Former Pike County, Ohio, Sheriff’s Deputy Jeremy Mooney was caught on sheriff’s office security video pepper-spraying and repeatedly punching an inmate who was bound in a restraint chair. Thomas Friend had been arrested for misdemeanor disorderly conduct and had reportedly spit on other inmates in the transport van. Mooney resigned after the sheriff’s office began an investigation of his actions. The sheriff’s office suspended without pay for two weeks and demoted to corporal Sgt. William Stansberry, a supervisor who witnessed part of the assault but did not try to stop it. Pike County, Ohio, Prosecutor Rob Junk has asked the FBI look into the matter.
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Former Pike County, Ohio, Sheriff’s Deputy Jeremy Mooney was caught on sheriff’s office security video pepper-spraying and repeatedly punching an inmate who was bound in a restraint chair. Thomas Friend had been arrested for misdemeanor disorderly conduct and had reportedly spit on other inmates in the transport van. Mooney resigned after the sheriff’s office began an investigation of his actions. The sheriff’s office suspended without pay for two weeks and demoted to corporal Sgt. William Stansberry, a supervisor who witnessed part of the assault but did not try to stop it. Pike County, Ohio, Prosecutor Rob Junk has asked the FBI look into the matter.
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This week, children may learn about that greedy man, Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is selfish until ghosts scare him into thinking about others’ well-being, not just his own.
Good for the ghosts.
But the way Scrooge addresses others’ needs matters.
Today’s advocates of equality, compassion, increased spending on education, health care, etc., say “we care” but demand that government do the work.
Controlling other people with the power of government doesn’t prove you care.
If you want to help the poor, clean the environment, improve the arts. Great! Please do.
But if you are compassionate, then you’ll spend your own money on your vision. You will volunteer your work and encourage others to volunteer theirs, by charity or commerce. You don’t force others to do what you think is best.
But government is not voluntary. Government has no money of its own. Whatever it gives away, it first must take from others through taxes.
If you vote for redistribution of wealth, welfare benefits, new Medicare spending or free education, you can tell yourself you’re “generous.” But you’re not. You’re just forcing others to pay for programs you think might help. That’s not generosity. That’s control. The more programs you demand, the more controlling you are.
In fact, you are worse than greedy old Ebenezer Scrooge.
With Scrooge, people have a choice. They can work for Scrooge or quit. They can do business with someone else.
Governments don’t offer us choice. Governments say: “Comply or we will lock you up. Pay taxes and we will decide whom to help. No one may escape the master plan.”
Why, then, do people react to big government ideas as if they’re generous instead of scary? Because most people don’t think clearly about what it means to tell government to use force against their fellow citizens. They think about society the way their ancestors did.
“Our minds evolved tens of thousands of years ago, when we lived in small groups of 50-200 people,” says HumanProgress.org editor Marian Tupy. “We would kill game, bring it back, share it.”
The idea of everyone getting an equal share still makes us feel warm and cozy.
Some of you may feel that coziness this week, sharing a Christmas meal. Great. But remember that if you decide that society’s resources should be redistributed, that’s much more complex than passing meat around a family table.
Seizing control of a big society’s resources has unforeseen consequences—ripple effects that are hard to predict.
Back in the cave, you stood a pretty good chance of noticing which hungry relative needed a bigger share of meat. In the tribe, that sort of central planning worked well enough. It doesn’t work as well once the tribe numbers thousands or millions of people. No tribal elder knows enough to plan so many different people’s lives.
Today’s politicians, for instance, don’t know how many workers will be laid off if they raise taxes on Walmart. They don’t know what innovation will never happen if they cap CEOs’ salaries. They don’t know how much wealth creation will be lost if they tax investors’ money in order to fund another government program.
Government’s built-in ignorance explains how it can spend trillions on failed poverty programs, and then respond to the failure by demanding more funds to continue the same programs.
You stand a better chance of getting good results if you do real charity, close to home, where you can keep an eye on it—and without coercing anyone else to do things your way.
We can invent new ways to give to each other. Philanthropy evolves, much the way markets do, harnessing new technologies and social networks that span the globe.
