zangtang » Thu Dec 03, 2015 3:14 pm wrote:almost time, one would have thought, for a hugely distracting
thermo/hyperbaric explosion somewhere......hugely distracting.
Well, we had exactly that here in the USA. The timing was perfect. SQUIRRELL!!
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by Nordic » Fri Dec 04, 2015 5:14 am
zangtang » Thu Dec 03, 2015 3:14 pm wrote:almost time, one would have thought, for a hugely distracting
thermo/hyperbaric explosion somewhere......hugely distracting.
by AlicetheKurious » Fri Dec 04, 2015 6:20 am
Putin during a press conference.
A CNN reporter asks, with a rude smile, "Is it not true that President Obama has demanded the removal of President Bashar Al-Assad?"
Putin's response:
"I contacted President Bashar Al-Assad yesterday. And coincidentally, he demanded the removal of President Barack Obama. And now I'm thinking, which one of them will be the one to go? I'll tell you: it would be best if Erdogan were removed. It's a good compromise. And to replace Erdogan, we can appoint Zhirinovsky as president of Turkey. It's a good idea, especially since he is quite knowledgeable about Turkey, its local culture and customs. In fact, I think it's an excellent idea. Any more questions?"
In the conference hall, there was complete silence for 26.5 seconds. The voice of Peskov (Dmitry Peskov, Putin's press spokesman) broke the silence to say, "Very well. Since it appears that there are no more questions, this conference is ended."
Nutcase Vladimir Zhirinovsky Tells Putin To NUKE Istanbul In Revenge For Downing Of Jet Bomber By Turkey
An enraged Russian politician urged Vladimir Putin to drop a NUCLEAR BOMB on Istanbul as revenge for Turkey shooting down a jet bomber.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky called for the extermination of nine million by annihilating the Turkish city during a radio interview.
“A nuclear attack can destroy Istanbul very easily. Just one nuclear bomb in the Istanbul Strait will wash the city away,” he told Moscow Speaking Radio.
It is not the first time the wild man of Russian politics has made controversial and shocking statements.
He attacked a pregnant journalist during a press conference, telling an aide to “rape the woman hard”.
Zhirinovsky is seen ranting at Stella Dubovitskaya who needed to be treated in hospital for shock afterwards, telling her she should stay at home instead of going to work.
The reporter for state-funded Russia Today asked a question, leading the far right Liberal Democratic Party founder to shout the obscenities.
At one point he pushes two male aides towards her shouting: “When I say, you run to her and rape the woman hard” and “Go and kiss her. Grab her.”
Zhirinovsky also apologised later on Russian TV and offered to pay any of Dubovitskaya’s medical bills.
He also reacted furiously to bearded lady Conchita Wurst’s Eurovision win, branding it “the end of Europe”. Link
At a press conference in April, when asked whether Russians should reciprocate the Ukrainian sex strike,[61] he replied that all Ukrainian women were "nymphomaniacs" like the journalist who had asked the question, Stella Dubovitskaya.[62] He then ordered two of his aides to "violently rape" the pregnant journalist for Rossiya Segodnya, who had to be briefly hospitalised for shock.[63] He later apologised with "I spoke a bit rudely when I replied to a young woman".[62] Link
by zangtang » Fri Dec 04, 2015 7:41 am
by Sounder » Fri Dec 04, 2015 8:02 am
And just who is this Vladimir Zhirinovsky? He's the Russian Donald Trump, on meth.
by Nordic » Fri Dec 04, 2015 8:11 am
zangtang » Fri Dec 04, 2015 6:41 am wrote:Hi Nordic, not familiar with the 'squirrell' call, so will assume (always dangerous, & in my limited experience particularly when on the cusp of a 3rd world war few of us will survive)
that it means......
'drop your nuts & run for the woods' ?
by zangtang » Fri Dec 04, 2015 8:24 am
by conniption » Sat Dec 05, 2015 9:00 am
AlicetheKurious » Fri Dec 04, 2015 3:20 am wrote:This has been circulating widely on FB, in Arabic. It's unsourced and may or may not be factual, though it rings true.Putin during a press conference.
