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Trump, the New York Times, and John Bolton – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on September 12, 2019

Bolton’s best-known policies have been to bomb Iran and replace the Mullahs with a US puppet government; turn Venezuela into an American oil well; exit the UN; and start World War III

We are well rid but Bolton’s opinion on one thing has always been correct.

Dump the UN.

https://original.antiwar.com/david-bromwich/2019/09/11/trump-the-new-york-times-and-john-bolton/

by

The New York Times on September 10 ran six articles with the word Trump in the headlines. Two of the stories were clearly warranted – one on Trump’s continuing resolve to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan, and one on the way the commerce department played along with Trump’s false message about the Alabama destination of the recent hurricane. The other stories were tabloid-fodder.

Then midday September 10 came the news that John Bolton had been sacked. That deserved a story, so it was fair to predict the Times would run three: one on the event, one on the history of a memorable relationship, and one on “possible consequences.”

The Times on September 11 ran four stories on Bolton. News analysis on page one, by Michael Crowley and Lara Jakes, opened with this sentence: “On one foreign policy issue after another, John R. Bolton was the in-house skeptic who checked President Trump’s most unorthodox instincts.” The word unorthodox is doing a lot of work there. It would be truer to say that Trump cut down Bolton’s most dangerous initiatives: for example his idea of starting a war with Iran by an immediate violent retaliation after the bloodless downing of a US surveillance drone.

Was John Bolton a “skeptic”? An “adult in the room”? Bolton’s best-known policies have been to bomb Iran and replace the Mullahs with a US puppet government; turn Venezuela into an American oil well; exit the UN; and start World War III soon while the US can win (if we don’t tie our hands). And meanwhile withdraw from none of the following countries: Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan…

Bolton was originally appointed by Trump at the request of the casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. It was Bolton’s advocacy of Israeli expansion, and his detestation of the very idea of a Palestinian state, that prompted both Adelson and Benjamin Netanyahu to recommend him as the the best choice for Trump’s third national security adviser…

It appears that anyone (no matter how devious and reckless) who opposes Donald Trump can now expect to be rewarded with the honorific title “skeptic” – a word often used in the past to describe a doubter rather than a fanatical supporter of an insane orthodoxy.

We are through the looking glass.

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Tulsi Gabbard Suggests Government Is Run By A “Small Group Of Political Elite” – Collective Evolution

Posted by M. C. on September 12, 2019

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2019/09/10/news-tulsi-gabbard-suggests-government-is-run-by-a-small-group-of-political-elite/

By

In Brief

  • The Facts:In an interview of Fox, Tulsi Gabbard appears to have suggested that the government of the United States is run by a small elite group of people and that this needs to change.
  • Reflect On:Does this statement not line up with what the evidence about the US government has shown for years? What does this mean for how we engage in the political system? Are voices truly heard?

Democratic candidate and congresswoman from Hawaii Tulsi Gabbard is an unconventional political figure in this upcoming election that has been turning heads. Whether it’s sharing truths about the Syrian war and the US arming terrorists or whether she was exposing establishment candidates like Kamala Harris, Gabbard is someone who many people are seeing as ‘the only viable Dem candidiate.’

But that doesn’t mean Gabbard has any chance at that spot because as we saw in 2016, the DNC is ready and willing to rig the election to favour controllable Deep State driven candidates like Biden and Harris. After all, WikiLeaks showed us this quite clearly when the DNC kicked Bernie out in favour of Hillary…

When she says political elite are controlling government, what does that mean in practicality exactly?

What do these statements say about the power of the people? How can we actually solve this issue? If people aren’t represented and don’t appear to have power, what’s the course of action moving forward?…

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Progressive Foreign Policy Fails Again – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on September 12, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/09/james-ostrowski/progressive-foreign-policy-fails-again/

By

Note: This is an excerpt from their book, The Impeachment of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for High Crimes in Syria and Libya.

What happened in Libya and Syria is simply a manifestation of a very dangerous mindset known as progressivism.  Progressivism amounts to a blind faith that government force can improve any given situation.  It is usually associated with domestic policy but progressivism also operates in foreign policy. Progressives ignore costs and consequences.  Progressives plunge into situations they do not understand, heedless of the consequences.  When progressives fail, they invariably attribute the failure to not using enough government force.  Thus, Obama, explaining his failure in Libya, stated, “I think we underestimated . . . the need to come in full force.”[1]

Thus, it is not merely Obama and Clinton who need to be held responsible.  Their underlying ideology also needs to be called to account.  We need to impeach progressivism too lest that dangerous ideology leads us into an endless series of future foreign policy disasters as it has already led us into 100 years filled with them.

It is important to understand that a callous disregard of consequences is intrinsic to progressivism,[2] whether applied to domestic or foreign policy. One consequence of foreign intervention which the progressives utterly ignore is blowback in the form of terrorist attacks in direct retaliation against the intervention.  It is probably a Freudian slip that those who supported overthrowing Gaddafi and Assad were oblivious to the consequences as these men had few ties to terrorism in recent years.

