"
If Palestinians declared Israel’s actions have made a two state solution impossible and demanded outright annexation and full civil rights, Israel would be put in a very difficult situation. "
Yeah, given the fascist thugs harassing people in airports, I preemptively stopped flying on US airlines entirely. I can afford to avoid flying...
If they ever try to give me trouble on a train, they are getting the mother of all legal cases.
At this point, I've decided there's no point in being afraid. These fascist thugs are so incompetent that they will harrass and assault people for doing absolutely nothing, so I might as well speak out against their fascist tyranny.
Heck, all the US would have to do would be to raise lease rates to the current *private-market* lease rates. That would shut down nearly all the leasing.
Right now, the federal-land leases are at GROSSLY sub-market rates.
It's not at all clear whether "business realism" will kick in for the Saudis, who are an aristocracy with no tradition of business sense. Ibn Saud was frankly a warlord of a very archaic style, and his successors are nearly as atavistic.
The UAE, Qatar, Oman, and even Bahrain have been "merchant prince" states, wealth derived from trading, for several hundred years, and they have taught their princes to prioritize business realism first, since the 1500s or earlier. They've been in the slave trade, the spice trade, and other trades before their current period in the oil trade. Therefore they WILL see the market shift coming and will switch out of the dying oil market into the growing solar market ASAP. They're already doing it.
The same is NOT true in Saudi Arabia, which has a totally different history.
Back in Civil War days, the military was simply not a career. The war ended, everyone went home to their old jobs & businesses. EVERYONE, including General Sherman and General Grant.
That's the sort of military with which the US won every war of the 18th and 19th centuries (even the 'losses' like the war of 1812 were wins geopolitically). A military organized from scratch for each war. Thomas Ricks has written and talked about this.
Not this careerist garbage. The careerist garbage jobs program which passes for a military in the US is completely worthless for anything except pork-barrel spending.
I really expect the US to lose a major war spectacularly sometime soon, the way Tsarist Russia lost World War I spectacularly early on... so spectacularly that the Russian Revolution happened.
Could be a lot worse. Iran's a pretty functional government and is NOT a strict theocracy (a "weak theocracy" perhaps. A "partial democracy" like the pre-1830s UK would be a better description of Iran, I think). If Syria ended up like Iran, it would be pretty good.
I fear it might end up worse. I don't think Daesh has a chance in hell of keeping power because they are making special efforts to alienate everyone, so eventually someone will destroy them. But you could end up with another "zero-democracy" tyrant. The worst scenario would be something like Saudi Arabia, but I think that's unlikely due to the lack of oil money.
The fundamental problem is that the NSA "surveillance" has only one function: blackmail. That's the only reason they're collecting the data, to blackmail their political opponents.
The dragnet data is not actually good for anything else. It's *completely* useless for law enforcement, and has never once been used for law enforcement; it's *worse than useless* with regard to terrorism, and has never once been used to stop a terrorist attack (though it may have been used to *cause* a few terrorist attacks).
There's too much data to analyze, so the only way to use it is to harass individuals who were previously picked out for harassement.
The destruction of the olive trees is contrary to the laws ot he Torah and the Talmud.
So the modern "Israel" is not a Jewish state. It's an anti-Jewish state. It's also anti-democratic, of course, denying most of its residents the right to vote.
It's really the twin of Saudi Arabia, which operates contrary to mainstream Muslim tradition, destroys its own heritage, and is grossly anti-democratic. Both states are cancers on the region.
For what it's worth, chopping down olive trees is specifically prohibited by the Torah. So any so-called "Jewish" people who do this are sinners and apostates.
Anyway, any person who truly belives in the Jewish tradition will be *firmly* opposed to this sinful, wasteful destruction, and the evil "Israelis" who are committing it.
We should impose sanctions on Israel for its secret nuclear weapons program and refusal to cooperate with international inspectors, really. The world cannot tolerate a nuclear bomb in the hands of a rogue state with unstable, warmongering leaders... a description which fits Israel. By contrast, Iran hasn't attacked any other countries for over 200 years.
This is also the problem with Assad: he is seen as illegitimate and ineffective.
A replacement Baathist who was not involved in the massacres would not have Assad's *record*, which would be sufficient to be seen as legitimate. This sort of coup happens all the time in South America and Africa when the leader is seen to be weak. I am actually surprised that such has not happened in Syria.
Attempting to prop up the Assad regime was an insane and unsound move.
The *correct* move was to salvage the Baathist regime while removing Assad, the 'Butcher of Aleppo', personally. Frankly, the Iranian government understands politics well enough to support this sort of move, and I'm sure the Indian government does too. I am not sure about Russia, since Putin appears to be stupid.
The US apparently was unwilling to make this distinction, which is the distinction which allows for the classic "quiet coup" by a colonel.
That's because the Syrian civil war needs to finish. When Assad (who nobody at all likes) is tossed out, a clear preferred power will develop in Syria, and that power will finish the work of ejecting ISIL/Daesh.
If Syria were one of the many countries in South America, Africa, and Asia where this sort of thing has happened, the sort of situation Assad is in would lead to an internal coup against Assad by some Ba'athist colonel whose hands were relatively clean, on a 'openness' platform. At which point the rebels would say "Good, Assad is gone", and unite behind the government.
Assad's insistence on staying in power personally is actually odd, and indicates that there's some personnel weakness within the Syrian administration. As such it will probably just collapse outright. At that point any warlord can fill the power vacuum, but a warlord who knows how to be popular can beat ISIL/Daesh any day.
For what it's worth, the British 'went native' in pretty much the whole of India, conquering it by bribing/cajoling/flattering native leaders. This was also their policy in North America, and in South Africa (though they carefully picked not the powerful Zulus, but the underdogs who hated the Zulus). This was also, earlier, the policy during the conquest of Wales and Scotland. Only in Australia and New Zealand (and, of course, *Ireland*) did they ignore and trample over the natives completely.
