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Buttigieg’s War and ‘The Shortest Way Home’ Arriving in Afghanistan, he thought of John Kerry. It’s a telling comparison, and an unflattering one.Greg Kelly and  Katie Horgan 

Posted By on January 7th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/buttigiegs-war-and-the-shortest-way-home-11578355312

“Seriously? This failed small town mayor who trades off of essentially non-existent military experience has people who want him to be President?” D.P.S.

When Mayor Pete Buttigieg talks about his military service, his opponents fall silent, the media fall in love, and his political prospects soar. Veterans roll their eyes.

CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Mr. Buttigieg Sunday if President Trump “deserves some credit” for the strike that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. “No,” the candidate replied, “not until we know whether this was a good decision and how this decision was made.” He questioned whether “it was the right strategic move” and said his own judgment “is informed by the experience of having been on one of those planes headed into a war zone.”

But Mr. Buttigieg’s stint in the Navy isn’t as impressive as he makes it out to be. His 2019 memoir is called “Shortest Way Home,” an apt description of his military service. He entered the military through a little-used shortcut: direct commission in the reserves. The usual route to an officer’s commission includes four years at Annapolis or another military academy or months of intense training at Officer Candidate School. ROTC programs send prospective officers to far-flung summer training programs and require military drills during the academic year. Mr. Buttigieg skipped all that—no obstacle courses, no weapons training, no evaluation of his ability or willingness to lead. Paperwork, a health exam and a background check were all it took to make him a naval officer.

He writes that his reserve service “will always be one of the highlights of my life, but the price of admission was an ongoing flow of administrativia.” That’s not how it’s supposed to work. The paperwork isn’t the price of admission but the start of a long, grueling test.

KRD NEWS Comments turned off

BARI WEISS, COLIN KAEPERNICK,

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://mailchi.mp/da1399d27006/krd-newsbari-weiss-and-the-solidarity-march?e=9365a7c638

Bari Weiss was a star at the NYC Solidarity March on Sunday! Watch her on video as she was interviewed by CNN walking over the Brooklyn Bridge (it’s a worthwhile five minutes), and read her speech (today’s featured article). She did not disappoint!

Colin Kaepernick mourns the death of a terrorist because of the color of his skin (one really can’t make this stuff up)!

Kaepernick had some choice words about the early Friday killing of Soleimani, which was ordered by President Donald Trump. “There is nothing new about American terrorist attacks against Black and Brown people for the expansion of American imperialism,” the football player wrote in a tweet published at about 3 p.m. Saturday. A minute later, Kaepernick followed up with another tweet accusing the United States of using its military might to enforce its will onto non-white people. “America has always sanctioned and besieged Black and Brown bodies both at home and abroad,” he wrote. “America militarism is the weapon wielded by American imperialism, to enforce its policing and plundering of the non white world.” (Newsweek, Jan 5);

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Iran, Again By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/death-to-america-iran-philosophy-for-40-years/

“Nothing else has gotten the United States to the point it desires — where the Iranian regime either drops “Death to America” as a slogan, a goal, and a philosophy, or everyone can genuinely rest assured that it is merely rote agitprop. The strike on Soleimani was something new — an experiment of sorts to see if it can generate the results that 40 years of other approaches have failed to generate. Let’s all hope that a new spirit of caution and prudence takes root in Tehran.”

For 40 years, Tehran’s philosophy has been simple and direct: ‘Death to America!’

S ince 1979, no one in the United States has figured out a good way to handle the regime in Tehran. For 40 years, we’ve been having the same arguments, and no matter what we tried, the results were disappointing.