Another consequence of war that is rarely discussed in advance is the legal risk of engaging in war.  When a state is attacked, it has the legal right to respond and defend itself.[4]  Such a response may include attacking any military facility in the attacking state. Obviously, any such attacks in modern war run the risk of civilian casualties.  Since this is rarely if ever mentioned by politicians, they apparently expect us to simply put all of this out of our minds.

What is truly revolting is this.  Obama and Clinton, who are protected by heavy security, have launched the United States into wars against parties likely to retaliate against innocent and vulnerable civilians, when the perpetrators of these illegal wars are utterly incapable of stopping such attacks or protecting such civilians.  The only legal remedy for such moral depravity is impeachment…

To sum up, progressivism fails in foreign policy for a number of important reasons. First, the progressives are pervasively ignorant about the countries they are invading and conquering. Second, such intervention fails to deal with the underlying causes of problems, usually being related to the preexisting culture and character of a people or the arbitrary borders into which disparate ethnic, racial and religious groups have been consigned. Third, such intervention sparks resistance and retaliation among the victims. Finally, such intervention usually results in unforeseen and unintended bad consequences.

Thus, the lesson of this book is not just that Obama and Clinton blundered by intervening into Libya and Syria but that, once again, progressives applied their utopian theory beyond the borders of the United States with the usual disastrous consequences.

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One of the original progressives

 

 

 

 

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Who Cares What the Government Thinks? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on September 12, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/09/andrew-p-napolitano/who-cares-what-the-government-thinks/

By

In 1791, when Congressman James Madison was drafting the first 10 amendments to the Constitution — which would become known as Bill of Rights — he insisted that the most prominent amendment among them restrain the government from interfering with the freedom of speech. After various versions of the First Amendment had been drafted and debated, the committee that he chaired settled on the iconic language: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.”

Madison insisted upon referring to speech as the freedom of speech, not for linguistic or stylistic reasons, but to reflect its pre-political existence. Stated differently, according to Madison — who drafted the Constitution as well as the Bill of Rights — because the freedom of speech pre-existed the government, it does not have its origins in government. The use of the article the reflects that pre-existence.

The First Amendment also reflects the framers’ collective belief that the freedom of speech is a natural right. It has its origins in our human nature. We all yearn to speak free from restraint, and we all understand that we can use our speech to express any idea we want to express without fear or hesitation. Those yearnings and understandings are universal — hence, natural.

The framers wrote the First Amendment to codify negative rights. That is, the First Amendment recognizes the existence of the freedom of speech for every person, and it negates the ability and the power of Congress — after the Civil War amendments, of all governments — to infringe upon it. The First Amendment does not command Congress to grant the freedom of speech (it is not Congress’ to grant); rather, it commands that Congress shall not interfere with it.

Nearly all of the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights are negative rights. Their essence is not a grant of liberty. Their essence is a restraint on the government from interfering with pre-existing liberty.

I offer this brief understanding of the freedom of speech in our constitutional form of government as an introduction to a discussion of the dangers of government exercising free speech. We know from the plain language in and the history of the First Amendment that all persons have the freedom of speech. But what about the government? Does government have the freedom of speech?

That is not an academic question. The short answer to it is: Under the theory of the Declaration of Independence — that our rights come to us from the Creator and are inalienable — and consistent with Madison’s understanding, the government has no freedom of speech. Government only can exercise the powers we have given it. Nowhere in the Constitution did the states give such powers to the feds, and nowhere did the people give such powers to the states. We don’t elect government to identify ideas it loves or hates. We elect it to protect our freedoms.

Stated differently, who cares what the government thinks?

In San Francisco, one needs to care. Last week, the city government there condemned the National Rifle Association, labeled it a domestic terrorist organization and prohibited city agencies from interacting with it or with those with whom it interacts, because of the NRA’s robust defense of the Second Amendment. Can any government in America constitutionally do that? In a word: No….

Whatever one thinks of the NRA, the government has no business condemning it. Can it condemn McDonald’s as a health menace for selling fatty foods? Can it condemn pro-life groups as domestic terrorists for publicly attempting to dissuade young women from having abortions? Can it condemn young socialists for demanding confiscation and redistribution of property? Can it condemn the free press as a public enemy when the press criticizes it? The answer to all these hypotheticals (the last is not so hypothetical today) is: No. The First Amendment was written to keep the government out of the business of influencing the free market of ideas.

The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to encourage and foment open, wide, robust, unbridled speech about the government. Speech without fear or favor from the government. Speech without government interference. Speech without government challenge or reward.

In the most liberal city in America — where free speech was once sacrosanct — it is now subject to official government disapproval…

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Rabid Republican Blog It's Frisco LibTurds vs SF Property ...