This is how they built such a big empire, frankly.
Consolidating power over a foreign country as a foreign, outside power is notoriously ineffective. "Going native" is much more effective.
Daesh has a *very short* shelf life, because they are intent on alienating *everyone*.
Saudi Arabia's shelf life dies when the age of oil dies.
Assad's shelf life expired already.
Israel's shelf life dies sometime after Saudi Arabia collapses. At that point all the petrostates (which have weak armies and do not respond to public opinion) will be gone. The regional survivors will have battle-tested armies with cohesion and modern strategy, while Israel will have a bunch of bully boys who don't know how to fight an actual war. Israel will also be completely economically isolated by then. At that point, one of the Israeli atrocities will be too much for the region and they'll be removed.
China's empire's future is looking quite bright at the moment. It has had some very smart people running it. They seem to have been replaced by idiots recently, but it'll take a while for that to destroy them.
The US has had nothing but idiots in power for 35 years; our shelf life is starting to be numbered. However, an empire as big and rich as this one takes a long time to collapse.
It's too bad that the internal state of political thought in Saudi Arabia is so... hard to find out, due to the constant censorship and general totalitarianism there.
The Saudi regime is going to collapse sooner or later. They are just as bad as ISIS in every way whatsoever (including demolishing ancient archaeological sites -- look up what they've been doing to Mecca). It's no loss if Daesh overthrows Saudi Arabia -- it's a lateral move.
The real question is when Saudi Arabia will be overthrown from *within*, by people who are sick of their Wahhabi / Salafi totalitarian ideology. Hard to say, but I think it depends on the flow of oil money drying up.
The US keeps dumping weapons into the region and they keep ending up in the hands of the Taliban, Daesh, or other bad actors. Maybe we should stop that.
Daesh does not control genuinely valuable regions. It seems that most of their resources are from one-time looting, not sustainable production. This leads to an "expand or die" pattern. But they have no chance of actually taking over Turkey or Iran, which means that their only source of reliable funding is oil. Which gets us back to priority one: make oil valueless.
I'm quite sure you have NOT thought this through. I have.
If Assad had left early, the government would have been replaced with a nice, peaceful opposition government.
If he'd left shortly after the massacres, he would have been replaced with moderate militants.
If he'd left later in the war, he would have been replaced with Islamic Brotherhood types.
If he'd left later, it would have been al-Qaeda types.
Now, he would be replaced with Daesh.
If he hangs on any longer, he'll be replaced with something even *worse*. If you can imagine that, and I can.
This is the pattern. If a hated dictator who is past his sell-by date refuses to leave, people will join more and more extreme violent resistance groups in order to get rid of him. The longer he hangs on, the worse the people who initially replace him will be.
He's doomed period -- there is precisely zero chance that he comes out of this on top. He's already surviving solely as a Russian puppet, and he hasn't managed to gain territory even with the Russian backing -- so there's no point in him hanging on. His "army" is already full of angry, unpaid conscripts. It's only a matter of time before he's overthrown.
Assad is only hanging on in order to make things worse after he leaves, a sort of "if I can't rule, I will break the country" tactic.
A lot of people are really dumb about geopolitics, but this pattern should have been obvious; it's happened in numerous countries.
There are parallels to the Syrian side of the war, where the feckless and deranged government of Assad -- absoutely guaranteed to lose power, no question about it, but intent on making as much of a mess as it can by refusing to resign -- is the main thing giving ISIS/ISIL power.
Reading the summary of Kissinger's latest waste of trees, it's apparent that Kissinger is a brain-damaged moron. There's been nobody more _realpolitik_ than Woodrow Wilson in the last 200 years.
Here's my question: in a typical parliamentary democracy, these results would cause Erdogan to (a) resign as head of the party, or (b) be thrown out as head of the party. Lose lots and lots of seats, get tossed as party head, that's the way it workd.
Will the AKP toss Erdogan, or does Erdogan's ego know no bounds?
Easy predictions. I'm trying to figure out the dynamics of the lead-up to the inevitable revolution. This situation is absurdly unstable; the MIC has no solid support left, not even *within* the military; and so there will be a revolution in the US (possibly peaceful, possibly not) but I can't quite figure out how it will happen.
I've been trying to predict when the sheer magnitude of the US foreign policy disaster will finally sink in to someone in power. I'm not sure anything short of losing a war to Mexico (which the US totally would lose, by the way) would do it.
OK, nice analysis, but it doesn't answer the interesting question: Why and how did the previous trading empires collapse? The Dutch empire, for example. The US trading empire is clearly collapsing; if we look at the collapse of previous trading empires, perhaps we will be able to see a pattern which we can use to predict what happens next, or to affect it.
Part of the problem is clearly the obsession with obsolete trade goods. The US imperialists are still acting as if US manufactures are what the world wants to buy (not true since the rise of Chinese manufacturing in the 1980s), still acting as if oil is the most important raw material to control (not true since the early 2000s at least), et cet. But what will bring down the delusional imperialists?
Thinking about it, Saudi Arabia isn't playing France to a Bismarckian Iran; they're playing *Austria*. Doomed strategy, utterly doomed, they're being outfoxed at every level.
Oh, that region is a tinderkeg. Absolute monarchies are usually problems; disenfranchised populations are serious problems; the insane gerontocracy of Saudi Arabia is a disaster.
Attempting to "constrain" the power of Iran with a bunch of underpopulated principalities could only be done with a genuinely superior military, which these autocracies obviously do not have and will never have. They are trying to tie themselves to the US, which loses every war it gets into (so, pretty much the definition of an *inferior* military) -- this shows stupidity on top of everything else.
Dubai and Oman seem to be run by smart merchant princes, as usual; they have managed to come out on top of the economic and political shifts for several hundred years running. The rest of the UAE as well.
I don't hold out much hope for the losers running Saudi Arabia and Bahrain; and it doesn't seem likely that they'll be replaced with anyone with the sort of *flexibility* which the Emirates have shown over the centuries.
