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I write about geopolitics and geo-economics from a big-picture perspective that aims to connect the dots. I observe current events through several prisms: Economics, the media, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, white-collar crime, power, corruption, sociology, and history. I have readers in 106 countries.
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That sums up my mission statement since I began this newsletter in 2021. I am a columnist with The National Post in Canada, Kyiv Post, UkraineAlert at the Atlantic Council Eurasia Center in Washington D.C., and other publications. I’ve written ten books. I began as a business writer and am an entrepreneur who relies on facts and figures to inform my analyses, not press releases, propaganda, or opinions.
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The Art of the Steal
November 14, 2024
A gradual takeover of the White House by the “New Right” is underway. Its public face is Elon Musk, who entered politics by purchasing Twitter in 2022 and turning it into a giant megaphone for himself and Republican political propaganda. This year, he campaigned with Trump and has become the elected president’s policy whisperer. He will reign as secretary of everything in the new cabinet. The two egos may clash and part, but it won’t matter because Musk already “bought” the Vice Presidency for his disciple J.D. Vance, who will stay behind. This represents a sea-change, or the de facto “acquisition” of America by Musk and other tech tycoons, who are as wealthy as nation-states and have decided to upend America’s government. These rich guys believe America’s a mess, and they also know it’s for sale. One of Musk’s pals, Reid Hoffman (founder of Linkedin), published the tech business plan: “In the matrix of people supporting Trump…`Are they purchasable?’ Biden and Harris are not purchasable, and Trump is the most purchasable president in our lifetime.” As it turned out, Hoffman was right. He donated to Harris, but Musk and fellow Paypal founder Peter Thiel backed Trump and have “bought” the Oval Office.
Political capture is nothing new. Mark Twain penned: “America has the best politicians that money can buy.” The U.S. political system remains corrupt because there are no limits on contributions, no disclosure requirements, and no barriers. The country’s political class is for sale to the highest bidder, individually or collectively. That’s why it’s little wonder that America’s democracy has been subjected, over the years, to waves of extremists or philosophical fads. This latest “New Right” infiltration is nothing new except that it’s concentrated in the hands of only a few people. The Democrats were in the grip of the “squad” and “progressives,” who convinced the party to be more concerned about pronouns and political correctness than about fixing the border or stoking the economy.
Now, a tail will still wag the dog, except the “New Right” dances to the tune of a mysterious software engineer blogger named Curtis Yarvin. It should come as no surprise that MAGA maestro Steve Bannon is also a Yarvin fan and that Yarvin believes that democracy, or rule by the people, doesn’t work or result in good decisions. He believes that democracy is a “destructive” form of government and that a techno-monarchy should run the place with a national chief executive who knows what he’s doing. Yarvin is close to Thiel, who’s close to Musk, who’s close to Trump.
Thiel made his first high-profile move into politics in 2022 by becoming a Republican Kingmaker and the most significant donor during those mid-term elections. He specialized in efforts to unseat moderate GOPs who voted to impeach Trump for his role in the Capitol insurrection. He spent $15 million getting J.D. Vance elected to the Senate that year. But Thiel had dabbled before, quietly giving millions to libertarian Ron Paul in 2012, then in 2016, he publicly endorsed Trump in a keynote speech at the Republican convention. By 2020, he had abandoned Trump after spending months inside his dysfunctional administration, a disappointment that led to the decision by these tech giants to insert Musk inside the regime to ensure quality “control.” The result is that Elon Musk is currently the “shadow president.”
This week, Trump announced that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would lead a “Department of Government Efficiency.” He said it would be “the Manhattan Project” of this era, driving “drastic change” throughout the government with significant cuts and new efficiencies in bloated federal bureaucracy agencies by July 4, 2026. (Ramaswamy sought the Republican nomination against Trump. He promised to eliminate the Education Department, the F.B.I., and the Internal Revenue Service. He proposed to axe 75 percent of all federal jobs and slash foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.)
It’s also important to note that Trump’s two sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, facilitated this tech takeover. They convinced their father to appoint Vance as his Vice Presidential running mate and to meet Musk and others. Now they are part of the tech world: Eric runs a cryptocurrency start-up, and Donald Jr. just announced he would join the same Thiel venture capital firm that trained Vance and made him rich. That firm also owns a piece of Tucker Carlson’s media company. Thus, Silicon Valley billionaires are forming a Yarvin-style “monarchy,” complete with an aristocracy of useful “princes” and a succession plan.
(By the way, everyone involved in this tech cabal has also made a killing. Musk’s shares in Tesla and Space X have soared by tens of billions, and Silicon Valley’s considerable stakes in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have rocketed upward. Even better, their tech-bro coup d’etat will eliminate the cost to all tech giants of fending off Congress's pesky onslaughts about the sector’s anti-competitive, predatory, and unethical practices.)
So here’s where America is headed. The mastermind is Thiel, who explained his beliefs in a 2009 libertarian blog: “I remain committed to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself `libertarian.’ But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically in terms of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Behind their philosophy is Yarvin, whose beliefs are described as “radical libertarianism,” “anti-progressive,” “anti-egalitarian,” and “anti-democratic.” But essentially, he believes in an enlightened dictatorship run by an elite, which would presumably include himself and his tech buddies. Weirdly, he also refers to the U.S. ruling regime as “the cathedral” and blames academics and journalists for propping up the current system. In Trump-talk, this translates into “fake news.”
Yarvin believes this “cathedral” must be destroyed. He also writes about RAGE, his acronym for Retire All Government Employees. This underpins Musk’s goal to slash $2 trillion from government overheads, which can only be realistically achieved by dismantling the Pentagon and cutting Medicare and Social Security obligations.
Finally, Yarvin’s centrally managed economy is led by a monarch who acts like a corporate CEO and can bypass all governmental procedures. All this “theology” underpins the “New Right” takeover and, frighteningly, gives new meaning to the alarming statement Trump made in July at a campaign rally: “Get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed and fine; you won’t have to vote anymore if you vote for me.” (When a Fox News journalist asked whether this meant he wouldn’t leave the Presidency in four years if he won, he said he would. “I left it the last time.” )
However, everyone knows that Trump fought to remain in the Presidency in 2020. He launched litigation, made threats, and helped organize a riot at the Capital Building that killed four and injured 174 to stay in power. Another worry is that Yarvin is also a revisionist. He has blamed democracy for electing Hitler and World War II when the facts are that Hitler won only 30 percent of the votes and stole the Chancellorship of Germany by hoodwinking an aging, demented German aristocrat, President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler’s takeover wasn’t an example of democracy’s shortcomings. It revealed the danger of elitism without checks and balances — a history that German-born Peter Thiel surely knows and that America must avoid.
Ukraine Will Win
November 21, 2024
Ukraine has offered America a deal that Donald Trump can’t refuse. President Volodymyr Zelensky wants American businesses to invest in his country’s natural resources, worth $26 trillion, equivalent to Canada’s or Australia’s mineral wealth. Zelensky also pledges that Ukraine’s military will help protect Europe’s security after the war. Ideally, a Marshall Plan using $350 billion of frozen Russian assets will also help rebuild Ukraine, as will Westerners who partner with Ukraine’s resource, industrial, and technology sector, the Silicon Valley of Europe. By contrast, after Trump’s election, the Russians responded by escalating their murderous attacks on Ukrainian civilians and cities, making nuclear threats again, and Russian State TV congratulated Trump and then aired nude photos from Melania Trump’s modeling past. However, Zelensky’s pitch to Trump is a “wise move to show that Ukraine is not a burden for the West…Trump wants to be a winner, not a loser,” said Ukrainian Member of Parliament Oleksandr Merezhko. “To become a winner, he must show Putin his place.”
This business approach by Zelensky is part of his “Victory Plan” and has been shown to Trump. It is not off-base or insulting to talk about dollars and cents. It is inspired and appropriate, turning Ukraine from a burden into a prize. It also mirrors Putin’s obsession with Ukraine, which has been more about money than about erasing or subjugating an ethnic group. He is a trillionaire tycoon who controls a nasty oligarchy that has exploited and harvested the resources of Ukraine and other former “colonies” for decades, as did Czars before them. Putin’s invasion on February 24, 2022, aimed to reconquer Ukraine and grab its massive resource endowment. In business terms, the calculus is simple: If the war costs $500 billion and Russia loses its $350 billion in frozen assets seized by Western banks, the capture of $26 trillion in resources, or even half or a quarter of that, represents a spectacular return on investment.
The West has been enormously generous to Ukraine and deserves to be rewarded and reimbursed for its military and humanitarian aid expenditures. It can also help rebuild the country. In August, talks began between Washington and Kyiv to formalize economic cooperation, launch joint investment projects, and devise plans to seize frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine’s reconstruction efforts. Ukrainians want and need American businesses to help turn its mining and processing industries into world-beating sectors and to produce high-tech products and semiconductors. The European Union and its companies will also invest in Ukraine, and they have already switched from Russian natural gas to American (and Norwegian) liquefied natural gas. Increasing US gas imports will also meet another Trump goal: dramatically reducing America’s trade deficit with Europe.
Adam Mycyk, a partner in Dentons’ Kyiv law office, published an estimate and summary of Ukraine’s natural resources. His figures show that Ukraine has more uranium than any country in Europe, the second largest natural gas reserves in Europe, and the second largest iron ore reserves worldwide. “The country boasts approximately 20,000 mineral deposits, covering 116 types of minerals. Essential resources include titanium, lithium, beryllium, manganese, gallium, uranium, zirconium, graphite, apatite, fluorite, and nickel. Ukraine holds the largest titanium reserves in Europe, accounting for 7 percent of the world’s reserves and almost 500,000 tons of lithium. This valuable strategic element could contribute to meeting the global demand for batteries.” There’s also enough oil and gas in Ukraine to meet the needs of Europe and shut Russian energy out of the region altogether.
These charts demonstrate how many billions Americans and Europeans have already provided to Ukraine:
In July 2021, the EU-Ukrainian Strategic Partnership on Critical Minerals was signed and aimed to provide government incentives to encourage the development of 100 mining projects. Kyiv has also auctioned lithium, copper, cobalt, and nickel exploration permits to Westerners. Some of Ukraine’s state-owned mining companies have already been auctioned off, and there are plans to sell more. However, Kyiv will shut China out of future sales and development inside Ukraine, which is appropriate given its collaboration with Russia during the war. For over a decade, China has quietly become one of the country’s most prominent foreign investors. By using Ukrainian oligarchs as proxies, Beijing has snapped up industries, farmland, and mineral-rich land spreads, and once the war ends, it should be forced to return all these assets to Ukrainians.
(Reports are that Trump was “interested” in Zelensky’s investment plan and liked its “ABC—anybody but China” stipulation.)
It must also be noted that Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was about resources too: Moscow recaptured Ukraine’s industrial heartland and coal mines plus Crimea with its vast offshore oil and gas reserves. The 2022 invasion is now designed to get the rest and disrupt and damage supply chains and opportunities for Europe and America. Now, even if 20 percent of Ukraine’s land remains occupied by Russia, the other 80 percent can be rebuilt and become a European economic and military-industrial powerhouse. This will destabilize Putin’s existing empire and may speed its dissolution, as happened to the Soviet Union in 1991.
Putin also hunts for oil and gas in Ukraine. In 2014, he snatched Crimea for its naval base and geopolitical vantage point. But the peninsula is surrounded offshore by colossal oil and natural gas reserves of up to 13 trillion cm of gas. Putin’s army currently attempts to capture central Ukraine’s major oil and gas-producing region, the Dnipro-Donetsk basin, which produces 90 percent of its production. There is also oil and gas in Western Ukraine’s Carpathian region, and one-third of Europe’s shale gas reserves are in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, which are also being fought over.
Kyiv’s other offer to President Trump is that Ukrainian soldiers replace American ones posted at NATO bases across Europe. This would save the US billions, and their cost would be borne by European nations, which have benefitted more than any other region from Ukraine’s sacrifices.
The “Victory Plan” will develop Ukraine’s vast resource wealth, rebuild the country, pay back its allies, and serve as a security guarantee. European troops inside Ukraine will secure any Trump peace deal, says Estonia. And Brussels is in the process of redirecting billions of euros to defense and security. That, along with substantial Western investments in the country for reconstruction and creating an extensive resource sector and military-industrial complex, will be as valuable as membership in NATO. Ukrainians will finally escape Russian threats and oppression once they are fully integrated with Europeans inside the Western alliance.
Frankly, it’s the deal of the century.
AI: Artificial or Apocalypse Intel?
October 10, 2024
It’s been a momentous few days in the world of artificial intelligence. On October 8, Geoffrey Hinton, dubbed a “Godfather of Artificial Intelligence”, won the Nobel Prize. A physicist, he created technologies that have led to the creation of ChatGPT and other AI breakthroughs. However, he is a member of the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit dedicated to convincing governments and companies to implement safety regulations to govern AI research and development globally. Hinton no sooner received his award than he immediately warned, as he has done before, that artificial intelligence must be supervised or one day it will be capable of controlling or wiping out humans. Unfortunately, California Governor Gavin Newsom wasn’t listening. On September 29, he vetoed SB 1047, the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act — the world’s first legislative attempt to make AI developers liable for the safety and preventing “critical harms.” Newsome vetoed it, succumbing to intense tech lobbying. The Bill’s sponsor, State Senator Scott Wiener, declared that the veto was “a setback for everyone who believes in oversight of massive corporations that are making critical decisions that affect the safety and welfare of the public and the future of the planet.”
Fortunately, there is still time to address the world’s foremost existential challenge. At this stage, AI is not sentient, cannot think independently, and has no intention of destroying mankind. But in 2023, Hinton quit Google because of his concern that protections were not in place to guide the multi-billion dollar race among America’s tech giants to create machines that will be smarter than human beings and eventually upend existence. He has said he regretted his life’s work because it can be hard to stop “bad actors from using it for bad things.”
In an interview after his Nobel was announced, he said: “The risks are having a whole class of people who are unemployed and not valued much because what they-- what they used to do is now done by machines.” He also pointed out the benefits of AI, such as diagnostic and drug formulation breakthroughs that have advanced medicine. However, he said autonomous military robots should be banned globally, and regulations should be strict regarding all AI applications. “It may be we look back and see this as a turning point when humanity had to decide whether to develop these things further and what to do to protect themselves if they did. I don't know. I think my main message is there's enormous uncertainty about what's going to happen next. These things do understand. And because they understand that we need to think hard about what will happen next. And we don't know.”
One of his Future of Life Institute colleagues, MIT physics professor Max Tegmark, is more blunt. “It is unfortunate to frame this as an arms race. This is more of a suicide race. It doesn’t matter who is going to get there first. It just means that humanity could lose control of its destiny.”
