Christmas in the Orthodox Church is celebrated today, January 7, in Russia. Given the time difference between the U.S. east coast and Russia it's little late to wish Orthodox Russians a merry Christmas although in Russia the Christmas greeting is "With Christmas!" But John Batchelor's interview Wednesday night with Russia Insider's Charles Bausman filled me with the Christmas spirit; much of the interview was about Christmas and Christianity in Russia.
This year there's been a dusting of snow in Moscow, which goes nuts with the most gorgeous Christmas light displays, so with the lights and snow Moscow just looked magical, reported Charles.
He explained that the Christmas religious service in Russia is at midnight and that it lasts four hours -- during which everyone stands! He added that the churchgoers wear comfortable shoes for the service but that the service is very inspirational and the Christmas choirs are wonderful.
Of course Batchelor wanted to know whether Russians put up Christmas trees, and "are there trains under the trees?"
Yes, replied Charles; some years ago the Russians adopted Germanic Christmas customs so there are trees, and yes (toy) trains under the trees.
Gordon Chang, co-hosting with John, wanted to know how the Russian enthusiasm for Christmas emerged from decades of Soviet state-imposed atheism. Charles replied that the resurgence in Christianity was one of the most amazing -- and under-reported -- stories of the late 20th Century. In the early 1990s, after the Soviet state was dissolved, "Hundreds of Russians were being baptized everyday." There are now 800 monasteries in Russia, and each is filled with hundreds of monks.
I'd known there was a resurgence but until Charles' report I'd had no idea how large it was; I was so surprised I momentarily lost track of the conversation, so I'll have to listen to the podcastof the interview (last segment) to make certain I heard right when he said that 10,000 churches have been built in Russia, or that the number are being built.
A chill went up my spine. In the early 1980s I and other Americans were ticked off at Sathya Sai Baba because he kept criticizing Americans. Finally I snapped to some other Americans at the ashram, "Why doesn't he ever criticize the Soviet Communists?" This brought forth vigorous nods of agreement.
Sai Baba got wind of this and in one of his hallmark plays on words said, "Not Comm-u-nists. Come you next."
Yeah, right.
It turned out he was right, more right than I could have imagined.
The Orthodox Christians in Syria have also had a White Christmas this year. There's been quite a bit of snow in several parts of the country, and not just in the mountains. Earlier in the week SANA posted photographs of snowy streets. There's been an unusual cold snap; for days the temperature had been 6-7 degrees below normal.
The snow bounty, while surely hard on Syrians getting by with little indoor heating, is a blessing because the ground can certainly use the snow melt.
And they go all-out for their Christmas services, as do Coptic Christians in Egypt. It's become a tradition for several Muslims, at least in Cairo, to serve as human shields by attending the Christmas services in the churches. Many Coptic churches have been bombed in Egypt by Muslim groups.
Christianity has been under such heavy attack in the Middle East from Muslims that there are reports the religion is being wiped out in the region. At the same time, Syria has been the great bastion for Christianity -- and other religious minorities -- in the Middle East, which is a big reason the Saudis and Turks loyal to Erdogan want Assad to go.
So I think Vladmir Putin's decision to defend Assad's government is seen by Syrian Christians as a kind of Christmas miracle -- and many Syrians in other sects, including Sunni Islam, have also taken Putin and the Russian people to their hearts for acting to preserve their secular government, of which Syrians are justifiably proud.
Syrians do not have a tradition of warring sectarian divisions, even though the Saudi, Qatari and Obama regimes have been fanning sectarianism so they can break up the country or at least balkanize it.
Well, enough grim considerations for the moment. As we start this January with buckets of bad news, it's good to remember that the Russian and other Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas at the start of the new year, which helps place all the bad news in context.
This realm isn't a rose garden; here death comes to all, and we demanded free will and got it. But it helps to stand back now and again to remember that the great role of religion is to remind us that we are not only angst. The spirit that towers over the human condition is adamantine, and the troubles it passes through in this realm are to it nothing more than a rain squall on one long glorious summer day.
With Christmas, indeed! With Christmas!
A few (just a few!) Christmas lights in Moscow
Armenian Orthodox Syrians celebrate Christmas at St. Sarkis Church
"Desertion from the FSA is more common in northern Syria, where Islamist groups dominate the military landscape. The appeal of such groups is generally attributed to the strength of Islamist rebels, whose organizations are generally better funded and have more weapons. Western countries have also been reluctant to support rebel groups, with the United States putting an end to its "train and equip" program in October because of fears that arms could fall into extremist hands.
In June 2014, the FSA high command was sacked over corruption allegations by the opposition government and the organization's Supreme Military Council was disbanded.
Despite such problems, FSA Col. Abdel Jabar Okaidy told Al-Monitor that the fighters' morale is still strong overall, contrary to what the southern front fighter said. He explained, "We are fighting for a cause we believe in, in spite of Russian air support and the deployment of Iranian, Lebanese and Iraqi militias, the pro-regime forces' advance has been slow and insignificant."
Hatahet explained that the regime's shortage of manpower has left it, at least so far, unable to capitalize upon the substantial support provided by Russia and Iran." US News and World Report
--------------
"... the pro-regime forces' advance has been slow and insignificant."
Well, if you can't win on the battlefield you can always try to BS your way to success in the foreign press. In fact the various FSA unicorn army groups and the jihadi monsters (somewhat reminiscent of the Reivers in the "Firefly" TV series) are falling to bits.