It is hard to overstate just how spectacularly unprepared the U.S. government was for the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The House Intelligence Committee revealed in a January 1979 report that two CIA long-term analyses written in the late 1970s had left policymakers with the impression that the rule of American-aligned Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was stable and strong. The House report cited a 60-page study from August 1977, titled “Iran in the 1980s,” that predicted that “the Shah will be an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s” and “there will be no radical change in Iranian political behavior in the near future.” The House also cited the CIA’s separate assessment in 1978, in its report titled “Iran After the Shah,” that “Iran is not in a revolutionary situation or even a ‘pre-revolutionary’ situation.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Martyrdom of Saint Greta of Sweden By Charlie Martin

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-martyrdom-of-saint-greta-of-sweden/

So Meat Loaf caused a little kerfuffle this weekend by saying he thought Greta Thunberg had been “brainwashed.”

I don’t know that should be a surprise, but it got me thinking about her again. I have a lot of sympathy for the kid.

For me, it started with seeing her picture. She’s small, slight, even scrawny; her head looks out of proportion to her body. She’s now 17 (as of 3 January) but she still looks childlike, prepubertal, younger than her 14-year-old sister. Frankly, she looks like she’s been in a concentration camp: malnourished over the long term.

Sure enough, reading a little about her, we find that she’s an Asperger’s child (I guess this month that’s now called “high-functioning autism”), she has obsessive-compulsive disorder, she stopped eating for months and still refuses to eat anything but certain specific things, in particular, a dish of pancakes filled with rice — but her OCD keeps her from eating if there’s a sticker or label on the package. She suffers from “selective mutism”, which means basically that there are situations in which she’s unable to speak.

She’s said that this means she only “speaks when she thinks it’s necessary.” This includes speaking to the UN General Assembly, but in interviews, her mother often speaks for her.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Golden Globes 2020: Ricky Gervais hits Hollywood stars exactly where it hurts By Kyle Smith *****

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://nypost.com/2020/01/05/golden-globes-2020-ricky-gervais-hits-hollywood-stars-exactly-where-it-hurts/

How Hollywood sees itself: dedicated craftsmen, important artists, world thought leaders. How Ricky Gervais (and everyone else) sees them: criminals, perverts and dopes — a gang of pretentious jerkwads who dropped out of high school when people noticed they were pretty, then mistakenly started to think their insights on world affairs matter. Hired to host the Golden Globes for the fifth and last time, Gervais saw it as his duty to tell Hollywood to eff off, and that’s exactly what he did. All those comics who think they’re “bold,” they “bite the hand that feeds them,” they “speak truth to power” — this is how it’s done.

“Let’s have a laugh — at your expense,” Ricky the G warned the roomful of celebrities, machers and blowhards in the only awards show that’s worth watching anymore because it’s the only one that would think of hiring someone like Gervais to host it. Thank you, thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and yes, you have my permission to print this column in the Bulgarian scandal sheets and Azerbaijani websites you work for.

Gervais (slugging what looked like a pint of beer but probably wasn’t) told the swells that if the Academy Awards could fire Kevin Hart for having made offensive tweets in the past, the Globes should have taken the hint. “Hello?’ Gervais said. ”Lucky for me the Hollywood Foreign Press can barely speak English.” He mentioned arriving in a limo and said, “Felicity Huffman made the license plate.” Ouch. Half the people in that room worked with Felicity Huffman and probably a lot more than half pulled strings to get their kids into college. Gervais was as welcome as a guy who breaks wind in an elevator. Tom Hanks looked like he’d just had a bowl of arsenic bisque. He looked almost as bad as I did when I watched “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump’s Ground Game Against Iran The assassination of Qassim Suleimani is a seismic event in the Middle East. By Michael Doran

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/opinion/trump-iran-suleimani-assassination-b

More than any other American military operation since the invasion of Iraq, the assassination yesterday of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Qods Force of its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, is a seismic event. The killings of Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leaders of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, were certainly meaningful, but they were also largely symbolic, because their organizations had been mostly destroyed. Taking out the architect of the Islamic Republic’s decades-long active campaign of violence against the United States and its allies, especially Israel, represents a tectonic shift in Middle Eastern politics.

To see just how significant Mr. Suleimani’s death truly is, it helps to understand the geopolitical game he’d devoted his life to playing. In Lebanon, Mr. Suleimani built Lebanese Hezbollah into the powerful state within a state that we know today. A terrorist organization receiving its funds, arms and marching orders from Tehran, Hezbollah has a missile arsenal larger than that of most countries in the region. The group’s success has been astounding, helping to cement Iran’s influence not just in Lebanon but farther around the Arab world.