Last month, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari weighed into the AI debate with his latest book “Nexus.” He examines the history of information networks – from ancient times and influential books to newspapers and social media -- and warns that AI is not a tool but an inorganic agent “over which we may lose control.” This “Frankenstein” prediction is nothing new. Neither is the danger of media brainwashing. After all, Hitler harnessed the radio and started a world war that murdered tens of millions. Today, a “Silicon Curtain” replaces the Iron Curtain in totalitarian countries like China or Russia, where information is used to manipulate people and events.
Even in nations where open access exists, social media sites run by an oligopoly of tech tycoons allow the spread of lies, disinformation, propaganda, hate, incitement to violence, conspiracies, and dangerous ideologies. Harari believes such poisonous information exchanges will worsen once AI takes over information networks and can participate in and oversee operations. AI cannot be controlled, which will be ruinous. “Humanity is closer than ever to annihilating itself,” he wrote.
Harari points out that bots already generate 29 percent of all tweets without controls. “Democratic conversation is falling apart, and at fault is this technology,” he stated. Algorithms created by humans direct these, but AI can make decisions by itself and create new ideas, such as texts, images, and video. “You should never summon a power you cannot control,” he cautioned. For instance, a dictator might delegate the power to launch nuclear attacks to an AI, which will then decide when or if to do so.
Social media and falsehoods stoked recent race riots in Britain, which were transmitted by bots. Such techniques influenced the Brexit vote and the 2018 slaughter of thousands of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar, which was fuelled by racist and false Facebook posts about a rape that never happened.
Technologist investor Marc Andreessen says all this is overstated. He is one of the brightest and richest technology guys in the world and labels Harari’s “doomsday” pronouncements as predictable and irrational. He wrote in 2023: “AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it… First, a short description of AI: The application of mathematics and software code to teach computers how to understand, synthesize, and generate knowledge in ways similar to how people do it. AI is a computer program like any other – it runs, takes input, processes, and generates output. AI’s output is useful across various fields, from coding to medicine to law and the creative arts. It is owned and controlled by people, like any other technology.”
He dubbed concerns a form of “moral panic,” a chronic social contagion that follows any technological advance. “Now, it is certainly the case that many new technologies have led to bad outcomes – often the same technologies that have been otherwise enormously beneficial to our welfare. So it’s not that the mere existence of a moral panic means there is nothing to be concerned about,” he conceded. “But the fear that technology of our creation will rise and destroy us is deeply coded into our culture. The Greeks expressed this fear in the Prometheus Myth – Prometheus brought the destructive power of fire, and more generally technology (“techne”), to man, for which Prometheus was condemned to perpetual torture by the gods.”
In modern times, technology fear has been stoked by “Frankenstein” and the killer robot in James Cameron’s Terminator films. Andreessen labels this belief as a “category error.” “AI is not an animal that has evolved over billions of years to survive ruthlessly over other species. AI is math–code computers built and controlled by people. It is like a toaster or a car – it doesn’t `want,’ have `goals’, or intend to `kill you’ because it’s not `alive.’” He goes further and describes doomsayers as members of an “apocalypse cult” that’s been around throughout history.
But he misses the point, while Harari and most of us do not. The fear is about the humans, corporations, or governments who make and control the technology. The root of the problem is not machines but is about the failings of humanity and the ruthless pursuit of power or wealth through any means available. “Why would human societies choose to entrust power to their worst members? Most Germans in 1933, for example, were not psychopaths. So why did they vote for Hitler?” he posited. Fortunately, he adds, “Computers are not yet powerful enough to destroy human civilization by themselves. As long as humanity stands united, we can build institutions that will regulate AI.”
Andreessen stresses that AI will enhance people’s lives. Every child will have an AI tutor; every person will have an AI mentor or advisor or therapist; every scientist will have an AI collaborator; and every CEO or leader will have the same. Abundance will result in productivity growth, lower living costs, and medical breakthroughs to extend lifespans. “Don’t get me wrong, cults are fun to hear. The short version is if the murder robots don’t get us, the hate speech and misinformation will,” he concluded.
He also stated that governments should work with the private sector and engage in each potential risk area to protect society. America must also retain dominance in the field. “To prevent the risk of China achieving global AI dominance, we should use the full power of our private sector, our scientific establishment, and our governments in concert to drive American and Western AI to absolute global dominance, including ultimately inside China itself. We win, they lose.”
But what’s important to note is that he and other tech tycoons talk about the need for government control, but few will agree to submit to it. Exhibit A: This month, the world’s first attempt to control tech development flopped, thanks to lobbying by the tech industry in California, which Andreessen has helped build.
30
Russia and Iran Go Bust
October 7, 2024
Russia and Iran perpetrated the October 7 massacre, which was also Putin’s birthday. Now on its anniversary, they hurtle toward financial ruin, a welcome development but small comfort to their millions of victims in Israel, Ukraine, and elsewhere. However, their financial troubles will end their atrocities sooner rather than later. This is inevitable. Both are “gasoline stations masquerading as countries” with immature economies run by murderous regimes dependent on fossil fuel exports, now heavily sanctioned. They cannot sustain their warmongering indefinitely but increase attacks and threats to project durability and power. They threaten escalation but are self-destructive and must be sped on their way. An intelligence report at a recent European security conference revealed that the Kremlin realizes it must end the war in 2025 for economic reasons. “The financial, technological, and demographic hurdles facing the Russian economy are more severe than is commonly understood,” wrote economist Anders Aslund. “Contrary to what the Kremlin would like others to believe, time is not on Russia’s side.”
Russia is the 11th largest economy globally, but its per capita income ranks 66th, lower than that of European nations and slightly above that of China. Iran is the 35th biggest economy in the world, but its per capita incomes rank 114th, lower than Iraq’s, Guatemala’s, or wartorn Ukraine’s. Their currencies have tanked, and their populaces remain captive to corruption, incompetence, and crackdowns. Most are pressed into poverty and military service. They are demoralized and disenfranchised, which means that only outside influences can stop their regimes from continuing to commit murder and mayhem in their regions and elsewhere.
Aslund is a Swede who worked as a senior economic advisor from 1991 to 1994 for Russia’s late President Boris Yeltsin. Today, he describes the state of the nation in grim terms: Sanctions have shaved off up to 3 percent of Russia’s GDP every year and caused chronic stagnation, which will worsen as the war continues. Its overall economy has grown by only 1 percent per year since it invaded Ukraine. Its GDP has fallen from US$2.3 trillion in 2013 to US$1.9 trillion, and Russia is no longer a superpower. “Regardless of the outcome on the battlefield, Russia will be the biggest loser,” he concludes.
What’s happening to Russia also happened to the Soviet Union, he pointed out. Interest rates are north of 19 percent, and inflation figures are sky-high and unreliable. Moscow has drained nearly two-thirds of its rainy-day wealth fund of US$183 billion since 2021, and reserves should run out next year or by the end of 2025 — thus the Kremlin’s war deadline. It is unable to raise funds by selling bonds or borrowing. Secondary sanctions on financial institutions dealing with Russia impede technology imports from China, Turkey, or Central Asia. Russia’s arms export income has collapsed because there are no surpluses to sell elsewhere. A brain drain of at least one million Russians has led to labor shortages and also constrains the ability to conscript more cannon fodder following catastrophic casualties in Ukraine.
Iran, consistently poor, worsens dramatically:
The Iranian economy “fluctuates between pessimism and panic,” noted an expert recently. Since the “revolution of 2000” and the ascendancy of Ayatollah Khameini, the country and its people have struggled. Iran has built and supported a costly web of terrorist organizations, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, to destroy Israel and disrupt the Middle East and the West. In May, a “progressive” candidate became President, heart surgeon Masoud Pezeshkian, but his hands are tied. Warfare has worsened, and poverty continues to spiral, according to expert Ahmad Meydari. “Until the mid-2000s, about 12 percent to 15 percent of the population of 88.5 million was in absolute poverty. By the mid-2010s, this figure rose to around 20 percent. Since 2018, it has increased sharply to 30 percent, with approximately 25.4 million people living in absolute poverty, according to the Statistical Center of Iran and the Research Center of Parliament.” Another 6 percent, or 5 million, suffer from “extreme poverty” or barely survive – shocking statistics given Iran’s immense oil wealth and the billions spent by its rulers on terrorism and military.
Both predator nations are subjected to counterattacks and massive sanctions, resulting in severe economic disruption. In a report this month, the Russian central bank projected that GDP would slow down sharply next year despite its wartime boom based on excessive spending. It added that OPEC’s production cuts will hurt economic growth, as in Iran. But the future looks grim indefinitely. Neither can attract foreign investors, technology, or expertise, and their future workforces die on the battlefield or leave.
The murderous and medieval Iranian theocracy has been undesirable to outsiders for decades, but Russia’s post-2022 confiscation of foreign corporations has also established it as a “no-go zone” globally. Talented and wealthy Russians who left after the war began will never return. The flight of capital out of the nation is unknown because it is illicit but is sizeable and gone forever. Demographically, the two are both at risk. Estimates are that Russia’s population will shrink by 50 percent in the coming decades.
“An economic catastrophe is lurking beneath Russia’s GDP `growth’ as Putin ‘throws everything into the fireplace,’” wrote Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Aslund, and other experts in a recent Fortune magazine piece. Besides murdering sons on the battlefield and squandering the country’s treasury, Vladimir Putin has chopped social benefits and pensions to all citizens. So has Iran.
They are committing economic suicide. Their fanatical leaders ignore market and financial realities and are pariahs. They abuse their people and have become more dependent upon one another and on China. But their tentacles spread, and they metastasize misery globally. Both nations must be stopped, and the free world should not hesitate to do so militarily and financially.
Russia’s economic deterioration will eventually result in its dissolution into independent regions, as happened to the Soviet Union in 1991. The same fate must happen to Iran. This is why, for the rest of the world, Russia and Iran's demise or dismemberment should be the geopolitical priority, and their principal victims, Ukraine and Israel, must be fully backed. Russia and Iran are behind most of the world’s current misery and violence. Diplomacy doesn’t remove tyrants. Only their defeat, bankruptcy, and regime change will make the world safer.
30
Comrade J.D. Vance
September 5, 2024
On September 4, U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland indicted two Russian employees of RT, Russia’s state-owned news outlet, for spreading propaganda and disinformation about Ukraine designed to undermine Kyiv and influence the American election. He also announced sanctions, awards to whistleblowers, seized web domains, and launched FBI investigations into individuals as part of a plan to counter a Russian “malign influence campaign known as Doppelganger” (run by a Putin insider). “The American people are entitled to know when a foreign power engages in political activities or seeks to influence public discourse,” Garland said. But a backstory exists that Americans deserve to know more about, which is that Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, who has spouted anti-Ukraine and pro-Russian talking points for months, is connected to Moscow’s RT and has been for some time. His connection is financial and may explain the anti-Ukraine narrative spouted by him, by radical Republicans, and by Trump.
In 2021, J.D. Vance, tech tycoon Peter Thiel, and ultra-conservative Vivek Ramaswamy invested in an online video platform called Rumble specializing in alternative, right-wing content that includes RT content, even after it was kicked off the air in 2022 by the U.S. and European Union following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Rumble live-streams RT and its questionable content. An example of Russia’s anti-American and pro-Kremlin nonsense in 2022 was interviews with two American soldiers captured by Russians who were forced to bad-mouth Ukraine and the West.
In October 2022, The New York Times described the soldier incident and its context: “RT had been largely taken off the air in the United States and banned by the European Union in March after Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s armies invaded Ukraine. But in June, its version of the captives’ story [under duress] appeared on Rumble, a video-sharing platform that stepped in this year and began carrying RT’s live feed and its clips. There, a glum-looking Mr. Huynh [a captured American soldier] says they joined the fight in Ukraine after being duped by `propaganda from the West’ that `Russian forces were indiscriminately killing civilians’.” The comments were coerced, and Rumble published the video.
Vance’s partner in Rumble, donor, and mentor, Peter Thiel, is a hard-right libertarian and isolationist who backed Vance in the business world and donated $15 million to Vance’s Senate campaign in Ohio in 2022. Thiel is an associate and partner with Elon Musk, who called Donald Trump, urging him to make Vance his running mate. During his 2022 Senate campaign, Vance was asked about Rumble’s controversial association with Russia’s RT, and his campaign issued a statement: “J.D. does not play an active role at Rumble, nor does he set Rumble’s content moderation policies,” the campaign said. “It’s a dishonest straw man to suggest that just because someone believes in free speech rights online, they also personally endorse that speech. It’s embarrassing that an industry like the media, which relies on the First Amendment, has so much trouble comprehending that.”
Thiel’s spokesman did not comment on his support for Rumble, which hosts RT content.
Essentially, Rumble is a media accomplice that delivers RT’s content, providing a steady drumbeat of propaganda praising Russia, slandering Ukraine, and criticizing giving aid to the invaded country. Vance publicly took the same position several days before the invasion when he said: “I gotta be honest with you. I don’t care what happens to Ukraine.” Rumble also hosts Trump’s “Truth Social” content, and Vance is about to embark on a media tour with another Putin fan, ex-Fox anchor Tucker Carlson. The “Tuck” famously “interviewed” Putin for hours, never once challenging him about war crimes, his unprovoked invasion, or his murder of civilians. He fawned endlessly about Moscow’s excellent hospitality and supermarkets. It was not journalism but publicity for Putin. It was a joke.
It’s also notable that Vance, as a vice presidential candidate, is a political train wreck. In an interview with Carlson, he said that “childless cat ladies” and anyone without children should not be allowed to vote or hold public office. He opposes abortion, even in cases involving incest or rape, because “two wrongs don’t make a right.” He shamelessly joined Trump as a running mate despite labeling him an “idiot,” “America’s Hitler,” and describing MAGA as “cultural heroin.” Vance now tries to finesse his loopy remarks. This summer, he tried to backtrack on his nasty comments about Trump and MAGA, and as for Ukraine, he said, “We want Ukrainians to be successful.” He called Putin “the bad guy” and added, “We’ve got to stop the money spigot to Ukraine eventually.”
Vance came to Thiel’s attention after he wrote the 2016 best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy” about his journey from poverty to Yale, where the two met. With Thiel's backing, he started a venture fund to invest in the Midwest. They invested in Rumble, launched in Toronto as a platform for alternative voices and views, primarily right-wing or unpopular. However, Rumble also became “an official outlet” for RT. By contrast, YouTube has banned RT.
The two American soldiers who appeared on the RT video that Rumble disseminated were later asked by The Times about their criticisms of Ukraine. “Those interviews were under duress,” said Alex Drueke, adding that his captors watched and stopped the interview to make them redo what they had said. They were stored in a closet between interviews and not told the purpose of the interviews. The second prisoner, Andy Huynh, said bluntly: “We know it’s a lie from our experience. We know they’re just putting words in our mouths.”
This week, the Justice Department and F.B.I. also announced that they have been investigating a handful of Americans accused of knowingly spreading false Kremlin narratives, reported The Times. “This month, F.B.I. agents searched the homes of two prominent figures with connections to Russian state media: Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector and critic of American foreign policy, and Dimitri K. Simes, an adviser to former President Donald J. Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016. Prosecutors have not announced charges against either of the men. More searches are expected soon, some of the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss investigations. Criminal charges are also possible, they said.”