US News is run by good old Mort Zuckerman who IMO never met an Arab he did not want to screw. The Syrian government is a particular favorite IMO among many of his crowd because, well, just because...
If you read carefully between the lines in this piece what you see is the image of rebel forces both north and south of Damascus that are in the process of slow motion collapse. pl
In recent months, two oil-rich nations also have abandoned their dollar pegs.
Azerbaijan scrapped its peg to the greenback in December and its currency quickly lost half its value. Kazakhstan, another economy dependent on natural resources, let its currency float freely in August and saw it lose more than a quarter of its value in one day.
China has also moved to devalue the yuan since the summer as it grapples with slowing economic growth.
“The last year has shown us that when economic fundamentals change, pegs break,” said Peter Kinsella, an emerging-market strategist at Commerzbank in London.
There is no free lunch here, but there is a better way. That's devaluing its currency. The important thing to remember, as economist Lars Christensen points out, is that even though Saudi Arabia gets paid for oil in dollars, it pays its people in riyal. So there are two ways for it to earn more of its own money: for the price of oil to go up against the riyal and everything else, or for the price of the riyal to go down against oil and everything else. The first one isn't happening, so the second one is all that's left. That would give Riyadh the riyals it needs to keep paying the same amount of benefits — no spending cuts necessary — albeit in riyals that aren't worth as much as before.
In other words, inflation would do the job that austerity is now. That might not sound like much, if any, of an improvement, but here's why it is: The deficit would disappear and the economy would keep growing. And with half its population under 25 years old, Saudi Arabia needs that so it can give people jobs if it can't give them as much welfare. That's the reason other oil-dependent countries, like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, have already given up their dollar pegs, and why markets are beginning to bet that Saudi Arabia will be next.
You can only defy economic gravity for so long.
Pundita; Jan. 6, 2015:
Ah, but Saudi Arabia isn't Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan. It's the axis on which the pricing of oil in U.S. dollars turns. If Al Saud lets go of the dollar peg, other oil producers will follow; there will be a falling dominoes effect that will destroy the reasons for continuing to price oil in the USD, which is as much saying it will destroy the current international monetary system. Would this abandonment be a good or bad thing for Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world?
A close look at the system shows it was subverted years ago. This happened first when an increasing number of oil-importing governments were able to cut deals with oil producing governments that allowed them to circumvent purchasing dollars to pay for oil; they were able to pay in their own currency.
This wasn't exactly a shadow system because it was on the books. But a real shadow system emerged after sanctions were slapped on a major oil producer, Saddam Hussein's government. This prompted the government to undertake a large operation in illegal oil trading that reached many parts of Asia and even into Europe.
There were penny-ante players as well, stealing enough oil from pipelines in the Middle East and Central Asia to finance their entry into additional illegal activities. Thus, the skyrocketing rise of 'black' globalization. These players were also willing to accept oil payments in local currencies but it was Hussein's government that industrialized the illegal oil trade from the wellhead -- a trade in oil that wasn't pegged to the U.S. dollar.
Sanctions against Iran, another major oil producer, produced another major entrant in the illegal oil trade.
Upshot: An increasingly significant portion of currency trades was a money laundering scheme that governments used to hide illegal oil purchases. It also meant that the oil trade, as a predictor of economic trends, became irrational. Much oil production was being double-counted -- first the actual oil produced, then some of the same oil was stolen and sold -- or production was greatly underestimated to hide massive theft.
It also meant that the shadow currency trade system, like the shadow banking system that rose along with it, was out of the reach of regulators. That meant there was no way to buffer shocks. The international monetary system began lurching from one crisis to another but no matter what regulators did the patches didn't hold.
It was as if the source of a water leak eluded the plumber; he knew there was a crack somewhere in a maze of pipes but the question was where.
The leader of the free world took to crying before the cameras yesterday. I don't know why he was crying. Something to do with his taking Executive Action in his ongoing attempts to take guns away from Americans. Or maybe he'd just been told that he was going to have to explain to the American public how U.S. special forces got pinned down by Taliban in southern Helmand province. Then again he might have been upset about a poll showing Vladimir Putin is more popular with Israelis than he.
Whatever the story about the waterworks, President Obama claims to be upset about the number of deaths in the USA from gun-related crimes. But then why would he continue arming terrorists in Syria?
Another question is why he refuses to allow the U.S. military to share with the Russian military command U.S. intelligence on Islamic State in Syria. The reply from the White House used to rationalize obstructive American actions in Syria has been "Assad must go" but this has nothing to do with getting rid of Islamic State.
President Obama is still having trouble with priorities; he seems to think the top priority is that the International Community credits the USA rather than Russia with routing Islamic State. He should consider what the community will think when IS shoots down several civilian and military aircraft. IS scientists are reportedly perfecting a way to do this -- ironically by refurbishing decommissioned U.S. missiles. That says nothing about progress IS scientists have made in developing chemical weapons.
(While both reports I linked to above are from Russia's Sputnik they're quoting reports in mainstream British news media.)
It just doesn't seem to have sunk in yet at the White House that Islamic State is not playing and that it's silly to view Vladimir Putin as one of Mr Obama's political enemies.
