Category: zerohedge

Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

For U.S. imperial strategists, the notorious Afghan graveyard of empires is not an entirely deadbeat loss. As President Biden noted gleefully and cryptically this week, “China has real problems… it will be interesting to see what happens.”

The United States may have suffered a shameful, historic defeat in Afghanistan, but there is still a silver lining in this cloud for the imperial planners in Washington.

The destruction, anarchy and trillions of dollars wasted in prosecuting a 20-year war can deliver a consolation prize for the United States. Namely, by making Afghanistan a cauldron of destabilization for China, as well as Russia, Iran and the Central Asia region.

When President Joe Biden was asked this week by reporters about the future relations between Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers and China, he sounded remarkably relishing.

“China has a real problem with the Taliban,” said Biden. And not only China, he added, but also Russia, Iran and Pakistan.

“They’re all trying to figure out what do they do now. So it will be interesting to see what happens.”

The American gloating here is sickening. Washington destroyed Afghanistan over two decades from a military occupation that inflicted millions of casualties and refugees. (Four decades if you count the covert CIA intrigues with the Mujahideen precursors of the Taliban and Al Qaeda).

Thus, more appropriately, an international tribunal for war crimes should be established to investigate and prosecute U.S. political and military leaders. At the very least, Washington should be billed with trillions of dollars for the postwar reconstruction of the Central Asian country – a country that U.S. leaders promised they were there for “nation-building” but in reality ransacked.

Yet in spite of this hideous, glaring legacy, here we have Biden enjoying the prospect that the smoldering remains of Afghanistan bequeathed by the Americans will cause future problems for perceived geopolitical rivals – in particular China.

Beijing, Moscow and Tehran have been cautiously reaching out to the Taliban since they took back control of Afghanistan on August 15 after the U.S.-backed regime in Kabul collapsed. Actually, communications were established by the various parties several years ago, even though Moscow for one still officially designates the Taliban as a terrorist organization.

The interim government unveiled this week by the Taliban has raised concerns that the new administration in Kabul is dominated by the old guard of the militant group which ruled prior to the U.S. invasion in 2001. That, in turn, raises questions about the Taliban leadership’s avowed commitments to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a hub for terrorism and narcotics which of course would present major security challenges for regional neighbors.

China has urged the Taliban to cut ties with terror networks belonging to Al Qaeda and the Turkestan Islamic Movement. The latter is an umbrella for Uighur jihadists who have been waging a years-long terror campaign in China’s Xinjiang western province which shares a border with Afghanistan. Uighur separatists have found safe haven in Afghanistan with the Taliban’s consent. Potentially, therefore, Afghanistan could pose increased security headaches for Beijing.

To this end, China has been diplomatically engaging with the Taliban and promising massive capital investment in Afghanistan for postwar reconstruction. From Beijing’s point of view, this is not just about buying security guarantees. Afghanistan stands to become a key link in China’s Belt and Road Initiative coupling Eurasian economic development.

For the Taliban, partnering with China and other regional powers makes sense too. They get the vital international recognition they require for underpinning governance. And they get badly needed funds for reconstruction. This is made all the more urgent because Washington and its Western allies have been reluctant to engage with the new rulers of Afghanistan. The U.S. has frozen foreign assets of the country since the Taliban swept to power.

So, it would seem to be very much in the interests of the Taliban to comply with the concerns of China and other regional states to stabilize the country and prevent it from descending into a conduit for terrorism.

Moreover, Beijing is also confronted with other terrorist dangers lurking in Afghanistan which threaten to harass China’s ambitious economic plans.

There has been an uptick in deadly attacks on Chinese diplomats and workers in Pakistan’s southwest Baluchistan province. The attacks have been reportedly carried out by the Baluchistan Liberation Army and another outfit called the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. These groups are motivated to disrupt the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor that stretches to the port of Gwadar in southern Pakistan that links to the oil-rich Persian Gulf, as well as the wider Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. That corridor is another key link in China’s transcontinental economic expansion.

The Baluchi militants are based in Afghanistan’s Kandahar city – a Taliban stronghold – and have, at least in the past, been supported by the Taliban. There are no suggestions that recent attacks on Chinese personnel and business interests have been abetted by the Taliban. But it is no doubt an acute concern for Beijing that the Taliban will be able to rein in militants that operate from their territory.

Hence, China and the Taliban rulers have a precarious balancing act ahead of them. China, like Russia, Iran and other regional stakeholders, needs a stable political environment for realizing economic ambitions. The Taliban need that stability too if their nation is to rise from the ashes of America’s “longest war”. And they don’t want to antagonize internal strife by combating militant groups.

But if Washington and its dutiful European allies decide to make Taliban governance troublesome by engendering adversarial international relations and obstacles then Afghanistan could, in consequence, pose serious security disruption for China as well as Russia, Iran and others. The Taliban may not be able to guarantee security, even if they wanted.