 

 

 

 

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Why a Prominent Economist Abandoned His Support for Carbon Taxes | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2019

https://mises.org/wire/why-prominent-economist-abandoned-his-support-carbon-taxes

David R. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and was a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California who taught courses on energy economics. He originally endorsed the standard view among economists that if some physical scientists are right that greenhouse gas emissions will lead to substantial warming, and if the government must “do something,” then the best policy response is a tax on carbon.

However, as Henderson explains in a recent article, he has since changed his mind, and no longer thinks a carbon tax is “a slam dunk.” Even if we stipulate the basic framework of the “market failure” argument, it’s not at all clear that academics and policy wonks should be agitating for a carbon tax. There might be much better solutions available, rather than having the government penalize carbon dioxide emissions.

In the present post I’ll review Henderson’s reasons for his change, and I’ll also address some of the objections that his critics raised against his essay.

Henderson on the Phrase “Price on Carbon”

Before diving into his more substantive points, let me relay Henderson’s discussion of the odd phrase “price on carbon” which you frequently hear in these debates:

Let’s first dispose of … the idea that taxing carbon is the same thing as “pricing carbon.” Carbon is already priced. Natural gas, oil, and coal all have prices and their prices are somewhat related to the amount of carbon they contain. To be sure, adding a tax to carbon would raise the prices of all those fuels, just as adding a tax to alcohol would make your tipple more expensive. But just as setting a tax on alcohol does not “price alcohol,” setting a tax on carbon does not “price carbon.” In my more cynical moments, I wonder if advocates of a carbon tax sometimes call such a tax a price to mislead people into thinking that a carbon tax is a market solution rather than a tax solution. [Bold added.]

Henderson here hits the nail on the head. Besides just being wrong, to equate a carbon tax with a “price on carbon” would sound ludicrous in the context of any other tax.

Henderson Changes His Mind on a Carbon Tax

After summarizing the textbook case for using a Pigovian (named after A.C. Pigou) tax as the least-cost, decentralized way to correct the “negative externality” of human carbon dioxide emissions — an approach that is endorsed by even conservative/libertarian Republican economists such as Greg Mankiw, George Shultz, and John Cochrane — Henderson explains why he now has serious doubts:

[E]conomists who advocate Pigovian taxes take as given that the most-efficient way to forestall global warming is to reduce the amount of carbon used. But what if their assumption is incorrect?

There are at least three important reasons to conclude that the assumption is wrong. First, cow farts. … A far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is methane. Methane … warms the planet much more quickly than carbon dioxide before decaying to carbon dioxide. …To be sure, the CO2 lasts much, much longer than methane, but the fact of methane’s huge short-run potency surely suggests that a tax on carbon may not be the cheapest way to forestall global warming.

Second, one important technological development over the last decade has been “geo-engineering.” The idea here is to change other things in the atmosphere that are easier to change than the amount of carbon used …

Is such a technology feasible right now? Maybe not. But if it were, it would be incredibly cheap. Myhrvold’s organization, Intellectual Ventures, estimated that it could be set up in two years for $20 million and an annual operating cost of about $10 million.

…The third low-cost way to rein in global warming is by planting trees. Trees absorb and store CO2 emissions. You could call the tree-planting strategy geo-engineering, but it would count as such in a very low-tech form. According to a July 4, 2019 article in The Guardian, planting one trillion trees would be much cheaper than a carbon tax and much more effective. At an estimated cost of 30 cents per additional tree, the overall cost would be $300 billion. That’s large, but it’s a one-time cost. [Bold added.]

To summarize, the specific change in Henderson’s thinking is that he has come to realize that even if we thought the government should “do something” about climate change, it’s not obvious that the correct policy is to induce businesses and households to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. That mentality is usually taken for granted in the Pigovian framing of the climate change debate, but — as Henderson explains — there are several reasons he now thinks that perhaps this assumption is itself wrong. To repeat, even if one stipulates (if only for the sake of argument) that the government should do something to avert the climate change that human activity will cause (if left unchecked), there might be more sensible policies than to tackle carbon dioxide emissions directly.

I have written on some of these themes here at IER, for example when I explained geo-engineering options to college students who wanted humanity to “do something” about the threat of climate change, and when I recently used the new tree-planting study to illustrate Ronald Coase’s famous critique of the entire Pigovian tax framework for fixing ostensible “market failures.” Note too that a huge advantage of planting trees is that they are a “geo-engineering” approach that has few of the downsides of more radical proposals; it would be hard for critics to object that planting trees will hurt the environment in some other, perhaps unpredictable, way.

To help make sense of Henderson’s point about methane, here is a quick chemistry refresher: Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a molecule consisting of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms, while a molecule of methane (CH4) consists of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms. Standard estimates conclude that a ton of methane is eighty-four times as potent in “global warming potential” as a ton of carbon dioxide over a 20-year horizon, and that perhaps one-fourth of humanity’s contribution to global warming to date has come from methane emissions.