Innovative ideas, like microlending, start in one kitchen. If they work, they grow.
By contrast, government grows even when it doesn’t work. It bosses people around even when it’s not really helping them.
Big hearts are a good thing. Big government is no substitute for them.
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This week, children may learn about that greedy man, Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is selfish until ghosts scare him into thinking about others’ well-being, not just his own.
Good for the ghosts.
But the way Scrooge addresses others’ needs matters.
Today’s advocates of equality, compassion, increased spending on education, health care, etc., say “we care” but demand that government do the work.
Controlling other people with the power of government doesn’t prove you care.
If you want to help the poor, clean the environment, improve the arts. Great! Please do.
But if you are compassionate, then you’ll spend your own money on your vision. You will volunteer your work and encourage others to volunteer theirs, by charity or commerce. You don’t force others to do what you think is best.
But government is not voluntary. Government has no money of its own. Whatever it gives away, it first must take from others through taxes.
If you vote for redistribution of wealth, welfare benefits, new Medicare spending or free education, you can tell yourself you’re “generous.” But you’re not. You’re just forcing others to pay for programs you think might help. That’s not generosity. That’s control. The more programs you demand, the more controlling you are.
In fact, you are worse than greedy old Ebenezer Scrooge.
With Scrooge, people have a choice. They can work for Scrooge or quit. They can do business with someone else.
Governments don’t offer us choice. Governments say: “Comply or we will lock you up. Pay taxes and we will decide whom to help. No one may escape the master plan.”
Why, then, do people react to big government ideas as if they’re generous instead of scary? Because most people don’t think clearly about what it means to tell government to use force against their fellow citizens. They think about society the way their ancestors did.
“Our minds evolved tens of thousands of years ago, when we lived in small groups of 50-200 people,” says HumanProgress.org editor Marian Tupy. “We would kill game, bring it back, share it.”
The idea of everyone getting an equal share still makes us feel warm and cozy.
Some of you may feel that coziness this week, sharing a Christmas meal. Great. But remember that if you decide that society’s resources should be redistributed, that’s much more complex than passing meat around a family table.
Seizing control of a big society’s resources has unforeseen consequences—ripple effects that are hard to predict.
Back in the cave, you stood a pretty good chance of noticing which hungry relative needed a bigger share of meat. In the tribe, that sort of central planning worked well enough. It doesn’t work as well once the tribe numbers thousands or millions of people. No tribal elder knows enough to plan so many different people’s lives.
Today’s politicians, for instance, don’t know how many workers will be laid off if they raise taxes on Walmart. They don’t know what innovation will never happen if they cap CEOs’ salaries. They don’t know how much wealth creation will be lost if they tax investors’ money in order to fund another government program.
Government’s built-in ignorance explains how it can spend trillions on failed poverty programs, and then respond to the failure by demanding more funds to continue the same programs.
You stand a better chance of getting good results if you do real charity, close to home, where you can keep an eye on it—and without coercing anyone else to do things your way.
We can invent new ways to give to each other. Philanthropy evolves, much the way markets do, harnessing new technologies and social networks that span the globe.
Innovative ideas, like microlending, start in one kitchen. If they work, they grow.
By contrast, government grows even when it doesn’t work. It bosses people around even when it’s not really helping them.
Big hearts are a good thing. Big government is no substitute for them.
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The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 includes a “requirement” that Americans “shall…ensure” that they and their dependents have “minimum essential coverage” for medical care. Seven years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts provided the decisive vote to uphold this requirement, also known as the “individual mandate,” after counterintuitively concluding that it was neither a requirement nor a mandate but was instead merely a condition for avoiding a tax that the law describes as a “penalty.”
As of January, thanks to a tax bill that Congress passed in 2017, that penalty was reduced to zero. Consequently, a federal appeals court ruled last week, the mandate that became a tax is now a mandate again and therefore unconstitutional, a decision that is simultaneously logical and puzzling, revealing the triumph of form over substance in the judicial branch’s failure to stop Congress from exercising powers it was never granted.