Arguably, a motive for Washington going into Afghanistan two decades ago was not the supposed revenge for the dubious 9/11 terror incidents, but rather to assert geopolitical control over China and Russia’s backyard. Militarily, the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan turned out to be a disastrous failure and at a ruinous cost for future American generations.

But for U.S. imperial strategists, the notorious Afghan graveyard of empires is not an entirely deadbeat loss. As President Biden noted gleefully and cryptically this week, “China has real problems… it will be interesting to see what happens.”

Plan A didn’t work out so well for Washington. Time for Plan B.

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

Perhaps more than anything else, the rationale given for the necessity of the state – and the necessity of supporting the regime at any given time – is that it “keeps us safe.” This permeates thinking about government institutions at all levels, from “thin blue line” sloganeering at the local level, all the way up to jingoism surrounding the  Pentagon.

Presumably, the hundreds of billions of dollars extracted from taxpayers, year after year after year, is all both necessary and laudable because without it, chaos would reign on our streets, and foreign invaders would slaughter Americans.

Yet, this rationale for state power also presumes that the nation’s alleged defenders are actually competent at their jobs.

Whether or not this is case certainly remains debatable as the recent military disasters in Afghanistan have made clear. The Pentagon brass pushed for continued war in Afghanistan for 20 years, and ultimately, lost the entire country to the Taliban, the very people Pentagon generals assured us they would eliminate “soon.”

Moreover, the so-called “intelligence community” in the United States has repeatedly failed in its mission at crucial times. This can be seen in the fact the CIA was asleep at the switch in the lead ups to both the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 —both of which constituted an immense blow to American “safety” by the American regime’s metrics.

Needless to say, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were made possible by an immense military and intelligence failure on the part of the United States government. Not only did the US government provide the motivation for the attacks—through endless meddling in Middles Eastern regimes—but the US regime failed to protect its own citizens when the blowback arrived. 

Yet, as is so common following displays of incompetence by government bureaucrats, virtually no government agents was held accountable for this failure. The head of the CIA on 9/11, George Tenet, continued at his post for years afterward. There certainly was no “house cleaning” at the FBI either. 

Yet federal agencies allegedly formed to “keep us safe” were more or less AWOL in the lead up to 9/11, choosing to focus on relatively petty goals, and on augmenting the agencies’ public-relations efforts, rather than on terrorism.

The CIA at the Center

A bevy of books have been published over the last 20 years examining the massive intelligence blundering that preceded 9/11. Many of them are partisan, and many attempt to blame everything on elected officials. But the failures leading up to 9/11 go much deeper than that. Much of this is described in detail by Milo Jones and Philippe Silberzahn in their book Constructing Cassandra: Reframing Intelligence Failure at the CIA, 1947-2001.

The authors note that the 9/11 failure was a failure of multiple intelligence agencies, as well as numerous US policymakers across many agencies and institutions.

But, as Jones and Silberzahn contend, “the CIA stands at the center of the failure. … [p]rior to 9/11, the CIA was primus inter pares among the agencies of the U.S. intelligence community, chartered specifically to coordinate the community’s activities against threats—especially surprise attacks originating abroad.”

The story of the CIA’s failure is one of an organization that was repeatedly warned of the al-Qa’ida threat by internal analysists. But both the CIA leadership, and the rank and file, chose to ignore the warnings.  Rather, before 9/11, the leadership insisted on focusing on China, Iran, and Iraq. Other priorities included drug trafficking, organized crime, and illicit trade practices and “environmental issues of great gravity.”

Thanks only partly to guidance handed down form the Clinton administration in the late 1990s, “intelligence about al-Qa’ida [was] equal to that [of] …the illegal trade of tropical hardwood.” Jones and Silberzahn note the CIA did not “push back” against these priorities but concerned itself with telling politicians what they wanted to hear. 

Looking at “CIA budgetary decisions prior to 9/11” it becomes clear that intelligence on terrorism and al-Qa’ida were “extremely low priorities” at the CIA and “the agency had repeatedly diverted money away from counterterrorism to other purposes.”

For instance, the CIA’s intelligence briefings for the Bush administration in 2001 (prior to September 11) were extremely vague and never communicated much beyond the bland facts that Islamic terrorists exist and might carry out attacks—sometime, somewhere.  The agency never devoted many resources to following up on the possibility of these attacks. Briefings on the topic of Islamic terrorism were historical in nature with little effort given to anticipating the details of possible future acts. There was no “actionable warning.”

The 9/11 Commission noted this problem:

Commission staff member Douglas McEachin—a veteran former CIA analyst himself—thought that it was “unforgivable” that no NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] on al-Qa’ida or terrorism of any sort was produced for four years before the attacks. McEachin was “shocked that no one at the senior levels of the CIA had attempted for years— to catalog and give context to what was know about al-Qa’ida.”

Yet, to this day, apologists for the CIA will shrug their shoulders and insist “hindsight is 20/20!” and “how could anyone have known?” These defenders of the regime, of course, ignore the fact that the intelligence community in 2001 was receiving $30 billion in taxpayer money—an amount that was real money in 2001—to anticipate security threats. Providing “early warning of an enemy attack” was (and is) their job.