Rather than restate the arguments that Henderson and I have made, it might illuminate the issues better if I now tackle two of the particular objections that critics raised in the comments section of the popular blog EconLog where Henderson posted his article.

Objection #1: “Tax Carbon Dioxide or Methane: Why Not Both?”…

Objection #2: “So Let’s Subsidize Trees and Tax Carbon!”…

Conclusion

Economist David R. Henderson used to believe that if the government were going to “do something” about climate change, then a carbon tax seemed to be the obvious policy tool to use. Yet now he has had serious doubts. This isn’t because he’s a “science denier” but rather because he’s thought through some of the limitations of the Pigovian tax framework for dealing with alleged negative externalities. Especially for activists who genuinely believe the world faces catastrophe, they should give serious consideration to Henderson’s reasons for thinking a carbon tax might be a false “solution” to climate change after all.

Originally published at the Institute for Energy Research

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Precautionary Principle | Sacred Cow Chips

 

 

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The mad-scientist who pioneered the CIA’s mind-control experiments | The Daily Bell

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2019

It really takes a special type of stupid to ignore all the violations in the past, from the Tuskegee syphilis experiments to the lies that get the US into war after war.

It’s revelations like these that make it insane to trust the government.

This is just one tiny example of the cold hard proof of how psychotic and evil our government can be.

https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/news-analysis/the-mad-scientist-who-pioneered-the-cias-mind-control-experiments/

By Joe Jarvis

The crazy people are the one who DON’T believe any conspiracy theories…

If you believed in the existence of MK-ULTRA CIA mind-control experiments in the 1960s, people would probably assume you took a little too much acid.

And that may very well have been the case if you were one of the unwitting subjects of the mad-scientist, Syndey Gottlieb.

Gottlieb developed his practices straight from Nazi-doctors responsible for some of the most horrific human experiments on concentration camp victims during World War II. At one point the Nazi scientists were flown to the USA to lecture CIA agents on the effects of the deadly poison gas sarin.

Gottlieb emulated these Nazi-tactics in black sites all over the world.

[Gottlieb] operated almost completely without supervision. He had sort of a checkoff from his titular boss and from his real boss, Richard Helms, and from the CIA director, Allen Dulles. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. This guy had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal — yet nobody looked over his shoulder. He never had to file serious reports to anybody. I think the mentality must have been [that] this project is so important — mind control, if it can be mastered, is the key to global world power.

Some of his experiments involved voluntary participants. For instance, Whitey Bulger volunteered during his first stint in prison. He was told the experiments were meant to research cures for Schizophrenia.

In reality, he was administered LSD every day for over a year in an attempt to destroy the human mind. That was step one, before the mind could be replaced with a new mind, one which the CIA would control.

Other victims included men lured in by prostitutes, and “expendable” foreign prisoners not afforded the right to due process.

During the process people went crazy, lives were ruined, and people died.

Stephen Kinzer is out today with a new book called Poisoner in Chief which dives deep in the man behind the now-infamous mind control experiments of the 1950s and 60s, MK-ULTRA.

Stephen Kinzer’s Poisoner in Chief reads like a spy thriller―but his revelations about the macabre career of the CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb are deeply disturbing. Kinzer’s work underscores once again the narrative power of biography to unearth our collective history.” ―Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of American Prometheus, author of The Good Spy.

It’s revelations like these that make it insane to trust the government.

This is just one tiny example of the cold hard proof of how psychotic and evil our government cab be.

So why on earth are there still millions and millions of people who argue every day for the government to have more power over us?…

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It’s Not A Mystery Why America’s Biggest Cities Are Losing Population | Zero Hedge

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2019

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/its-not-mystery-why-americas-biggest-cities-are-losing-population

by Tyler Durden

Authored by Scott Shackford via Reason.com,

Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City all have some easily identifiable management problems…

 

Chicago has been losing people for years now, but Los Angeles and New York City have also found themselves on the decline. Both cities had been seeing domestic outmigration (people moving out of the city to other parts of the country) for several years, but foreign immigration into the two cities have long made up for it.

But new census data show that Los Angeles County is seeing a net loss of about 13,000 folks, and New York’s Bronx, Kings, and Queens counties (all containing parts of New York City) have seen a combined net loss of about 40,000 people, based on census data released back in April.

Thompson hits some of the big issues affecting these cities (housing problems in Los Angeles, crime and racism in Chicago), but he does so in a vague “maybe this is a contributor?” fashion. It’s partly understandable; because the trend is new (except in Chicago) the full nature of this population drain isn’t entirely clear, and it’s too soon to give firm answers without falling into confirmation biases, even if they do have statistical support.

Still, each of these cities is facing some severe problems in the way they’re managed, their uncertain financial situations, and a general disregard for the welfare and liberty of the citizens who live there.