Whatever intelligence on IS the U.S. military has it should be sharing all of it with counterparts in the Russian and Syrian commands. And it should go without saying the U.S. should closely coordinate its military actions in Syria with both commands. The U.S. must also abandon all programs that arm any group in Syria. Regarding 'private' covert programs ostensibly beyond Mr Obama's ability to control, his friends in the American media establishment should be able to help him there. The Justice Department should also be able to help. Speaking of the media establishment: if Mr Obama is serious about stopping mass shooting incidents in the USA he should tell TV outlets such as CNN it's counterproductive to help him push his gun control agenda by giving the mass incidents saturation coverage. The shooters view the coverage as glorifying their acts. See also Daesh Receives Toxic Sarin Gas Ingredients From Turkey – Turkish Lawmaker; December 14, 2015, Sputnik ********
**** "Security in Helmand has spiraled out of control as the Taliban has pressed its offensive to regain the ground lost there between 2009-2011."
-- Long War Journal More than a dozen U.S. special forces were still trapped as of the time Griffin filed the following report; no word yet on how many Afghan troops are trapped along with them. US troops embroiled in firefight after helicopter crash in Afghanistan By Jennifer Griffin, Lucas Tomlinson
Published January 06, 2016 [no time stamp]
FOX News Channel [see also Jan 5 Long War Journal report, below]
More than a dozen U.S. Army special operations soldiers and a rescue helicopter flight crew are "securing the crash site" in Marjah, Afghanistan, taking cover in a compound surrounded by enemy fire and hostile Taliban fighters after a U.S. special operation solider was killed earlier in the day, senior U.S. defense officials told Fox News late Tuesday.
A U.S. official described the “harrowing” scene to Fox News, saying there were enemy forces surrounding the compound in which the special operations team sought refuge.
“On the map there is one green dot representing friendly forces stuck in the compound, and around it is a sea of red [representing hostile forces],” the official told Fox News.
A U.S. military “quick reaction force” of reinforcements arrived late Tuesday and evacuated the U.S. special operations soldier killed in action, and the two wounded Americans in the compound, according to a U.S. defense official.
The crew of the disabled helicopter also evacuated safely, the official said.
The rest of the U.S. special operations team remain in the compound to secure the damaged HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter in an area surrounded by Taliban fighters.
An AC-130 gunship has been called in for air cover as the U.S. troops now wait out the night.
Earlier in the day, two USAF HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters were sent to rescue the U.S. special operations team. One of the helicopters took fire and waved off the mission and flew back to base.
The Taliban in recent weeks has focused its efforts on retaking parts of Helmand, and the U.S. has countered with U.S. special operations forces working with Afghan troops.
Jennifer Griffin currently serves as a national security correspondent for FOX News Channel . She joined FNC in October 1999 as a Jerusalem-based correspondent. Lucas Tomlinson is the Pentagon and State Department producer for Fox News Channel.
The Taliban killed one American soldier and wounded two more as they fought alongside Afghan forces in the beleaguered southern Afghan town of Marjah in Helmand province earlier today.
A “US service member died as a result of wounds sustained during operations near Marjah” and two more were wounded, US Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) confirmed in a press release. The identity and branch of the soldier who was killed was not disclosed, however a US military official based in Afghanistan told The Long War Journal that a US special operations unit was conducting operations in Marjah with Afghan counterparts.
“This is an ongoing situation [and] there is still a fight going on in the immediate surroundings,” Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said in a briefing today with reporters.
Cook also said that two HH-60 Pavehawk helicopters, which are used by US Air Force search and rescue teams, attempted to extract the ground force as it came under fire. One of the helicopters was disabled and left at the scene. The Taliban claimed it shot down the Pavehawk.
The Taliban has laid siege to the town of Marjah for more than a month. The district of Nad Ali, which includes Marjah, is almost completely under Taliban control.
Marjah, which was once described by General Stanley McCrystal as a “bleeding ulcer”in 2010 as US Marines fought to clear the Taliban from its stronghold, was one of the first towns in Helmand cleared of the Taliban during the US “surge.” McCrystal said that clearing the Taliban from Marjah and surrounding districts in Helmand and Kandahar would bring an “irreversible sense of momentum” and lead to the Taliban’s defeat.
Instead, security in Helmand has spiraled out of control as the Taliban has pressed its offensive to regain the ground lost there between 2009-2011. Of Helmand’s 13 districts, five are known to be controlled by the Taliban (Nowzad, Musa Qala, Baghran, Dishu, and Sangin), and another five are heavily contested (Nahr-i-Sarraj, Kajaki, Nad Ali, Garmsir and Khanashin). Of the remaining three districts, The Long War Journal believes two (Washir and Nawa-i-Barak) are contested, but the situation is unclear. Only Lashkar Gah, the district that hosts the provincial capital, has not seen significant Taliban activity.
US and British special operations forces have been deployed to Helmand since the summer of 2015 to support the struggling Afghan forces. However, the reintroduction of US and British forces in Helmand has not prevented the districts of Nowzad, Musa Qala, and Sangin from falling to the Taliban.
Outside of Helmand, the Taliban has significantly expanded its influence in the past year. The Taliban now controls 40 districts in Afghanistan and contests another 39, according to data compiled by The Long War Journal. These numbers may be low given the methodology used to assess control in contested districts.
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of The Long War Journal.
So can we please kindly focus? Yes I have seen the headlines. I don't live in a cave. I do live in the District of Columbia, which should be renamed the District of Jumping Bean. If Riyadh and Tehran start World War Three, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, won't we. For now, Sputnik is giving into irrational exhuberance with this headline today:
The Syrian Democratic Forces - an alliance of Syrian Kurds and Arab rebel groups - backed by US coalition airstrikes, have captured several villages 30 kilometers north of the de facto Daesh capital of Raqqa, Reuters reported. ...
