national security

Israelis will elect a new parliament March 17. As WaPo notes, the main contest pits the right-wing Likud party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against a surprisingly strong challenge from the Zionist Union, a center-left political alliance led by Isaac Herzog of the Labor party. Polls place Herzog's bloc ahead of Likud, but that's no guarantee of victory. Since Israel's first election in 1949, no single party has ever won an outright majority in the 120-seat Knesset, the name for the Israeli parliament. That means smaller political parties -- and there are 26 in total -- play a significant role in shaping the ruling coalition that forms the Israeli government after the ballots get counted. There appear to be three main scenarios for Israel's next coalition...

The American Empire has been long in the making. A green light was given in 1990 to finalize that goal. Dramatic events occurred that year that allowed the promoters of the American Empire to cheer. It also ushered in the current 25-year war to solidify the power necessary to manage a world empire. The day will come when we will be forced to give up our role as world policeman and resort to using a little common sense and come home. This will only occur when the American people realize that our presence around the world and the maintenance of our empire has nothing to do with defending our Constitution, preserving our liberties, or fulfilling some imaginary obligation on our part to use force to spread American exceptionalism. A thorough look at our economic conditions, our pending bankruptcy, our veterans hospitals, and how we’re viewed in the world by most other nations, will compel Americans to see things differently and insist that we bring our troops home – the sooner the better.

In the discourse of statists, there is a group of phrases of which one or more tend to be present in nearly every argument. While this is not an exhaustive listing of that group, it does contain twenty-five of the most common phrases that statists use in their arguments. As propaganda has a tendency to be repetitive, some of these phrases contain the same logical fallacies, and will therefore have similar refutations...

The UK has announced it’s joining the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China’s answer to the Asian Development Bank over which Beijing feels the US has undue influence. US wonders aloud if "constant accommodation" is the best way to engage a "rising power".

"The amount a state needs to expend on guard labor is a function of how much legitimacy the state holds in its population’s reckoning... Why spy? Because it’s cheaper than playing fair. Our networks have given the edge to the elites, and unless we seize the means of information, we are headed for a long age of IT-powered feudalism."

In an attempt to secure some stability, i.e., funds, now that Venezuela is no longer able to tap Chinese bailout loans as last-recourse funding, Reuters reported that Venezuela's central bank is in talks with Wall Street banks to create a gold swap that would allow it to monetize some $1.5 billion of the metal held as international reserves, according to government sources familiar with the operation.  Under the swap, the central bank would provide 1.4 million troy ounces in exchange for cash.

Russians view the United States much more unfavorably today than they did during the end of the Cold War era.  As you will read about below, an astounding 81 percent of all Russians now view the United States negatively, and only 13 percent have a positive opinion of this country.  In all of the years when Russians have been surveyed on their attitudes toward the U.S., they have never been this negative.  But of course Americans generally do not view the Russian people unfavorably.  Even while most Americans are extremely apathetic about what is going on over in Russia, an increasingly large chunk of the Russian population is angry enough to go to war.

Today, the founders of Wikipeia announced they are filing a lawsuit against the National Security Agency "to protect the rights of the 500 million people who use Wikipedia every month. We’re doing so because a fundamental pillar of democracy is at stake: the free exchange of knowledge and ideas.  Our lawsuit says that the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance of Internet traffic on American soil — often called “upstream” surveillance — violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects the right to privacy, as well as the First Amendment, which protects the freedoms of expression and association. We also argue that this agency activity exceeds the authority granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that Congress amended in 2008."

Perhaps because the soap-opera factor of the puppet proxy civil war in east Ukraine is dying down, it is time for another geopolitical diversion, and it appears that the administration's attention this time has fallen on Venezuela. Yesterday Obama issued and signed the executive order which declared Venezuela a national security threat and ordered sanctions against seven officials. Maduro had a prompt response: "President Barack Obama, representing the US imperialist elite, has personally decided to take on the task of defeating my government and intervening in Venezuela to control it,”and "I have put together a special law that gives me special powers to preserve the peace, the integrity and the sovereignty of the country before any situation that presents itself due to this imperialist aggression.”

While Russia's envoy to NATO notes that statements by the deputy head of NATO testify to the fact that the leaders of the bloc want to intervene in Russia’s internal politics, and are "dreaming of Russian Maidan," Washington has a bigger problem... Germany. As Der Spiegel reports, while US President Obama 'supports' Chancellor Merkel's efforts at finding a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis, hawks in Washington seem determined to torpedo Berlin's approach. And NATO's top commander in Europe hasn't been helping either with sources in the Chancellery have referred to Breedlove's comments as "dangerous propaganda."

Yeah but apart from that, US-China relations are excellent. Following President Obama's barbed comments aimed at China's new counter-terrorism laws (and their implications for US tech companies - as NSA spying 'facts' reduce China's appetite for American-made IT products), Beijing has blasted back. In one of the least holds-barred undiploatic statements in recent times, China (speaking through its official mouthpiece Xinhua), calls Obama's criticism "utterly groundless and another piece of evidence of arrogance and hypocrisy of the U.S. foreign policy." And with that they are just getting started...

In a 'ripped from The Onion'-esque headline, WSJ reports that David Petraeus - the former director of the US Central Intelligence Agency - will plead guilty to a charge of mishandling classified information. The reitred military general, whose career was cut short by a very public affair with his biographer, reached a plea deal over sharing unauthorized information with her, in order to avoid an embarrassing trial. To summarize, the man trusted with all of the America's most secret secrets just plead guilty to pillow-talk-sharing of classified information...

While the Hillary Clinton campaign seems unperturbed by recent problematic disclosures by Politico into the Hillary Clinton Foundation, the former first lady and current democrat presidential hopeful will have a field day explaining why, as the NYT reported overnight, Hillary - in her role as Secretary of State - "exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business" according to State Department officials in violation of "federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record." Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

The poet W.B. Yeats was right in 1919 when he said the center cannot hold, as if, following the first great industrial slaughter of modern times, he discovered the lethal vacuum at the center of modernity itself. Although, perhaps most remarkable in our time is not merely the presence of evil, but the eerie dearth of heroes.

Like the Ukrainian Sniper Murders