As for that tinderkeg, the match is going to be a sustained drop in oil prices. Coming up in the next decade or two.
FWIW Hawaii is perfect for electric cars (and gasoline is super-expensive) and terrible for fossil-fuel heating (not that you need much heating in Hawaii). So I'm guessing Hawaii will actually hit nearly 100% of energy from renewables. Much easier there than, say, Maine.
Assad refused to resign. This is requirement #1 for any negotiations to commence. Remember, Assad is the author of the unprovoked massacres of civilians, and his father was known for breaking agreements. Nobody will make a deal with him because he's untrustworthy.
If he left, there would probably be a deal in short order. Old-school imperial geopolitics would call for his assassination, but the US sucks at assassinations.
OK, I get why Russia is supporting Assad (it's completely stupid geopolitically, but I get it). But why on earth would Iran support Assad? I get why Iran supports Hezbollah in Lebanon, but Assad has never really been their friend....
The sequence I expect is (a) the toppling of the old regimes, (b) the toppling of the ISIS type regimes, and (c) the rise of new regimes. This will take years because the US, and the buyers of Saudi oil, and Netenyahu, keep slowing the process down. The real wild card is the nature of the regimes in period (c). They could be elitist authoritarian WITH social welfare and infrastrucure; they could be democratic; there are lots of other possibilities.
Now, why do I say that he can't pull it off? Because of the crazy stuff which his subordinates are doing. Beheading people for watching soccer? Taking child "concubines" to rape? Nobody of the "build a society" type will tolerate that sort of stuff. In order to attract the judges and doctors and engineers, he has to wipe out that particular type of thuggery first.
The entire theory of how to take over is sound -- however, the ISIS/Daesh guys will be unable to establish order in stage 3, and so they will be knocked out as people back anyone who actually *can* establish order. Mao had a program as well as an agenda; he had technocrats as well as fighters; and he had everyone working for that cause, to build institutions.
Daesh lacks the technocrats, and "the Muslim will walk everywhere as a master" is not an actual agenda or program, it's just bloviation. Hizbollah in Lebanon had a coherent social program and government. The Taliban almost did, but it was pretty poorly thought out.
What I'm saying is that Daesh can knock out countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria, but they can't hold them; warlords who have a more pragmatic attitude who know how to build things up in times of peace will clean their clocks eventually. (After the old regimes are gone.)
Thanks for this. Most organizations are not reporting the internal dynamics in Yemen (I knew they were complicated, since I'm old enough to remember North and South Yemen, but I've never found as clear a description as yours.)
It seems to me that the alliance between the Saudi royals and the Wahhabis has been a poison which has been damaging the entire region. And this alliance is propped up pretty much entirely by the US and the West paying for Saudi oil; does anyone think the Saudi regime would survive for a month after the oil money dried up?
This is unfair. There are many Israelis who recognize that this situtation is unsustainable and will lead to utter disaster. Such as the Mossad ex-chiefs and Shin Bet ex-chiefs who were giving speeches about this precisely a couple of weeks ago.
Unfortunately, these sensible people are not a majority of the Israeli voters. (They are a majority of the population of Israel, of course, but with so many in the West Bank and Gaza disenfranchised...)
As for the exodus of the "best and brightest", it's been happening since Rabin was assassinated. The situation, however, sucks for the second or third generation Israelis who have no other citizenships and difficulty emigrating. Particularly the Mizrahi who as a group are actually native to the region and have never, ever had any power in the racist Israeli government, because the racist Israeli government thinks of them as dirty Arabs.
While all this is correct, it's a "heighten the contradictions" argument. And while those arguments are correct, it makes for a really viciously unpleasant period for the people who have to live through it.
I'm not sure the admission of a Palestinian state is the way to go here. One-state solution for the win.
Start demanding voting rights in Israel, and Netenyahu is SCREWED, because in order to oppose that, he has to openly oppose democracy. There is only one country in the world which is getting away with openly opposing democracy, and that's Saudi Arabia; even the Emirates and North Korea pay lip service to democracy.
Palestinian leadership needs to take this lesson from South Africa.
The only things standing in the way of a new, peaceful era for Israel... are the unwillingness of Zionist Union & Kulanu to form a joint government with the Joint List, and the unwillingness of Balad to form a joint government with Zionist Union and Kulanu.
Let us hope that they overcome this. Otherwise Netenyahu will lead the country down the road to perdition.
Lyndon Johnson owed little or nothing to Israeli government, and the Israeli government had recently caused him a great deal of trouble by deliberately initiating the Six-Day War.
The resolution was a response to the initiation of the Six-Day War by Israel. (And yes, those who have followed the internal details of the information released... that war was 100% started by the Israeli government. Deliberately. The Israeli government had previously invaded demilitarized zones and started stealing water, just in order to cause trouble.) Johnson was furious with the Israelis for their gratuitous aggressive war, which caused a lot of diplomatic problems for the US.
Netenyahu has already announced his future plans. He intends to push through a rewrite of the election law in the Knesset so that the party with the largest plurality is *always* given control of the government, even if there's a large coalition opposing that party.
Basically, stacking the deck so he'll keep winning even when he becomes unpopular. He is very very dangerous.
Unfortunately, there is a faction in the US which wants to expel or marginalize Americans of non-European ancestry. You know what they're called. "The Republican Party". 🙁
In the US, they're going to lose. They're going to lose because they've already committed one coup (2000) in order to keep power, and people are wise to them now. They failed to consolidate power and eliminate democracy while people were in shock -- they won't be able to do it now that they're widely recognized as anti-democratic.
There are much bigger problems in Israel due to a much more extremely high level of background racism. It's an exceptionally racist country, and this is preventing the leftwingers from different ethnic backgrounds from uniting. 🙁
Nope, it's pretty much straight-up apartheid in Israel. Complete with the complex caste system: in South Africa, they had special second-class treatment for "colored" and "Indian" (with third-class treatment for the majority population), while in Israel there is second-class treatment for the Jewish people of Middle Eastern and North African descent, and for those of Russian descent, and for the non-Jewish citizens...