Perhaps the US Department of Justice should investigate Vance and his partners for profiting from broadcasting questionable content from Russia to the world via RT.
US Gun Stupidity
July 15, 2024
An assassin’s bullet came within an inch of murdering Donald Trump at a rally on Saturday, a dramatic development that will impact the Presidential campaign. Already, Trump, a draft-dodger, is portraying himself and his fist bump, while protected by security agents, as heroic, defiant, and patriotic. Hours afterward, he waxed “Biblical” about the whole mess, to appeal to his Evangelical base, and declared that “God alone” saved his life. He then stated that “We will fear not” and must fight “wickedness”. His Republican radicals labeled the attempted assassination as “political violence”, and smeared the Democrats. Trump VP hopeful, Senator JD Vance, even repeated Russian talking points that President Biden’s campaign was at fault, repeating false claims made by RT, the Kremlin mouthpiece. But the perpetrator was a 20-year-old registered Republican with an assault rifle. Even so, it will be politics as usual.
Trump will abide by the National Rifle Association mantra that America needs more, not fewer, guns. Gun slaughter will continue. Trump will remain divisive and an “accelerant” for gun violence with his hateful and nasty rhetoric. Biden will appeal for unity, nationally and politically. And November is a long way off.
After the shooting, President Joe Biden called “Donald” to wish him well and halted his election ads out of respect and until Trump recovers. Such gentlemanly behavior won’t be reciprocated, but some of the rules of the election game might alter outcomes. For starters, security will be dramatically tightened for both candidates, and their running mates. Big rallies may be curbed or reduced. Biden will continue to push for gun controls, which has huge polling support among Americans, and Trump won’t. As for rhetoric, it’s unlikely that Trump can tone down his messaging. He no sooner left the site of the shooting than his son, Donald Jr., insinuated it was perpetrated by Democrats or “the left” and stated: “He will never stop fighting to save America, no matter what the radical left throws at him.”
Radical left? The gunman was a Republican and a disturbed individual with a pattern of pathology identical to that of other shooters. He was white, lonely, middle class, and with violent tendencies who was able to buy a powerful gun to enhance his masculinity and get even. But those facts have not stopped bogus conspiracies. CEO Sean Davis, of the far-right Federalist tweeted: “The ONLY question that matters—the ONLY question that needs to be answered—is who in the Biden regime authorized/allowed the assassination attempt on Trump. We all know why this happened.” A Congressman from Georgia, Mike Collins, demanded that “the Republican District Attorney in Butler County, PA, should immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination.”
The reality is that Trump was a victim of his belief in violence and his promotion of it. He’s courted white terrorist groups, incited a mob to storm the Capitol in 2021, threatened violence (last month he said “shoot shoplifters”), and slavishly supported the NRA’s a-gun-in-every-pot policy. More examples abound. On January 6, when Joe Biden officially became President, Trump and his crew gathered a crowd south of the White House, many of whom were armed. He spoke in code and said “walk down to the Capitol” adding “you will never take back our country with weakness”. Hundreds attacked and assaulted the Capitol chanting “take the country back”. Five died, many were injured, and Trump watched the melee on television in the White House for hours without summoning help from the National Guard. His last video posted to them online, as they ransacked the place, was to advise then to go home and he ended it by telling him he “loved” them and believed they’re “very special”. Now he refers to the hundreds of thugs convicted for misdeeds that day as “hostages” who will be pardoned if he returns to the Presidency.
He’s always been bellicose. At a rally in 2016 in Iowa, Trump told the crowd that there may be somebody throwing tomatoes. “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell out of them. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. There won’t be so much of them because the courts agree with us.” He made the same suggestion at a rally in Alabama after a man yelled “Black Lives Matter”. A video captured by CNN showed the man being kicked and punched by white men. In 2018, he defended the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists who rioted in Charlottesville. This year, he indirectly threatened New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, who successfully prosecuted him for multiple felonies. “This is a disgrace,” he said “and you ought to go after this attorney general.” He also recently said that the military general he personally appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who called China to allay its concerns about the January insurrection, should be executed for treason.
Words matter and Trump’s tone has escalated, fomenting hate crimes as well as partisan and sectarian hatred. He’s spawned a narrative that America is hopeless and falling apart. His brand of toxic masculinity is celebrated and believes that anyone has the right to buy a battlefield assault rifle and ammunition. Attacks on politicians, judges, and police have increased since he came on the political scene. And multiple indictments against him in four jurisdictions in recent months, plus civil litigation, have made him angrier and his speeches more incendiary and vicious.
He’s the NRA’s poster boy. “He is uniquely qualified to address our members who know what it’s like to stand for something, even when it’s hard. The NRA and our millions of members around the country have President Trump’s back, and we know he has ours,” said NRA interim CEO Andrew Arulanandam. By contrast, John Feinblatt, President of Everytown for Gun Safety, said “Donald Trump and the NRA are like two peas in a pod: Corrupt, politically toxic and more concerned with safeguarding the gun industry than American lives. When Trump was in office, he adopted the NRA’s extreme ‘guns everywhere’ agenda lock, stock and barrel.”
Biden has tried, with uneven success, to extend background checks, keep guns from domestic abusers, ban assault weapons, and license gun sellers. But in America it remains easier to buy a machine gun or shoulder-harness missile launcher than to vote or buy a beer, thanks to the NRA and Republicans and Trump. When murderous outbreaks occur, they trigger the same predictable ritual: Earnest news coverage, upsetting press conferences where the names of the dead are announced, punditry on why and what to do, and then nothing changes. The result is that America is an outlier, with the most guns and most gun deaths among developed nations.
The assassination attempt is more of the same: Hand-wringing, eye-witness reports, and grieving families. Law enforcement officials are quoted saying that they are hunting for the shooter’s motive which “remains unclear”. Really? His motive? That’s easy. He hated Donald Trump. He wanted him assassinated. He was depressed and enmeshed in America’s toxic culture of hate speech, poisonous political enmity, and unrequited anger. And he had access to a weapon of war. He knew how to use it.
As for the solution to stop rampant gun violence? Also easy. Adopt gun controls like most civilized nations have.
Where is Greenpeace or Greta?
May 20, 2024
The biggest “ecocide” in history unfolds as Russia rolls out diabolical weapons and measures specifically designed to destroy Ukraine’s environment. Where are the world’s environmentalists, or climate change politicians who cloak themselves in “green causes” to win votes? Where is the outrage at the fact that Russian planes, or artillery, scatter landmines called “little petals” that have contaminated nearly one-third of Ukraine’s land and forests, equivalent in size to Austria and Hungary. It will take years and billions to de-mine the country and until that’s accomplished hundreds of thousands of people and animals will be injured or killed. “Scattered from aircraft or delivered by mortars, the ‘petals’ spin through the air, bite into the earth and explode upon contact with as little as five kilograms of weight. Hectare by hectare, Russia’s invasion turns barren the country which contains almost a quarter of the world’s chornozem, a highly fertile soil. Even after the contaminants are removed, the toxins they release will affect the fields’ fertility for years,” wrote Dr. Sasha Dovzhyk, a researcher with the Ukrainian Institute. At a recent conference in New York she added “ecocide is now a tool of war”.
Ukraine has become the world’s biggest minefield. But this isn’t the first environmental catastrophe that Russia has visited upon Ukrainians. In 1986, Kremlin incompetence caused a nuclear reactor to explode at Chernobyl, spreading radioactivity across the country and Europe. Now a massive steel and concrete structure, or sarcophagus, covers that reactor and is located inside a 30-kilometer exclusion zone, 90 kilometers from Kyiv. The accident, and the Kremlin coverup, contributed mightily to the dissolution of the Soviet Union by revealing its dysfunction and colonial disregard for life.
Now Putin doubles down. In March 2022, right after the February 24 invasion, his army occupied Chernobyl and took over Ukraine’s four operating nuclear complexes, including the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), Europe’s largest. Operations are overseen by Russian military officials who permit limited oversight by the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA). This is a disaster waiting to happen. The NEA recently wrote: “The IAEA observers at ZNPP reported that they continued to be denied timely and appropriate access to all areas important to nuclear safety and security.”
Maintenance is inadequate and there is insufficient power or water to keep reactors cool at all times. Testing and inspections are also a problem and Ukrainian power officials have been banned from the site. The staffing of the facility has gone from 11,500 workers to 4,500. Then on June 6, 2023, the Russians blew up the Nova Kakhovka dam – 80 miles away – and dangerously reduced the water levels in the reservoir that cools ZNPP’s reactors. Water is now pumped in from local wells.
The Russians have also set up a military base around the plant and are shelling nearby Ukrainian areas with impunity because shelling back would be catastrophic. The strategy is demonic: Putin now has control over the safety of all Ukrainian nuclear facilities, as well as over the integrity of the Chernobyl sarcophagus which prevents the escape of radiation. This is eco-terrorism on an unimagined level: If just ZPNN explodes or is blown up, a meltdown would cause a massive fire and explosion that would release radiation over a vast area.
As shown in the video, a radioactive cloud would spread across many countries - from Russia in the east to Poland in the west - over a 72-hour period. Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and Russia would all be affected. IAEA Director General warned last year of problems: “We are living on borrowed time when it comes to nuclear safety and security at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Unless we take action to protect the plant, our luck will sooner or later run out, with potentially severe consequences for human health and the environment.”
And the odds of catastrophe increased after the destruction of the Nova Khakovka dam by Russia – a bombing that Moscow denies and blames Ukraine for doing. This act of ecological terrorism is the first involving a dam and unleashed water equivalent in size to America’s gigantic Great Salt Lake in Utah which is larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island. The flooding caused damage to humans, animals, topsoil, forests, wildlife, livestock, farming, local industries, villages, infrastructure, and drinking water. It was the “first ever” intentional dam explosion, commented Dovzhyk. “Ecocide on this scale should be a crime in the International Criminal Court and isn’t yet.”
Another environmental cataclysm unfolds at a large Donetsk coal mine where an underground nuclear test was conducted years ago by Russia and left behind massive amounts of radioactive material. Now Russian-occupied since 2022, mine maintenance has been neglected and the radioactive portion of its underground shafts have flooded which has resulted in radioactive water seeping steadily into a vast portion of Eastern Ukraine’s water table. This didn’t occur before because the water that entered the underground mine was pumped out to avoid flooding and contamination.
Putin’s ecocide is also a war against the Global South because he despoils Ukrainian food lands that feed hundreds of millions of poor people around the world. Arif Husain, chief economist at the UN World Food Program, said last fall “we tend to address the symptoms and forget the root cause, and the root cause is war. The numbers do not lie. Pre-Covid we were looking at about 135 million people in crisis or the worst type of food security situation. Today, including Ukraine’s impact, that number is 345 million. There are about 50 million people in the world who are what we call in hunger emergencies, meaning one step away from famine. That’s the magnitude, that’s the scale of the problem we’re talking about.”
The countryside is scarred with landmines, but also with pock marks, and are vicious aerial attacks without value other than to permanently destroy the agricultural base. “Two dozen experts who spoke with Reuters — including soil scientists, farmers, grain companies and analysts — said it would take decades to fix the damage to Europe's breadbasket due to contamination, mines and destroyed infrastructure - and that global food supplies could suffer for years to come. Shelling has also upset the delicate ecosystems of microorganisms that turn soil materials into crop nutrients such as nitrogen while tanks have compressed the earth, making it harder for roots to flourish,” reported Indian broadcast network NDTV.
Putin is barbaric and uncivilized, and his tactics are borrowed from ancient times. Thousands of years ago, Roman soldiers, after each murderous conquest, would sprinkle salt on occupied lands to ensure that nothing could ever grow there again, then steal and enslave the women and children. Today, Russia’s Evil Empire transgresses nuclear proliferation treaties too by turning nuclear reactors into potential “dirty” nuclear bombs. An occupied nuclear plant that can be blown up is a nuclear weapon.
And yet the world’s noisy and well-funded green movement stands silent as this global ecological tragedy unfolds.
That is simply unforgiveable.
Build The Bloody Wall
February 8, 2024
Why can’t the richest and most powerful country in the world guard its southern border? In 2023, more people scammed their way into the United States, 2.5 million, than live in most American cities. That’s a rate of 6,800 illegal aliens daily whose identities, criminal records, and intentions are unknown. They came from all over the world and are mostly young males from violence-prone cultures. They are released and asked to return for a hearing. Most don’t. Donald Trump’s “build that wall” and “make Mexico pay for it” pledges helped him win the 2016 election, but he didn’t fix it and neither has the current occupant in the White House. Recently, Republicans extracted serious border reforms from President Joe Biden by hitching them to an omnibus bill that included support for Israel and Ukraine’s war. Then they double-crossed Biden, at Trump’s behest, by sabotaging the bill in order to harm Biden’s re-election chances by refusing to mend the turmoil at the border. Attempts are underway to pass a standalone bill to fund Ukraine and Israel, but Trump’s troops will stop at nothing, including perpetuating the border mess, to try and capture the White House. This is war. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” gloated ringleader Matt Gaetz this week after he helped reforms go down in flames.
Gaetz’s politics have paid off, but President Joe Biden returned fire politically in a speech: “The border has been broken for years. But the only reason the border is not secure is because of Trump and his MAGA friends…Republicans would rather weaponize it than fix it. And opposing this bill [which includedf Ukrainian aid] is playing into Putin’s hands.” But rhetoric isn’t enough. He must deliver solutions by addressing the migration problem with whatever executive privileges and powers he has. In the defeated legislation, he agreed to enact the most restrictive migrant legislation in years and now must implement it. Reforms included adding thousands more border staff to interdict and adjudicate asylum claims; setting a firm cap on how many asylum claims daily will be processed, and shutting down the border, except to commercial trade, when the border is overwhelmed.
He also must clean the country’s streets by finding and deporting hundreds of thousands of undocumented, and dangerous, illegals. For instance, a recent report said 617,607 aliens with criminal records that were let into the country have disappeared.
The perpetual failure by Washington to seal the border is a shocking lapse. Two Presidents, both national parties, and Congress have fiddled as “Rome burns”. America’s mainstream media has also failed by one-sidedly misrepresenting the “immigration” issue as a humanitarian situation when it’s simply a massive crime scene. Mexican cartels make billions smuggling people and drugs into the US by gaming a system that should have been scrapped years ago. And it worsens. Since Biden became President, a total of 3.3 million illegals have been released into the United States — a migration tsunami that is costing state and federal governments $150.7 billion annually. This money pays for their medical care, for the incarceration of those who break laws, and for housing and welfare. According to a recent Congressional report, this cost is larger than the total GDP of 24 American states.