Chicago. 

What more is there to say about a city that is infamous for its corrupt police department (not to mention the rest of its government) as well as its growing financial crisis? The city and state pension crises continue to escalate as Chicago has—for years—failed to properly fund the pensions of its very well-paid employees. The city has responded to this growing crisis not by cutting back on spending but by desperately looking for revenue anywhere they can get it, which means trying to shake more change out of the pockets of city residents. Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella has documented how the city has been impounding people’s cars and attempting to soak them for thousands of dollars in fines.

Now the city is hoping that recently legalized marijuana sale revenue will help balance the budget, but the high taxes on recreational weed sales guarantee that (just like in California) a black market for pot will continue to thrive. The city cannot depend on that revenue to fix its problems.

As such, Chicago is seeking more and more money from its citizens to simply stay afloat. Chicago’s new mayor, Lori Lightfoot, noted in June that Chicago “cannot keep asking taxpayers to give us more revenue without the structural reforms that are fundamentally necessary to make our city and our state run better.” But then in July, Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker resisted her proposed solution to combine the state’s various pension systems under one umbrella out of fear it will hurt the state’s extremely troubled credit rating. Adam Schuster of the Illinois Policy Institute noted that Lightfoot’s plan was essentially an attempt to get a state bailout of Chicago’s pension debts, and the end result would likely be a massive state deficit and more calls for tax increases.

Chicago may well be in a financial death spiral. Given all the official city-sanctioned government pickpocketing, it’s not surprising that people are abandoning the Windy City.

Los Angeles. 

Thompson quite accurately notes that the city and the entire state of California are stuck in a crisis due to lack of housing, and it’s most certainly contributing to L.A.’s outmigration (not to mention the city’s expanding homeless population).

But Thompson doesn’t really delve into the deliberately destructive regulatory systems in California that keep big cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco from being able to efficiently build more homes.

California gives its residents way too much power to attack and veto nearby housing developments by abusing state environmental regulations. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is invoked regularly by wealthier NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) types who may fret in public about the homeless crisis but will fight any solution that might bring more people to their neighborhood. CEQA is also regularly abused by construction unions to try to force developers to negotiate with them or risk long delays and court fights in order to build anything at all.

These fights naturally drive up the costs of housing, making it harder and harder for developers to actually build “affordable” housing, which then becomes another tool used to fight any housing development at all by people trying to hold back progress, complaining it will lead to gentrification and people (particularly poor minorities) getting shoved out of their homes. Research consistently shows that the idea that gentrification is caused by adding more housing to poor or minority communities is mostly nonsense. Yet it still gets used by NIMBY neighbors who are really just trying to protect their property values.

All of that is to say that the source of L.A.’s housing problem is easy to identify and solve. Instead, we’re seeing responses that will make the housing problem worse—like expanded rent control. Fortunately, though, there are some major housing developments currently under construction in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the city council seems to think the solution to the city’s homeless problem involves banning them from sleeping outdoors in more places.

New York City.

It’s tempting to just say “Mayor Bill de Blasio” as an explanation of what’s ailing the Big Apple. There’s a reason that de Blasio is currently one of the least popular candidates vying for the presidential nomination: He is wildly unpopular in his own state.

De Blasio has pretty much no interest in what you, as a resident of New York City, would like to do with your property, your life, or your child’s education. He has said believes that the purpose of businesses and corporations are to serve the government and wants to seize and redistribute their profits if they make more money than he prefers. He has said he would like to seize poorly maintained properties to hand them over to the city’s Housing Authority, even though the agency has been ranked as the worst landlord in the Big Apple by the New York City Public Advocate, the city’s elected ombudsman.

De Blasio is also a massive enemy of school choice, unlike former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has donated his own money to support charter schools. De Blasio is fighting charter schools and gifted schools all to pander to unions and other politically powerful city residents. This attack isn’t going to hurt wealthy families—they will send their kids to private schools regardless. Instead, he’s hurting talented children in poor and minority families who see charter schools as an alternative when their kids are not being served well by traditional public schools. Instead of attempting to actually improve the quality of public schooling, he’s trying to institute demographic quotas to decide which children attend which schools in some misguided attempt at “fairness,” which will level the playing field by dragging everybody down to the city-approved level of mediocrity.

Despite de Blasio’s vocal attacks against the wealthy and connected, as mayor, he’s mostly served the entrenched city government power base at the expense of his own citizens. And we see the same in Los Angeles and Chicago. Is there any wonder people might be packing up and moving out?

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De Blasio’s Battle With Charter School Backlash – NYU Local

 

 

 

 

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The Media’s Betrayal of American Soldiers – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2019

Behind their self-conscious, over-adulation of military members lay a unspeakable dirty secret: these people are pawns of the military-industrial-complex, for whom the troops are naught but pawns in their partisan political games. When mixed with widespread public apathy regarding foreign affairs, the result is an utter abandonment of the soldiers that all purport to love.

https://original.antiwar.com/danny_sjursen/2019/09/10/the-medias-betrayal-of-american-soldiers/

by

Bipartisan critique of Trump’s plan to roll out an Afghan peace plan during the 9/11 anniversary from Camp David misses the point: negotiation was the only hope to avoid more needless American deaths.

