iftttwall

Authored by Chris Farrell via The Gatestone Institute,

Obama administration officials committed crimes against the constitution. They engaged in a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.

Will they really get away with it?

Forty government officials were indicted or jailed as a result of Watergate. White House staffers H.R. Haldeman and John Erlichman went to jail. White House counsel John Dean went to jail. Attorney General John Mitchell went to jail. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, Charles Colson and James McCord – all jailed. Nixon Press Secretary Ronald L. Ziegler called Watergate a “third-rate burglary.” It toppled a president.

“Obamagate,” or the “Russia Hoax” is a political and criminal scandal exponentially more serious and damaging to the constitution. Like the Richter Scale measurements of earthquakes, Obamagate can be measured in “orders of magnitude” greater seriousness than the third-rate burglary. Obamagate is the First American Coup. Not from the militaristic right, as fantasized by liberal Hollywood. Oh, no – from the “fundamental transformation” artists of the Bolshevik Left.

Writing in the New York Post on October 24, 2020, columnist Michael Goodwin listed his reasons for voting for Donald Trump, again. His reasoning included:

“The other side must not be rewarded for its efforts to sabotage and remove a duly-elected president.

“Russia, Russia, Russia was a scam that ruined lives and put a cloud over the White House for nearly three years. The sequel was partisan impeachment, a clumsy coup attempt orchestrated by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Trump haters in Congress, the deep state, and the media.

“The press corps’ bias of 2016 has morphed into full-blown partisanship on a daily basis at print, digital and broadcast outlets. Facebook, Twitter and other platforms openly use their power to censor pro-Trump news and opinion while promoting anything that makes the president look bad.

“It’s not the algorithms; it’s the people behind them.

“Their decision to block The Post’s groundbreaking reports on Hunter Biden’s business deals and Joe Biden’s involvement should scare anyone who treasures the First Amendment. To censors, Orwell’s nightmare is their dream.

“All fairness has been abandoned in a frenzy to destroy Trump and everything he represents. This culture war extends backward, too.”

This is all very important stuff. It is still defective in one key area: it ignores (largely) the crime. The details of the criminal seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.

How are we still missing this?

The (awesome and formidable) law enforcement and intelligence powers of the United States were perversely twisted and abused to advance a partisan political agenda by the sitting president (Barack Obama); his paid political operatives; and officers, agents and employees of the United States Government against Candidate Trump, President-elect Trump and President Trump.

There are handy references to keep track of the cast of characters involved in the coup plot. The Epoch Times has a resource, as does the Capital Research Center. One hopes John Durham has a reference, file or graphic that is something close to those analytical pieces. He seems to need some sort of help, since he apparently is unable to move past the anemic, pathetic Clinesmith indictment.

Seasoned investigators and attorneys can take the publicly available records and assemble sufficient facts, documentation and evidence to meet the legal threshold (“probable cause”) for successfully presenting a bill of indictment to a grand jury.

Why is there reluctance today? How is it that Attorney General William Barr and John Durham are consumed with prosecutorial ennui when the crimes and cover-ups are so painfully obvious? One is left to conclude that it really all comes down to political will. Do Barr and/or Durham have the stomach to seek the indictment of people like James Comey, John Brennan, Andy McCabe and (many) others?

Granted, Lindsey Graham is certainly no Sam Ervin; and Richard Burr abdicated the running of the Senate Intelligence Committee to Mark Warner years ago – but AG Barr and Prosecutor Durham do not need committees of Congress for “cover” to pursue the criminality of the Obama administration and their operatives in the Department of Justice, FBI, CIA and State Department.

Just remember: 40 jailed for Watergate.

Russia’s armed forces have benefited from a decade of investment, resulting in widespread modernization efforts and an increased defense-industrial base. 

From hypersonic weapons to fifth-generation fighter jets to drones to advanced main battle tanks to new service weapons, Russia has been busy upgrading its military as geopolitical tensions soar. 

Some of these new weapons were displayed at an international military-technical forum “Army-2020” outside Moscow in August. 

Russia’s state arms seller Rosoboronexport recently unveiled a new multi-caliber sniper rifle developed by Lobaev Arms at the “Interpolitex 2020” defense show held in Moscow last week, reported TASS News.  

“The new sniper rifle is more compact in its dimensions compared to the guns earlier developed by Lobaev Arms,” said Rosoboronexport Senior Expert Alexander Slobodyanyuk, in the company’s video presentation on its YouTube channel.

“The DVL-10M3 rifle’s weight has been reduced to 4.5 kg while it features a barrel length of 500mm. The gun’s effective firing range is up to 1 km,” the Rosoboronexport senior expert said.

“It [the DVL-10M3] is characterized by a very good accuracy of fire that does not exceed 0.38 minute of arc, and can be used together with a silencer,” he added. 

TASS notes the sniper’s barrels are interchangeable with 7.62x51mm, 6.5x47mm Lapua, and 6.7mm Federal.

Russia’s military-modernization efforts indicate that not only is it growing its defense-industrial base but has ambitions to become more dominant in the world as the US supremacy fades.  

Authored by Ivan Pentchoukov via The Epoch Times,

A collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family mysteriously vanished from an envelope sent to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the host said on Wednesday night.

Carlson’s team allegedly received the documents from a source on Monday. At the time, Carlson was on the West Coast filming an interview with Tony Bobulinski, the former business partner of Hunter Biden and James Biden. Carlson requested the documents to be sent to the West Coast.