In the 2012 case National Federation of Independent Business v. Sibelius, five justices agreed that forcing people to buy health insurance was not a legitimate exercise of the power to regulate interstate commerce, which has long been the favorite excuse for federal legislation that the Constitution otherwise does not seem to authorize. But Roberts was determined to save the individual mandate anyway, so he reinterpreted it as a tax, contrary to what he called the “most straightforward” and “most natural” understanding of the law, and joined four other justices in upholding the provision.
Explaining the danger of reading the Commerce Clause broadly enough to encompass a command to buy health insurance, Roberts observed that the clause “gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it.” If that distinction were ignored, he said, the Commerce Clause would “justify a mandatory purchase to solve almost any problem,” such as a command that people buy broccoli because it is good for their health.
In a dissent joined by three other justices, Antonin Scalia amplified that point. Upholding the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause, he said, would transform it into a “font of unlimited power, or in Hamilton’s words, ‘the hideous monster whose devouring jaws…spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.”
The cage designed by Roberts does not do much to keep that hideous monster confined. In his view, Congress cannot constitutionally impose a fine on people who decline to buy broccoli, but it can constitutionally impose a tax on them.
If Congress chooses the latter approach, it does not even have to claim that insufficient vegetable consumption has a “substantial effect” on interstate commerce. As Roberts put it, “the breadth of Congress’s power to tax is greater than its power to regulate commerce.”
Roberts emphasized that regulation via taxation “leaves an individual with a lawful choice to do or not do a certain act, so long as he is willing to pay a tax levied on that choice.” Yet people who decide not to pay a tax can get into plenty of legal trouble, including criminal prosecution as well as liens and forfeiture.
For political reasons, Congress barred the IRS from using those scary remedies to extract the penalty for failing to maintain health coverage. But future “tax” legislation aimed at getting Americans to behave as members of Congress think they should may not be so gentle.
Now that the penalty for disregarding the individual mandate is zero, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled last week, Roberts’ “tax” is not a tax anymore. “The provision no longer yields the ‘essential feature of any tax’ because it does not produce ‘at least some revenue for the Government,'” the court said. Hence “the provision’s saving construction is no longer available.”
In other words, when Congress was punishing people for not buying health insurance, the provision was constitutional. Now that the penalty has been eliminated, rendering the provision unenforceable, it clearly exceeds the federal government’s constitutional powers. Take that, hideous monster!
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 includes a “requirement” that Americans “shall…ensure” that they and their dependents have “minimum essential coverage” for medical care. Seven years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts provided the decisive vote to uphold this requirement, also known as the “individual mandate,” after counterintuitively concluding that it was neither a requirement nor a mandate but was instead merely a condition for avoiding a tax that the law describes as a “penalty.”
As of January, thanks to a tax bill that Congress passed in 2017, that penalty was reduced to zero. Consequently, a federal appeals court ruled last week, the mandate that became a tax is now a mandate again and therefore unconstitutional, a decision that is simultaneously logical and puzzling, revealing the triumph of form over substance in the judicial branch’s failure to stop Congress from exercising powers it was never granted.
In the 2012 case National Federation of Independent Business v. Sibelius, five justices agreed that forcing people to buy health insurance was not a legitimate exercise of the power to regulate interstate commerce, which has long been the favorite excuse for federal legislation that the Constitution otherwise does not seem to authorize. But Roberts was determined to save the individual mandate anyway, so he reinterpreted it as a tax, contrary to what he called the “most straightforward” and “most natural” understanding of the law, and joined four other justices in upholding the provision.
Explaining the danger of reading the Commerce Clause broadly enough to encompass a command to buy health insurance, Roberts observed that the clause “gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it.” If that distinction were ignored, he said, the Commerce Clause would “justify a mandatory purchase to solve almost any problem,” such as a command that people buy broccoli because it is good for their health.
In a dissent joined by three other justices, Antonin Scalia amplified that point. Upholding the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause, he said, would transform it into a “font of unlimited power, or in Hamilton’s words, ‘the hideous monster whose devouring jaws…spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane.”