It is a rare thing, indeed, when both establishment and media “liberals” and “conservatives” agree on anything. Nevertheless, lightning has proverbially struck this week as both sides attack President Trump with equal vehemence. Thus, here we are, and here I am – in the disturbing position of defending Trump’s (until Sunday) peace policy for Afghanistan. Nonetheless, though I don’t particularly like the way this position befits me, I’ll take it as a sign that I just might be on to something when the clowns at Fox News and MSNBC, alike, vociferously disagree with my position on an American forever war.

Few in the political or press mainstream ever much liked Trump’s regularly touted plans to extract U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Even “liberal” Rachel Maddow – who once wrote a book critical of US military interventions – turned on a dime and became a born-again cheerleader for continuing the war. After all, in tribal America, if Trump proposes it, the reflexive “left” assumes it must be wrong, anathema even. That’s come to be expected.

Only this time, even his own party has attacked the president after he let it slip that he’d planned a secret peace conference with the Taliban at Camp David and might even have announced a deal to gradually end the US role in the war during the anniversary week of the 9/11 attacks. Gasp! How dare he? End a failing war, save the lives of perhaps hundreds or thousands of US troops, and do so near the 9/11 anniversary? This amounts to heresy in imperial Washington D.C. But it shouldn’t be unexpected: Trump’s own policy advisers have opposed any meaningful steps to end the Afghan War from the get go.

Ever since he took office, Trump’s anti-interventionist “instincts” – though publicly popular – have been stifled by his advisers in what his base calls the “deep state,” and I prefer to simply label the national security warfare state. Whether it was, first, the ostensible, media-canonized “adults in the room” – really a troika of generals with tired, discredited ideas – or, recently, the neoconservative retreads, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, nearly every Trump national security adviser has worked tirelessly to keep America at war…everywhere.

Lost in all the bipartisan hysteria regarding the 9/11 anniversary and Camp David location choice, is one salient, if uncomfortable, truth: the only way these sorts of wars end, historically, is through negotiations with implacable enemies and nefarious actors. That’s real life, and ending stalemated wars is no time for dreamy delusions. Besides, what better option exists than peace talks and a phased US withdrawal? With the Taliban contesting more of the country than ever before, the Kabul regime broke and corrupt, and a record opium crop fueling Taliban finances, the war’s reached – for years now – a tenuous stasis between quagmire and stalemate…

What’s so bad about having Taliban representatives at Camp David? The PLO’s avowed “terrorist,” leader, Yasser Arafat has been there. What’s more, presidents and their representatives have negotiated with adversaries responsible for far more American deaths than the Taliban: Eisenhower with the North Koreans and Chinese; Nixon with the North Vietnamese and Vietcong; Reagan with the leader of the Soviet “evil empire.” In fact, I’d argue that diplomacy is actually more presidential than waging endless, reflexive warfare…

Nevertheless, the pundits at the helm of corporate media programs, and party-line Democrats and Republicans, only pretend to care about the lives and well-being of America’s servicemen and women. Behind their self-conscious, over-adulation of military members lay a unspeakable dirty secret: these people are pawns of the military-industrial-complex, for whom the troops are naught but pawns in their partisan political games. When mixed with widespread public apathy regarding foreign affairs, the result is an utter abandonment of the soldiers that all purport to love. Which is exactly what the mainstream media’s (even Republican!) vacuous critique of Trump’s planned but canceled 9/11 week peace announcement is: a betrayal of the troops and a death sentence for who knows how many more American soldiers.

Now, let me be clear: as New Yorker from a blue collar Staten Island neighborhood chock full of cops and firemen, I don’t take the 9/11 attacks lightly. In fact, I took the whole tragedy personally and long seethed with anger against bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the likely complicit Saudi kingdom, for that matter. September 11, 2001 left two of my FDNY uncles forever emotionally scarred, took the life of a dear family friend, sent my father fleeing for his life from an office across the street from the Twin Towers, and renamed countless streets in my borough to honor dead firemen.

That said, call me provocative or unpatriotic, but I thought that Trump’s original reported plan to announce a peace deal with the Taliban – and impending end to the US war in Afghanistan – to be quite fitting. Consider it a sad, yet appropriate, final bookend to the still prevalent and absurd notion that America’s longest war still carries any connection to 9/11. The ill-advised, unwinnable, foolish attempt at nation-building in Afghanistan and ongoing stalemate combating Taliban farm boys, has long since lost any 9/11-based justification. To pretend otherwise is an exercise in self-delusion…

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Pompeo’s Constant, Shameless Lying About Iran | The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2019

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/pompeos-constant-shameless-lying-about-iran/

By Daniel Larison

Mike Pompeo can’t get through a single interview without telling a bald-faced lie. Here he lies about Iran again:

They’re investing in missile systems that they’re not allowed to have. They continue – indeed, they announced just yesterday that they’re going to continue to do more research and development on their nuclear weapon systems [bold mine-DL]. Those things are unacceptable.