According to Carlson, the producer shipped the documents overnight to California using a large national package carrier. He didn’t name the company, saying only that it’s a “brand name company.”

“The Biden documents never arrived in Los Angeles. Tuesday morning we received word from our shipping company that our package had been opened and the contents were missing,” Carlson said. “The documents had disappeared.”

Damning Hunter Biden documents suddenly vanish pic.twitter.com/B2qsajZlID

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 29, 2020

The company took the incident seriously and immediately began a search, Carlson said. The company traced the package from when it was dropped off in New York to the moment when an employee at a sorting facility reported that the package was opened and empty.

“The company’s security team interviewed every employee who touched the envelope we sent. They searched the plane and the trucks that carried it. They went through the office in New York where our producers dropped the package off. They combed the entire cavernous sorting facility. They used pictures of what we had sent so that searchers would know what to look for,” Carlson said.

“They far and beyond, but they found nothing.”

“Those documents have vanished,” he added.

“As of tonight, the company has no idea and no working theory even about what happened to this trove of materials, documents that are directly relevant to the presidential campaign just six days from now.”

Executives at the shipping company were “baffled” and “deeply bothered” by the incident, Carlson said.

Carlson’s interview with Bobulinski aired on Tuesday night. In the interview, Bobulinski opined that Joe Biden and the Biden family are compromised by China due to the business dealings of Hunter Biden and James Biden. Joe Biden has not publicly responded to Bobulinski’s allegations, but during a presidential debate on Oct. 22 said he had “not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life.”

Bobulinski provided more than 1,700 pages of emails and more than 600 screenshots of text messages to Senate investigators and handed over to the FBI the smartphones he used during his business dealings with the Bidens. The documents detailed a failed joint venture between a billionaire tied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and a company owned by Hunter Biden, James Biden, Bobulinski and two other partners.

While the corporate documents don’t mention Biden by name, emails sent between the partners suggest that either James Biden or Hunter Biden held a 10 percent stake for the former vice president. In the email, the stake is assigned to “the big guy,” who Bobulinski says is Joe Biden.

Fall enrollment has plunged, some colleges are shuttering operations, revenues across the entire higher education industry are collapsing, and the shift from physical to virtual education due to the virus pandemic could prick the next bubble: the student housing debt market. 

Our warning about the coming implosion of the higher education industry (see here from 2014), as a whole, has become louder and louder over the last six-plus years as the student debt bubble has recently swelled to more than $1.6 trillion. Years ago, no one at the time, could’ve forecasted a virus pandemic would doom colleges and universities. 

Credit rating agency Moody’s recently downgraded the entire higher education sector to negative from stable, and the American Council on Education estimates colleges and universities will experience a $23 billion decline in revenues over the next academic year.

Bloomberg outlines the increase of virtual education in a virus pandemic has resulted in an abundance of empty dorms at colleges and universities, creating a $14 billion headache for the student housing debt market. 

“West Virginia State University, already hit with a 10% enrollment drop, plans to give money to a school foundation so it can meet its bond covenants for residence hall debt. A community college in Ohio is using part of a $1.5 million donation for a financially-strapped student housing project. And officials at New Jersey City University, which serves largely first-generation and lower-income students and has recorded years of deficits, are prepared to shore up a dorm there,” Bloomberg said. 

The squeeze on university finances comes as the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center warned about a 16% drop in first-year undergraduate students enrolled for the fall semester. This means new revenue streams are quickly drying up for overleveraged colleges and universities. 

“The limiting factor is some of these schools themselves are facing uncertainty with many of their revenue streams,” S&P Global Ratings analyst Amber Schafer said in an interview. “It’s a matter of not only willingness, but if they’re able to support the project.”

“Typically, privatized student housing debt is paid off by the revenue generated by the dorms — meaning there’s little recourse for bondholders if things go south,” Bloomberg said. With occupancy rates already declining as coronavirus cases are surging, well, this could be bad news for colleges and universities heading into 2021. 

“Borrowers have begun revealing how empty residence halls are as the pandemic spurs many campuses to keep classes online. According to the school foundation that sold the debt, West Virginia State University’s dorm is 71% full, putting it about 20 percentage points from where it needs to be to satisfy debt covenants. Other privatized student housing projects, like two on Howard University’s campus, are virtually empty due to online-only instruction there,” Bloomberg said. 

Bloomberg warns: “Privatized dorms are struggling the most given that they weren’t structured to withstand 20% to 30% drops in occupancy — or no students at all.”

“West Virginia State University may have to step in to help student housing bonds at risk of violating a debt service coverage ratio, Moody’s warned this month. The historically-black college faces “considerable” challenges in backstopping the bonds, Moody’s said.

The nearly 290-bed residence hall with rents of $3,881 per semester was just 71% occupied this fall, while it needed to be about 92% occupied, said Patricia Schumann, president of the university foundation that sold the debt. Schumann said the university is projected to provide a $75,000 payment in January. In the meantime, she said the school was working to bolster its financial position and boost recruitment and donations.

“We’re not standing still,” she said.

Ohio’s Terra State Community College, which has more than 2,100 students, was downgraded deeper into junk over the risk posed by a dorm owned by a nonprofit, given that the school “appears to provide an unconditional guarantee” to meet the debt obligations, Moody’s said. The project was financed through a bank note.

The dorm’s occupancy fell to 62%, and the college is using a previously-received donation to cover a shortfall in project revenue amounting between $500,000 to $600,000, the ratings company said in a report this month.