The cage designed by Roberts does not do much to keep that hideous monster confined. In his view, Congress cannot constitutionally impose a fine on people who decline to buy broccoli, but it can constitutionally impose a tax on them.
If Congress chooses the latter approach, it does not even have to claim that insufficient vegetable consumption has a “substantial effect” on interstate commerce. As Roberts put it, “the breadth of Congress’s power to tax is greater than its power to regulate commerce.”
Roberts emphasized that regulation via taxation “leaves an individual with a lawful choice to do or not do a certain act, so long as he is willing to pay a tax levied on that choice.” Yet people who decide not to pay a tax can get into plenty of legal trouble, including criminal prosecution as well as liens and forfeiture.
For political reasons, Congress barred the IRS from using those scary remedies to extract the penalty for failing to maintain health coverage. But future “tax” legislation aimed at getting Americans to behave as members of Congress think they should may not be so gentle.
Now that the penalty for disregarding the individual mandate is zero, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled last week, Roberts’ “tax” is not a tax anymore. “The provision no longer yields the ‘essential feature of any tax’ because it does not produce ‘at least some revenue for the Government,'” the court said. Hence “the provision’s saving construction is no longer available.”
In other words, when Congress was punishing people for not buying health insurance, the provision was constitutional. Now that the penalty has been eliminated, rendering the provision unenforceable, it clearly exceeds the federal government’s constitutional powers. Take that, hideous monster!
“Once upon a midnight clear, there was a child’s cry, a blazing star hung over a stable, and wise men came with birthday gifts. We haven’t forgotten that night down the centuries. We celebrate it with stars on Christmas trees, with the sound of bells, and with gifts… We forget nobody, adult or child. All the stockings are filled, all that is, except one. And we have even forgotten to hang it up. The stocking for the child born in a manger. It’s his birthday we’re celebrating. Don’t let us ever forget that. Let us ask ourselves what He would wish for most. And then, let each put in his share, loving kindness, warm hearts, and a stretched out hand of tolerance. All the shining gifts that make peace on earth.”—The Bishop’s Wife (1947)
The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.
The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.
Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later?
What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born at this moment in time? What kind of reception would Jesus and his family be given? Would we recognize the Christ child’s humanity, let alone his divinity? Would we treat him any differently than he was treated by the Roman Empire? If his family were forced to flee violence in their native country and sought refuge and asylum within our borders, what sanctuary would we offer them?
These nativity scenes are a pointed attempt to remind the modern world that the narrative about the birth of Jesus is one that speaks on multiple fronts to a world that has allowed the life, teachings and crucifixion of Jesus to be drowned out by partisan politics, secularism, materialism and war.
The modern-day church has largely shied away from applying Jesus’ teachings to modern problems such as war, poverty, immigration, etc., but thankfully there have been individuals throughout history who ask themselves and the world: what would Jesus do?
What would Jesus—the baby born in Bethlehem who grew into an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day (namely, the Roman Empire) but spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—do?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked himself what Jesus would have done about the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his assassins. The answer: Bonhoeffer risked his life to undermine the tyranny at the heart of Nazi Germany.
Martin Luther King Jr. asked himself what Jesus would have done about America’s warmongering. The answer: declaring “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King risked widespread condemnation when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War on moral and economic grounds.
Even now, despite the popularity of the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) in Christian circles, there remains a disconnect in the modern church between the teachings of Christ and the suffering of what Jesus in Matthew 25 refers to as the “least of these.”
As the parable states:
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’ They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’”
This is not a theological gray area: Jesus was unequivocal about his views on many things, not the least of which was charity, compassion, war, tyranny and love.
After all, Jesus—the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet—was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. When he grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say, things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.
When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.
Can you imagine what Jesus’ life would have been like if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state?
Consider the following if you will.
Had Jesus been born in the era of the America police state, rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets are in your home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.
Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.
Then again, had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they first would have been separated from each other, the children detained in make-shift cages, and the parents eventually turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.
From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.
Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.
Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.
Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”
While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.
Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.
Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.
Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.
Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.
Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. Currently, 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.
Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later.
Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.
Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.
Indeed, as I show in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, given the nature of government then and now, it is painfully evident that whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.