Don't be so sure about that. There are still people who remember the lessons of World War I.
Although the US is repeating most of the mistakes of Wilhelm's Germany at this point, perhaps there may be enough people in power with the sense to avoid getting dragged into a world war over a pointless scrap of territory, whether it's Palestine or Serbia.
Bibi has alienated the people he can't afford to alienate. By allying himself strictly with the Republican Party, there is now no upside for Democrats in backing this clown.
It's getting extremely clear which country is the most dangerous and unstable "rogue state" threatening world stablity. It's the one with the Pentagon.
Given that racist right-wingers who claim to be Jewish have been accusing anyone and everyone of being "anti-Semitic" just for things like opposing mass murder, I don't think that is doing to be true for much longer. People are sick of the false accusations.
Hunter: there's a very apt comparison to the situation in the state of Israel today in apartheid South Africa. Which was much more complicated than most people remember today, and involved all kinds of fake window-dressing "democracy". The Afrikaaners even tried to claim that they were an oppressed minority, just like the upper-class Ashnenazi elite who run Israel try to claim that they are.
If the US government actually cared about this, Bush would have invaded to protect the ancient Buddhas at Bamiyan.
If the US cared now, we would fund the Kurdish Peshmerga and we would fund Iran, along with funding Turkey. Those are the coherent forces which are capable of smashing Daesh.
Unfortunately, the US government has shackled itself to the corpses of Saudi Arabia and Israel. It reminds me of the German Empire before World War One: making all the wrong moves.
Saudi Arabia and Israeli are paper tigers; the emirates along the Gulf are not even pretending to be tigers and are content to control their trading outposts.
Egypt is too insular to achieve regional hegemony.
The countries with a real likely chance at regional hegemony at this point are Turkey and Iran. Same as it has been for thousands of years. A sensible US policy would back *both* of them.
Solar deployment has been growing at an annualized (geometric-average) rate of 1.22 since 1975. In the last decade, the rate has been 1.4.
There is no sign of this trend stopping. As a result, world electricity production will be 100% renewable somewhere between 2028 and 2032....
.... unless lots of new electricity demand appears, which might happen if everyone switches to electric cars and replaces fossil-fuel heat with electric heat. In that case, it might take a couple more years.
It's worth noting the anti-authoritarian message of the LEGO Movie. Anti-authoritarian but pro-organization: basically exhorting kids to develop the skills and habits necessary to overthrow governments.
Solar deployments are growing exponentially, with a variable year-over-year increase rate which is averaging at least 35%. These are conservative estimates.
Now, what does this mean for the US? You can calculate based on the EIA numbers: In the US, this means that in 2033, 100% of current US electricity demand will be met by solar power.
Most of the trends are for less electricity demand: LED lighting, modern heat-pump A/C, insulation, etc.
Solar is already cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives in many places, and will be cheaper everywhere in a couple of years (2016 for grid parity in the US; around the same time, new fossil fuel plants will be uneconomic for utilities.)
Batteries are also improving and getting cheaper, though not at the same rate as solar. This is changing the tipping-point economic calculations very fast.
Battery-electric cars have cheaper TCO than gas cars if you drive 100K miles per year -- and they're getting cheaper as batteries get cheaper, and electricity stays cheap. While gas will certainly get more expensive.
For trucks and buses and trains, the economics is even stronger, and their TCO will call for electrification much earlier than cars.
Current mass solar deployments are creating huge downward pressure on electricity prices. Even before solar replaces all fossil fuel electricity generation, people will start shifting more things from fossil fuels to electricity for the price savings -- this trend is already starting.
In 2034, with a huge solar panel industry and the US already covering our entire existing electricity needs, the shift from oil to solar will be massive: oil will simply be unable to compete!
So, 19 years, and that's it. Oil demand dies in the US, and probably in the world fairly soon afterwards. The good guys need only to play a delaying game, just as we did with fracking: the bad guys will be destroyed by economics in 18 years, so we just have to throw sand in their gears until then.
Unfortunately, US policy in Yemen is to indiscriminately bomb weddings and groups of civilians with drones. This is radicalizing pretty much everyone in Yemen and causing the entire country to consider the US their enemy -- which seems like a fairly reasonable response to me.
So, basically, the majority of Israelis are right-wing racists, and Netenyahu has that vote locked up.
Doesn't surprise me. The left-wing Israelis started emigrating after Rabin was assassinated, the extremist right-wingers still have lots and lots of children, and I don't see a demographic counterweight to those trends *among those who are allowed to vote* in Israel. The Russian immigrants might be a counterweight but have not proven to be.
Putin is running a classic colonialist operation.
Netenyahu is just an idiot.
"
If Palestinians declared Israel’s actions have made a two state solution impossible and demanded outright annexation and full civil rights, Israel would be put in a very difficult situation. "
It will happen within 10 years.
I don't think the Republicans understand how much power a President has if he decides to use it. They got lucky in that Obama is a wimp.
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/
You can see which states the Republicans can easily steal with election fraud, and which states they can't steal. Worth keeping track of...
Erdogan has pretty much thrown away all his political capital. The question is what opposition has the ability to toss him out.
Yeah, given the fascist thugs harassing people in airports, I preemptively stopped flying on US airlines entirely. I can afford to avoid flying...
If they ever try to give me trouble on a train, they are getting the mother of all legal cases.
At this point, I've decided there's no point in being afraid. These fascist thugs are so incompetent that they will harrass and assault people for doing absolutely nothing, so I might as well speak out against their fascist tyranny.
He's still going to cut US military funding to Israel if he gets elected, because he's going to cut *all* the wasteful US military funding.
Eh. Iran is a pretty good place for Sunnis... Sunnis who *aren't Salafi or Wahabi*. I think this is understood...