Building up on this successful experience, Mr. Suleimani spent the last decade replicating the Hezbollah model in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, propping up local militias with precision weapons and tactical know-how. In Syria, his forces have allied with Russia to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad, a project that, in practice, has meant driving over 10 million people from their homes and killing well over half a million. In Iraq, as we have seen in recent days, Mr. Suleimani’s militias ride roughshod over the legitimate state institutions. They rose to power, of course, after participating in an insurgency, of which he was the architect, against American and coalition forces. Hundreds of American soldiers lost their lives to the weapons that the Qods Force provided to its Iraqi proxies.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Will the Iran-US Confrontation Spiral Out of Control? Even the Experts Don’t Know Charles Lipson

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://spectator.us/iran-us-confrontation-spiral-control-experts/

Escalation poses major risks for both Tehran and Washington — and they both know it

Politicians and policy experts tell us, with confidence, that America’s targeted killing of Qasem Soleimani makes the world safer — or more dangerous. Take your pick. Whatever answer they give, the talking heads sound very certain. They shouldn’t be. However deep their understanding of Iran, the Middle East, and US foreign policy, nobody really knows what will happen next.

The problem is simply too complex. It depends on a sequence of difficult decisions, first by Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and then by President Donald Trump, each responding to the other’s choices, each calculating the risks of going too far — or not far enough.

The next decision is Tehran’s. Khamenei and his advisers face enormous pressure to strike back after Soleimani’s death, both because he was so important and because the United States openly took credit for the killing. The Revolutionary Guard and its elite Quds Force, which Soleimani led, will demand decisive action. They work directly for the Ayatollah and are essential to the regime’s continuation. Their demands will surely resonate with the supreme leader. He knows, too, that a weak response would undermine the regime’s authority at home and its reputation across the region.

So, Khamenei is almost certain to act and to go beyond the opportunistic announcement that Iran will resume its nuclear enrichment program. The most fundamental question he faces is how far to go. Is he willing to risk a major military escalation, which could put the regime itself in jeopardy? The choice involves several related questions: should Iran act with its own military forces or rely on proxies and terrorist cells? How big should its actions be? Should it use its navy to block oil shipments through the Straits of Hormuz? Does Iran dare undertake the riskiest escalation of all, directly attacking American targets?

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Water Leakage, Water Loss, Ends With Curapipe By Nurit Greenger

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://newsblaze.com/business/latest-business/curapipe-ends-water-leaks_161161/

The state of Israel has become a world center for inventions and technology, cyber, science, and startup companies.

Ben Shenkar

Ben Shenkar, Curapipe CEO, is  deeply involved in our world’s ecosystem. Subsequently, he is involved in the developmental innovations, related to his advocacy in this field. In a Skype interview, I spent a longer than usual time with Ben and have learned  how large and worldwide is the loss of water problem.

Ben, an MBA economist, joined Curapipe four years ago. The company is based in Israel, founded by a group of PhDs in physics and chemistry in 2007. Ben’s textile industrialist family background is impressive, among which is worth mentioning the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, in Ramat Gan, Israel.

The family formerly operated a multi-million dollar value ‘made in Israel‘ textile items industry which sold its goods to major US brands. When the economy in Israel changed, 12 years ago, the family sold its factories and Ben, with manufacturing and large scale operations background, moved to other, more fitting businesses, such as renewable and solar energy, social media marketing and investment opportunities.

With that change in business direction, Ben came across Curapipe which he first joined as an investor. But with his business drive, he wanted to have more impact on the company’s direction, to contribute, in many aspects, to the way the startup Curapipe was heading.

Two years ago, a large South African mining company decided to divest from coal and venture into other business, investing a sizeable sum in Curapipe. That gave the company the impetus to be able to move forward with significant business steps.