Thus, as we draw near to Christmas with its celebrations and gift-giving, we would do well to remember that what happened on that starry night in Bethlehem is only part of the story. That baby in the manger grew up to be a man who did not turn away from evil but instead spoke out against it, and we must do no less.
Japan Proposes Dumping Radioactive Waste Into Pacific As Storage Space Dwindles
As the decade comes to an end, the future of nuclear power in the west remains in doubt. Almost nine years ago, a powerful underwater earthquake triggered a 15-meter tsunami that disabled the power supply and cooling at three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The accident caused the nuclear cores of all three damaged reactors to melt down, prompting the government to issue evacuation orders for all people living within a 30 kilometer radius of the damaged reactors, a group that included roughly 100,000 people.
And the evacuation zone:
Now, the Epoch Times reports that Japan’s Economy and Industry Ministry has proposed that TEPCO gradually release, or allow to evaporate, massive amounts of treated but still radioactive water being stored at the power plant. TEPCO, or the Tokyo Electric Power Co, is the owner of the Fukushima plant, and is also responsible for leading the clean-up of the damaged reactors.
But as regulators have stepped in to try and guide TEPCO as it struggles to dispose of all the contaminated water, one ministry has offered a proposal that is almost guaranteed to anger the fishermen who have resisted all of TEPCO’s other plans for dumping the contaminated water.
In its Dec. 23 proposal, the ministry suggested a “controlled release” of the contaminated water into the Pacific. Offering another option, the ministry also suggested allowing the water to evaporate, or a combination of the two methods.
But the ministry insisted that the controlled release of the contaminated water into the sea would be the best option because it would “stably dilute and disperse” the water from the plant, while also allowing the government and TEPCO to more easily monitor the operation.
And as we have reported, the Japanese fishing industry isn’t the only party that objects to the government’s plan. South Korea has also complained to the IAEA about TEPCO’s plans to dump the radioactive water.
The project is expected to take years to fully dispose of the water.
Still, the fishermen are bound to be skeptical because of one radioactive element that TEPCO has been unable to remove from the contaminated water: It’s called tritium.
Fukushima fishermen and the National Federation of Fisheries Co-operative Associations have strongly opposed past suggestions by government officials that the water be released to the sea, warning of an “immeasurable impact on the future of the Japanese fishing industry,” with local fishermen still unable to resume full operations after the nuclear plant accident.
The water has been treated, and the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., states that all 62 radioactive elements it contains can be removed to levels not harmful to humans except for tritium. There is no established method to fully separate tritium from water, but scientists say it isn’t a problem in small amounts. Most of the water stored at the plant still contains other radioactive elements including cancer-causing cesium and strontium and needs further treatment.
Tritium is routinely found in nuclear explosions and other nuclear accidents, including the meltdown at Three-Mile Island back in 1979. But experts at the IAEA recommend that the controlled release of the tritium-laced water at Fukushima into the sea is probably the best option for handling the situation – even if the Japanese decide to wait until after the Summer Olympics in 2022.
The ministry noted that tritium has been routinely released from nuclear plants around the world, including Fukushima before the accident. Evaporation has been a tested and proven method following the 1979 core meltdown at Three Mile Island nuclear plant in the United States, where it took two years to get rid of 8,700 tons of tritium-contaminated water.
TEPCO says it is currently storing more than 1 million tons of radioactive water and only has space to hold up to 1.37 million tons, or until the summer of 2022, raising speculation that the water may be released after next summer’s Tokyo Olympics.TEPCO and experts say the tanks get in the way of ongoing decommissioning work and that space needs to be freed up to store removed debris and other radioactive materials. The tanks also could spill in a major earthquake, tsunami, or flood.
Experts, including those at the International Atomic Energy Agency who have inspected the Fukushima plant, have repeatedly supported the controlled release of the water into the sea as the only realistic option.
On Dec. 22, some experts on the panel called for more attention to be given to the impact on the local community, which already has seen its image harmed by accidental leaks and the potential release of water.
“A release to the sea is technologically a realistic option, but its social impact would be huge,” said Naoya Sekiya, a University of Tokyo sociologist and an expert on disasters and social impact.