Reuters, eh? I wish they'd stick to financial reporting.
... The units of the SDF, which are also supported by Russia, have been advancing on the Daesh forces near the town of Ain Isa in the country’s northern Al-Raqqa province, SDF spokesman, Colonel Talal Selo, said.
"We no longer think as we did before that Daesh cannot be defeated," he added.
In June the Kurdish popular defense forces managed, with US air support, to seize Ain Isa only to be forced out by the terrorists two weeks later.
Selo said several thousand fighters from the Democratic Forces of Syria had inflicted heavy losses on the Daesh forces. He did not say when a major assault on Raqqa would begin.
Russian warplanes have been assisting the Syrian opposition forces in an offensive on the de facto Daesh capital of Raqqa."With the support of the Russian aviation group, the Syrian Democratic Forces' units… are conducting an offensive on the Daesh capital, the city of Raqqa," chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Sergei Rudskoi told reporters late last month.
The Syrian Democratic Forces are an alliance between Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian and other militias that was founded in October 2015.
[END REPORT]
[chuckling] Reuters hates mentioning the Syrian Army. Anyhow, we don't know how near the end is because there is no indication when the assault could begin. Criminey, it's past 9 in the morning; I need to get some sleep. Bye for now. Check in with FARS; they have several reports on the latest in the impressive progress beng made by the Syrian Army. oh, and don't forget to listen to Batchelor's discussion with Steve Cohen tonight about Russia. 10:05 Eastern Time. Be there or be square. *******
(Ankara) Turkey now boasts more than 100,000 millionaires, making it the Middle East's top country for the wealthy, according to an expert on high net worth individuals. Andrew Amoils of New World Wealth in London predicted Turkey would see a 60 percent increase in the number of millionaires living in the country by 2025. Wealthy individuals are particularly attracted to Istanbul's high-end boutiques, expensive restaurants and spacious seaside villas. "Istanbul is the undoubted jewel of the Middle East in terms of wealth," Amoils told Anadolu Agency. "Despite the rise of Dubai and Doha, Istanbul remains the main hub of Middle Eastern business. Whilst Dubai and Doha rely on only a few sectors, Istanbul is strong in a much larger number of key sectors."
Amoils states, "Istanbul also remains the main gateway of investment into the rest of the Middle East, as a large number of Istanbul-based businesses have big investments and projects in other Middle Eastern countries." Of the 100,200 high net worth individuals (HNWIs) in Turkey with assets of $1 million or more, 5,200 HNWI have net assets of over $10 million. Turkey is followed by the United Arab Emirates, which counts 72,100 HNWIs among its population. Israel has 71,700 HNWIs and Saudi Arabia 59,000. "The HNWI number in Turkey has grown by 145 percent since 2000 and by 90 percent since 2005," Amoils said, adding that there are 28 billionaires in the country, which has a population of 78 million. In the last four years, luxury brands such as Prada, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Chanel, Christian Louboutin, Ralph Lauren and Armani all have opened at least two outlets in Istanbul, while Ermenegildo Zegna and Burberry have three stores each. According to Euromonitor International, a London-based market intelligence firm, Turkey accounted for 1 percent of global luxury spending in 2015 - a market that is expected to double over the next two years to $5.4 billion.
New millionaires were primarily springing up in Eastern Europe as well as Turkey, Euromonitor said in a March report.
Amoils, whose researchers compile data from sources such as country wealth reports, said HNWI numbers had been boosted by the migration of approximately 12,000 rich individuals to Turkey since 2000, mostly from the Middle East and North Africa.
The 460,000 HNWIs living in the Middle East at the end of 2014 held nearly half of the region's $4.6 trillion wealth, according to New World Wealth. The consultancy claims there are around 13 million millionaires in the world holding assets worth $66 trillion. [END REPORT]
Incredible; FARS scooped everyone with this still-breaking news about a Syrian air strike on a meeting between Jaysh al-Islam's most senior leaders and Nusra Front's top commanders. The report also revealed the strike last month that killed the previous Jaysh leader, Zahran Allouch, was made possible by the Syrian air force's intelligence unit. They had gotten a mole into Allouch's outfit who was able to nail the exact time of an important meeting. Heh. You can't trust anyone these days. By the way the FARS report insists the strike last month was carried out by Syrian's air force; I and just about everyone else believes it was a Russian strike. Anyhow, the Syrian intel is what made it possible. Great work, guys.
FARS is a state agency website, but they are on fire. Reminds me of Eason Jordan's Iraq Slogger -- gosh, I wish we had that site now for Iraq war news. FARS is faster with war reports from Syria than the Russian sites, faster than Syria's state site SANA, and maybe two days later Google News catches up -- but now all the major press are starting to pile onto FARS and all the war bloggers are living there now. Everybody knows; be there or be behind the curve. And FARS knows this. The site has never had such traffic from around the world. As to how they're doing it -- many sources on the ground in Syria. But they also know this is their chance to present themselves to the rest of the world in a better light so they're knocking themselves out. Are you getting propaganda with the news? Not so much with the straight-up Syrian war reports but the rest, sure. That's okay; all the major press are passing along their own government's propaganda. That's just the way things are during war. Kudos, FARS. Just kept doing what made you famous; don't get fancy and pile on the propaganda with a trowel. ********
In summer 2013, the [American] Joint Chiefs discovered that Turkey had co-opted the CIA's program to arm so-called moderate Syrian rebels. Ankara had decided to redirect US aid to extremists, including [Islamic State] and al-Qaeda affiliate Nusra Front, Hersh writes.