At New Jersey City University, a student housing project financed though a separate entity will likely miss a required debt service coverage ratio. The public school having to step in to help the bonds would be a challenge, but a surmountable one, said Jodi Bailey, the university’s associate vice president for student affairs. The student housing bonds aren’t a debt of the university, so the school would be choosing to provide financial support, according to bond documents.

The school is working to cut expenses related to the dorm. “Is it a harder year? Most definitely,” she said.

The student housing bonds, issued by West Campus Housing LLC in 2015, were slashed deeper into junk in September by S&P, which said in a report that residence halls’ occupancy there had fallen to 56% so the school could accommodate social-distancing guidelines,” said Bloomberg. 

To summarize, plunging enrollments, resulting in falling occupancy rates for dorms, is a debt bomb waiting to go off for many overleveraged colleges and universities that are panicking at the moment to divert enough funds to service debts, as the usual revenue streams, that being rent checks from students, are nowhere to be found as virtual learning keeps young adults in their parents’ basements and out of dorms. 

If occupancy rates continue to slide through 2021, then we must revisit what we said months before the virus pandemic began in the US: 

 “…20% of colleges and universities will shut down or merge in the next ten years, and probably more.”  

Absent of a federal bailout, things could get ugly for colleges and universities in 2021. 

Authored by Major Danny Sjursen (ret.) via AntiWar.com,

Who needs dystopian novelists or absurd satirists when otherwise banal bureaucrats of the U.S. national security state do the job for them? It’s an old story with a new tech-savvy twist. The late great Joseph Heller knew a thing or two about war’s foundational farce. He joined the army air corps at age 19 and flew 60 combat missions as a bombardier on World War II’s Italian front.

In his classic 1961 novel Catch-22, his wounded protagonist lamented that “outside the hospital the war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals.” Yet in today’s confusing modern twist, with the citizenry and even soldiery now opposing America’s endless wars, the only men going mad are inside Washington. Even now they’re looking for reasons to keep awarding medals to overtaxed and unenthused overseas warriors.

It makes for a strange state of affairs here in year 20 of the crusade formerly known as the “war on terror.” Just last week, two assumedly unrelated stories offered case studies (or are they clinics) in America’s national security politics and procedures of absurdity.

Fit for Heller: An (Open) Secret Intel Budget

First, there was a passing annual footnote in the Pentagon’s bland bureaucratic budget line.

Part of that military budget goes to what DefenseNews labeled the “Pentagon’s secret intelligence fund” – last year they went with “black intel funding.” Its officially titled the more mundane Military Intelligence Program, or MIP. Last week’s obligatory announcement was that Congress appropriated $23.1 billion for its operations in fiscal year 2020, a nine year high. In fact, the boys on the Hill tacked on a $100 million dollar bonus on top of the Pentagon’s request. So super sleuth are the MIP’s black ops, that the DOD waits until after the fiscal year to admit how many tax dollars unknowingly funded missions the tax-payers aren’t allowed to know about.

It’s a shadowy program by its very nature, separate from the “white-side” National Intelligence Program (NIP), and vaguely described as “defense intelligence activities intended to support operational and tactical level intelligence priorities supporting defense operations.” That’s a 15-word method of saying nothing at all.

Per annual tradition, the Pentagon’s four sentence statement declared that beyond the top line amount, “No other MIP budget figures or program details will be released, as they remain classified for national security reasons.” But have no fear, the war department – which hasn’t even eked out a minor war since Gorbachev sat in the Kremlin – assures us all that cash “is aligned to support the National Defense Strategy.” After all the abject adventurism and counter-productivity of America’s agents and analysts, this seems explanation feels exceedingly inadequate.

No one is asking for the Pentagon – or Langley, for that matter – to release info on their sources and methods for stymying still active terror plots. Then again, these days, odds are Langley’s spooks (at least) might do just that if it served the designedly “politically independent” Agency’s political interests. But why aren’t check-writing citizens entitled to more than the current description – which clocks in at $6 billion-per-sentence – of what’s being cashed in their name?

After all, given the hardly distinguished recent track record of America’s 17 different intelligence agencies – eight of them within the DOD – a bit more oversight and skepticism seems sensible. Especially since, in any given year, combined intelligence programs account for some 11 percent of the total defense budget. Call me crazy, but it seems that an Intel community known for their mischievousness can do plenty of mischief carrying a cool $23 billion in unsupervised cash.

Even ex-Captain Joseph Heller might chuckle at a secret Intel program too vital not to fund, but too secret to reveal what’s being funded. He might mumble, “That’s some catch, that Catch-2020;” to which a better read Defense Secretary Mark Esper might quip: “It’s the best there is.”

In other words, trust us. And, after lying on, then botching up, minor matters like 9/11, Iraq’s WMD, torture, Libyan regime change, Syria’s “moderate rebels,” and Russian “bounties” – why of why wouldn’t we? The whole thing strikes me as an Obi-Wan Kenobi “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” mind-trick. Welcome to the Star Wars universe…come to think of it, didn’t Trump recently stand-up a literal Space Force?

Fit for Orwell: JSOC’s “Taliban Air Force”

Which brings us to last week’s second textbook profile in absurdity: according to a Washington Post (no, an Onion) headline, “The U.S. is secretly helping the Taliban fight ISIS in Afghanistan.” Beyond their shared commitment to that S-word, the two reports may be more linked than it seems.