Other possible strategies for disposing of the contaminated water have included injecting the water deep into the Earth’s crust. Another strategy, which called for storing the nuclear waste in large industrial tanks outside the plant, was ruled out because of fears that leaks in the tanks could contaminate some of Japan’s most important fishing waters.
Once in a blue moon an indispensable book comes out making a clear case for sanity in what is now a post-MAD world. That’s the responsibility carried by “The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs,” by Andrei Martyanov (Clarity Press), arguably the most important book of 2019.
Martyanov is the total package — and he comes with extra special attributes as a top-flight Russian military analyst, born in Baku in those Back in the U.S.S.R. days, living and working in the U.S., and writing and blogging in English.
Right from the start, Martyanov wastes no time destroying not only Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s ravings but especially Graham Allison’s childish and meaningless Thucydides Trap argument — as if the power equation between the U.S. and China in the 21stcentury could be easily interpreted in parallel to Athens and Sparta slouching towards the Peloponnesian War over 2,400 years ago. What next? Xi Jinping as the new Genghis Khan?
(By the way, the best current essay on Thucydides is in Italian, by Luciano Canfora (“Tucidide: La Menzogna, La Colpa, L’Esilio”). No Trap. Martyanov visibly relishes defining the Trap as a “figment of the imagination” of people who “have a very vague understanding of real warfare in the 21st century.” No wonder Xi explicitly said the Trap does not exist.)
Martyanov had already detailed in his splendid, previous book, “Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning,” how “American lack of historic experience with continental warfare” ended up “planting the seeds of the ultimate destruction of the American military mythology of the 20thand 21stcenturies which is foundational to the American decline, due to hubris and detachment of reality.” Throughout the book, he unceasingly provides solid evidence about the kind of lethality waiting for U.S. forces in a possible, future war against real armies (not the Taliban or Saddam Hussein’s), air forces, air defenses and naval power.
Do the Math
One of the key takeaways is the failure of U.S. mathematical models: and readers of the book do need to digest quite a few mathematical equations. The key point is that this failure led the U.S. “on a continuous downward spiral of diminishing military capabilities against the nation [Russia] she thought she defeated in the Cold War.”
In the U.S., Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) was introduced by the late Andrew Marshall, a.k.a. Yoda, the former head of Net Assessment at the Pentagon and the de facto inventor of the “pivot to Asia” concept. Yet Martyanov tells us that RMA actually started as MTR (Military-Technological Revolution), introduced by Soviet military theoreticians back in the 1970s.
One of the staples of RMA concerns nations capable of producing land-attack cruise missiles, a.k.a. TLAMs. As it stands, only the U.S., Russia, China and France can do it. And there are only two global systems providing satellite guidance to cruise missiles: the American GPS and the Russian GLONASS. Neither China’s BeiDou nor the European Galileo qualify – yet – as global GPS systems.
Then there’s Net-Centric Warfare (NCW). The term itself was coined by the late Admiral Arthur Cebrowski in 1998 in an article he co-wrote with John Garstka’s titled, “Network-Centric Warfare – Its Origin and Future.”
Deploying his mathematical equations, Martyanov soon tells us that “the era of subsonic anti-shipping missiles is over.” NATO, that brain-dead organism (copyright Emmanuel Macron) now has to face the supersonic Russian P-800 Onyx and the Kalibr-class M54 in a “highly hostile Electronic Warfare environment.” Every developed modern military today applies Net-Centric Warfare (NCW), developed by the Pentagon in the 1990s.
Rendering of a future combat systems network. (soldiersmediacenter/Flickr, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Martyanov mentions in his new book something that I learned on my visit to Donbass in March 2015: how NCW principles, “based on Russia’s C4ISR capabilities made available by the Russian military to numerically inferior armed forces of the Donbass Republics (LDNR), were used to devastating effect both at the battles of Ilovaisk and Debaltsevo, when attacking the cumbersome Soviet-era Ukrainian Armed Forces military.”