(It’s also worth asking if the perennial excuse-makers for government failure can provide an example of a military or intelligence failure that they wouldn’t shrug off.)

The CIA Was Warned, and Did Nothing

Moreover, the data is clear that it didn’t require revolutionary thinking to anticipate that Islamic terrorists might use airplanes as weapons, or that al-Qa’ida posed a credible threat.

After all, the CIA leadership was warned by its own analysts, especially those under Michael Scheuer who headed up the CIA’s much-ignored bin Ladin unit. As early as 1996, Scheuer had attempted to warn his superiors at the CIA of the threat of Islamic terrorism in general, and al Qa’ida in particular. Usama bin Laden had been publicly threatening Western nations to Western media since 1993, and publicly declared war on the United States on September 2, 1996.

Unlike most staffers and officials at the CIA, Scheuer took bin Ladin seriously, but he and his unit were regarded with little esteem at the agency. While Scheuer was attempting to raise the profile of al-Qa’ida, “Anyone with seniority or savvy avoided assignment to the bin Ladin unit.”

Scheuer was regarded as “obsessive” and those who were assigned to work with him were usually “very junior” and also female. Indeed, the bin Ladin unit, staffed as it was by Scheuer and a number of women, came to be derisively called “The Manson Family” among CIA staff.

Eventually, Scheuer lost what little influence he had in 1999. Frustrated with senior officials, Scheuer attempted to engage CIA director Tenet directly. This was regarded as an unforgiveable breach of bureaucratic protocol and Scheuer was demoted to the position of a librarian and shunted off to a cubicle in the library at Langley.

Airplanes as Weapons: It Was Predictable

Having studiously ignored the potential threat of al-Qa’ida throughout the late 1990s, CIA staff and leadership also failed to anticipate the methods eventually used on 9/11.

Followers of early 2000s popular culture will sometimes recall that the television show The Lone Gunmen—a spinoff of The X-Files—aired an episode in March 2001 in which a nefarious “hacker” deliberately flies a 747 at the World Trade Center.

Many note with amazement that authors of fiction saw the potential for the use of airplanes as weapons while the intelligence community apparently ignored the idea. Yet, the writers at The Lone Gunmen were hardly the first to conceive of the idea, which further illustrates the lack of imagination employed at the CIA.

As Jones and Silberzahn note,

In 1994, an Algerian group hijacked a plane in Algiers and apparently intended to fly it into the Eiffel Tower; in 1995, Manila police reported in detail about a suicide plot to crash a plane into CIA Headquarters; since the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, the NSC actively considered the use of aircraft as suicide weapons. Tom Clancy also wrote a novel about such an attack. As the [9/11] commission itself noted, the possibility of commercial planes as suicde weapons was both “imaginable and imagined” not just at the CIA.

A Lack of Expertise

So why was the CIA leadership so incapable to taking the al-Qa’ida threat seriously?

Much of it, Jones and Silberzahn conclude, was due to sizable weaknesses in the CIA’s analytical capabilities. Just as a general example, the authors note that even as late as 2013, “very few CIA analysts can read or speak Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, or Farsi—which collectively comprise the languages spoken by nearly half the world’s population.”

Jones and Silberzahn note this is part of a general problem at the CIA of cultural homogeneity. Prior to 9/11, and likely still today, the CIA capabilities in understanding foreign cultures is limited by the fact the CIA is largely the domain of college-educated Americans, generally from the same socio-economic strata.

As noted by one CIA officer shortly after 9/11:

The CIA probably doesn’t have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern Background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist… For Christ’s sake most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia.

Indeed, “In 2001, only 20 percent of the graduating class of clandestine case officers were fluent in a non-Romance language.” It’s unlikely that in 2001, the CIA had even a single case officer who spoke Pashto, the language of the Taliban. These great intelligence “experts” were groping around in the dark, often due to bureaucratic laziness and ignorance. 

The CIA’s defenders today may still make excuses for the CIA’s failure to know the details of the 9/11 conspiracy ahead of time, but it is clear today that the CIA wasn’t even looking in the right general direction to discover such information were it to present itself. Rather, in 2001, the CIA was apparently more interested in working with policymakers and media to leak headlines that would play up the foreign threats the CIA was most interested in talking about.

Unfortunately, in spite of these enormous failures, the CIA and the intelligence community have seen little damage to their reputations. Nor is there any reason to assume the situation has substantially changed and that the federal bureaucracy is any more competent today than it was on September 10, 2001. There is no market test or objective measure of success in government bureaucracies. In the decade following 9/11, the US’s intelligence agencies were rewarded with a marked increase in funding over 1990s levels. 

Twenty years after 9/11, a much-needed culture of skepticism around the nation’s “intelligence community” has yet to arise. This attitude will only pave the way for the next time it becomes tragically clear that America’s well-funded collection of intelligence agencies doesn’t actually “keep us safe.” 