That’s because, thanks to a 2019 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report we do have some vague idea of who nets some of those black intel bucks: US Special Operations Command, to pursue “several current acquisition efforts focused on outfitting aircraft — both manned and unmanned, fixed and rotary wing…that will work in multiple environments.” And guess which outfit has reportedly been surveilling and bombing on the Taliban’s behalf in our impalable 19-year enemy’s fight with the local chapter of ISIS-wannabes? The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) counterterrorism task force, of course – which has been “using strikes from drones and other aircraft to help the Taliban.” According to a member of the elite team, “What we’re doing with the strikes against ISIS is helping the Taliban move,” by pinning down or destroying ISIS defenders.

In reality, most foot-soldiers for the “Khorasan Province” (ISIS-K) of the now defunct Iraq-Syria-centered caliphate aren’t Arab – but disgruntled Afghans (often ex-Taliban), or Pakistani Tehrik-i-Taliban refugees from Islamabad’s crackdown on its own incubated Islamists. Furthermore, much of the fighting and US airstrike assistance described in recent reports unfolded in Kunar Province’s Korengal Valley – where some 40 US troops have been killed in rather infamous combat over the years. There, as even WaPo admits, the Taliban, U.S.-backed Kabul government, local criminal gangs, and now ISIS(K), have often really “tussled for control of the Korengal and its lucrative timber business.” It’s about wood as much as Wahhabism.

If the US taking and switching sides in a 10,000 miles-from-home lumber war seems strange, remember that what the CIA – these days in tandem with JSOC – lacks in competence it compensates with consistency. Notice that every time – and there’ve been a lot of times – the Agency founds or fuels some jihadi Frankenstein’s Monster, it quickly loses control of it. Then it all but inevitably turns on America or its allies As if that wasn’t bad enough, another more monstrous splinter or offshoot rises like a problematic Phoenix. This, of course, prompts panic and expedient alliances with the original ogres – themselves threatened by more radical challengers. Only it turns out “enemy of my enemy” friendships rarely endure.

Patient Zero: “American” Iraq

Indeed, Washington – spearheaded by its intelligence agencies and special operators – has a long and sordid history of switching enemies without skipping a beat or bothering to explain.

Take just Iraq:

Long before President George H.W. Bush hinted that he was a Hitler-reprise, Sunni-secularist Saddam Hussein was seen as a necessary counterweight to revolutionary Iran. Thus, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan essentially green-lighted, then definitively backed, Iraq’s 1980-88 invasion of the Islamic Republic. Saddam was our autocrat; that is until he invaded Kuwait in 1990. After a touch of waffling, Bush’s team rhetorically transformed Saddam into the fuhrer himself. Therefore, anything less than a full-fledged U.S.-led counterattack was akin to “Munich” style appeasement.

Just before kicking Saddam’s overrated army out of Kuwait, Bush’s had perhaps a triumphal flight of fancy and – speaking at a Raytheon plant! – encouraged Iraqi Shia to “take matters into their own hands” and rise up. Yes, the very same Shia Washington once feared as a potential Iranian Fifth Column. Sure enough, they did revolt; but Bush lost his nerve (or thought better of it) and abandoned them. Saddam slaughtered at least 30-60,000 of them.

In 2003, when Bush’s less-savvy son conquered a country that hadn’t an iota to do with the 9/11 attacks, the once-jettisoned Iraqi Shia were suddenly back in favor. They’d form the democracy’s vanguard for the whole Arab World. Unfortunately it turned out their leaders largely sprung from expat-Shia Islamist parties, militias, and terror outfits. Having sought refuge in Iran – some even fighting against their countrymen in the eight-year war – many were uncomfortably close to their recent hosts. Plenty were a tad too authoritarian, to boot.

By 2005-06, we US military occupiers found ourselves propping-up a corrupt, legitimacy-challenged Shia sectarian regime. American troops were also regularly attacked by Shia militias, various Sunni (nationalist and Islamist) factions, and jihadi foreign fighters. Bush II’s team finally realized something had to give. So, in a fresh turnabout, the Sunni tribes – many with ample American blood on their hands – were rebranded the “Awakening,” and billed as the next last great hope for democracy on the Tigris. That let President Barack Obama tardily pull US troops, but the Shia plurality clung to power and proceeded to sideline and suppress America’s Sunni frenemies.

Boosted by the U.S.-aggravated chaos over Syria’s porous border, Iraq’s Al Qaeda faction (AQI) staged a striking comeback and regained the allegiance of alienated Sunnis. Radicalized, empowered, and fed on a healthy diet of triumphalist delusions of caliphate grandeur, a significant AQI splinter pronounced itself the Islamic State (ISIS) and ran roughshod over Iraq’s hollow U.S.-raised and -trained army. After conquering huge swathes of the country’s west/northwest and driving to Baghdad’s outskirts, Iraq’s desperate government announced a wholesale Shia levée en masse – conscripting all comers, who counted a cornucopia of militia loyalties. Many were vaguely aligned with Iran.

Unwilling to see America’s troubled Iraqi progeny go extinct, Obama sent drones, planes, and “non-combat” combat advisors to steady a wavering Iraq’s soldiers and melange of green militiamen. The US advisers were advised to avoid getting themselves killed, and stay mute about embarrassing contradictions and cleavages among the sundry Shia cannon-fodder sent to the front. Appearances and all. By December 2017, when Baghdad’s U.S.-assisted gypsy army had retaken all significant caliphate territory, some 26,000 Iraqi and at least 20 American soldiers had been killed – along with a mid-range estimate of 8,000 civilians killed.