Heck, all the US would have to do would be to raise lease rates to the current *private-market* lease rates. That would shut down nearly all the leasing.
Right now, the federal-land leases are at GROSSLY sub-market rates.
It's not at all clear whether "business realism" will kick in for the Saudis, who are an aristocracy with no tradition of business sense. Ibn Saud was frankly a warlord of a very archaic style, and his successors are nearly as atavistic.
The UAE, Qatar, Oman, and even Bahrain have been "merchant prince" states, wealth derived from trading, for several hundred years, and they have taught their princes to prioritize business realism first, since the 1500s or earlier. They've been in the slave trade, the spice trade, and other trades before their current period in the oil trade. Therefore they WILL see the market shift coming and will switch out of the dying oil market into the growing solar market ASAP. They're already doing it.
The same is NOT true in Saudi Arabia, which has a totally different history.
Back in Civil War days, the military was simply not a career. The war ended, everyone went home to their old jobs & businesses. EVERYONE, including General Sherman and General Grant.
That's the sort of military with which the US won every war of the 18th and 19th centuries (even the 'losses' like the war of 1812 were wins geopolitically). A military organized from scratch for each war. Thomas Ricks has written and talked about this.
Not this careerist garbage. The careerist garbage jobs program which passes for a military in the US is completely worthless for anything except pork-barrel spending.
I really expect the US to lose a major war spectacularly sometime soon, the way Tsarist Russia lost World War I spectacularly early on... so spectacularly that the Russian Revolution happened.
Could be a lot worse. Iran's a pretty functional government and is NOT a strict theocracy (a "weak theocracy" perhaps. A "partial democracy" like the pre-1830s UK would be a better description of Iran, I think). If Syria ended up like Iran, it would be pretty good.
I fear it might end up worse. I don't think Daesh has a chance in hell of keeping power because they are making special efforts to alienate everyone, so eventually someone will destroy them. But you could end up with another "zero-democracy" tyrant. The worst scenario would be something like Saudi Arabia, but I think that's unlikely due to the lack of oil money.
The fundamental problem is that the NSA "surveillance" has only one function: blackmail. That's the only reason they're collecting the data, to blackmail their political opponents.
The dragnet data is not actually good for anything else. It's *completely* useless for law enforcement, and has never once been used for law enforcement; it's *worse than useless* with regard to terrorism, and has never once been used to stop a terrorist attack (though it may have been used to *cause* a few terrorist attacks).
There's too much data to analyze, so the only way to use it is to harass individuals who were previously picked out for harassement.
The destruction of the olive trees is contrary to the laws ot he Torah and the Talmud.
So the modern "Israel" is not a Jewish state. It's an anti-Jewish state. It's also anti-democratic, of course, denying most of its residents the right to vote.
It's really the twin of Saudi Arabia, which operates contrary to mainstream Muslim tradition, destroys its own heritage, and is grossly anti-democratic. Both states are cancers on the region.
For what it's worth, chopping down olive trees is specifically prohibited by the Torah. So any so-called "Jewish" people who do this are sinners and apostates.
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/961313/jewish/Cutting-Down-Fruit-Trees.htm
http://www.torah.org/advanced/weekly-halacha/5763/shavous.html
(You can find a lot more of these references.)
Anyway, any person who truly belives in the Jewish tradition will be *firmly* opposed to this sinful, wasteful destruction, and the evil "Israelis" who are committing it.
We should impose sanctions on Israel for its secret nuclear weapons program and refusal to cooperate with international inspectors, really. The world cannot tolerate a nuclear bomb in the hands of a rogue state with unstable, warmongering leaders... a description which fits Israel. By contrast, Iran hasn't attacked any other countries for over 200 years.
Had evening appointments during the meeting. :sigh:
Gary is correct.
This is also the problem with Assad: he is seen as illegitimate and ineffective.
A replacement Baathist who was not involved in the massacres would not have Assad's *record*, which would be sufficient to be seen as legitimate. This sort of coup happens all the time in South America and Africa when the leader is seen to be weak. I am actually surprised that such has not happened in Syria.
Attempting to prop up the Assad regime was an insane and unsound move.
The *correct* move was to salvage the Baathist regime while removing Assad, the 'Butcher of Aleppo', personally. Frankly, the Iranian government understands politics well enough to support this sort of move, and I'm sure the Indian government does too. I am not sure about Russia, since Putin appears to be stupid.
The US apparently was unwilling to make this distinction, which is the distinction which allows for the classic "quiet coup" by a colonel.
That's because the Syrian civil war needs to finish. When Assad (who nobody at all likes) is tossed out, a clear preferred power will develop in Syria, and that power will finish the work of ejecting ISIL/Daesh.
If Syria were one of the many countries in South America, Africa, and Asia where this sort of thing has happened, the sort of situation Assad is in would lead to an internal coup against Assad by some Ba'athist colonel whose hands were relatively clean, on a 'openness' platform. At which point the rebels would say "Good, Assad is gone", and unite behind the government.
Assad's insistence on staying in power personally is actually odd, and indicates that there's some personnel weakness within the Syrian administration. As such it will probably just collapse outright. At that point any warlord can fill the power vacuum, but a warlord who knows how to be popular can beat ISIL/Daesh any day.
Beautiful summary.
For what it's worth, the British 'went native' in pretty much the whole of India, conquering it by bribing/cajoling/flattering native leaders. This was also their policy in North America, and in South Africa (though they carefully picked not the powerful Zulus, but the underdogs who hated the Zulus). This was also, earlier, the policy during the conquest of Wales and Scotland. Only in Australia and New Zealand (and, of course, *Ireland*) did they ignore and trample over the natives completely.
This is how they built such a big empire, frankly.
Consolidating power over a foreign country as a foreign, outside power is notoriously ineffective. "Going native" is much more effective.
All have a shelf life.
Daesh has a *very short* shelf life, because they are intent on alienating *everyone*.
Saudi Arabia's shelf life dies when the age of oil dies.