It comes as no surprise the Second Amendment is under attack in a neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts, one of the most anti-gun states in the country. 

Members of the Select Board in Brookline, Massachusetts, are proposing zoning limits for gun stores, according to the Patch. 

Under the new zoning proposal submitted by town board members Petra Bignami, Janice Kahn, Alexandra Metral, and Sharon Schoffman, gun stores would only be allowed to operate by special permit. It also states buffer zones will be around residential properties, private and public K-12 schools, and childcare facilities, which would block firearm businesses from operating within a certain distance. 

The proposal came after the City of Newton, one town over, approved new zoning rules for gun stores in June that restricted them to three locations. This action was in response to a new gun store attempting to open. 

“When the issue of the gun store going into Newton, that got everybody’s attention I think about potentially a flaw in the towns land use that might allow gun stores in places we don’t want, and so I asked the planning department to begin to work on that,” Brookline’s Town Administrator Melvin Kleckner said at a Select Board meeting last month. 

Kleckner said the proposal is a good idea and is “essentially the Newton model.”  

Responding to this liberal madness is The Machine Gun Nest (TMGN), who said: 

“Not surprising that the proposal is coming from Massachusetts, one of the most anti-gun states in the country. The irony is that the same people who claim to be for personal freedom and free expression push laws that stifle commerce and limit free choice. The simple fact is that zoning gun shops out of participation in the local economy will do absolutely nothing to stop gun violence and will only make it harder for law-abiding citizens to access their 2nd amendment rights and defend themselves.”

The Newton model might work in the Northeast, but elsewhere, 1,930 US counties are protected by Second Amendment Sanctuary legislation, and a crackdown on gun stores might be challenging. 

Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics.com,

The Democratic Party and its apparatchiks in the media keep asking the American people variations on a single question: What are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

From the Trump/Russia collusion fantasy and concocted claims that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” to ongoing efforts to cast an America that has never been freer or fairer as a nation riddled with “systemic” racial oppression, they keep insisting that we reject clear and convincing evidence and embrace politically driven falsehoods.

The latest example is President Biden’s refusal to even acknowledge the catastrophic failure of his withdrawal from Afghanistan. The nation heard him say on July 8 that it was highly unlikely that the Taliban would overrun the country. The Washington Post reports that his senior leadership team was caught so unaware by the Taliban’s August advance that many were on vacation when Kabul fell. Then came the images of chaotic panic at the airport, a grim scene turned violently grisly when a suicide bomber murdered scores of people, including 13 Americans.

Biden subsequently described the withdrawal as an “extraordinary success” even as he left behind lethal state-of-the-art military equipment worth billions of dollars as well as many Americans and Afghans who had aided us during the 20-year struggle – including the interpreter who helped rescue Biden himself in 2008.

Slowly but surely the mainstream press, which initially covered the debacle forthrightly,  is beginning to embrace Biden’s narrative. Ezra Klein offered his New York Times readers a fatuous counterfactual defense: “A better withdrawal was possible — and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable — but so was a worse one.” Jonathan Karl of ABC News played the Trump card: “The truth is that Biden accomplished exactly what Trump had tried to do in his final year in office. The only real difference is that Trump wanted to withdraw more quickly and with less regard for the Afghan citizens who worked with the United States.”

Expect to hear more of the same in the coming weeks. Don’t be surprised if Biden is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. The brazenness is stunning. This is not your typical political spin, it is propaganda. It is the willful effort to corrupt our perception of reality. Say it loud and long enough and people will believe it. If they don’t, get Twitter mobs and cancel culture to silence and punish them. That is increasingly becoming the Democrats’ playbook.

Why do they do it? The obvious and most important answer is that they can, and it is incredibly useful. The spread of the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory helped them hobble a presidency just as the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story helped them win an election.

They are able to get away with it because they have convinced their allies in the press and millions of voters that our nation is locked in an existential battle with an evil enemy: the Republican Party. False narratives that kneecap the enemy are serving a higher truth; admissions of error are taboo because they will only strengthen the opposition. Give no quarter is their mantra.

There is also a politico-psychological dynamic behind this posture. Democrats are the party of well-educated elites, whose position in society and sense of self are anchored in their belief in their intellectual merit. Likewise, the Democratic Party’s argument for an all-powerful government is based on claims of competence and expertise. Acknowledging errors undermines their claims to authority.

This helps explain the lack of accountability. Firing, say, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken or Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley for the Afghanistan debacle would suggest that our brilliant leaders are not so brilliant.

To admit the obvious, yes, Republicans practice deception all the time. And it is also corrosive. But they do not control the government or, more importantly, the news. Their lies are almost always exposed, while those of the Democrats are often propagated.

This is at the root of our country’s deep divide.

Even thoughtful conservatives are rightly skeptical of most everything they are told. This increasingly knee-jerk antagonism not only leads some to seek the truth, but also others to reject honest information, such as the efficacy of vaccines.

When you don’t know who to trust, you don’t know what to trust. As long as our leaders keep trying to subvert reality, this is the reality we are consigned to inhabit.

