Turkey

Americans have a broad and heavy bias away from unpleasant data. We are ready to be manipulated by vested interests in finance, economics, and climate change, whose interests might be better served by our believing optimistic stuff "that just ain’t so." We are dealing today with important issues, one so important that it may affect the long-term viability of our global society and perhaps our species. It may well be necessary to our survival that we become more realistic, more willing to process the unpleasant, and, above all, less easily manipulated through our need for good news.

One lesson from military history is that once mobilization for war begins, it takes on a momentum of its own and is uncontrollable. This might be what is occuring unrecognized before our eyes.

From the time a Russian three star general strolled into the US embassy in Baghdad and informed the staff that airstrikes “start in one hour,” the rapidity with which Putin’s forces have established a base, sent in equipment, and launched a coordinated campaign with the IRGC and Hezbollah has been nothing short of astonishing.

Well, Sure ... But We Should Keep 'Em In NATO Because, Um ... They Make a MEAN Lamb Kabob!

Having won Time's "Person of the Year" award, German chancellor Angela Merkel may have little time, or cause, for celebration. The reason for that is shown in the chart below.

This afternoon we got another completely amorphous claim from The Pentagon regarding the death of a “senior” ISIS commander when Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL (whatever that is) Brett McGurk took to Twiiter to announce the death of an Islamic State FinMin.

After yesterday's rollercoaster session in both the S&P and in oil, where initially stocks soared alongside oil, only to promptly tumble as stops were taken out and as the refiners' inventory strategy was exposed after the DOE's latest weekly numbers were released, it has been a quieter session so far, though maybe not for China where stocks jumped at the open only to fizzle and close at the lows in what appears to be ever less intervention by the market manipulating "National Team."

With Turkey and Iraq still at odds over the former's deployment of between 150 and 300 troops along with two dozen tanks to Bashiqa, Russia told the Security Council on Tuesday that Ankara is acting "recklessly and inexplicably." Of course Moscow has a powerful friend among the five permanent members and on Wdnesday, Beijing weighed in on the Turkish troop issue for the first time.

“The government and parliament need to review the agreement signed with the United States on security because the United States does not seriously care about its fulfillment, We demand that it be annulled." 

"This new, modern, highly efficient, and highly precise weapon can be equipped with both a conventional warhead as well as a special, nuclear warhead.  Naturally, in the fight against terrorism that is not needed and I hope there will be no need [to use nukes against the Islamic State]."

- Vladimir Putin

Send a Million Troops From All Over the World Pouring Into Raqqa

According to one US soldier who fought in Mosul from 2005 to 2006, all of the "loose talk" about retaking the city from ISIS is wishful thinking. "Look at the stories from Fallujah — a city that is 20 percent the size of Mosul," he cautions adding that even if the city could be captured and sealed off from ISIS supply lines, troops would need to "settle in for a siege and a ten-year war of attrition."