Assad's shelf life expired already.
Israel's shelf life dies sometime after Saudi Arabia collapses. At that point all the petrostates (which have weak armies and do not respond to public opinion) will be gone. The regional survivors will have battle-tested armies with cohesion and modern strategy, while Israel will have a bunch of bully boys who don't know how to fight an actual war. Israel will also be completely economically isolated by then. At that point, one of the Israeli atrocities will be too much for the region and they'll be removed.
China's empire's future is looking quite bright at the moment. It has had some very smart people running it. They seem to have been replaced by idiots recently, but it'll take a while for that to destroy them.
The US has had nothing but idiots in power for 35 years; our shelf life is starting to be numbered. However, an empire as big and rich as this one takes a long time to collapse.
It's too bad that the internal state of political thought in Saudi Arabia is so... hard to find out, due to the constant censorship and general totalitarianism there.
The Saudi regime is going to collapse sooner or later. They are just as bad as ISIS in every way whatsoever (including demolishing ancient archaeological sites -- look up what they've been doing to Mecca). It's no loss if Daesh overthrows Saudi Arabia -- it's a lateral move.
The real question is when Saudi Arabia will be overthrown from *within*, by people who are sick of their Wahhabi / Salafi totalitarian ideology. Hard to say, but I think it depends on the flow of oil money drying up.
The US keeps dumping weapons into the region and they keep ending up in the hands of the Taliban, Daesh, or other bad actors. Maybe we should stop that.
Daesh does not control genuinely valuable regions. It seems that most of their resources are from one-time looting, not sustainable production. This leads to an "expand or die" pattern. But they have no chance of actually taking over Turkey or Iran, which means that their only source of reliable funding is oil. Which gets us back to priority one: make oil valueless.
I'm quite sure you have NOT thought this through. I have.
If Assad had left early, the government would have been replaced with a nice, peaceful opposition government.
If he'd left shortly after the massacres, he would have been replaced with moderate militants.
If he'd left later in the war, he would have been replaced with Islamic Brotherhood types.
If he'd left later, it would have been al-Qaeda types.
Now, he would be replaced with Daesh.
If he hangs on any longer, he'll be replaced with something even *worse*. If you can imagine that, and I can.
This is the pattern. If a hated dictator who is past his sell-by date refuses to leave, people will join more and more extreme violent resistance groups in order to get rid of him. The longer he hangs on, the worse the people who initially replace him will be.
He's doomed period -- there is precisely zero chance that he comes out of this on top. He's already surviving solely as a Russian puppet, and he hasn't managed to gain territory even with the Russian backing -- so there's no point in him hanging on. His "army" is already full of angry, unpaid conscripts. It's only a matter of time before he's overthrown.
Assad is only hanging on in order to make things worse after he leaves, a sort of "if I can't rule, I will break the country" tactic.
A lot of people are really dumb about geopolitics, but this pattern should have been obvious; it's happened in numerous countries.
There are parallels to the Syrian side of the war, where the feckless and deranged government of Assad -- absoutely guaranteed to lose power, no question about it, but intent on making as much of a mess as it can by refusing to resign -- is the main thing giving ISIS/ISIL power.
Reading the summary of Kissinger's latest waste of trees, it's apparent that Kissinger is a brain-damaged moron. There's been nobody more _realpolitik_ than Woodrow Wilson in the last 200 years.
Here's my question: in a typical parliamentary democracy, these results would cause Erdogan to (a) resign as head of the party, or (b) be thrown out as head of the party. Lose lots and lots of seats, get tossed as party head, that's the way it workd.
Will the AKP toss Erdogan, or does Erdogan's ego know no bounds?
Of course, you have guessed correctly!
This is the sort of stuff Apartheid South Africa did.
We have a playbook to work from, guys. Boycott, divestment, sanctions.
Easy predictions. I'm trying to figure out the dynamics of the lead-up to the inevitable revolution. This situation is absurdly unstable; the MIC has no solid support left, not even *within* the military; and so there will be a revolution in the US (possibly peaceful, possibly not) but I can't quite figure out how it will happen.
I've been trying to predict when the sheer magnitude of the US foreign policy disaster will finally sink in to someone in power. I'm not sure anything short of losing a war to Mexico (which the US totally would lose, by the way) would do it.
I'm glad that one terrorist leader (Levinger) has died, but we know that with terrorists, removing a leader doesn't stop them.
OK, nice analysis, but it doesn't answer the interesting question: Why and how did the previous trading empires collapse? The Dutch empire, for example. The US trading empire is clearly collapsing; if we look at the collapse of previous trading empires, perhaps we will be able to see a pattern which we can use to predict what happens next, or to affect it.
Part of the problem is clearly the obsession with obsolete trade goods. The US imperialists are still acting as if US manufactures are what the world wants to buy (not true since the rise of Chinese manufacturing in the 1980s), still acting as if oil is the most important raw material to control (not true since the early 2000s at least), et cet. But what will bring down the delusional imperialists?
Thinking about it, Saudi Arabia isn't playing France to a Bismarckian Iran; they're playing *Austria*. Doomed strategy, utterly doomed, they're being outfoxed at every level.
Oh, that region is a tinderkeg. Absolute monarchies are usually problems; disenfranchised populations are serious problems; the insane gerontocracy of Saudi Arabia is a disaster.
Attempting to "constrain" the power of Iran with a bunch of underpopulated principalities could only be done with a genuinely superior military, which these autocracies obviously do not have and will never have. They are trying to tie themselves to the US, which loses every war it gets into (so, pretty much the definition of an *inferior* military) -- this shows stupidity on top of everything else.
Dubai and Oman seem to be run by smart merchant princes, as usual; they have managed to come out on top of the economic and political shifts for several hundred years running. The rest of the UAE as well.
I don't hold out much hope for the losers running Saudi Arabia and Bahrain; and it doesn't seem likely that they'll be replaced with anyone with the sort of *flexibility* which the Emirates have shown over the centuries.