The U.S. response to climate change and decarbonization is ramping up, and putting a focus on the country’s electricity mix.

As pressure has increased for near-term and immediate action after the UN’s latest IPCC report on climate change, major economies are starting to make bolder pledges. For the United States, Visual Capitalist’s Omri Wallach notes that includes a carbon pollution-free utilities sector by 2035.

But with 50 states and even more territories—each with different energy sources readily available and utilized—some parts of the U.S. are a lot closer to carbon-free electricity than others.

How does each state’s electricity mix compare? This infographic from the National Public Utilities Council highlights the energy sources used for electricity in U.S. states during 2020, using data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The U.S. Electricity Generation Mix By State

How does the United States generate electricity currently?

Over the course of 2020, the U.S. generated 4,009 TWh of electricity, with the majority coming from fossil fuels. Natural gas (40.3%) was the biggest source of electricity for the country, accounting for more than nuclear (19.7%) and coal (17.3%) combined.

Including nuclear energy, non-fossil fuels made up 41.9% of U.S. electricity generation in 2020. The biggest sources of renewable electricity in the U.S. were wind (8.4%) and hydro (7.3%).

But on a state-by-state breakdown, we can see just how different the electricity mix is across the country (rounded to the nearest percentage).

At a glance, regional availability of a fuel source and historical use is clear.

For example, coal is the most-used electricity source in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Wyoming, historical coal rich regions and economies.

On the flip side, the Pacific Northwest and New England generated the most hydroelectricity, and the biggest producers of wind energy were all located in the Great Plains. Even the biggest percentage producers of solar and geothermal energy, California and Nevada, have plenty of access to sunlight and geothermal activity.

The Changing Electricity Landscape

But for the U.S. to reach its ambitious carbon-free goal by 2035, the biggest impact will need to come from the biggest electricity producers.

That title currently goes to Texas, which generated 12% of total U.S. electricity in 2020. Despite being the most populous state, California generated less than half Texas’ output, and less than both Florida and Pennsylvania.

So although it’s positive that many states in the Pacific Northwest and New England have more plentiful non-fossil fuel electricity, their overall impact on the total U.S. picture is lessened.

Still, more and more states (and countries) are increasing their efforts and ambitions to decarbonize, and that progress makes it easier and more affordable over time. States that might struggle to attain carbon-free electricity, or where costs are too high, face less hurdles as technology improves and subsidies increase.

And with most major U.S. based utilities focusing on improving their ESG reporting and keeping up with decarbonization pledges of their own, the total electricity mix is expected to shift rapidly over the next decade.

National Public Utilities Council is the go-to resource for all things decarbonization in the utilities industry. Learn more.

Op-Ed via The Machine Gun Nest (TMGN). 

There’s been big news for gun rights these past few days, with headlines focusing on President Biden officially pulling David Chipman’s nomination to serve as ATF director.

With Chipman’s nomination removed, gun owners might have missed this story, absent from mainstream media, about military courts ruling bump stocks are not machine guns. 

On Sept. 9, the U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that bump stocks are not machine guns in the case U.S. v. Ali Alkazahg. This is a big win for gun owners and reaffirms the fact that items that are not machine guns by legal definition cannot be classified as machine guns simply because the ATF “feels” like they meet the definition.

Let’s take a peek at the case. Private Ali Akazahg was in Hawaii on the Marine Corps base in Kaneohe Bay. While there, he was convicted of possessing two machine guns in violation of the UCMJ or Uniform Code of Military Justice. Although, these “Machine Guns” were, in fact, bump stocks. Akazahg’s defense argued that bump stocks did not meet the legal definition of a machine gun.

Here’s an excerpt from the decision:

“Instead, the President directed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives [ATF] to issue a new interpretation of a rule—that contradicted the ATF’s previous interpretation—governing legislation from the 1930s. This Executive-Branch change in statutory interpretation aimed to outlaw bump stocks prospectively, without a change in existing statutes.”

The court is essentially laying out the fact that the ATF bypassed Congress to create law. They go on to explain that:

“In 1986, Congress passed the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act [FOPA], banning possession of machine guns not owned before 1986. FOPA also banned any parts, to include frames and receivers, which were part of a machine gun or were designed for converting a weapon into a machine gun. The current statute at issue is 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b), which defines what a machine gun is. Due to having a bump stock, Appellant was charged under the statute which states that a machine gun is “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically, more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”

The court explains that the bump stock not only does not meet that definition, but similar situations have already been litigated in Civilian courts as well. They cite Gun Owners of America v. Garland, which took place in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. In GOA v. Garland, the Sixth Circuit agreed that bump stocks did not meet the definition of a machine gun. Interestingly, they noted that the current classification of bump stocks as machine guns has relied upon Chevron deference. For those unfamiliar, it is a legal principle that compels federal courts to defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous or unclear statute. 