Washington’s foot-dragging has been mostly due to the fact that the crisis is felt locally, in border states like Texas and Arizona that don’t control the national agenda or media. But last year, Texas and Florida officials began busing and dumping hundreds of thousands of illegals into Democratic cities such as New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In 2023, New York City received 145,000 “asylum seekers” and now spends $1 billion a year on housing and support – a tab that has forced cutbacks on other spending. Dislocations and street crime have increased, as has opposition.
America’s generosity is not returned in kind and dangers multiply. On January 30 a violent incident in New York City illustrated how hazardous the situation has become as well as how inept the system is to protect the public. That day, security cameras in Times Square caught five young illegals viciously beating up two policemen. They were arrested and charged with assault, but hours later were released without bail. Reports are that they the fled then swapped immigration identification numbers with other people at their refugee shelter and used those identities at a church to obtain food vouchers and free bus tickets to California.
All five were members of a pickpocket gang of Venezuelans operating for months in crowded tourist areas in the city. Some were allowed into the country despite criminal records, and had racked up offenses for months. All five were released without bail despite other pending charges. One had a dozen larceny charges outstanding involving credit card theft, and another faced assault and robbery. Others awaited trials concerning resisting arrest, larceny, and criminal possession of stolen property. After the incident, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis tweeted: “Illegals can walk across the border, beat up cops in NYC, and be released without bail. This is a national embarrassment. Deport the illegals and close the border.”
The incident received scant national media attention. The footage was shown but short-lived. Meanwhile, the country’s immigration cheerleaders – The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post – virtually ignored it or gave it short shrift. By so doing, they once again failed to inform the public about the seriousness of the “immigration” problem. Only Fox News covered it and continues to lead the nation journalistically by stationing cameras at the border and airing critics and statistics that describe Washington’s dereliction of duty.
Other forms of economic damage remain unreported. In 2023, nearly 143,000 illegal immigrants were deported – a costly correction required because they should never have been allowed in. Untold thousands work illegally for cash under the table, commit crimes, or are employed by the Mexican cartels to work off the $5,000 smuggling fees they owe to them. In the employ of cartels, their duties include robberies or pushing, smuggling, processing, or delivering illicit drugs and contraband.
What’s frustrating is that solutions exist. Asylum applications should only be made from outside the United States (in accordance with the UN Asylum rules). Tens of thousands of Immigration agents must be hired to track down and deport those who never showed up for their asylum hearing. An e-verify system must be required to crack down on illegal employment. And those who employ illegals should be prosecuted. Most importantly, Mexico must be ordered to block its southern border and ports of entry from illegals, and stop their transit.
Republican Presidential candidate, and former U.N. Ambassador, Nikki Haley also offered a few bold suggestions. She supports bringing in the US military. “When it comes to the cartels, we should treat them like the terrorists that they are," Haley told Fox News in a recent interview. "I would send special operations in there [Mexico] and eliminate them just like we eliminated ISIS and make sure that they know there's no place for them. If Mexico won't deal with it, I'll make sure I deal with it.”
President Biden must initiate strong measures and seal the border. A physical wall need not be necessary. A virtual one can prevent unwanted crossings by deploying satellite surveillance and laser fencing to detect illicit activity and drugs, on either side. Mexico must cooperate or face the possibility that the North American trade deal with the US and Canada will become bilateral. If Biden cracks down and closes the border to illegals, he will win the Presidency. After witnessing years of political grandstanding and incompetence, Americans now realize that the border with Mexico is the country’s most important domestic issue. As Louisiana Senator John Kennedy comically remarked before voting against tougher measures: “The border’s wide open. It’s easily fixed. Just stop people from coming in.”
Putin's 143 Million Prisoners
January 22, 2024
Amidst all the attention about Donald Trump and America’s 2024 Presidential election, the faux “re-election” of Vladimir Putin rolls on. Of course, it is a sham and he will win on March 17 because Russia is a criminal organization where elections are window-dressing and speech is about as free as it is inside China’s Politburo. Even so, credible polls reveal that support for Putin’s war ebbs as the conflict drags on, killing or maiming 315,000 and imperilling another 300,000 Russians at the warfront. But politics are also about “local” issues and Russians are upset because eggs are scarce and expensive, interest rates high, and frozen pipes burst constantly leaving hundreds of thousands without heat. But Russians endure by using dark humor and sarcasm to express feelings and opinions. One anti-war joke making the rounds these days is that “Putin’s partial mobilization means that you are drafted in whole and return back with parts missing”. But this election is different because movements opposing the war appear which may be why Putin suggests, through back channels, that he will accept a ceasefire even though, publicly, he doubles down. His latest billboard campaign boasts Imperially beneath his image that “Russia’s borders do not end anywhere” and recently declared that he still wants all of Ukraine.
Surely Putin realizes that his army cannot beat a NATO-backed Ukraine. At the same time, however, he also realizes that he cannot lose power at home. So he bides his time and hopes for Western war fatigue and a Trump victory in the fall. This week, Trump won the Iowa Republican primary and repeated that he could solve the Ukraine war “very fast” – a pledge only possible if the White House threatens to stop providing military aid to Ukraine unless it negotiates a cease-fire. But Europeans rally to help Ukraine, in response to Washington’s political gridlock, and Kyiv is about to deploy this spring a few dozen F16s, donated by EU nations, that could decimate Putin’s hapless cannon fodder along the front line.
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But internal threats lurk inside Russia. Its obscene casualty rate has sparked a low-key, but effective anti-war protest from women relatives of soldiers, dubbed the “white scarves” movement. They hide their identities, gather to lay carnations at unknown soldier’s monuments, and have issued a manifesto calling Putin’s mobilization of their menfolk “legalized slavery”. Other groups have sprung up in remote regions where a disproportionate number of men from ethnic minorities have been press-ganged into the military and died. Putin avoids putting into uniform the rich, well-connected young “white” Russians who live in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as described in my June 12 newsletter “Putin’s other genocides”.
Russian draftees die in droves due to improper training and equipment. Once inducted, they disappear, leaving relatives in the dark as to their whereabouts or condition. Many deaths are unreported and reports surface that conscripts have been shot as deserters for retreating or for refusing to obey dangerous orders. Army morale is low and many escape and hide. A recent investigation alleged that a group of draftees, who complained to officers, were purposely sent to their deaths in battle. “Our problems have been constantly ignored, but we won’t let our men be forgotten,” said Maria Andreyeva, the wife of a mobilized soldier and one of the few members of the movement willing to go public.
The “white scarves” leaders tread carefully and, thus far, have not been subjected to the arrests and abuse that most anti-Putin activists incur. There has been some intimidation, and bans against certain protests, but violent repression is taboo. This is why the movement – online and off – continues and grows. Russian political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin believes this relatives’ movement is “a serious symptom of growing problems” in the country. And it is why authorities cautiously handle the situation because “the consequences [of action] could be unpredictable.”
These women spread concern. A Russian investigative website reported recently that a letter signed by 100 family members of soldiers stationed in Ukraine demanded an end to Putin’s “meat assaults” against Ukraine’s military. Another reporter wrote that an entire platoon just deserted in Crimea and is being hunted. True or false, underground stories spread like COVID across Russia and the quiet protest by women has even garnered the attention of the esteemed Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in Washington. It recently commented that the “angry relatives” are Putin’s biggest concern. "Putin's presidential campaign will reportedly not focus on the war in Ukraine, and the Kremlin likely considers the relatives of mobilized personnel to be a social group that may pose one of the greatest threats to his campaign.”
Then there are the eggs and price of groceries. Police recently arrested a member of the Uzbek diaspora for “inciting hatred” with an online meme that spoofed both the country's economic inflation and the military mobilization. He faces a jail sentence for this post and caption in Russian: “Screw you and your eggs! Bring back the roosters from the front.”
Don’t laugh.
Last month, Putin publicly apologized for the soaring cost of eggs. But discontent grows, according to recent polls conducted by non-governmental, independent organizations. Support for Putin’s war hits rock bottom, according to Euronews. In October, Russian pollster, the Chronicle, said support for the invasion had halved in two years. It added that 40 percent of Russians favor the withdrawal of troops from Ukraine without war aims being achieved and that only 33 percent were against exiting from the war, down from 47 percent one year ago. Another poll found that 80 percent of Russians are worried about their financial well-being, a figure that’s 30 percent higher than recorded in May. Such anxiety is worrisome in any election, rigged or otherwise, but in combination with Putin’s quagmire in Ukraine is now reportedly unsettling Putin’s “siloviki” or the intelligence and security inner circle.
Journalists say oligarch “clans” openly feud and discredit one another to shift blame as well as to secure more power for themselves after the election and war. Putin has always encouraged infighting to retain power. This tactic was demonstrated last year when a raucous rivalry between his military brass and the late oligarch and mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin surfaced. The clash resulted in a violent but quick mutiny by Prigozhin; a climb down then a love-in with Putin, and finally his assassination weeks later.
The reality is that the election is a foregone conclusion and Russia’s 143 million people are prisoners in a gigantic gulag with 10 timezones. Heroic political foe Alexey Navalny still survives and says that Russia will “collapse and crumble”. But his recent tweet illustrates his personal plight in captivity after being recently transferred during the election to a jail near the Arctic Circle.
Putin keeps Navalny alive, and lets him communicate to the outside world, because he serves a purpose. Navalny’s increasingly gaunt appearances convey the message: Putin’s power is intractable and the consequences of anyone who opposes him are dire. Navalny recently resurfaced at a court hearing at his new hideous prison, and deployed the same dark humor and sarcasm that all Russians use to cope. He entered the court smiling and told the judge that he wanted the court to know that he missed the guards from his last prison, which caused the judge to laugh. Then he described his new conditions. “At this temperature, you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you have time to grow a new nose, ears, and fingers.” Then he joked, tragically, that he hoped to figure out what court would accept a lawsuit from him so that he could change the weather.
30
Political Genocide
January 18, 2024
Why does South Africa accuse Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice and ignore genocides committed by Russia, Iran, and China? Moscow currently wages war to obliterate Ukrainians, their culture, and country. Iran perpetrates a decades-long “death to Israel” crusade and terrorist campaign to destroy the Jewish state. China abuses and decimates Muslim Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group in its Xinjiang Province bordering Kazakhstan in Central Asia. The actions of all three meet the definition of genocide which is the “intent to destroy, whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. And yet, South Africa accuses Israel of genocide even though it’s a victim. On October 7, Israel was viciously attacked by Iranian-supported Hamas. Its army retaliated by attacking Hamas which was burrowed in residential areas inside Gaza. Israel’s military warned civilians to evacuate by dropping leaflets, by phone calls, and online, then designated safe relocations. Unfortunately, thousands of civilians died. While tragic, the fact is that the Israel army attacked Hamas, not Gazans. This was defense, not genocide. “It is a legal absurdity to suggest that a country that is defending itself from genocide is thereby guilty of genocide,” commented retired Canadian Supreme Court Judge Rosalie Abella.
South Africa’s allegations should have been directed at the underlying culprits of the war – the genocidal regimes in Russia and Iran. Both have stoked strife for years throughout the Middle East, and both were behind the massacre of Israelis on October 7 — which also happens to be Vladimir Putin’s birthday. The killers were members of Hamas, financed by Iran and trained by Russian mercenaries. Days after the atrocity, their leaders were praised in Tehran and some flew to Moscow to be feted. Despite such glaring evidence, South Africa decided to blame the victim, not the perpetrators, because it belongs to BRICS, the anti-West organization launched by Russia and China that includes Iran and other nations in the so-called Global South.
The case is unjust. If Israel is guilty of genocide for defending itself against Hamas, then Ukraine is also guilty for defending itself against Moscow and causing 315,000 casualties. After the Oct. 7 massacre it was necessary to dismantle and destroy Hamas operatives, rocket sites, and hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath Gazan cities. Guerrillas were everywhere in Gaza, using residents as human shields, and this required Israel to evacuate civilians to reach the terrorists.
Unfortunately, reckless and radical politicians in Israel provided a hateful “sound track” of genocidal threats toward Gazans, statements which have found their way into Court documents. For instance, President Isaac Herzog erroneously stated that all Gazans were "responsible" for Hamas's surprise attack. Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant initially ordered a full siege on the Gaza Strip, where almost half the population are children. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly." At the trial, these remarks were entered as evidence of genocide, but Israel’s defense lawyers argued their words were irrelevant because these persons did not make military decisions.
The case was heard on January 11 and 12. A ruling by judges will take weeks more. The West lined up behind Israel. America rejected charges as “unfounded”, the UK called them “unjustified”, and Germany (perpetrator of the largest genocide in recent history) said it “explicitly rejects” them. In Court, Israel described South Africa’s accusations as "grossly distorted" and asked the Court to dismiss the case and to reject South Africa’s request that it be forced to halt its anti-Hamas operation.
But the facts are that many Israelis are upset with their government’s aggressive prosecution of the war. The newspaper Haaretz excoriated Netanyahu and some cabinet members for their intemperate remarks, then noted these provided fodder for the Court case. On January 12, after the Court convened, its editorial read: “It was an uncalled for, a sad and bad day for Israel at the International Court of Justice in the Hague on Friday. On the one hand, Israel made a compelling case against the obscene accusation of `genocide’ for its military response in the Gaza Strip following the October 7 massacre. On the other, it might not have been standing there in the first place had it not been for its half-wit politicians… A collection of misfits masquerading as the government casually spewed out moronic one-liners: Nuke Gaza, burn Gaza, flatten Gaza, erase Gaza, cleanse Gaza, eliminate Gaza, displace Gazans – all of which found their way into the South African application that the world court heard on Thursday.”
Haaretz columnist Noa Landau wrote that Israelis now have “a big problem: 23,708 problems, to be exact. That is the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza, according to United Nations data, many of them civilians, including women and children. Another 60,005 have been injured and around 1.9 million people, who constitute about 85 percent of the Strip's population, have been displaced from their homes. Unfortunately, both the plaintiffs and the defendants fall into the rhetorical trap of focusing on words and videos posted on social media instead of the question of whether Israel is doing enough to minimize harm to innocent civilians on the way to reaching its goals. The takeaway should be that `revenge’ on innocents is not a plan of action and that atrocities committed by the enemy do not grant a license for any reaction.”
The culprit is Iran, and its hateful nexus which includes Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and Russia. For years, Tehran has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map”. Iran and Russia helped destroy Lebanon and Syria, and have financed bombing attacks and assassinations for decades against innocent Israeli citizens. Iranian parades routinely include “death to Israel” banners; its military practices by firing missiles at Star of David targets, and its media broadcasts anti-Israeli and anti-American hate speech or slogans constantly. Genocide is “embedded” in the Iranian psyche and government, like a warped constitution. In 1979, its “religious” leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared “we believe the solution to Palestine is in destroying the Israeli regime”.
So why isn’t Iran hauled, continuously if necessary, before the Court for this perpetual and genocidal Jihad? And why hasn’t South Africa or other nation-states dragged Russia into Court for genocide after President Vladimir Putin launched his 2022 war to eliminate Ukraine? Instead, pursuing justice was left up to Ukraine itself which took the matter to the Court two days after the 2022 invasion, following Russia’s hideous slaughter, rape, and torture of hundreds civilians in Bucha outside Kyiv. Within short order, judges ordered Russia to suspend military operations against Ukraine, but the order was ignored.