As for that tinderkeg, the match is going to be a sustained drop in oil prices. Coming up in the next decade or two.
FWIW Hawaii is perfect for electric cars (and gasoline is super-expensive) and terrible for fossil-fuel heating (not that you need much heating in Hawaii). So I'm guessing Hawaii will actually hit nearly 100% of energy from renewables. Much easier there than, say, Maine.
Assad refused to resign. This is requirement #1 for any negotiations to commence. Remember, Assad is the author of the unprovoked massacres of civilians, and his father was known for breaking agreements. Nobody will make a deal with him because he's untrustworthy.
If he left, there would probably be a deal in short order. Old-school imperial geopolitics would call for his assassination, but the US sucks at assassinations.
Oil & gas will be irrelevant by roughly 2040 (probably a bit earlier actually). It will be interesting to see how the politics shifts.
OK, I get why Russia is supporting Assad (it's completely stupid geopolitically, but I get it). But why on earth would Iran support Assad? I get why Iran supports Hezbollah in Lebanon, but Assad has never really been their friend....
The sequence I expect is (a) the toppling of the old regimes, (b) the toppling of the ISIS type regimes, and (c) the rise of new regimes. This will take years because the US, and the buyers of Saudi oil, and Netenyahu, keep slowing the process down. The real wild card is the nature of the regimes in period (c). They could be elitist authoritarian WITH social welfare and infrastrucure; they could be democratic; there are lots of other possibilities.
Now, why do I say that he can't pull it off? Because of the crazy stuff which his subordinates are doing. Beheading people for watching soccer? Taking child "concubines" to rape? Nobody of the "build a society" type will tolerate that sort of stuff. In order to attract the judges and doctors and engineers, he has to wipe out that particular type of thuggery first.
It won't work, but for fairly obscure reasons.
The entire theory of how to take over is sound -- however, the ISIS/Daesh guys will be unable to establish order in stage 3, and so they will be knocked out as people back anyone who actually *can* establish order. Mao had a program as well as an agenda; he had technocrats as well as fighters; and he had everyone working for that cause, to build institutions.
Daesh lacks the technocrats, and "the Muslim will walk everywhere as a master" is not an actual agenda or program, it's just bloviation. Hizbollah in Lebanon had a coherent social program and government. The Taliban almost did, but it was pretty poorly thought out.
What I'm saying is that Daesh can knock out countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria, but they can't hold them; warlords who have a more pragmatic attitude who know how to build things up in times of peace will clean their clocks eventually. (After the old regimes are gone.)
Great opportunity for a budding warlord.
Thanks for this. Most organizations are not reporting the internal dynamics in Yemen (I knew they were complicated, since I'm old enough to remember North and South Yemen, but I've never found as clear a description as yours.)
It seems to me that the alliance between the Saudi royals and the Wahhabis has been a poison which has been damaging the entire region. And this alliance is propped up pretty much entirely by the US and the West paying for Saudi oil; does anyone think the Saudi regime would survive for a month after the oil money dried up?
This is unfair. There are many Israelis who recognize that this situtation is unsustainable and will lead to utter disaster. Such as the Mossad ex-chiefs and Shin Bet ex-chiefs who were giving speeches about this precisely a couple of weeks ago.
Unfortunately, these sensible people are not a majority of the Israeli voters. (They are a majority of the population of Israel, of course, but with so many in the West Bank and Gaza disenfranchised...)
As for the exodus of the "best and brightest", it's been happening since Rabin was assassinated. The situation, however, sucks for the second or third generation Israelis who have no other citizenships and difficulty emigrating. Particularly the Mizrahi who as a group are actually native to the region and have never, ever had any power in the racist Israeli government, because the racist Israeli government thinks of them as dirty Arabs.
While all this is correct, it's a "heighten the contradictions" argument. And while those arguments are correct, it makes for a really viciously unpleasant period for the people who have to live through it.
I'm not sure the admission of a Palestinian state is the way to go here. One-state solution for the win.
Start demanding voting rights in Israel, and Netenyahu is SCREWED, because in order to oppose that, he has to openly oppose democracy. There is only one country in the world which is getting away with openly opposing democracy, and that's Saudi Arabia; even the Emirates and North Korea pay lip service to democracy.
Palestinian leadership needs to take this lesson from South Africa.
The US government kept supporting the apartheid government of South Africa for decades.
However, the US people turned sharply against apartheid, and the program of boycotts and divestments was highly effective.
The only things standing in the way of a new, peaceful era for Israel... are the unwillingness of Zionist Union & Kulanu to form a joint government with the Joint List, and the unwillingness of Balad to form a joint government with Zionist Union and Kulanu.
Let us hope that they overcome this. Otherwise Netenyahu will lead the country down the road to perdition.
Lyndon Johnson owed little or nothing to Israeli government, and the Israeli government had recently caused him a great deal of trouble by deliberately initiating the Six-Day War.
The resolution was a response to the initiation of the Six-Day War by Israel. (And yes, those who have followed the internal details of the information released... that war was 100% started by the Israeli government. Deliberately. The Israeli government had previously invaded demilitarized zones and started stealing water, just in order to cause trouble.) Johnson was furious with the Israelis for their gratuitous aggressive war, which caused a lot of diplomatic problems for the US.
Netenyahu has already announced his future plans. He intends to push through a rewrite of the election law in the Knesset so that the party with the largest plurality is *always* given control of the government, even if there's a large coalition opposing that party.
Basically, stacking the deck so he'll keep winning even when he becomes unpopular. He is very very dangerous.
Unfortunately, there is a faction in the US which wants to expel or marginalize Americans of non-European ancestry. You know what they're called. "The Republican Party". 🙁
In the US, they're going to lose. They're going to lose because they've already committed one coup (2000) in order to keep power, and people are wise to them now. They failed to consolidate power and eliminate democracy while people were in shock -- they won't be able to do it now that they're widely recognized as anti-democratic.