To sum up, the Judges declared that bump stocks are not machine guns. This adds to the growing list of bump stock court cases making their way to the Supreme Court, as the US Court of Military Appeals is like the Federal Court of Appeals, one step below the Supreme Court. 

So now you might be asking yourself? “Why should I care about the bump stock?” Well put simply, the current legal precedent allows for ATF, and the anti-gun lobby to now take steps to ban all semi-automatic firearms. It is essential for those of us that care about our 2nd amendment rights to draw a line in the sand and say, “No More.” The goal of the anti-gun lobby and the Congressmen that line their pockets with their donations is the complete and total disarmament of the United States of America. The bump stock might just be the key to their goal. The complete and total repudiation of this ban is how we stop them.  

* * * 

… and if readers want to learn more about possible future gun policy via TMGN, they’ve laid out the “puzzle pieces” of how the ATF maybe David Chipman appointed as White House “Gun Czar” has plans to classify semi-automatic rifles, such as the AR-15, as “machine guns.” 

Kentucky Fried Chicken is serving up a new vegan future for its fast-food chain amid poultry shortages and the continued disruption caused by the virus pandemic. 

KFC’s president in the U.S., Kevin Hochman, has been preparing the Louisville-based fast-food restaurant chain, known for its “Finger-Lickin’ Good” chicken, for a future of plant-based meat. The company has been testing plant-based nuggets from Beyond Meat in select locations but has yet to take it nationwide. 

The poultry shortage, which has disrupted chicken supply chains across the UK and US, could be why Hochman brings a faux option that replicates chicken to market faster than anticipated to alleviate supply woes. The shortage is so dire in the US that the company cannot promote its breaded chicken tenders on US television. 

Bloomberg’s Leslie Patton said KFC is preparing for what looks like an inevitable future of fake chicken going mainstream. He sat down with the KFC executive to discuss more about faux nuggets. 

“Our plan is to try to replicate that Kentucky Fried Chicken as close as we can, obviously without using the animal. A lot of that is about how the chicken cuts and tears and the mouth feel. The gold standard is the chicken tenderloin or chicken strip,” Hochman told Patton, adding that millennials are more receptive towards plant-based meat. 

He continued: “We’re pretty bullish on that. We don’t think that plant-based is a fad, we think that’s something that’s going to continue to grow over time.” 

However, vegan could be a tough sell for the fast-food chain. The C-suite employees at its Louisville headquarters are more rounded than anyone else in their target audience and shouldn’t deviate from the norm: Finger-Lickin’ Good” chicken. Trying to convince someone in middle America to eat fake meat versus the real thing could be a tricky sell. 

In the meantime, fake chicken nuggets could be the solution for KFC to alleviate supply troubles. 

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

We may never know the full contours of the whole riddle inside an enigma when it comes to 9/11 and related issues…

Massoud leaving Bazarak in the Panjshir after our interview in August 2001, roughly three weeks before his assassination. Photo: Pepe Escobar

It’s impossible not to start with the latest tremor in a series of stunning geopolitical earthquakes.

Exactly 20 years after 9/11 and the subsequent onset of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), the Taliban will hold a ceremony in Kabul to celebrate their victory in that misguided Forever War.

Four key exponents of Eurasia integration – China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan – as well as Turkey and Qatar, will be officially represented, witnessing the official return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. As blowbacks go, this one is nothing short of intergalactic.

The plot thickens when we have Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid firmly stressing “there is no proof” Osama bin Laden was involved in 9/11. So “there was no justification for war, it was an excuse for war,” he claimed.

Only a few days after 9/11, Osama bin Laden, never publicity-shy, released a statement to Al Jazeera: “I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons (…) I have been living in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders’ rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations.”

On September 28, Osama bin Laden was interviewed by the Urdu newspaper Karachi Ummat. I remember it well, as I was commuting non-stop between Islamabad and Peshawar, and my colleague Saleem Shahzad, in Karachi, called it to my attention.

Saudi-born alleged terror mastermind Osama bin Laden in a video taken ‘recently’ at a secret site in Afghanistan. This was aired by Al Jazeera on October 7, 2001, the day the US launched retaliatory bombing of terrorist camps, airbases and air defense installations in the first stage of its campaign against the Taliban regime for sheltering bin Laden. Photo: AFP / Al Jazeera screen grab

This is an approximate translation by the CIA-linked Foreign Broadcast Information Service: 

“I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people.

“I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it.

“Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country or ideology could survive. Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year (…) They need an enemy.”

This was the last time Osama bin Laden went public, substantially, about his alleged role in 9/11. Afterward, he vanished, and seemingly forever by early December 2001 in Tora Bora: I was there, and revisited the full context years later.

And yet, like an Islamic James Bond, Osama kept performing the miracle of dying another day, over and over again, starting in – where else – Tora Bora in mid-December, as reported by the Pakistani Observer and then Fox News.

So 9/11 remained a riddle inside an enigma. And what about 9/9, which might have been the prologue to 9/11?