One might think Washington would make nice with its tacit Iranian allies and the Tehran-backed Shia militias after their shared victory over ISIS, then bolt back out of Baghdad. No such luck. Instead the aptly-titled US mission “Inherently Resolved” to inevitably persist under the guise of an ISIS-mop-up operations. The real reason for staying constitutes another American open secret – admitted by hawkish think-tankers, mainstream Democrats, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, alike: to “balance” and/or “contain” Iran and “reign in” its Shia militias. Of course, the latter only attack US forces because they’re there – uninvited, I’d add. American service members have overstayed their welcome by almost 11 months – Iraq’s parliament voted to expel them last January. Details, mere details.

Finally (for now), in the wake of ISIS’s de facto defeat, its aggressive escalation of tensions with Iran – including assassinating its top general and national icon in Baghdad – and Iraq’s parliamentary expulsion vote, Washington’s tacked back towards the wayward Sunnis and any pliant Shia figureheads willing to work with their sectarian rivals. One of the “sophisticates” over at the Brookings Institution even recommends the Baghdad government pin its post-ISIS, post-COVID recovery hopes on petro-princelings heading the Sunni Gulf States – the very countries who’ve long-fueled assorted Islamist groups, including (initially) ISIS itself.

To review Iraq’s cursory case study by the numbers: since 1979, the loosely Shia side has switched from American enemy-to-ally at least four times; the sketchy Sunni squad did so five times and counting.

Orwell in Afghanistan

That’s just one extreme example among among many. In other words, there’s plenty of precedent for the Taliban-ISIS-K swap – and the latter group is itself consequence and outgrowth of counterproductive US policies in Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan. Plus, the merger between ISIS-K and Tehrik-i-Taliban was a product of Washington’s sometime Pakistani proxies own devil’s bargains. They raised and fostered Pashtun Islamists to control Afghanistan and harass India’s occupation of Kashmir. When these groups predictably turned on on the state, Islamabad’s resultant bloody crackdown sent plenty of fighters to the Afghan hills – whence many offered bayat (loyalty pledge) to the Taliban’s ISIS-K competitors.

Washington’s and its proxies’ games of ally-enemy musical chairs have almost been too easy. The sad fact that those few citizens keeping tabs and throwing rational barbs have generally been dismissed as cranks and conspiracy theorists counts as proof positive.

Look to the breezy, offhanded nature JSOC-jocularity. The operators’ inside jokes about serving as the “Taliban’s Air Force” go beyond the standard darkness of soldierly sarcasm. There’s something resignedly fatalistic about their acceptance – almost expectation – of such absurd mission twists. After all, the more senior leaders among them have likely swapped sides, ditched friends, and befriended ex-enemies a time or two – and on a few continents – during their own careers. According to recent headlines Afghan veteran fathers are now watching their sons deploy to the same war. This grotesque scenario conjures Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984:

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war…war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.

Americans were once told by Reagan that the Soviets represented an absolute “evil empire.” Therefore helping raise, fund, and arm the Taliban’s Islamist precursors to fight off Moscow’s invasion was deemed obligatory – in fact it had already begun, under President Carter. After 9/11, the Taliban – which Washington had long tolerated even as they terrorized the populace – became the new absolute evil incarnate. We had to win what Bush called, nineteen Octobers ago, “a war between good and evil” – and save those embattled Afghan women we hadn’t cared a lick about a few months before.

Only we couldn’t. It took an utterly ridiculous president, Donald J. Trump, to admit as much and try making messy peace instead of endless war with the Taliban. Now the US has not-so-tacitly allied with evil to defeat an ostensibly eviler evil ISIS-K outfit birthed by America’s ludicrous folly in Iraq.

The American people aren’t meant not to notice. Orwell described such matters in 1984 – when Great Britain’s fictional facsimile suddenly switched enemies in its own forever war:

The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

Funny, if – and I’m just spit-balling here, of course – a vocal wing of senior military officers, their now retired superiors-turned-pundits, plus a basically conjoined political-media establishment wanted to indefinitely prolong the Afghan zombie war, shifting its justification to a nasty franchise facsimile of ISIS might seem just the trick. Especially if Trump’s “peace” deal appeared to end US involvement in a wildly unpopular war had rendered Taliban-baiting obsolete. No one much cares about the reigning king of the pundit-generals, H.R. McMaster, and his protestations that the done-deal is (you guessed it!) a “Munich” appeasement “travesty.”

Which raises the question: when do conspiracy theories stop being conspiratorial? Unlike their black budget’s details, the intelligence community’s past policy fiascoes are public record, and they read like broken ones. Time and again the spooks find an enemy to justify their funding and relevance – short of that, they’ll produce or provoke one.

Establishment Republican and Democratic politicians and their media mouthpieces – who are utterly out-of-step rank-and-file – have prolonged the Afghan War and the broader interventionist apparatus that funds it (and their campaigns) for a good while. Even those who once opposed the war now oppose ending it because they don’t like the ender. Informed citizens ought fear the new U.S.-Taliban anti-ISIS alliance will be used to justify and breathe life into a walking dead Afghan deployment. Washington’s war-hawks have done it before, and they’ll try it again – regardless of who wins the White House a week from today.

Joking about serving as a Taliban air force is clearly counterintuitive, paradoxical, and absurd – but taken to its logical conclusion it’s also dangerously dystopian. The thing about an empire shuffling and substituting enemies is that eventually the war-state’s shuffled substitute becomes the citizenry itself. In 1984, the state’s ultimate targets were domestic dissenters like the novel’s protagonist, Winston. Brought before the government’s torturers, he assumes he’s meant to confess but is quickly corrected by the inquisitor:

We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.