The Joint Chiefs also discovered that viable moderate Syrian rebels did not exist and that the opposition consisted nearly uniformly of extremists.
So, in the fall of 2013, the Joint Chiefs decided to start secretly "providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army," Hersh writes. They sent US intelligence to Germany, Russia, and Israel, which sent it to Assad.
Member States of NATO and the GCC were unable to launch a conventional attack against Syria. However, for ten months they have been laying the groundwork by waging a low intensity war coupled with an economic and media assault. The city of Homs became the symbol of the conflict. The Free "Syrian" Army seized the neighborhoods of Baba Amr and Inchaat and proclaimed an Islamic Emirate that heralds its political program.
With the backing of Russia - still traumatized by her experience with the Islamic Emirate of Ichkeria - and China, eager to see the Syrian government protect its citizens, the Syrian [Arab] Army stormed the stronghold on 9 February after all mediation attempts had failed.
Defeated, the Free "Syrian" Army soon entrenched itself in an area of approximately 40 hectares, which was immediately sealed off by loyalist forces; it steadily withered and eventually fell on 1 March.
In retaliation, the remaining armed elements of the Emirate massacred the Christians in the two villages they ripped through on their way to exile in Lebanon.
Throughout this period, major media have served to veil the sordid and cruel reality of this Emirate, and to replace it with a made-up story of revolution and repression. A special effort was made to create the impression that thousands of civilians were being shelled by the Syrian military artillery or the air force.
At the heart of this propaganda construct, we find a press center used by the satellite channels of the Coalition: Al-Jazeera (Qatar), Al-Arabiya (Saudi Arabia), France24 (France), BBC (UK) and CNN (USA) under the coordination of Israeli journalists.
That must have been a dizzy bunch of Israeli journalists, or ones so far outside the loop they had no idea what was going on in Israel's war cabinet. What was going on, with regard to Syria, is that the Israelis knew Assad must not fall. "The devil you know" as Malcolm Hoenlein explained to John Batchelor's audience one night a couple years ago. The Americans had no plan for replacing Bashar al-Assad, or the plan was so asinine it had no chance of succeeding. If Assad's government fell -- the Israelis didn't like Assad but they didn't want him replaced by fiends. Did Thierry Meyssan know any of this when he wrote The journalist-combatants of Baba Amr in March 2012 for Voltaire Network? Meyssan doesn't like Israel and he might not like Jews, so he could have inserted the remark about Israeli journalists even if he'd known the real story. Meyssan is a tin foil-hat conspiracy theorist, so why would I listen to anything he reported about Baba Amr and the roots of the Syrian war? Firstly because Meyssan was there:
The Western journalists trapped inside the Emirate posted distress call videos on the Internet. Two of them seem to be wounded, while the third one appears to be in good health. Their respective governments made of their retrieval a matter of principle. France dispatched an official to negotiate with the rebels. Several other states, including Russia, keen to cool tensions in the Levant, offered their good offices.
I took part in this collective effort. In actual fact, a French journalist declined the first opportunity to get out with the help of the International Red Cross and the Syrian Red Crescent. Suspecting a trap, she refused to accept the extended hand.
My mission was two-fold. In the first place, to establish contact with my compatriots, brief them about the political and military context, and facilitate their handover to a French official to be placed under diplomatic protection. Secondly, I had to report to those who are working for peace in this region regarding the exact sequence of events and assess the good will of the actors.
As we know, the negotiations failed. The intelligence service agents, representing the various states involved, were in a position to observe that the Syrian authorities and aid agencies had done their utmost and that the hindrance was solely attributable to the Free "Syrian" Army.