Finally, on March 17, 2023, the Court issued warrants for Putin’s arrest involving the mass abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children which is clearly a war crime. Russia ignores that too because it does not acknowledge the Court’s jurisdiction, but at least the warrants have restricted Putin from travelling to many countries. Ironically, he was inhibited this summer from attending the BRICS confab held in South Africa, which recognizes the Court. He did not go because South Africa advised Putin not to come because he would be arrested and shipped to The Hague for trial.
China has also been let off the hook concerning its genocide against Uyghurs. Last year, 51 UN members issued a declaration condemning this as a crime against humanity and called on Beijing to end its human rights abuses. But such declarations are toothless and no genocide case has been submitted to the Court. At the very least, all three of these nation-state perpetrators should be denied UN votes in the General Assembly or Security Council. They should be designated as State Sponsors of Terrorism and Genocide, which would result in severe and permanent sanctions, defense export bans, and severe financial restrictions.
Regrettably, they remain un-indicted and strut around the world Scot-free, attending international gatherings. Meanwhile, their political collaborators game the International Court of Justice, United Nations, and other institutions so they can continue to harass and malign Israel, Ukraine, the Uyghurs, and future targets. That’s the real injustice here.
30
It’s World War III
November 6, 2023
The Israel-Gaza and Ukraine-Russia conflicts are the result of a world war started in 1999 by Vladimir Putin to recreate the Soviet Union’s empire. Russia’s war machine operates in the shadows and is behind most of the world’s strife. It is not a goose-stepping monolith, but a hidden Hydra with thousands of tentacles that reach worldwide and have grown for decades. Putin prefers to wage hybrid warfare and deploys mercenaries, rogue nations, and non-state players such as terrorists or political extremists to foment unrest and revolts. He weaponizes food and fuel and sabotages economies, elections, reputations, and industries. Russian operatives corrupt nations; torture, poison, or bribe individuals; kidnap children; take hostages, and launch cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns on an industrial scale. Such tactics have culminated in the two major wars underway in Europe and the Middle East, and, despite ample evidence of Russia’s involvement, there is no global consensus that this is World War III and must be stopped. Instead, leaders haggle over next moves and whether to fund Ukraine as opposed to Israel, as though the same Evil wasn’t behind all conflicts. Only a global alliance will stop Russia’s war.
If you examine the current geopolitical problems through the prism of a world war orchestrated by another ruthless leader, there is no room for appeasement, neutrality, avoidance, nor for dreams that negotiations, ceasefires, or peace talks will stop the mayhem. Only eradication of Russia’s network, in all its guises, will win the peace. Russia’s nation-state allies are Iran and North Korea, but Moscow has also financed and trained thousands of non-state actors that are embedded everywhere to cause trouble. Hamas and Hezbollah are well-known terrorist guerrilla armies on the payroll of Russia and Iran, but so is a roster of anti-West countries, political parties, terrorist sleeper cells, movements, and leaders. Finally, there is Russia’s huge conventional army as well as the Wagner Group mercenaries that have played an over-sized role in destabilizing Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Venezuela. All must be defeated.
Instead, the world currently focuses on the killing fields of Israel and Ukraine, but should view them as tragedies that have happened because of the world’s strategic blindness to the existence of this insidious global war. The current Israeli situation, for instance, illustrates at least two mistakes: The failure by Israel and others to recognize and stop Putin’s behind-the-scenes maneuvres; and the reliance on conventional armed forces to provide security against elusive, hybrid warfare. The result was that on October 7 (Putin’s birthday) Hamas slaughtered 1,400 people despite Israel’s large military and Putin’s “friendship” with Benjamin Netanyahu. Then, in retaliation, Israel counter-attacked by conducting massive bombing raids and a ground invasion of Gaza to destroy Hamas as if it were a static nation-state and not a cunning mobile insurgency that had already “left town”.
By the time the tanks arrived, Hamas was gone or hiding behind Palestinian civilians as shields. Israel’s ferocious retaliation demolished half of Gaza, killed thousands of civilians, but eliminated only a few dozen terrorists. This outcome handed Russia and its global tentacles an opportunity to weaponize the air waves by amplifying the plight of Palestinian civilians at the hands of Israel. This has roiled world opinion and resulted in criticism of Israel even among its allies. Theoretically, if the world had realized what Putin was up to, an allied hybrid war capability might have detected and prevented the attack or, having failed to do so, could have conducted a surgical counterattack with fewer civilian casualties. But now the West and Israel have been undermined, American politicians divided, Arab and Muslim allies alienated, and the possibility of a two-state solution postponed indefinitely.
Not surprisingly, Vladimir Putin granted a rare interview days later with Qatar-owned Al Jazeera where he expressed concern about the “catastrophic increase” in the number of civilians killed in Israel and the Gaza Strip. “The Russian leader also took aim at Washington’s policy in the Middle East which he said had failed by not taking the needs of Palestinians into account,” read the website.
The failure to take a global approach to Russia’s predations allows one ally to be pitted against another or to make a grave strategic error that damages all. Clearly, a unified alliance must create a hybrid war counter-offensive that can identify, track, anticipate, infiltrate, and destroy Russia, Iran and their malevolent non-state actors before they attack. The failure to muster a global force against Russia allows Putin to gain ground, geographically or politically, by dividing and conquering foes, isolating targets, and generating instability across the world.
Ukraine is another example of what happens when the civilized world fails to unite against Russia. In 2008, Putin invaded Georgia, then Ukraine in 2014 without much fuss by America, Europe, or others. The Obama regime opted to do a reset with Russia, a nonsensical strategy given the sociopathy of the Putin regime. That miscalculation, along with appeasements, led to the invasion of Ukraine on February 2022. But if the West had understood that Putin was salami-slicing the West on a quest to dominate Eastern Europe once more, other strategies would have been undertaken. For starters, Europe would have realized it could never become fully dependent on Russian oil and natural gas; NATO would have expanded into Scandinavia, Georgia, and Ukraine years ago, and the West would have invested billions in protecting the collective security, not forced to play catch up for the past 20 months.
Fresh from these two major triumphs, Russia will continue its “hybrid warfare” globally. It will fund any anti-American, anti-European Union, anti-Israel, or anti-NATO group, media, political party, and leader. Such efforts have already borne fruit. Putin’s tentacles have backed anti-European Union populists such as Marine LePen in France, Victor Orban in Hungary, Slovakian or Serbian politicians, Britain’s “Brexit” movement, white supremacists in America, and anti-Europe celebrities like Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and Tucker Carlson in America — whether they know it or not.
Russia has also weaponized migration into Europe and America to destabilize both politically and socially. As many as 20 million refugees have landed in Europe following Russian military interventions in Syria and Ukraine. Neither jurisdiction has secured its borders or properly screened entrants. (Read my “Global Refugee Mess” published on October 2.) If one agrees with my assertion that World War III is already underway, it’s hardly a stretch to speculate that included, among the tens of thousands of Venezuelan and Central American men who enter the United States, are spies, criminals, drug mules, or terrorists. In addition, thousands more arrive from further afield, including Russia. And Europe is in worse shape because it lacks a continental navy and is inundated with refugee claimants, most recently arriving by boat from the Middle East, or countries in Africa where Russian influence is powerful.
China has stayed on the sidelines in this global war despite boasts by Putin about being “no limits friends”. Russia would love nothing better than to convince China to open a third theater in its world war by invading Taiwan. But this is a Kremlin distraction combined with wishful thinking. Since Ukraine’s invasion, China has distanced itself from Russia, and refused to provide military aid. Military conquest is not China’s style. Its foreign policy has been mercantilist, via its Belt and Road Initiative. Besides that, Beijing moves toward détente with the United States and Europe out of self-interest to shore up its exports and economy in future. And it too fears Russia, as it should. Russia, not China, initiated and backed the only post-war invasions in Asia -- Korea and Vietnam. Both conflicts embroiled the United States for years as its alliance of conventional troops fought to stalemates against guerrilla armies.
Today Russia remains a global scourge and is winning its world war. This is why an alliance must stop and dismantle its deadly war machine.
Israel’s Hidden War Redux
I’M REPUBLISHING THIS ADDITIONAL NEWSLETTER, FROM JUNE 3, 2021, WHICH EXPLAINS THE DANGEROUS DIVIDE WITHIN ISRAELI SOCIETY THAT HAS NOW LED TO THE CURRENT WAR.
IT DESCRIBES THE UNFATHOMABLE DIVIDE IN THE COUNTRY WHICH THREATENS ITS ECONOMIC FUTURE AND MAY EVENTUALLY RESULT IN CIVIL WAR BETWEEN SECULAR ISRAELIS, WHO ARE PUTTING THEIR LIVES ON THE LINE IN ITS ARMED FORCES, AGAINST RELIGIOUS ISRAELIS WHO REMAIN EXEMPT FROM MILITARY SERVICE AS WELL AS FROM PAYING TAXES. THE DIVIDE IS ALSO EDUCATIONAL — HIGHER, WELL-ROUNDED EDUCATION FOR SECULAR ISRAELIS VERSUS NARROW, SCRIPTURAL TEACHINGS FOR RELIGIOUS ISRAELIS.
THE NETANYAHU GOVERNMENT, CONTROLLED BY RADICAL RELIGIOUS ZEALOTS, TOOK OVER AND FAILED TO PROTECT ISRAELIS ALONG ITS BORDER WITH GAZA WHO WERE MASSACRED ON OCTOBER 7 BY ISLAMIC TERRORISTS. IT HAS ALSO ENCOURAGED RELIGIOUS SETTLERS IN THE WEST BANK TO ILLEGALLY ANNEX PALESTINIAN LANDS.
HERE IS A TWO-YEAR-OLD NEWSLETTER THAT EXPLAINS THE ROOTS OF THE TERRIBLE WAR, AND SHOCKING REPRISALS BY NETANYAHU’S REGIME:
June 3, 2021 — The latest Israel-Palestinian crisis flared for a handful of days as bombs rained down on both sides, causing the predictable diplomatic flurry and another cease-fire deal that won’t last. Nothing will change for two reasons: Fortress Israel is impregnable, and the Palestinians in the occupied territories cannot get their act together because of their dysfunctional and corrupt leaders. So the cycle will repeat, and pundits will bleat, about a two-state solution and other options that are unattainable.
But Israel’s real existential challenge is within. It’s about an irreconcilable clash between worldviews: Israelis (Jewish and Arab citizens) who want Israel to remain a vibrant economic and technological powerhouse and liberal democracy; and ultra-orthodox Jews, or Haredim, who believe Israel should be a theocracy for the devout. The hidden war is due to demographics and the fact that the Haredim population explodes and in less than two generations will represent half of Israel’s population.
This challenge is behind the creation this week of a broadly-based coalition of eight political parties — right, left, centrist, and the United Arab List parties — which aims to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his radical policies. It’s important, however, to note that this is an awkward alliance that only agrees on one issue, his removal. Governance going forward will be tricky, to say the least, and the coalition intends to be led for two years by Naftali Bennet as Prime Minister, a hard-line religious-nationalist, then by centrist leader Yair Lapid, favored by secular Israelis.
The coalition is a metaphor for Israel’s deep divisions. Arab Israelis represent 20 percent of the population (and 25 percent of its children), the ultra-orthodox or Haredim represent 14 percent (and 20 percent of the country’s children), and the remaining majority consists of secular and religious Jews. The Haredim have been awarded major privileges by Netanhayu over the years while the Arab minority has been neglected in state budgets and housing and land policies. Further, in 2018, an incendiary Nation-State Law passed that enshrined the right of national self-determination as being “unique to the Jewish people,” rather than to all Israeli citizens.
While a blow, Arabs in Israel enjoy higher living standards and more freedoms than their counterparts anywhere else and are becoming democratically engaged. Arab parties are in the new coalition, and Arabs also becoming more successful. For instance, today half of Israel’s pharmacists and one-fifth of all its physicians are of Arab background.
Israel’s biggest “threat”, politically and economically, is the exponential population growth — and political clout — of the Haredim, or ultra-orthodox Jews. (“Haredim” is defined in the Oxford dictionary as “a member of any of various Orthodox Jewish sects characterized by strict adherence to the traditional form of Jewish law and rejection of modern secular culture, many of whom do not recognize the modern state of Israel as a spiritual authority.”) They are not a threat because of their religion, but because their worldview differs from other Israelis who believe in liberal democracy.
Demographically, the Haredim will take over Israel’s population in two generations because of exploding birthrates. Their political clout is already dominant and Netanyahu has taken the country radically to the “right” in favor of special privileges for the Haredim. This demographic alarum has been raised often by Professor Dan Ben-David, an economist at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Public Policy who heads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research. The Haredim, he says, constitutionally enjoy enormous privileges while, at the same time, disdain modern life and gainful employment, therefore living off all Israeli taxpayers.
This trajectory will result in unresolvable internal conflicts which have begun to bubble over into the population at large. For the first time inside Israel, serious inter-communal violence broke out during the latest crisis with Hamas in Israel’s “mixed communities” as far-right Jewish militias attacked Arabs, who retaliated, according to news accounts.
“The most shocking developments occurred on the streets of Israel, as rival Jewish and Arab mobs attacked cars, shops, and people in several towns and cities,” wrote The New York Times. “In Bat Yam, a seaside suburb south of Tel Aviv … dozens of Jewish extremists took turns beating and kicking a man presumed to be Arab, even as his body lay motionless on the ground. Another occurred in Acre, a northern coastal town, where an Arab mob beat a Jewish man with sticks and rocks, also leaving him in a critical condition.”
This is happening at a time when Arabs have integrated more with their Jewish neighbors in recent years, wrote The New York Times. “But at the same time, the Israeli Jewish leadership has grown more right-wing and nakedly racist.”
When the Haredim won certain inalienable rights in 2018, etched into the country’s Basic Laws, they obtained special status, wrote Ben-David. This includes exclusive control over the education of their children and support for their growing “community of learners” (Torah students) who are not only exempt from military service but may refrain from paid work too, and must be supported by taxpayers. The result is that employment rates among Haredi men are low.
These low employment rates among Haredim men are partly a choice (to pursue religious studies) but are also the result of poor educational outcomes. Yeshivas don’t teach core subjects and Ben-David adds that many Arab children attend schools that are under-funded and sub-standard. “One-quarter of Israel’s schoolchildren are Arab-Israeli and perform poorly in core subjects – in math, science and reading – even below that of other Muslim countries, and most of the Haredim (ultra-orthodox) children, which comprises one-fifth (20 percent) of the total, and is growing exponentially, don’t study these subjects in their religious schools,” wrote Ben-David in an article for The Times of Israel in 2019.
Not surprisingly, Israeli students as a whole underperform the rest of the developed world in terms of test results.
