Israel

Westerners have a deep history of a culture of myths (see Joseph Campbell).  We love to believe in Santa Claus, "The American Dream," the Tooth Fairy, housing market always goes up, and countless others.  So it's easy for us to be 'terrorized' by a myth; that hiding behind every corner are evil 'terrorists' waiting to blow themselves up because 'they hate our freedoms.' 

Should Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ever set foot inside Spain, he - and six other current and former Israeli government officials - would be subject to arrest, thanks to a Spanish judge who effectively issued an arrest warrant for the group late last week.

America’s leading Sunni ally is proving how easily hubris, delusion, and old-fashioned ineptitude can trump even bottomless wealth.

“Soon, very soon,“the blood will spill like an ocean.”

"We will uproot the state of the Jews. You and Fatah, and all of the secularists are nothing. You will be overrun by our creeping multitudes,”

According to the U.S. State Government 2013-2015 Foreign Assistance report, an estimated $5.9 billion was spent on foreign military funding alone in fiscal year 2014.  This is equivalent to 17% of the estimated $35 billion spent on total global aid discussed in our previous article. U.S. foreign military aid to countries ranged from $200,000 to $3.1 billion. Of the top 10 recipients, two countries received 75% of the $5.9 billion.

Empires, like adolescents, think they’ll live forever. In geopolitics, as in biology, expiration dates are never visible. When death comes, it’s always a shock. "At the beginning of the great unraveling, in 2015, I was still a young man. Like everyone else, I didn’t see this coming. Today, in 2050, fewer and fewer people can recall what it was like to live among those leviathans... Thirty-five years and endless catastrophes later on a poorer, bleaker, less hospitable planet, it’s clear that we just weren’t paying sufficient attention. Had we been listening, we would have heard the termites. There, in the basement of our common home, they were eating the very foundations out from under us. Suddenly, before we knew quite what was happening, all that was solid had melted into air."

“By sanctioning a ‘shoot first, think later’ approach to policing, the Court renders protections of the Fourth Amendment hollow.”

There was a time when there were needs, and there were wants, and we knew the difference. Now? Now, no such boundaries exist. Your 4,000 Facebook friends should know if you can’t pay for your rent - or your plastic surgery. And who knows? They may just pay up.

If Americans Only Knew ...

"There's no point in other countries getting together and deciding about a system of government and the head of that state. This is a dangerous innovation which no government in the world would accept being imposed on itself. The solution to Syria's problem is elections."

Epic fail...

It appears that Washington, ever a seething cauldron of bright ideas, is looking for a shooting war with China, or perhaps trying to make the Chinese kowtow and back down, the pretext being some rocks in the Pacific in which the United States cannot possibly have a vital national interest. Or, really, any interest. If Washington somehow won a naval war with China, so what? It would provide the satisfactions of vanity, but China’s danger to the US imperium lies in increasing economic power and commercial expansion through Asia, where it holds the high cards: it is there, Washington isn’t.

Most investors don’t take kindly to change. “The market” chooses to stay in the here and now; each human component vibrant and alert while the whole is passive and inert…like a herd of wildebeests, protected by its mass and collective wisdom that each one of them is statistically safe from lions as long as they stay together.

The United States provided approximately $35 billion in economic aid to over 140 countries in fiscal year 2014. The question is: Who received the largest slice of the pie from the U.S.?