Here you might observe that Meyssan must be something in addition to a conspiracy theorist to have been involved in such high-level and critical negotiations. Well, it says in the Wikipedia article I am pretty sure he wrote himself that he's also a journalist and political activist. But he's gotten into the darndest situations There was the time he was stuck in the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli during the Libyan war in 2011, and reporting live to RT (Russia Today) that CNN reporters at the hotel were actually CIA agents and that MI6 agents were posing as BBC reporters, and that they were all there to kill him. Thierry Meyssan reminds me of the Afghan intelligence operatives who see Pakistan's ISI behind every rock, only he sees the CIA behind every rock and MI6 behind every tree. If some wit observes, 'But the ISI is behind every rock in Afghanistan' -- yes, well, you can write Meyssan and ask him to tell you who and what he really is. He lives now in Damascus, Syria or so it says in Wikipedia. I don't know the street address but just send the letter care of the Syrian Embassy in Moscow and it'll probably get to him. Moving along -- Secondly, because while Meyssan was wading into the crisis in Syria I was sitting in front of my television in Washington, DC, studying CNN's coverage of the Arab Spring. When I say 'studying' I mean that I slept only when CNN slept -- when it aired re-runs of shows earlier in the day. Even then I slept little because I was reviewing 'rush' transcripts that CNN published of the day's broadcasts, which were wall-to-wall about the Arab Spring. I had missed CNN's coverage of the 'color' revolutions in Eastern Europe, very little of which aired in the USA, and which had been staged for TV cameras with the help of George Soros. But CNN bumped all other news reporting for American audiences to cover the Tahrir Square protests. So this time I was determined to catch CNN in the act. After Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CNN moved briefly to the Arab Spring in Bahrain, where Arwa Damon and Anderson Cooper wept together over a video of security forces shooting unarmed protestors in cold blood. Then it was on to Syria. There were disembodied voices of civilians under fire from the Syrian Army, pleading to Anderson via cell phone for the Americans to please help them. But there was something odd about CNN's wrenching coverage of the pleas and Anderson's anguished reporting about them. Never once was there mention of a Free Syrian Army made up of extremists whose views were the same as al Qaeda's, never mention that it had set up an 'emirate.' CNN's coverage of Syria ended abruptly and the station returned to regular broadcasting, and I was left to ponder all I'd learned. The Tahrir Square protests were staged for the TV cameras -- Cecil B. DeMille on the Nile I termed the event. But the show in the square was designed to be peaceful; what was happening in Syria was not. No more color revolution. No more stage show. My throat suddenly went dry. I whispered, "They're escalating. With no one to stop them, they're escalating." December 18, 2015 Barack Obama’s Syrian Lies Continue Hiding from Reality By Larry Johnson
No Quarter
[See website for video of the press conference]
Barack Obama’s description in today’s end of the year press conference about how the current mess in Syria came about sounded plausible but was beyond disingenuous. It was a bald-faced, manipulative lie. The heart of the lie is this–that Bashar Assad is such an evil, brutal son of a bitch that the majority of Syrians rose up spontaneously to oust him and that the United States was a mere by-stander and Obama did nothing in terms of his Presidential powers to move the needle. There are lies and then there are damned lies. Barack Obama is a damned liar.
The State Department has secretly financed Syrian political opposition groups and related projects, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country, according to previously undisclosed diplomatic cables.
The London-based satellite channel, Barada TV, began broadcasting in April 2009 but has ramped up operations to cover the mass protests in Syria as part of a long-standing campaign to overthrow the country’s autocratic leader, Bashar al-Assad. . . .The U.S. money for Syrian opposition figures began flowing under President George W. Bush after he effectively froze political ties with Damascus in 2005. The financial backing has continued under President Obama. . .
Syria became more of a target for destabilization as the Arab Spring gained momentum. Obama, with the full support of Hillary Clinton, turned not only his attention but directed covert intelligence resources to step up the campaign against Syria’s Assad in early 2011.
The protests started on 15 March 2011, when protesters marched in the capital of Damascus, demanding democratic reforms and the release of political prisoners. The security forces retaliated by opening fire on the protesters,[146] and according to witnesses who spoke to the BBC, the government forces detained six of them.[147] The protest was triggered by the arrest of a boy and his friends by the government for writing the graffiti, “The people want the fall of the regime”, in the city of Daraa.[146][148] Louai al-Hussein, an analyst and writer wrote that “Syria is now on the map of countries in the region with an uprising”.[148] On the 20th, the protesters burned down a Ba’ath Party headquarters and “other buildings”. The ensuing clashes claimed the lives of seven police officers[149] and 15 protesters.[150] Ten days later in a speech, President Bashar al-Assad blamed “foreign conspirators” pushing Israeli propaganda for the protests.[151]
Syria’s al-Assad was not paranoid nor hallucinating. A deliberate campaign, with the assistance of the United States, to destabilize Syria was launched, which included funneling money to opposition leaders in Syria. Part of this was cynical campaign to force the Syrian Government to fight back, create casualties and, in the process, further enrage the Syrian population. But the target was not Syria. Syria was merely a stepping stone for the broader campaign to block the spread of Iranian influence in the region. By August of 2011, Saudi Arabia took the lead, along with Turkey, of demanding the ouster of Assad:
Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has spoken out against the Syrian regime. But as Babak Dehghanpisheh reports, the move was also a shot at Syria’s ally: Iran.
The message was about as blunt as it gets. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah issued a statement on Sunday calling for the Syrian regime to “stop the killing machine.”“Large numbers of martyrs have fallen, their blood has been shed, and many others have been wounded,” he said. “This is not in accord with religion, values, and morals.” To drive the point home, King Abdullah recalled the Saudi ambassador in Damascus on Monday; Kuwait and Bahrain quickly followed suit. On the surface, this seems like a strong position taken by one of the region’s most influential Arab governments. After all, at least 2,000 Syrians have been killed since the violent crackdown began in March.But why did it take five months for the Saudis to speak up? “The Saudis have been leading the antidemocratic transformation in the Arab world, trying to push back the Arab Awakening,” says Rami Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut. “So it’s kind of out of character for them to suddenly join the chorus of people who are pressuring the Syrians.”
The reality is that the harsh message wasn’t aimed only at Syria. The elderly Saudi king was also taking a straight jab at another country: Iran, Syria’s most prominent regional ally. “[The Saudis] want to destroy the single and only foreign-policy success of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, which is [establishing] links with Syria and Hizbullah,” Khouri says.
The United States and Barack Obama were not idle bystanders as this conflict escalated. Obama made the decision in the February/March 2012 timeframe, with the full backing of Hillary, to use the CIA and other intelligence assets to oust Assad. This included the movement of Libyan arms from Benghazi to Syria via Turkey.
President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing U.S. support for rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government, sources familiar with the matter said.