Arriving in the Panjshir valley in one of Massoud’s Soviet helicopters in August 2001. Photo: Pepe Escobar  

A green light from a blind sheikh

“The commander has been shot.”

The terse email, on 9/9, offered no details. Contacting the Panjshir was impossible – sat-phone reception is spotty. Only the next day it was possible to establish Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary Lion of the Panjshir, had been assassinated – by two al-Qaeda jihadis posing as a camera crew.

In our Asia Times interview with Massoud, by August 20, he had told me he was fighting a triad: al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the Pakistani ISI. After the interview, he left in a Land Cruiser and then went by helicopter to Kwaja-Bahauddin, where he would finish the details of a counter-offensive against the Taliban.

This was his second-to-last interview before the assassination and arguably the last images – shot by photographer Jason Florio and with my mini-DV camera – of Massoud alive.

One year after the assassination, I was back in the Panjshir for an on-site investigation, relying only on local sources and confirmation on some details from Peshawar. The investigation is featured in the first part of my Asia Times e-book Forever Wars.

The conclusion was that the green light for the fake camera crew to meet Massoud came via a letter sponsored by CIA crypto-asset warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf – as a “gift” to al-Qaeda.

In December 2020, inestimable Canadian diplomat Peter Dale Scott, author among others of the seminal The Road to 9/11 (2007), and Aaron Good, editor at CovertAction magazine, published a remarkable investigation about the killing of Massoud, following a different trail and relying mostly on American sources.

They established that arguably more than Sayyaf, the mastermind of the killing was notorious Egyptian blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, then serving a life sentence in a US federal prison for his involvement in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

Among other nuggets, Dale Scott and Good also confirmed what former Pakistani foreign minister Niaz Naik had told Pakistani media already in 2001: the Americans had everything in place to attack Afghanistan way before 9/11.

In Naik’s words: “We asked them [the American delegates], when do you think you will attack Afghanistan? … And they said, before the snow falls in Kabul. That means September, October, something like that.”

As many of us established over the years after 9/11, everything was about the US imposing itself as the undisputed ruler of the New Great Game in Central Asia.

Peter Dale Scott now notes, “the two US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 were both grounded in pretexts that were doubtful to begin with and more discredited as years go by.

“Underlying both wars was America’s perceived need to control the fossil fuel economic system that was the underpinning for the US petrodollar.”

Deceased Taliban founder Mullah Mohammed Omar in a file photo. Photo: Wikimedia

Massoud versus Mullah Omar

Mullah Omar did welcome Jihad Inc to Afghanistan in the late 1990s: not only the al-Qaeda Arabs but also Uzbeks, Chechens, Indonesians, Yemenis – some of them I met in Massoud’s riverside prison in the Panjshir in August 2001.

The Taliban at the time did provide them with bases – and some encouraging rhetoric – but deeply ethnocentric as they were, never manifested any interest in global jihad, in the mold of the “Declaration of Jihad” issued by Osama in 1996.

The official Taliban position was that jihad was their guests’ business, and that had nothing to do with the Taliban and Afghanistan. There were virtually no Afghans in Jihad Inc. Very few Afghans speak Arabic. They were not seduced by the spin on martyrdom and a paradise full of virgins: they preferred to be a ghazi – a living victor in a jihad.

Mullah Omar could not possibly send Osama bin Laden packing because of Pashtunwali – the Pashtun code of honor – where the notion of hospitality is sacred. When 9/11 happened, Mullah Omar once again refused American threats as well as Pakistani pleas. He then called a tribal jirga of 300 top mullahs to ratify his position.

Their verdict was quite nuanced: he had to protect his guest, of course, but a guest should not cause him problems. Thus Osama would have to leave, voluntarily.

The Taliban also pursued a parallel track, asking the Americans for evidence of Osama’s culpability. None was provided. The decision to bomb and invade had already been taken.

That would have never been possible with Massoud alive. A classic intellectual warrior, he was a certified Afghan nationalist and pop hero – because of his spectacular military feats in the anti-USSR jihad and his non-stop fight against the Taliban.

Jihadis captured by Massoud’s forces in a riverside prison in the Panjshir in August 2001. Photo: Pepe Escobar  

When the PDPA socialist government in Afghanistan collapsed three years after the end of the jihad, in 1992, Massoud could easily have become a prime minister or an absolute ruler in the old Turco-Persian style.

But then he made a terrible mistake: afraid of an ethnic conflagration, he let the mujahideen gang based in Peshawar have too much power, and that led to the civil war of 1992-1995 – complete with the merciless bombing of Kabul by virtually every faction – that paved the way for the emergence of the “law and order” Taliban.

So in the end he was a much more effective military commander than politician. An example is what happened in 1996, when the Taliban made their move to conquer Kabul, attacking from eastern Afghanistan.

Massoud was caught completely unprepared, but he still managed to retreat to the Panjshir without a major battle and without losing his troops – quite a feat – while severely smashing the Taliban that went after him.

He established a line of defense in the Shomali plain north of Kabul. That was the frontline I visited a few weeks before 9/11, on the way to Bagram, which was a – virtually empty and degraded – Northern Alliance airbase at the time.