No Escape From the Kinzhal
Martyanov provides ample information on Russia’s latest missile – the hypersonic Mach-10 aero-ballistic Kinzhal, recently tested in the Arctic.
Crucially, as he explains, “no existing anti-missile defense in the U.S. Navy is capable of shooting [it] down even in the case of the detection of this missile.” Kinzhal has a range of 2,000 km, which leaves its carriers, MiG-31K and TU-22M3M, “invulnerable to the only defense a U.S. Carrier Battle Group, a main pillar of U.S. naval power, can mount – carrier fighter aircraft.” These fighters simply don’t have the range.
The Kinzhal was one of the weapons announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s game-changing March 1, 2018 speech at the Federal Assembly. That’s the day, Martyanov stresses, when the real RMA arrived, and “changed completely the face of peer-peer warfare, competition and global power balance dramatically.”
Top Pentagon officials such as General John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have admitted on the record there are “no existing countermeasures” against, for instance, the hypersonic, Mach 27 glide vehicle Avangard (which renders anti-ballistic missile systems useless), telling the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee the only way out would be “a nuclear deterrent.” There are also no existing counter-measures against anti-shipping missiles such as the Zircon and Kinzhal.
Any military analyst knows very well how the Kinzhal destroyed a land target the size of a Toyota Corolla in Syria after being launched 1,000 km away in adverse weather conditions. The corollary is the stuff of NATO nightmares: NATO’s command and control installations in Europe are de facto indefensible.
Martyanov gets straight to the point: “The introduction of hypersonic weapons surely pours some serious cold water on the American obsession with securing the North American continent from retaliatory strikes.”
Kh-47M2 Kinzhal; 2018 Moscow Victory Day Parade. (Kremilin via Wikimedia Commons)
Martyanov is thus unforgiving on U.S. policymakers who “lack the necessary tool-kit for grasping the unfolding geostrategic reality in which the real revolution in military affairs … had dramatically downgraded the always inflated American military capabilities and continues to redefine U.S. geopolitical status away from its self-declared hegemony.”
And it gets worse: “Such weapons ensure a guaranteed retaliation [Martyanov’s italics] on the U.S. proper.” Even the existing Russian nuclear deterrents – and to a lesser degree Chinese, as paraded recently — “are capable of overcoming the existing U.S. anti-ballistic systems and destroying the United States,” no matter what crude propaganda the Pentagon is peddling.
In February 2019, Moscow announced the completion of tests of a nuclear-powered engine for the Petrel cruise missile. This is a subsonic cruise missile with nuclear propulsion that can remain in air for quite a long time, covering intercontinental distances, and able to attack from the most unexpected directions. Martyanov mischievously characterizes the Petrel as “a vengeance weapon in case some among American decision-makers who may help precipitate a new world war might try to hide from the effects of what they have unleashed in the relative safety of the Southern Hemisphere.”
Hybrid War Gone Berserk
A section of the book expands on China’s military progress, and the fruits of the Russia-China strategic partnership, such as Beijing buying $3 billion-worth of S-400 Triumph anti-aircraft missiles — “ideally suited to deal with the exact type of strike assets the United States would use in case of a conventional conflict with China.”
Beijing parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic, October 2019. (YouTube screenshot)
Because of the timing, the analysis does not even take into consideration the arsenal presented in early October at the Beijing parade celebrating the 70thanniversary of the People’s Republic.
That includes, among other things, the “carrier-killer” DF-21D, designed to hit warships at sea at a range of up to 1,500 km; the intermediate range “Guam Killer” DF-26; the DF-17 hypersonic missile; and the long-range submarine-launched and ship-launched YJ-18A anti-ship cruise missiles. Not to mention the DF-41 ICBM – the backbone of China’s nuclear deterrent, capable of reaching the U.S. mainland carrying multiple warheads.
Martyanov could not escape addressing the RAND Corporation, whose reason to exist is to relentlessly push for more money for the Pentagon – blaming Russia for “hybrid war” (an American invention) even as it moans about the U.S.’s incapacity of defeating Russia in each and every war game. RAND’s war games pitting the U.S. and allies against Russia and China invariably ended in a “catastrophe” for the “finest fighting force in the world.”