Obama’s order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence “finding,” broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.
But Obama’s policy, rather than help bring democracy to Syria, brought death, refugees and empowered the the radical Islamists keen on establishing Sunni predominance in a country that previously had no dominant sectarian influence.
Barack Obama also continues to delude himself into believing that the Russian military support for Syria is a fool’s errand. However, he is the only fool in this situation. Syria, with the support of Russia and Iran, continue to make steady progress in re-taking territory from the rebels and re-establishing government control. ABC News reported earlier this week:
Syrian troops and allied militiamen seized control of a sprawling military air base near Damascus on Monday, bolstering the government’s presence in a key area overwhelmingly controlled by opposition forces.
The Marj al-Sultan air base lies in the eastern suburb of Damascus known as Eastern Ghouta, and had been held by rebels for the past three years.
Bloomberg reported today that Russia’s efforts in Syria have brought some US operations to a halt:
There is a new crisis for the international effort to destroy the Islamic State, created by the Kremlin. The U.S. has stopped flying manned air-support missions for rebels in a key part of northern Syria due to Russia’s expansion of air defense systems there, and the Barack Obama administration is scrambling to figure out what to do about it.
Russia’s military operations inside Syria have been expanding in recent weeks, and the latest Russian deployments, made without any advance notice to the U.S., have disrupted the U.S.-led coalition’s efforts to support Syrian rebel forces fighting against the Islamic State near the Turkey-Syria border, just west of the Euphrates River, several Obama administration and U.S. defense officials told us. This crucial part of the battlefield, known inside the military as Box 4, is where a number of groups have been fighting the Islamic State for control, until recently with overhead support from U.S. fighter jets.
But earlier this month, Moscow deployed an SA-17 advanced air defense system near the area and began “painting” U.S. planes, targeting them with radar in what U.S. officials said was a direct and dangerous provocation. The Pentagon halted all manned flights, although U.S. drones are still flying in the area. Russia then began bombing the rebels the U.S. had been supporting. (U.S. manned airstrikes continue elsewhere in Syria.)
These facts seem to matter little to Barack Obama, the press and the American people. But the realities on the ground in Syria are quite different and no amount of Obama delusion and pretend ignorance will alter those facts
I want to go back for a moment to theharmonica jam session, and the complaint made by a YouTube viewer about how the jam was filmed. Here's what he wrote; he was clearly addressing the person who filmed the video:
David Dollar I thought this was a great video. Some really good players. It would have been 10 X better if you had just turned the camera (phone) sideways. Then we could have the screen full of the great players. It's called "landscape" mode. Look into it. three thirds of the screen filled instead only one third. Thanks
Someone did actually film it that way, as the video poster pointed out; he provided a link to the other film. The difference is striking. Yeah, you can see more in the other film, but it showed things going on that were extraneous to the jam -- people milling around or trying to film the session, etc. That's because the jam session wasn't planned or staged; clearly it happened on the spur of the moment after a convention had wrapped up for the night. And did David Dollar really want to see more of an empty convention hall?
By using the camera in 'portrait' mode, which cut down on what the viewer could see, and panning to each harp player who was doing a riff, this cut out a lot of distractions that draw the eye and make it harder to focus on the music and the musicians.
As has been demonstrated again and again by scientists in their attempts to wean people from using mobile phones while driving a vehicle, the human brain is not a multi-tasker.(1) A question I have is whether there's a cause-and-effect connection between increased visual information via internet and TV mediums and increased mental/brain disorders.
Some scientists might say that the vaunted increase in the disorders is deceptive, that it's actually due to better information-gathering on people with disorders, and to more people recognizing that they have a disorder and seeking help for it.
I would question that this is the entire explanation, as I'd question any assertion that the percentage of drug addiction tends to remain constant in any population. I'm writing this essay freestyle; i.e., without collecting links on statistics, but it's generally known that in the USA an astounding number of people now use at least one prescription psychotropic drug or illicit drug.
There is the argument that the increase in psychotropic drug use is due to marketing in the mass media, and by physicians who pass out drug prescriptions like they're candy. But again, I am asking whether visual information overload is a significant factor in what seems to be an epidemic of craziness sweeping the USA and other countries.
There are other explanations: too much sugar in the diet; too much indoor lighting overstimulating the brain, so that the sleep cycle for many people is out of whack. And there are the psychological explanations: increased alienation as much of the population now resides in cities, the breakup of the nuclear family, and so on. But those situations have been in effect for close to 80 years, at least in highly developed countries. It's only in the last decade that it's become evident there are now a lot of crazy people in this world, and that the number is skyrocketing.
What's changed in the last decade? Three big changes are all related to visual information:
1. The internet has gone from being a pretty static medium to one with millions of companies winking and blinking ads at the reader, even in a New York Times hard-news report.
2. People can now carry all this winking and blinking with them, via mobile devices.
3. The proliferation of satellite TV channels, all which people can carry with them via smartphones along with the regular broadcast TV reports now routinely available on the intenet.
All this reminds me of an observation made by a chef contestant on Top Chef about a fellow contestant. He said she drove him crazy whenever she was a passenger in the car he was driving. He explained that she was one of those Lookee See car passengers, who keep saying to the driver, "Oh look at that! Look over there!" about whatever they see from the passenger window that strikes them as interesting.
From his description, she was an out-of-control 'sharer' -- those people who want people around them to share in everything they see that they consider to be noteworthy for 15 seconds.