After two decades, the America’s military and intelligence forces are clearly incapable of destroying the Taliban, so now Washington may once again change enemies and ally with its old jihadi friends and reminisce about the good old Cold War battles against those bad old Soviets. The real target though, the real audience, is us. Victory for the state isn’t defined militarily anymore – that ship has sailed. True victory comes when the people hardly notice the foe-flipping at all. Changing thought, compliance through apathy – that’s the trick.

In Heller’s classic satirical antiwar novel Catch-22, when the semi-autobiographical protagonist, the bombardier Captain Yossarian, takes shrapnel in the thigh, he awakes to find the lead pilot of tending his wound mid-flight. Confused and suddenly struck with growing horror, Yossarian asked “Who’s minding the store?” Though quickly assured that Lieutenant Nately (played by Art Garfunkel in the 1970 film version) was “at the controls” of the soaring bomber, it’s clear that Heller – through Yossarian – was really asking about the cockpit of the broader war. And so should we still.

Whether it’s the annual furtive funding gymnastics or another round of friend-foe contortionism in Afghanistan, such stories never fail to engender head shakes at my youthful naïveté. Back when, at 17, I followed uncritical patriotism, aspirational masculinity, and visions of martial glory to West Point – and for much of the next five years – whenever a U.S. policy seemingly failed efficacy or ethics tests, I, like most Americans, assumed some “they” must know something a Main Street “we” didn’t. Trust the process and policy, no matter how strange, became way of life and sanity-defense mechanism.

I wanted to believe, needed to believe – even in the face of mounting evidence of early blunders and own goals – that some omniscient and benevolent insiders were manning the nation’s controls. In my case, the delusion had an expiration date of October 2006 – as I took the reins in tiny sub zones of treacherous backwater sub-districts of Southeast Baghdad.

It’s remarkable how stark a turnabout can result from fighting two wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) sold and waged on lies, watching two others (Libya and Syria) born of the same, plus launching countless raids against innocents – instigated by embarrassingly bad intel. What first I feared, then suspected, and finally knew at ground-level applies to the aggregate – and Americans ought learn it fast:

Whether in Washington, Arlington, or Langley – there are no adults “in the room“…or minding the store.

Proof continues to emerge that nurses, who are usually the first line of help in any hospital setting, are bearing the worst brunt of the Covid epidemic amongst healthcare workers.

More than 33% of all healthcare workers that have been hospitalized with Covid-19 between March and May turned out to be in nursing-related positions, a new report from Becker’s Hospital Review notes, citing CDC analysis. 

In general, healthcare workers have accounted for about 6% of total adults that have been hospitalized due to Covid. 36.3% of these hospitalizations have been nurses or Certified Nurses Assistants. 

The CDC analysis looked at 6,760 hospitalizations across 13 states, including New York, Ohio and California. It also revealed that 90% of healthcare workers hospitalized due to Covid-19 had underlying conditions, such as obesity.

28% of those hospitalized were admitted to the ICE and 15.8% required invasive ventilation. 4.2% of those admitted died during hospitalization. The analysis didn’t differentiate whether or not the healthcare workers caught Covid-19 as part of their job duties, or within their respective communities. 

The CDC stated: “Healthcare workers can have severe COVID-19-associated illness, highlighting the need for continued infection prevention and control in healthcare settings as well as community mitigation efforts to reduce transmission.”

And while the study doesn’t take into account pay associated with being a nurse, we’re willing to bet that they are hardly being compensated appropriately for the risks they have been taking across the nation.

Recall, months ago, this was an issue we pointed out with EMTs. We noted that many were leaving their jobs in “alarming numbers” because the Covid pandemic had made it overwhelming and not worth the menial salary they were making. 

Robert Baer, an EMT in New York City who was formerly one of the first responders on September 11, told CBS several months ago: “I knew it would probably kill me if I went out there and had multiple exposures — and I’m not a chicken. I love the job, but my doctors were telling me I shouldn’t be going in the field, that it was very dangerous.”

He was supposed to be deployed to Elmhurst Hospital in Queens back in March, but decided his risks were too high and, instead, quit his job. As a result of the September 11 response, he suffers with asthma, chronic bronchitis and sleep apnea that put him at a higher risk for Covid. 

Oren Barzilay, president of the FDNY-EMS Local 2507, representing New York City medics noted that about 60 EMTs had left the department over the last 4 months. Many of those retiring are over the age of 50. 

Barzilay said: “Some people like to complete 30 years on the job so they can maximize their pension, but I noticed a trend in recent weeks that they aren’t really concerned about that anymore. As soon as they reach their eligibility, which is 25 years, they are leaving.”

“They see the risks associated with the job and the low pay, and it’s just not worth it,”  Barzilay continued. EMTs start at just $30,000 per year in New York and pay tops out at about $50,000. Nationally, the job pays just $38,830 per year on average. 

Authored by Wendy McElroy via The Mises Institute,

On September 22, President Trump signed the Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping. The order speaks of “race or sex stereotyping,” which is defined as the act of “ascribing character traits, values, moral and ethical codes, privileges, status, or beliefs to a race or sex, or to an individual because of his or her race or sex.” Federal agencies or entities that receive federal funds are prohibited from stereotyping in their training or educational procedures. If an organization wants federal money, for example, its material cannot claim that individual males are racist, sexist, or oppressive simply because they are male, white, or heterosexual. Doing so is racial and sexual stereotyping.