There are much bigger problems in Israel due to a much more extremely high level of background racism. It's an exceptionally racist country, and this is preventing the leftwingers from different ethnic backgrounds from uniting. 🙁
Nope, it's pretty much straight-up apartheid in Israel. Complete with the complex caste system: in South Africa, they had special second-class treatment for "colored" and "Indian" (with third-class treatment for the majority population), while in Israel there is second-class treatment for the Jewish people of Middle Eastern and North African descent, and for those of Russian descent, and for the non-Jewish citizens...
Mostly on behalf of weapons manufacturers. Gotta use up the old bombs so we can sell new bombs.
Eisenhower warned us about this. We were also warned about it waaaay back before World War One.
Don't be so sure about that. There are still people who remember the lessons of World War I.
Although the US is repeating most of the mistakes of Wilhelm's Germany at this point, perhaps there may be enough people in power with the sense to avoid getting dragged into a world war over a pointless scrap of territory, whether it's Palestine or Serbia.
Bibi has alienated the people he can't afford to alienate. By allying himself strictly with the Republican Party, there is now no upside for Democrats in backing this clown.
It's getting extremely clear which country is the most dangerous and unstable "rogue state" threatening world stablity. It's the one with the Pentagon.
Given that racist right-wingers who claim to be Jewish have been accusing anyone and everyone of being "anti-Semitic" just for things like opposing mass murder, I don't think that is doing to be true for much longer. People are sick of the false accusations.
Hunter: there's a very apt comparison to the situation in the state of Israel today in apartheid South Africa. Which was much more complicated than most people remember today, and involved all kinds of fake window-dressing "democracy". The Afrikaaners even tried to claim that they were an oppressed minority, just like the upper-class Ashnenazi elite who run Israel try to claim that they are.
If the US government actually cared about this, Bush would have invaded to protect the ancient Buddhas at Bamiyan.
If the US cared now, we would fund the Kurdish Peshmerga and we would fund Iran, along with funding Turkey. Those are the coherent forces which are capable of smashing Daesh.
Unfortunately, the US government has shackled itself to the corpses of Saudi Arabia and Israel. It reminds me of the German Empire before World War One: making all the wrong moves.
Saudi Arabia and Israeli are paper tigers; the emirates along the Gulf are not even pretending to be tigers and are content to control their trading outposts.
Egypt is too insular to achieve regional hegemony.
The countries with a real likely chance at regional hegemony at this point are Turkey and Iran. Same as it has been for thousands of years. A sensible US policy would back *both* of them.
Solar deployment has been growing at an annualized (geometric-average) rate of 1.22 since 1975. In the last decade, the rate has been 1.4.
There is no sign of this trend stopping. As a result, world electricity production will be 100% renewable somewhere between 2028 and 2032....
.... unless lots of new electricity demand appears, which might happen if everyone switches to electric cars and replaces fossil-fuel heat with electric heat. In that case, it might take a couple more years.
It's worth noting the anti-authoritarian message of the LEGO Movie. Anti-authoritarian but pro-organization: basically exhorting kids to develop the skills and habits necessary to overthrow governments.
Well, think about it, anyway. It made me happy. 🙂
Yep, only even more so. Netenyahu is deliberately spreading anti-semitism in Europe. A few (Jewish) writers are beginning to recognize this.
http://www.yourmiddleeast.com/opinion/netanyahus-policies-are-fueling-antisemitism_29162
Netenyahu is truly evil, and extremely dangerous. I think all he cares about is his own personal power.
Haven't they figured out that oil is obsolete?
Solar deployments are growing exponentially, with a variable year-over-year increase rate which is averaging at least 35%. These are conservative estimates.
Now, what does this mean for the US? You can calculate based on the EIA numbers: In the US, this means that in 2033, 100% of current US electricity demand will be met by solar power.
Most of the trends are for less electricity demand: LED lighting, modern heat-pump A/C, insulation, etc.
Solar is already cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives in many places, and will be cheaper everywhere in a couple of years (2016 for grid parity in the US; around the same time, new fossil fuel plants will be uneconomic for utilities.)
Batteries are also improving and getting cheaper, though not at the same rate as solar. This is changing the tipping-point economic calculations very fast.
Solar + batteries already beats diesel for remote locations: http://cleantechnica.com/2015/02/12/solar-plus-storage-power-copper-mine-western-australia/ This includes Alaska and Hawaii. As prices drop, this will start to be true in non-remote places like California, and eventually everywhere.
Battery-electric cars have cheaper TCO than gas cars if you drive 100K miles per year -- and they're getting cheaper as batteries get cheaper, and electricity stays cheap. While gas will certainly get more expensive.
For trucks and buses and trains, the economics is even stronger, and their TCO will call for electrification much earlier than cars.
Current mass solar deployments are creating huge downward pressure on electricity prices. Even before solar replaces all fossil fuel electricity generation, people will start shifting more things from fossil fuels to electricity for the price savings -- this trend is already starting.
In 2034, with a huge solar panel industry and the US already covering our entire existing electricity needs, the shift from oil to solar will be massive: oil will simply be unable to compete!
So, 19 years, and that's it. Oil demand dies in the US, and probably in the world fairly soon afterwards. The good guys need only to play a delaying game, just as we did with fracking: the bad guys will be destroyed by economics in 18 years, so we just have to throw sand in their gears until then.
Unfortunately, US policy in Yemen is to indiscriminately bomb weddings and groups of civilians with drones. This is radicalizing pretty much everyone in Yemen and causing the entire country to consider the US their enemy -- which seems like a fairly reasonable response to me.
So, basically, the majority of Israelis are right-wing racists, and Netenyahu has that vote locked up.
Doesn't surprise me. The left-wing Israelis started emigrating after Rabin was assassinated, the extremist right-wingers still have lots and lots of children, and I don't see a demographic counterweight to those trends *among those who are allowed to vote* in Israel. The Russian immigrants might be a counterweight but have not proven to be.