The chef's observation was one of the reasons I stopped watching television (in July 2013). He made me sharply aware that while TV could be very educational, it was also a prime place to have sharer types inflict on the viewer their ideas of what is interesting, even when it's superfluous.
Since that time I've noticed that the internet is now also a prime attraction for the sharer types. I can't even read a hard news report anymore without the editor wanting to share with the reader what some Twitter users think of the news event covered in the report.
This is in addition to all the winking and blinking inserted in the report not only by advertisers but also by the news organization itself: If you're reading this report you might also be interested in reports we did from six months back on the issue or reports on similar news; here are the links. Which they scatter through the report one is trying to read.
How many eyes and brains do these web editors think I have? The situation is out of control, which isn't really a criticism of the medium; it's just a simple statement of fact. But I think this statement explains a lot about the polarization of American politics during the past decade, and which gets more extreme, and nuttier, every year.
The extreme political polarization in the USA is mirrored in 'developing' countries that have seen an incredible proliferation of satellite TV channels -- and the ever-increasing number of people in those countries who can carry the TV channels around with them via smartphones.
Then people wonder why the entire Middle East seems to have gone crazy.
On one level the flood of information is a good thing; of course it's always good when people are better informed. But if people can't intellectually process the information, it's a bad thing. And it would be nightmarish if the flood is also creating a kind of brain fever, in which the brain can't process all the visual data but keeps trying anyhow.
To return to the harp jam session -- again, the 'portrait' type of video filming format that David Dollar didn't like cuts out a great deal of extraneous visual information present in the 'landscape' video, if one's intent is just to listen to the music and watch the musicians at their craft. Television, while focusing the eyes on the screen, also provides a tremendous amount of extraneous visual information.
This syndrome is particularly noticeable in TV news reporting. Although the camera will often cut in for a close-up on a speaker (e..g., reporter, interviewee), much of the video reporting fixes the viewers' eyes on visuals that have nothing to do with the news event being reported. So this isn't actually visual information. It's visual noise, for want of a better term.
I'd assume there wouldn't be lasting harm to the brain from this kind of noise when taken in small doses, but the problem is that now the dosage is very big. Again, my question is whether this actually harms the brain, in a lasting way, over time, or at least contributes to mental disorders. It's possible the question has already been asked by science but if so, any conclusions haven't worked their way into the mainstream media.
So I think visual information overload, or visual noise overload, is something to be aware of, as we start a new year. Granted, many people might not consider it noise, in the way David Dollar wanted to see more of the scene around the harmonica players. He didn't consider the scene to be extraneous information.
Yet I think such people need to ask themselves just how much they would want to engage in the Lookee See syndrome if over time it could be harmful to their brains or mental state.
There are all kinds of tactics one could deploy to cut down on the visual overload; here are a few:
> Listen to TV news instead of watching it.
> Switch to radio for the nightly news and news headline updates during the day. For Americans and Canadians, PBS Newshour, an hour-long weekly TV news report, is also available on the radio at local FM stations that participate in the public broadcasting system.
> Find news report aggregator websites that are straight text.
1) The famous basketball game experiment is ample demonstration of this. I'll assume that someone who's undergone long training in mustering attention, such as a Zen master, could have spotted the oddity about the game without being told what to look for. But even if you've been told beforehand and start trying to focus on the oddity, this would mean you'd take have to sacrifice attention to carrying out the counting instruction you're given before being shown the video of the basketball game.
In short, you can't do both: try to count how many basketball passes one team makes plus notice the woman in a black witch costume slowly walking straight through the action on the basketball court.
Without being forewarned to look for her, the witch is absolutely invisible to most people's eyes even though they're staring straight at the basketball game. Yet she's wearing a large peaked black hat. Can't miss it -- unless you're trying to execute a counting task involving fast-moving people in the same space.
There are many other demonstrations of the brain's inability to multi-task. For example, any vice squad detective could attest that snatch thieves and pickpockets depend on the mark being distracted. To the point where gangs will have some members set up a distraction before they strike; e.g, a loud argument or other kind of commotion.
Magicians also depend on the audience being distracted -- the famous 'stage business.' The eyes tend to focus on the stage business created by the magician's assistant rather than the magician's hands.
Will return to Syria and other unpleasant subjects on Monday but I'm going to try to reserve one day a week when I get away from negative topics. And give the highly discursive part of my brain a rest.
All right. Here's the mother of all impromtu harmonica jam sessions -- no amplification, just people who are incredible musicians on the mouth harp. Uploaded to YouTube by Noam Cohen on August 15, 2009 with this introduction:
LD Miller, Brendan Powers, Christelle Berthon, and 15 yr old Jay Gaunt. LD beat boxes while playing at the same time. This is some of the best harp jamming you will ever see or hear -- It took place at 3 in the morning during the 2009 SPAH convention in Sacramento, California.
There was a complaint from one YT viewer about the way it was filmed -- something about the cameraperson needed to use landscape mode on the cellphone camera. It was 3 o'clock in the morning, for crying out loud. Pundita, don't be argumentative. Not on Fridays anymore. Another viewer wrote, "Still one of the greatest things I've seen on YouTube." This is the first year I've paid attention to YouTube so I don't know but the video does strike me as social media at its best. Pundita, can we cut out the social criticism on Fridays? sigh. This is not going to be easy for me. 7 minutes