The Iranian government announced no such thing, and Iran has no “nuclear weapon systems.” Iran has no nuclear weapons program, and hasn’t had anything like that for more than fifteen years. Pompeo is promoting an extremely dangerous lie here, and as usual he is never challenged on what he says. The Trump administration is desperate to deceive the public into thinking that Iran seeks nuclear weapons when that is not happening. They dishonestly put modest Iranian responses to U.S. violations of the JCPOA in the worst light in the hopes that people don’t realize that their reckless and destructive Iran policy has failed and has brought us dangerously close to an unnecessary war.

The so-called “third step” that the Iranian government announced this week was that they were no longer going to respect the JCPOA’s limits on research and development. They taking this step in response to the continued economic war being waged against them by the Trump administration after it violated the deal and reimposed sanctions. The purpose of these limited, reversible steps is to pressure the other parties to the agreement to deliver on their end of the bargain. To date, our European allies have failed to deliver, and so Iran keeps taking these steps.

The Times article on the announcement makes another important point:

Rescinding the limits on research and development violates one of the accord’s core principles, but does not necessarily put the Iranians any closer to the ability to make a bomb.

Iran continues to reduce compliance with an agreement that the U.S. reneged on more than a year ago, and it is going to continue doing that as long as the U.S. keeps illegitimate sanctions in place. That doesn’t mean that Iran is going to start pursuing nuclear weapons, and it is important to understand that none of this would be happening had the U.S. not broken its word and violated the agreement first. If the U.S. eased or lifted the sanctions, it is likely that Iran would respond in kind by reversing some of its recent actions. Of course, the Trump administration wants to drive Iran out of the JCPOA because they want the deal to collapse, and they want it to collapse because they see it as an obstacle to creating a pretext for conflict.

The administration’s Iran policy is a complete failure that has needlessly increased tensions between the U.S. and Iran to the detriment of both countries, and the only way that Pompeo can sell this policy to the public is by constantly, shamelessly lying about Iran and the nuclear deal.

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How the CIA, Mossad and “the Epstein Network” are Exploiting Mass Shootings to Create an Orwellian Nightmare, by Whitney Webb – The Unz Review

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2019

In each case, these companies’ products are built in such a way that they can easily be used to illegally surveil the governments, institutions and civilians that use them, a troubling fact given Unit 8200’s documented prowess in surveillance as a means of obtaining blackmail and Israel’s history of using tech companies to aggressively spy on the U.S. government.

Following another catastrophic mass shooting or crisis event, aggressive efforts will likely follow to foist these “solutions” on a frightened American public by the very network connected, not only to Jeffrey Epstein, but to a litany of crimes and a frightening history of plans to crush internal dissent and would-be dissenters in the United States.

http://www.unz.com/article/how-the-cia-mossad-and-the-epstein-network-are-exploiting-mass-shootings-to-create-an-orwellian-nightmare/

Following the arrest and subsequent death in prison of alleged child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a little-known Israeli tech company began to receive increased publicity, but for all the wrong reasons. Not long after Epstein’s arrest, and his relationships and finances came under scrutiny, it was revealed that the Israeli company Carbyne911 had received substantial funding from Jeffrey Epstein as well as Epstein’s close associate and former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist and prominent Trump backer Peter Thiel.

Carbyne911, or simply Carbyne, develops call-handling and identification capabilities for emergency response services in countries around the world, including the United States, where it has already been implemented in several U.S. counties and has partnered with major U.S. tech companies like Google. It specifically markets its product as a way of mitigating mass shootings in the United States without having to change existing U.S. gun laws.

Yet, Carbyne is no ordinary tech company, as it is deeply connected to the elite Israeli military intelligence division, Unit 8200, whose “alumni” often go on to create tech companies — Carbyne among them — that frequently maintain their ties to Israeli intelligence and, according to Israeli media reports and former employees, often “blur the line” between their service to Israel’s defense/intelligence apparatus and their commercial activity. As this report will reveal, Carbyne is but one of several Israeli tech companies marketing themselves as a technological solution to mass shootings that has direct ties to Israeli intelligence agencies.