Martyanov also addresses the S-500s, capable of reaching AWACS planes and possibly even capable of intercepting hypersonic non-ballistic targets. The S-500 and its latest middle-range state of the art air-defense system S-350 Vityaz will be operational in 2020.
His key takeway: “There is no parity between Russia and the United States in such fields as air-defense, hypersonic weapons and, in general, missile development, to name just a few fields – the United States lags behind in these fields, not just in years but in generations [italics mine].”
All across the Global South, scores of nations are very much aware that the U.S. economic “order” – rather disorder – is on the brink of collapse. In contrast, a cooperative, connected, rule-based, foreign relations between sovereign nations model is being advanced in Eurasia – symbolized by the merging of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the NDB (the BRICS bank).
The key guarantors of the new model are Russia and China. And Beijing and Moscow harbor no illusion whatsoever about the toxic dynamics in Washington. My recent conversations with top analysts in Kazakhstan last month and in Moscow last week once again stressed the futility of negotiating with people described – with overlapping shades of sarcasm – as exceptionalist fanatics. Russia, China and many corners of Eurasia have figured out there are no possible, meaningful deals with a nation bent on breaking every deal.
Indispensable? No: Vulnerable
Martyanov cannot but evoke Putin’s speech to the Federal Assembly in February 2019, after the unilateral Washington abandonment of the INF treaty, clearing the way for U.S. deployment of intermediate and close range missiles stationed in Europe and pointed at Russia:
“Russia will be forced to create and deploy those types of weapons…against those regions from where we will face a direct threat, but also against those regions hosting the centers where decisions are taken on using those missile systems threatening us.”
Translation: American Invulnerability is over – for good.
In the short term, things can always get worse. At his traditional, year-end presser in Moscow, lasting almost four and a half hours, Putin stated that Russia is more than ready to “simply renew the existing New START agreement”, which is bound to expire in early 2021: “They [the U.S.] can send us the agreement tomorrow, or we can sign and send it to Washington.” And yet, “so far our proposals have been left unanswered. If the New START ceases to exist, nothing in the world will hold back an arms race. I believe this is bad.”
“Bad” is quite the euphemism. Martyanov prefers to stress how “most of the American elites, at least for now, still reside in a state of Orwellian cognitive dissonance” even as the real RMA “blew the myth of American conventional invincibility out of the water.”
Martyanov is one of the very few analysts – always from different parts of Eurasia — who have warned about the danger of the U.S. “accidentally stumbling” into a war against Russia, China, or both which is impossible to be won conventionally, “let alone through the nightmare of a global nuclear catastrophe.”
Is that enough to instill at least a modicum of sense into those who lord over that massive cash cow, the industrial-military-security complex? Don’t count on it.
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Pepe Escobar, a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is “2030.” Follow him on Facebook.
Christmas Trees: The Battle Between Pine & Plastic
Starting in early December, many U.S. families carry out an annual and important ritual: an outing to find the perfect Christmas tree. Once the most desirable tree is found, it’s then lugged home and lavishly decorated while its piney smell wafts through the house.
As nice as that smell is, a real tree has numerous disadvantages such as prickly pines that shed and it eventually needs to be disposed of.
For some families, its just too much hassle and assembling a plastic three that spends most of the year in the basement is the preferred option. It also represents a once-off purchase, another advantage over its real counterpart.
So, with America firmly experiencing prime Christmas tree shopping season, how do sales of real and plastic trees compare?
32.8 million real trees were sold in the U.S. last year, the highest total since 2013. That’s despite the huge increase in people buying fake trees with their sales numbers climbing from 10.9 million in 2012 to 23.6 million in 2018.
There is bad news for fans of real trees this year and that’s a supply shortage. During the recession, farmers planted fewer trees and that’s now impacting the industry a decade later. Industry workers say that everyone intent on buying a real tree will find one but that prices are going up, something that has the potential to drive more families towards plastic. In 2017, the average price of a real tree was $75 and that went up to $78 in 2018. Meanwhile, the average price of a plastic tree fell from $107 to $104 during the same period.