The order has teeth in two ways. Presumably, the executive can compel compliance within its own federal agencies. Tax recipients, including contractors, who do not comply can be defunded or stripped of “licenses”; a university could lose federal money, student access to federal loans, or accreditation.

People object to government involvement in issues of discrimination, and justly so, because individuals have a right to freedom of association. The law has no business regulating peaceful interactions or refusals to interact. But government is already involved to the hilt, and the executive order seeks to take several steps back. Moreover, the dynamic of discrimination or stereotyping changes when it is a government agency or tax-funded entity that is discriminating. They are accountable to the public for how tax money is used, or they should be. And the pool of money should never be used to promote the unequal treatment of people because of their race or sex. (Whether the laws or funding should exist at all is an important but separate discussion.)

Discrimination against males is currently commonplace in government agencies and with federal tax recipients. Recent decades have turned men into an underclass who are virtually shut out of federal services, such as DOJ-funded domestic violence (DV) programs.1 The executive order’s redefinition of discrimination—race and sex stereotyping—is a long-overdue challenge and rejection of identity politics and its dogmatic mantra that men oppress women, that men and women are class enemies, and that men have it coming. Only after discrediting the ideology of identity politics can the laws, policies, and institutions based on it be dismantled.

What specifically does the order redefine?

It begins with Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous statement.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Today, King’s dream has been turned inside out so that justice to his children is said to require discrimination based on race and sex. The content of character is secondary, at best.

Two ideological trends accomplished this feat: identity politics and critical race theory.

• Identity politics claims individuals are not defined by their choices or character but by the class(es) to which they belong—white or minority, male or female, for example.

• Critical race theory is a postmodern framework by which all institutions and dynamics of society are analyzed in terms of race and hierarchy.

The executive order summarizes these trends, “Many people are pushing a different vision that is grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual.”

This vision sees America as “an irredeemably racist and sexist country” in which “some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors.” By contrast, the executive order returns to King’s dream by defunding the tax-paid diversity and antiracism training that is based on identity politics and critical race theory. 

In theory, the order means that all such federally funded training will cease.

This seems to be a serious push. A September 4 memorandum issued by the Office of Management and Budget broke ground for the executive order. “Training in Federal Government” instructed agencies to “begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on critical race theory” or institutional racism. The memo outraged and alarmed its targets, of course, who seem equally serious about resisting the push. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents seven hundred thousand federal and DC employees, quickly condemned it.

 “As racial injustice continues to rock this nation,” the AFGE national president declared, “we ought to be building more bridges of understanding. But all this president seems to know how to do is build walls of division.”

Obstruction in some form is likely.

To ground the coming conflict in practical reality: Which sort of agency is being targeted, and specifically for what? Three examples are instructive. The order singles out:

• The Department of the Treasury, an executive department, which held a seminar that argued “virtually all white people…contribute to racism.” Attendees were instructed to avoid advocating either color blindness or letting people’s “skills and personalities be what differentiates them.” Judging people on merit is considered racist.

• Argonne National Laboratories, a federal entity, which stated in its material that racism is “interwoven into every fabric of America” and described “color blindness” or advocating a “meritocracy” as “actions of bias.”

• The Smithsonian Institution, heavily funded by federal money, claimed that concepts like “[o]bjective, rational linear thinking,” “[h]ard work,” and the “nuclear family” were divisive “aspects and assumptions of whiteness.”

Clearly, the new policy will apply aggressively across the board.

The most interesting institutions to watch may well be universities.

They are wellsprings of identity politics and critical race theory, as well as pioneers in the demonization of men. Virtually all universities receive federal funds—if not directly then indirectly through mechanisms like student loans. In theory, this means all of them will drastically alter both their training material and probably their curricula. Academics have also reacted with outrage and alarm. In a joint statement, the deans of all five University of California law schools gave an unusually passionate defense of critical race theory, calling Trump’s “rhetoric redolent of McCarthyism and the Red Scare.” Obstruction in some form is likely.

The universities have reason to be scared, because a day of reckoning may be nigh. Consider just one way in which this policy change could alter the American campus. Every women’s studies program promotes the theory of patriarchy, which is defined as an “unjust social system that subordinates, discriminates or is oppressive to women.” The oppressors are males as a class; the victims are women and minorities. This makes every women’s studies program guilty of the sex stereotyping described in the order. In theory, these programs need to abandon their ideology or face defunding and the possible loss of accreditation.

The words in theory must be emphasized when discussing the executive order’s impact, because a bureaucratic backlash is inevitable, and it will be fierce. Universities are bastions of impenetrable infrastructure that closes ranks when under attack. Exposing the system as intellectually corrupt, rawly discriminatory, and vicious toward young men in its care will make the wagons circle. Universities are the hill on which this executive order may die.

The bill is due. This time the cost is falling on universities rather than male students. Will the system pay up? If happens on campus, then it will happen everywhere else.

Or universities could become the springboard for a saner method of how people should associate with each other—that is, as individuals who connect based on their own assessment of each other’s merit. Social justice spilled out of the campus onto Main Street; perhaps the same can be true of reason and a respect for the individual.

An asteroid measuring 300 meters across is gaining speed as it tacks towards Earth – and could be on a collision path with the planet by 2068, experts at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy revealed on Tuesday. 

Astronomers at UH warned, the asteroid, named 99942 Apophis, or has been dubbed by some as the “God of Chaos” – is speeding up due to something known as the Yarkovsky effect. This means the asteroid’s speed is increasing because of thermal radiation from the sun. 