This means that Israel will lose its status as a “start-up nation” unless educational and other reforms are enacted because already nearly half of Israel’s children will be unprepared to assume the reins of a high-tech nation, argues Ben-David. “How is it even possible that government after government refuses to grant an exponentially increasing number of Haredi children the basic right to a core curriculum – a right that is stipulated by the law in every developed country, except Israel.”
This dramatic demographic shift results in conundrums: How can Israel’s pluralistic and meritocratic society continue to grant special status and financially support an increasing number of unproductive persons, based on religion? How can the country tolerate poor educational outcomes, and welfare dependency, and still deliver economic prosperity? “Not only is Israel’s labor productivity among the lowest in the developed world, but the gap between the leading G7 countries (the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Japan) and Israel has increased over three-fold over the past forty years,” he wrote.
The proportion of Haredi men with an academic degree has remained very low and unchanged over the past decade and a half, however, a slight increase has occurred among Haredi women.
Will this growing divide result in more inter-communal clashes, such as those that just occurred during the latest conflict? Fortunately, these were sporadic and relatively short-lived because, it’s important to note that calm was restored, thanks to centrist politicians representing both Arab Israelis and secular Jews. “The vast majority of the people of Israel -- Jews and Arabs -- are far better than this,” said Yair Lapid. Likewise, Ayman Odeh, a young Israeli-born, multilingual lawyer of Arab descent who describes himself as secular and heads the Joint Arab List representing four Arab parties, publicly called for restraint and urged followers to participate only in organized demonstrations.
Odeh is a respected power broker who recites Martin Luther King and concentrates on establishing peaceful co-existence among all Israelis. He was born in Israel and describes himself as an Arab Israeli, not a Palestinian. And in a leadership debate in 2015, he made his mark when he was attacked by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, a right-wing leader of Israel’s Our Home party, who sneered at him: “Why did you come to this studio, why not to Gaza, or Ramallah? Why are you even here? You are not wanted here; you are a Palestinian citizen.”
Odeh was unruffled and replied: “I am very welcome in my homeland,” he said in Hebrew, then referred to the fact that Lieberman migrated from the Soviet Union. “I am part of nature, the surroundings, the landscape.”
Hopefully, the new coalition can begin to address the country’s need to level the playing field, institute comprehensive, systemic education reform that will turn Israel’s schools – including in the Haredi sector – into the world’s best, and improve healthcare, infrastructure, and policing in all poor neighborhoods.
In The Times of Israel piece, Ben-David concludes with a demographic warning: “It should be clear that the complexity of the challenges that Israel faces extends far beyond the issue of Haredim. Pervasive poverty and income inequality also exist among non-Haredi Jews, not to mention Arab-Israelis. Not everything begins and ends with education. But if a population group this large continues to exercise considerable influence on the direction and amplitude of flows from the government faucet in a manner that only further enhances their exponential growth, while concurrently depriving their children [and others] of the vital tools necessary for integration into a competitive global economy and a modern society, Israel will cease to exist.”
Putin's Pope
August 17, 2023
On the morning of June 2, 1979 church bells pealed across Poland as Pope John Paul II stepped from his plane onto the soil of his native country then knelt to kiss its ground. His dramatic gesture of devotion and his crusade against human rights abuses helped demolish the Soviet Union. Polish insurgents were allowed to meet, organize, and pass messages in Catholic churches as their Pope spoke out eloquently against Soviet wrongdoing everywhere. In 2003, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize and declined out of humility. In 2014, he was canonized. By contrast, the current incumbent, Pope Francis, has never directly condemned Vladimir Putin or Russia by name in the 18 months since their horrific war began against the Ukrainian people. Worse, the Pope’s first quoted reaction echoed Kremlin talking points when he suggested that the war was a consequence of “NATO barging at Russia’s gate” and the “international arms industry”. This Pope’s failure to publicly condemn Putin and Russia, and his moral equivocation when pressed, is unforgivable and reminiscent of the Papacy’s tacit acceptance of Hitler and his Second World War.
Pope Francis is creating another “historic mess” because he aims to “show that he is neither on one side or the other,” commented Giovanni Maria Vian, a former editor of the Vatican’s newspaper. The Papal silence is perplexing, given that Catholicism is the largest religion in Europe and that 10 percent of Ukrainians are members of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church which recognizes the Holy See. Other religious Ukrainians belong to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine which broke away from its Russian counterpart in 2019, but their worldwide spiritual leader, Patriarch Bartholomew, immediately labelled Russia’s invasion as “unholy and demonic”. And this March, he also directly accused the Russian branch of the Orthodox church and the Kremlin of cooperating “in the crime of aggression and shared the responsibility for the resulting crimes, like the shocking abduction of the Ukrainian children.”
Perhaps Pope Francis refuses to name the predators because one of them is a friend — Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill who also happens to be a former KGB agent and confidante of Putin’s. A few years ago, Forbes Magazine estimated that Kirill’s personal net worth was $4 billion, but this remains unverified. However, he wears $30,000 watches and owns a private jet, a palatial estate, a yacht, and valuable real estate in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Suspicions are that his fortune was accumulated by skimming profits made by his Church in the mid-1990s after it was granted a monopoly to import cigarettes duty-free.
After the February 2022 invasion, Kirill did not condemn it as the worldwide Orthodox Patriarch did, but issued a directive to Russian soldiers that “your task is to wipe the Ukrainian nation off the face of the Earth”. Despite such a shocking pronouncement, Pope Francis told newspapers in Italy a few weeks later that he spent 40 minutes on a zoom call with his friend Kirill and warned him against becoming “Putin’s altar boy”, wrote The Washington Post. He warned him? Surely, the Pope knew that Kirill was a Putin insider and collaborator and had publicly promoted genocide.
One year later, on 30 April 2023, Pope Francis announced that the Vatican was embarking on a secret "peace mission" to try to end the war. In May, President Zelensky flew to meet the Pope to discuss the mission, but left in disgust and tweeted: “I asked [the Pope] to condemn [Russia’s] crimes in Ukraine. Because there can be no equality between the victim and the aggressor. I also talked about our Peace Formula as the only effective algorithm for achieving a just peace. I proposed joining its implementation.”
The next day Zelensky’s advisor Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted a withering condemnation of the Vatican’s inaction, failure to call out the culprits, and use of the Kremlin’s damaging narrative. “The Vatican is primarily about morality. When you call an aggressor by their name. When you harshly and directly condemn mass crimes. When you openly side with a country that is being killed and destroyed without provocation. When you personally defend those who are unconditional victims of Russian aggression. When you call evil, which is Russia, by its name. Only then does Holy Justice emerge.”
One month later Pope Francis personally announced that his peace mission was over because there was no apparent end in sight to the war after his envoy held three days of talks in Moscow. But a Vatican statement followed which revealed that the Pope’s consultations were doomed (or cynical) from the start because they were between the Pope’s envoy and one of President Vladimir Putin's closest foreign policy advisors as well as the odious Patriarch Kirill.
The International Affairs Institute of Italy analyzed why the Pope failed to mediate a deal. It blamed the Pope’s NATO-bashing narrative which aligned him with the Kremlin and portrayed Ukraine’s struggle for freedom and democracy and justice as simply a proxy war between colonial powers. “It denies agency to the Ukrainian people, undermining their ability to be active participants in the conflict and possible negotiations. Instead, it presents Ukraine, and its population of over 40 million, as a mere pawn in the hands of the so-called `great powers’,” it concluded.
So is this Pope tone deaf or co-opted? Is it because he’s not European, but from the Global South where Europe remains resented? Or is it because he’s a Jesuit, an order of priests devoted to education who are often theological “eggheads” that indulge in parsing and dissembling moral issues even when answers are simple and obvious. Such casuistry, or unsound reasoning in relation to moral questions, certainly afflicts this Pope. When asked by an Italian newspaper whether it was right to send weapons so Ukraine could defend itself, he said “I don’t know.” When pushed to castigate Putin and Russia, he responded “I am simply against reducing complexity to the distinction between good guys and bad guys, without reasoning about roots and interests, which are very complex” then added Russia’s war in Ukraine was “perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented.”
Whatever the underlying causes, his behaviour is inexcusable. The facts are simple: Ukraine was invaded by Russia, its people are being killed, the country is being destroyed, his friend Kirill has called for genocide, and every perpetrator must be condemned and punished. This is not morally debatable.
It’s surprising that, despite the Pope’s dereliction of duty, some members of his flock haven’t lost faith. In August, many young Ukrainians attended the Apostolic Visit by the Pope in Portugal on World Youth Day hoping he would take up their cause. “The Pope said nothing”, remarked Rev. Roman Demush reported The New York Times. He leads the youth ministry office for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. “The war should make us scream, and it silences. He said he was impotent in front of this evil. It’s not enough just to listen — he has to do something. We want the Pope to be clear, in an understandable way, that Russia is a terrorist state.”
Canada's Mediocracy
June 5, 2023
In January, most Canadians were embarrassed after their federal government announced that four Leopard tanks would be given to Ukraine as it fights for its very existence, as well as Europe’s. Four more came a month later, but these were measly gifts, considering that Canada is wealthy, home to the second largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world, and America has given disproportionately more to Kyiv. It’s also fair to assume that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has not phoned President Joe Biden or NATO or Ukraine offering help along the way, or suggesting that Canada will ship substantially more energy to help reduce energy inflation and replace Russian fossil fuels. Trudeau has been in power since 2015 and yet to meet NATO military spending commitments. He also has worrisome connections with China, has impeded Canadian economic growth with his anti-resource policies, and neglected his country’s military. Canada has the longest coastline in the world and a navy smaller than Sri Lanka’s without a presence in a vast Arctic region that it shares with a militarized Russia.
Trudeau has governed for nearly eight years with little more than one-third of the popular vote by forming a coalition with socialist leader Jagmeet Singh, another privileged, professional politician who never met a payroll. Only two in five Canadians approve of their performance, but the electorate is fragmented. Trudeau’s cabinet totals 35 members and none have domain expertise in the positions they hold. Before winning, most were political operatives or environmental radicals, and, collectively, they lack management, finance, business, military, engineering, geopolitical, resource, or economic skills. The result is that Trudeau’s government this year will spend C$17.7 billion, or two-thirds of what it spends on defense, hiring consultants to tell them what to do because they are clueless.
“Canada doesn’t have the Air Force and Navy to protect its borders anymore,” commented American terrorism and cyber warfare expert Clint Watts last year in an interview. This year, Chinese surveillance balloons over Canada had to be shot down by American jet fighters. Canada’s stinginess and foot-dragging on defence poses a threat not only to itself, but to North America and the Western alliance. Trudeau has never met NATO’s 2-per-cent of GDP commitment to defense spending he promised to fulfil in 2015, and told NATO officials he never will, according to the Washington Post.
Canada’s intelligence capability is also considered substandard and penetrable by members of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance. In 2019, Canada’s master spy was arrested and charges still remain secret. In 2020, the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, David Vigneault, warned publicly that “the greatest strategic threat to Canada’s national security comes from hostile activities by foreign states” and that China presented “a direct threat to our national security and sovereignty”.
Trudeau adheres to Greenpeace directives rather than to international pledges. This has security implications. That environmental organization’s non-sensical anti-nuclear policy (even though nuclear generates zero emissions) was fully embraced by Germany, which made the country dependent on Russia energy as it closed nuclear plants. This gave Putin leverage over Europe and emboldened him to invade Ukraine.
Even so, Trudeau remains a devotee: His Environmental Minister is a former Greenpeace executive, as was his closest friend and former chief advisor. This environmental zealotry has, as occurred in Germany, impaired Canada’s energy sector, stunted development of its world-class resource endowment, and indirectly impeded the free world’s battle against Russia. Washington had to press Canada to increase oil exports after the war, which it did marginally, and now pressures Canada to remove anti-mining constraints because it is the only Western nation with an abundance of undeveloped cobalt, graphite, lithium, and nickel (plus copper and rare earths) that are essential in the future.
In Trudeau’s Canada, these would remain in the ground as would oil, natural gas, and uranium. He has been impervious to offers by allies willing to pay billions for resource development. In August, Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz met with Trudeau and offered to pay the cost of building pipelines, ports, and LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) facilities on Canada’s east coast for export to Europe. Trudeau’s response was that there has “never been a strong business case” for Canadian LNG exports, and yet, days later, Scholz signed a massive LNG deal with Australia. In January, Trudeau gave Japan’s leader the same “no business case” story after Tokyo offered to build multiple LNG plants on Canada’s west coast. And in March, Spain’s energy giant Repsol SA withdrew from a planned LNG project in New Brunswick because Canadian federal government obstacles made its LNG project unviable. “Trudeau’s stewardship is a disaster. Like a dream world,” commented New Brunswick’s Premier Blaine Higgs, an engineer and energy expert.
Western Canada is the fourth largest producer of oil in the world — 5.43 million barrels of oil a day and lots of natural gas — and exports most of this to the United States. But it could produce and export much more energy if foreign environmental groups hadn’t spent billions on litigation and lobbying to stymie and strand its oil and gas reserves. In 2017, a pipeline to bring Canadian oil and gas from Western Canada to Eastern Canada’s coast was proposed and killed by Quebec, environmentalists, and Trudeau. If allowed, it would have brought Canadian oil to its eastern regions, where OPEC oil is now imported, and facilitated the creation of an LNG hub in Eastern Canada. The result of cancelling the inter-continental pipeline was that 18 LNG projects were nixed and the only LNG project underway is in British Columbia where it has been delayed and dogged by excessive political, legal, and regulatory interventions.
By contrast, the United States has revolutionized its natural gas industry in response to the Russian war as well as to global demand for cleaner energy. There are more than 140 LNG processing plants and ports in America with more on the drawing boards. America is now the world’s biggest LNG exporter. If Canada’s east-west pipeline hadn’t been sabotaged by Trudeau, environmentalists, and Quebec, the two countries would have replaced all Russian gas exports in Europe by now and helped many developing countries, and Eastern Canada, replace dirty coal-burning power plants with cleaner gas-fired ones.
Trudeau’s slavish adherence to Greenpeace is damaging enough, but his coziness with China has become a national issue in recent weeks. Press reports, based on intelligence leaks, claimed that Beijing meddled in Canada’s 2021 election to help Trudeau’s party. A full-blown public inquiry was demanded but, in response, Trudeau appointed a family friend, David Johnston, to determine whether a public inquiry was warranted. A China booster himself, Johnston predictably stated that a public inquiry was unnecessary and impossible because this would require disclosure of documents in breach of secrecy laws. He then went further and said that he looked at classified documents, found no wrongdoing, but couldn’t say why because he’d signed the Secrecy Oath. It was high-handed and disrespectful.
Naturally, Parliament’s opposition parties demanded Johnston’s resignation, but he refused. Some demanded an in camera judicial inquiry, but have been stonewalled. And Trudeau refuses to comment and or respond to requests that laws be put in place that would require foreign operatives to register and that would prevent election meddling, as Australia and others have done.