In each case, these companies’ products are built in such a way that they can easily be used to illegally surveil the governments, institutions and civilians that use them, a troubling fact given Unit 8200’s documented prowess in surveillance as a means of obtaining blackmail and Israel’s history of using tech companies to aggressively spy on the U.S. government. This is further compounded by the fact that Unit 8200-linked tech companies have previously received U.S. government contracts to place “backdoors” into the U.S.’ entire telecommunications system as well as into the popular products of major American tech companies including Google, Microsoft and Facebook, many of whose key managers and executives are now former Unit 8200 officers.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it no secret that placing Unit 8200 members in top positions in multinational tech companies is a “deliberate policy” meant to ensure Israel’s role as the dominant global “cyber power”, while also combating non-violent boycott movements targeting Israel’s violations of international law and stifling the United Nations’ criticisms of Israeli government policy and military operations abroad.

As Jeffrey Epstein’s links to intelligence in both the United States and Israel — the subject of a recent four-part series exclusive to MintPress — began to be revealed in full, his financing of Carbyne came under scrutiny, particularly for the company’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence as well as to certain Americans with known connections to U.S. intelligence. Ehud Barak’s own role as both financier and chairman of Carbyne has also added to that concern, given his long history of involvement in covert intelligence operations for Israel and his long-standing ties to Israeli military intelligence.

Another funder of Carbyne, Peter Thiel, has his own company that, like Carbyne, is set to profit from the Trump administration’s proposed hi-tech solutions to mass shootings. Indeed, after the recent shooting in El Paso, Texas, President Trump — who received political donations from and has been advised by Thiel following his election — asked tech companies to “detect mass shooters before they strike,” a service already perfected by Thiel’s company Palantir, which has developed “pre-crime software” already in use throughout the country. Palantir is also a contractor for the U.S. intelligence community and also has a branch based in Israel.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, whatever technological solution is adopted by the Trump administration, it is set to use a controversial database first developed as part of a secretive U.S. government program that involved notorious Iran-Contra figures like Oliver North as a means of tracking and flagging potential American dissidents for increased surveillance and detention in the event of a vaguely defined “national emergency.”

As this report will reveal, this database — often referred to as “Main Core” — was created with the involvement of Israeli intelligence and Israel remained involved years after it was developed, and potentially to the present. It was also used by at least one former CIA official on President Reagan’s National Security Council to blackmail members of Congress, Congressional staffers and journalists, among others.

Given recent reports on the Trump administration’s plan to create a new government agency to use “advanced technology” to identify “neurobehavioral signs” of “someone headed toward a violent explosive act” using data collected by consumer electronic devices, the picture painted by the technology currently being promoted and implemented under the guise of “keeping Americans safe” is deeply Orwellian. In fact, it points directly to the genesis of a far-reaching surveillance state far more extensive than anything yet seen in American history and it is being jointly developed by individuals connected to both American and Israeli intelligence...

Perhaps most disturbing of all, whatever technological solution is adopted by the Trump administration, it is set to use a controversial database first developed as part of a secretive U.S. government program that involved notorious Iran-Contra figures like Oliver North as a means of tracking and flagging potential American dissidents for increased surveillance and detention in the event of a vaguely defined “national emergency.”…

While Epstein and Barak are the two financiers of Carbyne whose ties to intelligence are clearest, another funder of Carbyne, Peter Thiel, has ties to U.S. intelligence and a history of investing in other companies founded by former members of Unit 8200. Thiel co-founded and still owns a controlling stake in the company Palantir, which was initially funded with a $2 million investment from the CIA’s venture capital fund In-Q-Tel and quickly thereafter became a contractor for the CIA.

After the success of its contract with the CIA, Palantir became a contractor for a variety of federal agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Homeland Security(DHS) and the military’s Special Operations Command, among others. Last year, it won a contract to create a new battlefield intelligence system for the U.S. Army. Palantir is also in demand for its “pre-crime technology,” which has been used by several U.S. police departments. According to the Guardian, “Palantir tracks everyone from potential terrorist suspects to corporate fraudsters, child traffickers and what they refer to as ‘subversives’… it is all done using prediction.”…

Aside from the dystopian nature of both DARPA and potentially HARPA’s approach to mental health, there is grave cause for concern regarding the Trump administration’s moves to address U.S. mass shooting events by implementing pre-crime technology based on artificial intelligence, data-mining and mass surveillance, technologies already laying in wait thanks to companies like Palantir and numerous Israeli tech start-ups led by former Unit 8200 officers.

With companies like Carbyne — with its ties to both the Trump administration and to Israeli intelligence — and the Mossad-linked Gabriel also marketing themselves as “technological” solutions to mass shootings while also doubling as covert tools for mass data collection and extraction, the end result is a massive surveillance system so complete and so dystopian that even George Orwell himself could not have predicted it.

Following another catastrophic mass shooting or crisis event, aggressive efforts will likely follow to foist these “solutions” on a frightened American public by the very network connected, not only to Jeffrey Epstein, but to a litany of crimes and a frightening history of plans to crush internal dissent and would-be dissenters in the United States.

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Israeli spying on U.S. extends to every man, woman, and ...

 

 

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