What is Curapipe

What if water loss could be reduced by at least 75% and in the process save energy?

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Some Perspective On Iran  Francis Menton

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-5-some-perspective-on-iran

As you probably know, over the course of several weeks in December Iranian proxies known as the Kataib Hezbollah carried out multiple attacks against military installations in Iraq. On December 27, one of those attacks killed an American contractor, and wounded several other Americans and Iraqis, at the K1 military base near Kurkuk. Then on December 31 the same Iran-backed group stormed the U.S. embassy compound in Baghdad. On January 3, the U.S. military, under orders from President Trump, conducted a retaliatory strike that killed the leader of Iran’s so-called Quds Forces, Qasem Soleimani. Subsequently, Iran has threatened further rounds of retaliation against the U.S., although those have not occurred as of this writing.

Before getting too caught up in the tensions of the current moment, perhaps we should step back and look at how things have been going lately for Iran. The answer is, not very well. This is one of those things that you can figure out if you look around enough, but rarely is the information compiled in one place. So I’ll do it for you. As I have remarked before, the U.S. has been incredibly blessed over the years by the rank incompetence of its geopolitical adversaries. Think Russia, Cuba and North Korea as examples. China too, although I’ll save more detail on that one for a future post.

Iran’s population in 2020 (from worldometers.info) is just under 84 million. That is slightly more than 1% of world population, and makes Iran the second most populous country in the Middle East, after Egypt. And Iran has the seeming blessing of vast oil reserves.

So you would think that Iran would have a relatively large and growing economy. Not so. Iran’s GDP (IMF 2019 estimate) is only $458 billion, or about 0.57% of world GDP, and just over $5000 per capita. (For comparison, the per capita GDP of Mexico and China are around $10,000, Brazil about $9000, and the U.S. over $60,000.).

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

FBI ABUSE, MORE BLACK AMERICANS GOING TO THE GOP, TRUMP DOCTRINE HUMILIATES ENEMIES AND THE LEFT

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

Inspector General Report Shows Special Counsel Replicated FBI Abuse
Margot Cleveland

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/06/inspector-general-report-shows-special-counsel-replicated-fbi-abuses/

Shortly after the release of the special counsel report last year, I posited that Robert Mueller’s failure to investigate whether Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election by feeding dossier author Christopher Steele disinformation established that Mueller was either incompetent or a political hack. Now, with the release of the inspector general’s report on FISA abuse, we know the answer: He was both.

Black Americans are coming home to the GOP Rebecca Hagelin

www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/5/black-americans-are-coming-home-gop/

They are bold, compassionate leaders who believe that every person is created equal by God himself. They understand that every human life has infinite value and limitless potential. They have suffered from some sort of discrimination — but are not bitter. Instead, they seek reconciliation, believe in redemption, and work to advance a more just society. They know that hard work, economic freedom, the preservation of the traditional family, and reducing government control are the keys to success.

And they are black Americans who support the policies of President Trump.

The Trump Doctrine Humiliates Both Foreign Enemies and Domestic Liberals
Kurt Schlichter,

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2020/01/06/the-trump-doctrine-humiliates-both-foreign-enemies-and-domestic-liberals-n2558968?

This has been a really difficult time for Ben Rhodes, John Kerry, and the rest of the geniuses who zombie Neville Chamberlain recently hailed as “a flock of insufferable sissies crowded around the behind of America’s enemy, shamelessly smooching their dignity away.” Zapping Qassam Soleimani ruined an Iranian offensive that had started with such promise. When the dirtbag catspaws of the dirtbag Iranian mullahs surrounded the American embassy in Baghdad, American liberals were more excited than the old Weekly Standard’s staff would have been upon discovering that it was sharing one of its cruises with a pool boy and sexy gardener convention. Libs and their Fredocon submissives were practically salivating at the thought of fellow Americans being murdered by scuzzy foreigners and the opportunity such a tragedy would present for blaming Donald Trump. This was Trump’s Benghazi test, they chortled on social media.

 Yeah, except Trump passed his test.