This political snafu is only a glimpse into the fact that Trudeau and his Liberals are infested with, and driven by, a business, investment, political, and personal network that is heavily invested and aligned with China. For example, two years ago Beijing kidnapped two innocent Canadian businessmen and canceled billions of dollars worth of trade contracts to force Canada to release a Huawei executive arrested under an extradition warrant by the United States. Trudeau did not retaliate and instead appointed as Ambassador to China another friend, Dominic Barton, who was too close to Chinese officials after serving as Chairman of McKinsey & Company and opening dozens of offices across China. Eventually, the Canadians were released but only after America negotiated a prisoner exchange.
The list of Liberal China lackeys is long. Trudeau’s closest friend and cabinet minister, Francois-Philippe Champagne, bought two apartments in London UK with mortgages from the Bank of China valued at C$1.8-million. He never disclosed this, as required, but confirmed the transactions after they were leaked and never resigned. Trudeau’s Family Foundation has received large sums from Chinese donors. And Trudeau’s mentor, former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, has family connections to Power Corporation of Montreal which has billions in assets in China and close ties to its political and business elites.
Domestically, Trudeau’s Canada loses ground economically. An OECD report in October 2021 predicted that Canada will be the worst performing advanced economy with the worst economic growth from 2030 to 2060. “In other words, Canada will be dead last not only for the next decade, but also for the three decades after that,” concluded the OECD.
Fortunately, Canada remains a pleasant country to live in with sensible gun controls and a good universal healthcare system that predates Trudeau’s tenure. But it’s now a chronic underachiever. Canada suffers from “state capture” by an anti-business Liberal and socialist elite and by foreign countries and non-state players. The country is fragmented, regionally and linguistically, which has led to this weak, anti-business coalition government that stonewalls Canadian voters and doesn’t pull its weight internationally. This is, more than a handful of tanks or an inadequate navy, the greatest embarrassment of all.
Russia's Sopranos
June 26, 2023
The bizarre events in Russia over the weekend provide a glimpse into the reality that the country is not a nation, but an empire with warring factions that is run by a mafia. Vladimir Putin has reigned as the “Boss” for 23 years and remained in place by enriching Russia’s thugs, bridling them, and playing one off against another. Under his rule, they have built palaces, stolen the national wealth, become warlords, amassed staggering portfolios, and lived like Czars. But on February 24, 2022, Putin decided to escalate the grift by invading Ukraine to steal more of its resources. Now this war is failing, as is Russia’s economy and Putin’s grip on power. And on June 23, Putin’s inability to control a wartime feud between warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin and Russia’s military brass turned into a full-blown armed mutiny. Prigozhin pulled his mercenaries from the frontline in Ukraine and led a “march for justice” against Putin’s military inside Russia. Putin labeled Prigozhin a “traitor” on national television, ordered his arrest, then instructed his puppet in Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, to make an offer to Prigozhin that he couldn’t refuse: Stand down, charges would be scrapped, and move to Minsk. The crisis ended quickly, but Putin, the Russian Federation, and the war in Ukraine, will never again be the same.
Prigozhin grew up in St. Petersburg, where Putin did, and went to jail as a young man for fraud and theft. He has since become a billionaire oligarch as a result of his connections to Putin and business smarts. More recently, he has become a household word in Russia because of the success of his personal army, the Wagner Group mercenaries, as well as his diatribes on social media against Russia’s generals. He has accused them of poor strategies, corruption, and of using Russian soldiers as cannon fodder. His gutsy stances have made him a populist hero even though he is also a member of the elite. But Prigozhin is different. He’s gone “native” and dons fatigues, is on the frontlines with his mercenaries in the Ukrainian war zone, and excoriates Putin’s generals for drafting young Russians from poor families and regions then sending them to their deaths by the thousands without training or proper equipment.
“The children of the elite smear themselves with creams, showing it on the internet; ordinary people’s children come in zinc, torn to pieces,” said Prigozhin, a reference to metallic coffins. “Those killed in action had tens of thousands of relatives, and society always demands justice and, if there is no justice, then revolutionary sentiments arise.”
Prigozhin warns of revolution but is not a revolutionary. He became a successful chef, then caterer and started a mercenary army that has operated for years surreptitiously around the world on Putin’s behalf. For instance, Wagner helped Putin occupy Crimea and Donbas in 2014, it fought in Syria and various African countries for Moscow for years, and has been involved in the 2022 invasion, fighting alongside Russian regulars in Ukraine. But last year he began to aggressively criticize Russia’s Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, and Chief of General Staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov and Putin never intervened. This was because he was doing Putin’s dirty work again and blaming the generals for military failures. But Shoigu and Gerasimov struck back by sabotaging the Wagner Group on the battlefield. Prigozhin claimed they withheld ammunition and provided only sub-standard equipment. Then, last month, he alleged that the two actually shelled Wagner troops.
By June, Prigozhin’s success in the battlefield and growing social media presence across Russia and abroad was becoming a threat, so Putin sided with his generals. He ordered Wagner fighters to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense by July 1. This represented a de facto expropriation which is why Prigozhin pulled his troops from the front line in Ukraine on June 23 and marched them into Russia. That night, Putin condemned Prigozhin on state television and ordered Lukashenko to deliver the deal. Putin has not surfaced since June 24, and unconfirmed reports are that he fled Moscow.
A coup or armed conflict was avoided, but damage was done. Putin’s climb-down and capitulation to a man he had just called a “traitor” destroyed his tough-guy image. It’s obvious that he is not the “Boss”, but merely a figurehead who sits atop a rotten system of squabbling and greedy oligarchs. Prigozhin’s stunt also unveiled Russia’s vulnerability. He was able to march two-thirds of the way toward Moscow in a few hours without resistance. His troops also reportedly shot down six Russian helicopters and an IL-22 airborne command-center plane, killing 13 airmen, along the way, without consequences.
Prigozhin backed down and agreed to self-exile, but he’s not going to disappear, except physically. The generals he demanded that Putin fire still remain in power so he will continue to broadcast his criticisms from afar and plot a comeback, either from a dacha somewhere around the world or on a yacht. He will rebuild Wagner and may attract allies inside and outside Russia who want to overthrow Putin and his generals. He may aspire to be President but that is unlikely. He would be thoroughly unsuitable as President, but, unless assassinated, his ongoing crusade will be a catalyst for change inside Russia and serve the interests of Ukraine and the West. Prigozhin has already undermined Russia’s leadership, damaged frontline morale, stirred up the public, and shredded Putin’s concocted narrative that the invasion was necessary because Ukraine and NATO were a threat to Russia’s existence.
There’s little likelihood that a grassroots movement against Moscow will sprout around Prigozhin because it is a reign of terror and because he’s another thug whose forces have killed many Ukrainians and others. But his popularity was rising in polls before his armed mutiny because his rants resonated with civil society, mostly younger people. He also attracted international recognition with his condemnation of the war itself in the days leading up to the confrontation: “The war wasn’t needed to return Russian citizens to our bosom, nor to demilitarize or denazify Ukraine,” he said. “The war was needed so that a bunch of animals could simply exult in glory.”
The weekend’s events may not have brought about regime change, but Prigozhin has already dealt Putin, and Russia as currently constituted, a fatal blow. As the war continues to backfire, Ukraine and its alliance will push harder and so will separatist movements inside Russia who want autonomy or secession. Putin’s weakness is now apparent, and his tenure uncertain, which will also convince neighboring nations and Russian allies to recalibrate their relationship or forge new ones. Most significantly, Putin’s cave-in and cowardice concerning Prigozhin also means that his many “red lines” in this war are meaningless which is why many have been crossed and more should be ignored in future.
It is ironic that Prigozhin has opened a Pandora’s Box about corruption and injustice in a country run by criminals like himself. His lightning attack also raises fears internationally as to how secure Russia’s nuclear arsenal is from seizure by disgruntled factions such as Wagner or others. Experts say the events haven’t altered the security status of Russia’s nuclear weapons, and the West carefully monitors their movement and storage facilities.
But the country is run by gangsters who have upended the world order. Only “100 beneficiaries and several thousand accomplices” own everything, said Mikhail Kodorovsky, an oligarch jailed by Putin in 2005 on trumped-up charges. “Most of these people began their careers in the criminal underworld of St. Petersburg. Despite having now taken control of the Presidency, the group retains every aspect of the criminal ilk from which they came.”
Putin’s Russia is a criminal organization that must be overthrown. And finally, one of its own has told the world, and Russian people, why it must disappear.
AI and Frankenstein
April 6, 2023
A chilling letter, signed and published by 1,000 computer scientists and technology experts on March 28, warned of “profound risks to society” posed by artificial intelligence (AI). Their admonition was issued weeks after ChatGPT shocked the world with its verbal aptitude followed by GPT-4 that frightened the experts. The thousand technologists called for a six-month pause on AI projects to allow industry to devise safety controls. They claimed artificial intelligence labs were “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict or reliably control.” This was widely reported, but the same warning was issued in 2015 by the Future of Life Institute and ignored. This time, Eliezer Yudkowsky, who founded this field known as “general artificial intelligence”, refused to sign the letter and wrote that drastic action was needed immediately. “We need to shut it all down. The most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die.”
Some label Yudkowsky an alarmist or an “AI Apocalyptic”, but many agree (including myself) that the unbridled development of AI is a graver threat to humanity than the proliferation of nuclear weapons or the next pandemic. This is because cyber-based super-intelligence, by definition, will surpass humans in a generation then become unmanageable, will replace most workers, and will be used for nefarious purposes. When this happens, mankind will find itself in the same position as Dr. Frankenstein, in the classic 19th century novel, who made a monster in his own likeness and declared famously “it’s alive!”, then realized it was thoroughly uncontrollable.
ChatGPT is a wonder and can answer any question within seconds, in sentences or rhyme, by instantly tapping into data bases then formulating readable answers. It can write code, essentially producing new cyber-based super-intelligence. This “thinking machine” already tests higher than 90 percent of humans on a SAT test, higher than would-be lawyers on the LSAT, and aces the Uniform Bar exam. This “reasoning machine” can search, pattern match, and deduce, but cannot feel. In a few years, AI will upend the world by replacing anyone who writes or speaks words or code to make a living, mathematicians, artists, analysts, doctors, teachers, and engineers. Artificial intelligence will no longer be a tool. It will be the toolmaker.
Even Sam Altman – CEO of OpenAI that developed these CHATbots — admitted that he has concerns. “We’ve got to be careful here. I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this. I’m particularly worried that these models could be used for large-scale disinformation. Now that they’re getting better at writing computer code, [they] could be used for offensive cyber-attacks…but it could be the greatest technology humanity has yet developed”.
But Yudkowsky goes further. He is the head of research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley California and explained the dangers. “To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world, you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to post-biological molecular manufacturing.”
Put another way, AI will be able to reproduce.
Currently, development is in the hands of the private sector, concerned with profits, not safety. OpenAI, the creator of these CHATbots, began as a non-profit research entity a few years ago, and was co-founded by Elon Musk. But there was a falling out and the research organization became a corporation that has raised billions to build its technology. Now billions more are being raised by start-ups from venture capital outfits aimed at quickly building even more powerful AI “machines”. This is why, after ChatGPT came out, Musk commented at a conference in Dubai that “one of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI.”
Unlike Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, these “thinking machines” are not yet self-aware, but only imitators. However, cautioned computer scientist Yudkowsky, “we do not actually know that. If you can’t be sure whether you’re creating a self-aware AI, this is alarming — not just because of the moral implications of the `self-aware’ part — but because being unsure means you have no idea what you are doing and that is dangerous and you should stop.”
To date, no one has “programmed” empathy or “values” into these software creatures, or knows how to do so, which is another reason why their development must be arrested immediately, he added. “It took more than 60 years, when artificial intelligence was first proposed and studied, to reach today’s capabilities. Solving safety of superhuman intelligence—not perfect safety, safety in the sense of `not killing literally everyone’—could very reasonably take at least half that long. And the thing about trying this with superhuman intelligence is that if you get that wrong on the first try, you do not get to learn from your mistakes, because you are dead. Humanity does not learn from the mistake and dust itself off and try again, as in other challenges we’ve overcome in our history, because we are all gone.”
In engineering terms, artificial intelligence is like a bridge that has been built to carry millions of cars for years, but its design and construction have not included guardrails or been subjected to rules, or regulatory oversight. And AI will become smarter than the humans who try to govern and regulate its operations, or who will be tasked with monitoring and policing it to insure it doesn’t go rogue. “We would need to be super-intelligent ourselves,” engineering professor Roman Yampolskiy told Popular Mechanics. “We are only able to speculate [or regulate] using our current level of intelligence.”
Put another way, it cannot be stopped in a few years.
Yudkowsky concluded: “We are not prepared. We are not on course to be prepared in any reasonable time window. There is no plan. Progress in AI capabilities is running vastly, vastly ahead of progress in AI alignment or even progress in understanding what the hell is going on inside those systems. If we actually do this, we are all going to die.”
The only solution, he wrote, is to “shut it all down” until controls are in place. Then governments and institutions must create a global AI “non-proliferation treaty”. The nuclear version took 25 years to develop, but the world doesn’t have that much time today. Back then, no one could develop a nuclear weapon in their garage, but tomorrow’s AI cataclysm is just one mad computer scientist away from happening. Yudkowsky said a multinational effort must track and limit computing power and development of large-scale systems globally by private entities, governments, or militaries. Further, the agreement must stipulate that members “be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.”
The world is at a crossroads, according to Max Tegmark, President of the Future of Life Institute and a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It is unfortunate to frame this as an arms race. This is more of a suicide race. It doesn’t matter who is going to get there first. It just means that humanity as a whole could lose control of its own destiny.”
Putin's Ethnic Cleansing
March 18, 2023
The March 20 Moscow meeting between China’s President Xi Jinping and President Vladimir Putin was upstaged and ruined on March 17 when the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant to arrest Putin for war crimes involving tens of thousands of Ukrainians. This is a stunning development that demolishes his reputation for all time by accusing him personally of committing despicable acts involving kids, intentionally torn from their families and culture. Large-scale child abuse, based on ethnicity, constitutes genocide, and will most certainly impede any hope of a closer alliance with China. “This is significant and also embarrassing for China”, commented former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and Ukraine expert Kurt Volker, “when it is deliberately trying to position itself as neutral and an honest broker in peace talks. The preamble to China’s proposed peace plan begins with a statement about upholding respect for territorial integrity.”