All of the above is a sorry contrast to the role of Masoud Jr, who’s in theory the leader of the “resistance” against Taliban 2.0 in the Panjshir, now completely smashed.

Masoud Jr has zero experience either as a military commander or politician, and although praised in Paris by President Macron or publishing an op-ed in Western mainstream media, made the terrible mistake of being led by CIA asset Amrullah Saleh, who as the former head of the National Directory of Security (NDS), supervised the de facto Afghan death squads.

Masoud Jr could have easily carved a role for himself in a Taliban 2.0 government. But he blew it, refusing serious negotiations with a delegation of 40 Islamic clerics sent to the Panjshir, and demanding at least 30% of posts in the government.

In the end, Saleh fled by helicopter – he may be now in Tashkent – and Masoud Jr as it stands is holed up somewhere in the northern Panjshir.

In this file photo taken on September 11, 2001, a hijacked commercial aircraft approaches the twin towers of the World Trade Center shortly before crashing into the landmark skyscraper in New York. Photo: AFP / Seth McAllister

The 9/11 propaganda machine is about to reach fever pitch this Saturday – now profiting from the narrative twist of the “terrorist” Taliban back in power, something perfect to snuff out the utter humiliation of the Empire of Chaos.

The Deep State is going no holds barred to protect the official narrative – which exhibits more holes than the dark side of the moon.

This is a geopolitical Ouroboros for the ages. 9/11 used to be the foundation myth of the 21st century – but not anymore. It has been displaced by blowback: the imperial debacle allowing for the return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to the exact position it was 20 years ago.

We may now know that the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11. We may now know that Osama bin Laden, in an Afghan cave, may not have been the master perpetrator of 9/11. We may now know that the assassination of Massoud was a prelude to 9/11, but in a twisted way: to facilitate a pre-planned invasion of Afghanistan.

And yet, like with the assassination of JFK, we may never know the full contours of the whole riddle inside an enigma. As Fitzgerald immortalized, “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” probing like mad this philosophical and existential Ground Zero, never ceasing from asking the ultimate question: Cui Bono?

The world’s first autonomous cargo ship, based in Japan, is facing its first real test as it gets ready to take on a 236 mile journey. It’s the first step in a literal journey of a thousand miles that Japan hopes will result in half of all domestic ships eventually piloting themselves. 

Japan’s Nippon Foundation, a public interest organization, is backing the effort in hopes of seeing crewless ships make up 50% of Japan’s local fleet by 2040, according to Bloomberg. 

The first such trial run will belong to Nippon Yusen KK, who is setting up a container ship to pilot itself from Tokyo Bay to Ise in February 2022. The 236 mile trip will be the first of its kind by an autonomous ship in heavy marine traffic.

The autonomous global shipping market could be worth as much as $166 billion by 2030, the report notes.

Satoru Kuwahara, a general manager at Nippon Yusen subsidiary Japan Marine Science Inc. told Bloomberg: “When it comes to the automation of ships, our mission is to have Japan lead the rest of the world.”

He continued, stating that he thinks there’s a “real need” for autonomy in shipping because the country’s workforce is shrinking and aging. 40% of the country’s crew are 55 years or older, the report notes.

The Nippon Foundation believes $9 billion in savings can be realized by autonomous shipping and that it can eliminate many maritime accidents. “With the issue of Japan’s shrinking workforce in mind, there’s growing need for these technologies to uphold safety,” Kuwahara said.

Data will be collected from February’s test run and the vessel will be controlled remotely, if necessary. 

Kuwahara predicts “practical use” of the technology by as early as 2025. 

He concluded: “We need this technology to be recognized, otherwise actual implementation in society won’t move forward. As a first demonstration, we can’t fail.”

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We recently discussed how many on the left have discovered the allure of book burning, book banning, and blacklisting of authors.

While expressing shock at ISIS and other extremist groups burning books, the practice appears acceptable based on the titles or content.

Now educators in Ontario have held a “flame purification ceremony” for the local indigenous population by burning roughly 5,000 books.

The notion of teachers burning books is almost as bizarre as the thought of book sellers embracing blacklisting but both are now part of the realities of our age of rage.These school officials actually videotaped the celebration of book burning for students at 30 schools with the announcement that:

“We bury the ashes of racism, discrimination and stereotypes in the hope that we will grow up in an inclusive country where all can live in prosperity and security.”

The announcement even has a type of Maoist cultural revolution feel to it. In addition, Lyne Cosette, a spokeswoman for the public French-speaking Catholic schools of Ontario, told the National Post newspaper, “Symbolically, some books were used as fertilizer.” 

The entire demonstration was a disgrace to educators everywhere. The lesson of book burning left with these children will likely be indelible and lasting. I have worried about the rise of a generation of censors but the Catholic schools of Ontario appear intent on raising a generation of book burners.

What is truly chilling is the Orwellian call for children to burn books in order to be a more “inclusive country.”