was the most glaring example. Those seeking withdrawal from the European Union appeared prepared to ignore all other issues provided they could promote that single quest, not to say obsession.

The massive development of cyberspace has given single-issue politics an unexpected boost. Today, almost anyone anywhere in the word could create his or her own echo-chamber around a pet subject from Frisian secession to saving the polar bears from extinction, shutting out the outside world and its many other concerns. Here, the aim is to fight for one’s difference with as much passion as possible.

That trend is in contrast with another trend, promoted by the traditional, or mainstream media, offering a uniform narrative of events.

Turn on any TV or radio channel and go through almost any newspaper and you will be surprised by how they all say the same thing about what is going on. Thanks to a sharp decline in field reporting, mostly caused by financial constraints, mainstream media today have to depend on a narrow compass provided by a few agencies and/or “citizen” journalists.

That, in turn, encourages the growing belief that facts are nothing but opinions expressed in the manner of shibboleths.

All that leads to an impoverishment of political debate. The weakening of political parties, trade unions, international organs, and institutions like parliaments that provided platforms for debate and decision-making, has deprived many societies of both a space and a mechanism for the battle of ideas and the competition among different policy options.

The bad news is that 2018 was not a good year for pluralist politics. The good news is that 2019 may expose the fundamental flaws of fissiparous populism.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2EXtWsK Tyler Durden