Of course, the Kremlin immediately rejected the allegations and pointed out that the warrant is unenforceable because Russia dropped its involvement with the ICC in 2014 after its judges condemned the illegal annexation of Crimea. Even so, it has reach. The accused “war criminal” may not be nabbed at one of his palaces or dachas, but he won’t be going to any of the 123 countries that are signatories to the ICC because he will be arrested, incarcerated, and extradited to The Hague to stand trial. These include 18 Eastern European countries, 25 Western European, 33 African, 19 Asia-Pacific, and 28 in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Worse, the day before ICC’s bombshell, a UN-based inquiry provided evidence of Russian war crimes. These involved the mass kidnappings, but also the atrocities against civilians in occupied regions who have been murdered, tortured, and inhumanly incarcerated. The ICC, however, uniquely singled out Putin, and his minister of “child welfare”, and stated: “There are reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population and that of unlawful transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, in prejudice of Ukrainian children.” The pre-trial statement by judges added that Putin failed to “exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts, or allowed for their commission, and who were under his effective authority and control.”
Putin and Russia have clearly committed genocide under the United Nations’ definition contained in Article II of the Convention: “Genocide is a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, or racial or religious group, in whole or in part.”
Reports are the judges considered issuing secret warrants, but decided that making them public could “contribute to the prevention of the further commission of crimes”. The evidence is overwhelming. Since the first foray and massacres by Russia into Bucha and Irpin outside Kyiv, Ukraine began conducting its own investigations, with the help of 33 other nations. To date, they have documented 74,000 war crimes. In addition, another probe, by the Associated Press (AP) over many months, uncovered the reason why Putin has been indicted by the ICC.
AP reported in October that “Russian law prohibits the adoption of foreign children without consent of the home country, which Ukraine has not given. But in May, Putin signed a decree making it easier for Russia to adopt and give citizenship to Ukrainian children without parental care — and harder for Ukraine and surviving relatives to win them back. Russia also prepared a register of suitable Russian families for Ukrainian children, and paid them for each child who gets citizenship — up to $1,000 for those with disabilities. It holds summer camps for Ukrainian orphans, offers `patriotic education’ classes and even runs a hotline to pair Russian families with children from Donbas.”
AP conducted interviews with family members in Ukraine and Russia and scoured documents and media reports. “Russia’s open effort to adopt Ukrainian children and bring them up as Russian is already well underway, in one of the most explosive issues of the war,” the newswire service concluded. “Thousands of children have been found in the basements of war-torn cities like Mariupol and at orphanages in the Russian-backed separatist territories of Donbas. They include those whose parents were killed by Russian shelling as well as others in institutions or with foster families, known as `children of the state’.”
AP also explained Russia’s cover-up: “Russia claims that these children don’t have parents or guardians to look after them, or that they can’t be reached. But the AP found that officials have deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-held territories without consent, lied to them that they weren’t wanted by their parents, used them for propaganda, and given them Russian families and citizenship,” it wrote.
The anguish is unfathomable for the families and the nation itself. Mariupol had a population of 425,681 people in January 2022, but was obliterated by the Russians. “It is absolutely a terrible story,” said a local official Petro Andryushchenko, who claims hundreds of children were taken from that city alone. “We don’t know if our children have an official parent or (stepparents) or something else because they are forcibly disappeared by Russian troops.”
No self-respecting leader or country can support Putin or Russia. For China’s Xi, the timing of these revelations couldn’t come at a worse time and are likely to derail any plans, even covert, to ship weaponry to Russia. The unprovoked invasion of Ukraine makes a mockery of Xi’s avowed belief in territorial integrity. Further, Putin will go down in history, with Hitler and Pol Pot, as a monster who regarded his victim’s children as spoils of war. He, and his rotten regime, are barbaric on an unimaginable scale because, for the first time, their predations have been televised and photographed for all the world to see.
Negotiations with Putin are inconceivable. A cease-fire would be unconscionable because it would allow him to keep what he has stolen from Ukrainians. Peace is not possible. Only defeat or a firing squad will end Putin’s ethnic cleansing. Russia is truly the Evil Empire.
30
Law, Order, and Tech
February 27, 2023
Anyone who grew up reading Sherlock Holmes or watching Perry Mason, Miami Vice, True Detective, or CSI believes that justice is the result of dogged police work, interrogation aptitude, hunches, shoe-leather policing to knock on doors to find witnesses and uncover evidence, and crime scene clues. But two of America’s most sensational multiple murder cases currently in the courts – a prominent South Carolina lawyer accused of murdering his wife and son and a PhD student accused of murdering four undergraduates in Idaho -- provide an eye-popping glimpse into the technological transformation of policing and prosecutions. What’s changed is that every day all of us leave digital fingerprints everywhere. Our devices, from cellphones to Apple watches, vehicles, surveillance cameras, and doorbells stalk us wherever we go, as a victim or perpetrator. Today, more evidence in minute detail is available than ever before and is accessible to authorities because it is stored, for all eternity, in the “cloud”.
The “Internet of Things” [IoT] has arrived. This is SiliconValley “speak” to describe the electronic architecture that links physical objects with sensors, cameras, recorders, processing ability, software, and bio- and nano- technologies. This linkage allows data to be unearthed and exchanged from cell phones, electronic devices, or systems via the Internet or social media networks. The “IoT” harvests individual information and stores it in gigantic data bases. This Brave New World of connectivity enables thieves or terrorists to pry, spy, steal funds or identities, hack programs to cause chaos, or penetrate financial, infrastructure, defense, or corporate systems. But it also enables law enforcement to more easily find and bring culprits to justice.
Everything is “smart” these days — phones, houses, trucks, watches — except the criminals who get caught if they leave behind traces of their identity such as fingerprints or DNA or are unaware their actions are recorded all the time. Once identified as potential suspects by police, their entire life – from movements to opinions to associations and threats – can be dug up by investigators who access data socked away in some server farm in a remote location under lock and key. The result — as these two murder cases illustrate — is people are being incriminated by smart phones, computers, or “smart” cars which are increasingly computers on wheels.
A cell phone, today, is essentially a mobile “crime scene” because of the trove of information and leads that it provides investigators who are hunting for wrongdoing. Whether belonging to the victim or a perpetrator or a witness, the phone is now central to police work because virtually everyone has one. Every smart phone retains a record of its owner’s or user’s movements, locations based on cellphone towers, conversations (deleted or saved), texts, emails, images, videos, social media, Siri interactions, contacts, detailed records of contacts made, and incoming and outgoing calls, along with a statement of frequency. All this information can be “mined” from phones even if they have been smashed, shot, submerged, or microwaved.
Likewise, cars are a treasure trove of personal information. There is now a new policing specialty known as digital vehicle forensics because cars contain an astonishing amount of information in their onboard computers. A recent case involved a dead man who was found in his car and investigators uncovered a voice recording of the murder suspect telling the victim’s car to play a certain song after a pre-determined time of death. Vehicles are also “telltales” like phones, but are easier for police to access because there are fewer privacy protections for cars.
What follows are details from the two most sensational multiple murder cases in America where technology has been a major player. (Note: Charges have been laid but neither of the accused men have been convicted and I have excluded their names because it’s irrelevant. What’s important in the following narratives is the role played by digital and bio forensics.)
On November 13, 2022, four college students were stabbed to death in the early hours in their rental home in Moscow, Idaho. Police found a fingerprint on the sheath of the murder weapon left behind that allowed their forensic experts to work up a DNA “profile”. A neighbor’s doorbell camera also recorded a white car that was driving in the vicinity before and after the crime. Police decided this unusual activity was suspicious and issued a bulletin to the public asking for the whereabouts of the car. A security guard at a nearby college reported that it was parked at a student residence. The owner was identified but not notified — he was a criminology student — and police scoured video camera footage through the region to track where the car had travelled in the days before and after the crime.
Police surreptitiously, but legally, obtained a search warrant that required the suspect’s cell phone provider to give police access to all his phone data. The search showed he had left his house just before the murders, had turned off his phone for two hours (within which time the murders occurred), then returned home and came back to the site the next morning. In December, the suspect and his father drove the car to their home in Pennsylvania and, after they arrived, the FBI rifled through the family garbage to get DNA samples. They hit a match: DNA analytical results showed that a man living there was 99.9 percent certain to be the father of the person who left his fingerprint and DNA on the knife sheath at the murder scene. His son was arrested the next day.
The other case — the Murdaugh family murders in South Carolina – has also extensively used technology in evidence-gathering. In July 2022, the accused — husband and father of the victims and a prominent lawyer — was charged a year after the murders. Both victims were shot on the family hunting estate at night in front of dog kennels. There were no witnesses and the accused told police that he was not at the kennels in the hours leading up to their deaths. He told police he had napped in the family residence, a football field away, then visited his ailing parents miles away. Gone for a couple of hours, he said he returned home to find his wife and son lying in pools of blood and immediately called 9-11. He told police, after they arrived, that he had just returned home to find them 20 minutes before.
But cellphone data debunked his alibi and placed him at the crime scene minutes before their deaths. The evidence was contained in his son’s cell phone because he had sent a video of his father at the site, time-stamped, on Snapchat to his friends. Once disclosed, the accused abruptly changed his alibi, admitted he had lied, but continued to claim he did not kill them. While damning, this won’t convict him alone because the evidence is circumstantial and the two murder weapons have not been found. But prosecutors have been building a base to the jury that his denial of the murders is unreliable. On the stand, he admitted to stealing millions of dollars from clients and law partners, massive opioid addiction, lying to authorities over the years, and lying that he was napping and not at the kennels the night they died.
In both cases, the importance of technology sleuthing is front and center. Of course, these new tech tools also raise questions about privacy and unreasonable search that will be adjudicated by the courts or by edict. But facial recognition, police body cams, mining data bases, tens of millions of surveillance cameras, and smart devices containing clues are a reality. They have revolutionized the world of law and order profoundly and permanently. And they may even make society slightly safer.
30
30
PUTIN’S ALTAR BOY
December 12, 2022
Ukraine struck military targets inside Russian territory in recent days, and in early Kyiv December 2 attacked the enemy within by announcing it will ban and sanction Ukrainian-based Orthodox churches and clergy with links to Moscow’s Orthodox Patriarch Kirill. Police raids have discovered suspicious persons, unregistered weapons, and Russian propaganda at churches and monasteries. So far, 33 priests have been arrested. This collaboration is no surprise. Kirill is a confidante of Putin’s and has publicly weaponized his Russian Orthodox Church, and placed his moral authority, behind the Kremlin’s vicious genocide. In April, he issued a directive to Russian soldiers that “your task is to wipe the Ukrainian nation off the face of the Earth”. His support for mass murder has rattled the Orthodox world of 260 million across Europe. The World Council of Churches, representing more than 580 million Christians, condemned Russia’s war as well as Kirill’s "misuse of religious language and authority to justify" it. And Pope Francis, leader of the world’s 1.35 billion Roman Catholics, compared Russia’s slaughter to Germany’s Holocaust and told Patriarch Kirill to stop being “Putin's altar boy".
Patriarch Kirill is also an exceedingly wealthy oligarch and has been sanctioned by several countries for blessing war crimes. He has been Moscow’s Patriarch since 2009 and controlled Ukrainian as well as Russian Orthodox Churches until 2019 when thousands of Ukrainian churches broke away, a move allowed by the over-arching Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew in Constantinople (Istanbul). For 300 years, Ukrainians have paid obeisance to a Moscow Patriarch, but in recent years have realized that many of their churches were “Trojan horses” aimed at enhancing Kremlin influence in their country. The schism enraged Kirill and Putin.
Patriarch Kirill, a former KGB operative like most of Putin’s cronies, has been rewarded handsomely for his services. Forbes Magazine estimated a few years ago that his net worth was $4 billion, but this remains unverified. However, he wears $30,000 watches and owns a private jet, a palatial estate, a yacht, and valuable real estate in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Suspicions are that his fortune was accumulated by skimming profits made by the church in the mid-1990s after it was granted a monopoly to import cigarettes duty-free. He’s also a celebrity with great influence, appears on television regularly, is an oil trader, and a “playboy” who plays the stock markets, races cars, downhill skis, and has a villa in Switzerland. Britain, Canada and others have sanctioned him for his war-mongering and the European Union attempted to do the same but Putin-friendly Hungary vetoed its attempt. The U.S. has not imposed sanctions on him as yet.
Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul openly condemned the invasion as “unholy and diabolical” and Ukraine’s new Orthodox leader, titled Metropolitan Epiphanius, compared Putin to the Antichrist and Adolf Hitler. “The spirit of the Antichrist operates in the leader of Russia, the signs of which the Scriptures reveal to us: pride, devotion to evil, ruthlessness, false religiosity. This was Hitler during World War II. This is what Putin has become today.”
Currently, about 8,000 Orthodox parishes in Western Ukraine now adhere to a Kyiv-based Patriarch, but another 12,000, in the Eastern part of the country where fighting is widespread, remain officially attached to Kirill’s Patriarchate. However, many parishioners have taken the law into their own hands by evicting suspicious or pro-Putin priests. This has placed the Ukrainian government in an awkward position as churches or priests that haven’t distanced themselves from Moscow now demand police protection from angry Ukrainians. They also ask Kyiv to protect their constitutional right to continue their allegiance to the church of their choice. In several regions, the religious divisions are so perilous that some churches have been closed temporarily. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Dec. 2 edict extends the bans and sanctions to any religious organization with links to Moscow. “We will never allow anyone to build an empire inside the Ukrainian soul,” he said.
Putin’s politicization of religion has also spread to America where, according to a recent NPR report in Appalachia of all places, there’s been an uptick in membership at Russian Orthodox Churches by far-right Americans. “They're drawn to what they believe to be conservative views on things like LGBTQ rights, gender equality. Abortion is a really big issue for these folks, the culture wars issues, really," said an analyst. "And so they leave other faith traditions that they don't believe to be as stringent about those issues anymore. For many of them, Putin becomes this sort of king-like figure in their narratives. They see themselves as oppressed by democracy because democracy is really diversity. And they look to Putin because democracy isn't really, as we see right now, an option [in Russia].”
But Kirill is reviled by many Orthodox believers even across the Moscow-affiliated church. Hundreds of priests accuse him of preaching “heresy” and have asked global church leaders to bring him before a tribunal to decide whether he should be deposed. Said one: “Kirill committed moral crimes by blessing the war against Ukraine and fully supporting the aggressive actions of Russian troops on the Ukrainian territory. It is impossible for us to remain in any form of canonical submission to the Patriarch of Moscow.”
Clearly, Kirill’s rhetoric has stoked Putin’s “Holy war” tirades. He has called Ukraine an “inalienable part” of Russia’s “spiritual space.” He denies the legitimacy of the Patriarch in Istanbul as well as the one in Kyiv. Not surprisingly, he wants to conquer the entire faith and make Moscow the spiritual center of global Orthodoxy.
This month, Pope Francis escalated his condemnation of Russia’s war by aptly comparing his war to the Holodomor tragedy, when Stalin starved to death millions of Ukrainians in its eastern regions in 1932 and 1933 in order to, as is now the case, suppress their aspirations for independence. And Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke to the World Council of Churches recently and stated that the Russian Church is encouraging war crimes and no longer represents Christianity’s best values. “No Christian who still possesses his faith, his mind and feelings will be able to see the will of God in this,” he said.
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