 

“The new observations we obtained with the Subaru telescope earlier this year were good enough to reveal the Yarkovsky acceleration of Apophis,” UH astronomer Dave Tholen said. 

“They show that the asteroid is drifting away from a purely gravitational orbit by about 170 meters per year, which is enough to keep the 2068 impact scenario in play,” Tholen sad. 

Apophis will make an “extremely” close pass by the Earth in April 2029:

 “We have known for some time that an impact with Earth is not possible during the 2029 close approach,” he said. 

The asteroid’s size and proximity to the Earth have resulted in NASA categorizing it as a “Potentially Hazardous Asteroid.” NASA scientists are aware of the asteroid’s track could shift from now till the potential impact date. 

If, for whatever reason, the asteroid strikes Earth in 2068, its potential impact would be the equivalent of 880 million tons of TNT, making it 65,000 times more destructive than Hiroshima. 

A horrifying simulation shows what could happen if Apophis hits Earth. 

By John Hirschauer, via Real Clear Education,

A recent survey of nearly 20,000 undergraduates at 55 major American colleges and universities suggests that students at the University of Chicago enjoy the most robust free-speech rights – and not just on paper, but in practice.

The 2020 College Free Speech Rankings is a joint venture of RealClearEducation, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and research firm College Pulse. Questions gauge students’ commitment to free expression and their perception of peer and administrative tolerance for controversial speech. Responses were coded and partitioned by institution and were used to create an Overall Score, grading the colleges and universities on their relative commitment to free speech. The Overall Score aggregates an institution’s performance in five areas: tolerance, openness, administrative support for free speech, self-expression, and the existence of speech codes on campus.

Of the 55 institutions included in the survey, none ranked higher than the University of Chicago. Its Overall Score of 64.2 outpaced second-ranked Kansas State (57.3) by 6.9 points, a larger gap than the one between 10th-ranked University of Arizona (55.3) and 50th-ranked Oklahoma State University (49). Chicago ranked first in student tolerance of controversial speakers, student perception of administrative support for free speech, and students’ perception of their ability to express themselves on campus.

Ninety-two percent of Chicago’s students felt confident that the administration would defend an embattled speaker caught in a free-speech controversy—by far the highest mark received by any institution. In a press release, FIRE quipped that while the Ivy League “offers students sterling credentials,” students should “try the University of Chicago instead” if they’re interested in being “offer[ed] free speech.”

Chicago created the Committee on Free Expression in 2014 and charged it with “articulating the University’s overarching commitment to free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation among all members of the University’s community.” The Committee’s final report, released in January 2015, affirmed Chicago’s commitment “to free and open inquiry in all matters” and promised “all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.”

The resulting “Chicago Statement” is widely considered a landmark in the ongoing battles over speech on campus. FIRE president Greg Lukianoff said that Chicago “should be proud” of the university’s free speech statement and compared it with other canonical free-speech declarations, like Yale University’s Woodward Report and the American Association of University Professors’ Declaration of Principles.

Some Chicago students dispute the survey’s depiction of the situation on campus. Undergraduate Evita Duffy claims that if her university was considered a leader on free-speech issues, then the “repression of conservative ideas on campuses is worse than most people think.”

Duffy highlighted an open letter signed by more than 120 faculty members in January 2018, which called for the disinvitation of former White House adviser Stephen Bannon from a scheduled debate, as an example of Chicago’s intolerance for controversial speech on campus. The letter’s signatories argued that Bannon “should not be afforded the platform and opportunity to air his hate speech on this campus” and implicitly accused the event organizers of “normalizing hate speech by granting it a privileged forum.”

The university released a statement defending Bannon’s right to speak on campus but failed to condemn the faculty members who wanted to deny him a platform. As of this writing, the debate in which Bannon was scheduled to participate has not occurred.

A University of Chicago spokesman told RealClearEducation that it was because of the University’s commitment to free inquiry and free expression that it refused to condemn the faculty members’ attempted disinvitation of Steve Bannon.

“The University does not limit the speech of faculty or mandate apologies for their speech, unless there has been a violation of University policy or the law,” the spokesman said. “Nor does the University insulate speakers from criticism of the manner or content of their speech or writing.”

Seventy-four percent of Chicago students identified themselves as liberal on the survey, while only 11% identified as conservative. Still, Chicago would rank third overall in the College Free Speech Rankings even if only the opinions of conservative students were considered. And when the views of all students are taken into account, the university is a clear leader over its peers.

Located just seven miles away, the University of Illinois at Chicago did not fare nearly as well, placing 44th in the survey rankings. More than half of UIC students surveyed said that shouting down a speaker on campus might be acceptable, and only 55 percent were confident that the university administration would support a speaker embroiled in a free-speech controversy.

Many students found the atmosphere on campus hostile to certain points of view. One self-described “moderate” student noted that “UIC is a very safe and protected place to speak if you’re liberal” but is “an incredibly prickly and volatile place to express any view that’s not in keeping with liberal . . . principles.” Several students expressed fear of reprisal from faculty members if they disagreed with a professor’s political opinions in class.

FIRE gave UIC a “Red” speech-code grade after reviewing the university’s codes of conduct, highlighting several passages in campus regulatory documents that could stifle students’ exercise of their First Amendment rights. By contrast, the University of Chicago earned FIRE’s “Green” speech-code grade, reflecting the institution’s strong written policies on student speech.

At the time of publication, the University of Illinois at Chicago had not responded to multiple requests for comment.