A CNN reporter asks, with a rude smile, "Is it not true that President Obama has demanded the removal of President Bashar Al-Assad?"
Putin's response:
"I contacted President Bashar Al-Assad yesterday. And coincidentally, he demanded the removal of President Barack Obama. And now I'm thinking, which one of them will be the one to go? I'll tell you: it would be best if Erdogan were removed. It's a good compromise. And to replace Erdogan, we can appoint Zhirinovsky as president of Turkey. It's a good idea, especially since he is quite knowledgeable about Turkey, its local culture and customs. In fact, I think it's an excellent idea. Any more questions?"
In the conference hall, there was complete silence for 26.5 seconds. The voice of Peskov (Dmitry Peskov, Putin's press spokesman) broke the silence to say, "Very well. Since it appears that there are no more questions, this conference is ended."
And just who is this Vladimir Zhirinovsky? He's the Russian Donald Trump, on meth.
RT
How Britain killed democracy: Illegal wars and terror wars
Catherine Shakdam
Catherine Shakdam is a political analyst, writer and commentator for the Middle East with a special focus on radical movements and Yemen. A regular pundit on RT and other networks her work has appeared in major publications: MintPress, the Foreign Policy Journal, Mehr News and many others.Director of Programs at the Shafaqna Institute for Middle Eastern Studies, Catherine is also the co-founder of Veritas Consulting. She is the author of Arabia’s Rising - Under The Banner Of The First Imam
Published time: 4 Dec, 2015
Anti-war protesters demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament in London, December 2, 2015. © Neil Hall / Reuters
And so it has begun … shortly after British Prime Minister David Cameron manipulated his way to war, Britain dispatched its first planes to Syria, pounding, officials have confirmed, those targets London identified as radical hideouts.
“I can confirm that four British Tornados were in action after the vote last night attacking oilfields in eastern Syria – the Omar oilfields – from which the Daesh terrorists receive a huge part of their revenue,” Defence Secretary Michael Fallon told the BBC on Thursday, adding: “This strikes a very real blow at the oil and the revenue on which the Daesh terrorists depend.”
But there’s more, Britain is already gearing up for a much larger military deployment as it wants to commit eight additional jets - two Tornados and six Typhoons - to its operations in Syria.
Without so much as a mention of international law, or even an acknowledgement of Syria’s territorial sovereignty, Fallon was only too eager to note how Britain was finally meeting the coalition’s military needs by stepping up its military involvement.
“We are doubling our strike force. The additional eight aircraft being sent to Akrotiri are now in the air and on their way … These are the aircraft the coalition has been asking for,” said the Defense Secretary.
And so here we are, contemplating yet another war against yet another country in the name of lady national security - this elusive siren neocons have serenaded for the past decade, arguing cataclysmic plagues to a gullible public should they fail to intervene.
And intervene they did! If anything in this past decade, intervention has been a constant - the very matrix upon which national and foreign policies have been weaved upon and arched towards.
But intervention against whom? Or rather, intervention against what principles?
Britain’s latest declaration of war on the Syrian nation, which nation I’d like to note never once warranted such ire, did not just sound another chapter in Western interventionism in the Middle East, it very much spelled out the end of Western democracy.
Over dramatic you say? Britain is standing up to terror so that democracy can ring in those corners of the world where only tyranny has ruled you say? I would suggest you take a good look around because democracy reigns no more …. it hasn’t for a very long time.
Ask yourself this: how did Britain get its war? What events allowed for war’s sponsors to position themselves as the voice of reason? In times of great fear, ignorance leads, for passions and not reason are running the argument.
And since fear is all that Britain, Europe and the Western world can think about, breathe and debate, warmongers are holding nations hostage, masquerading political and social radicalization for democracy and free speech.
A lot can be said of a government which labels its political detractors terror sympathizers. A lot can be said of a government which holds closest to its heart those allies whose behavior is disturbingly in sync with terror. And a lot can be said of those powers which deny one nation’s sovereign rights so that they could increase the breadth of their own.
Western powers have played by terror’s rules for so long it has become difficult to differentiate between the two - only maybe that one has yet to become institutionalized.
Who needs democracy when all is required is the illusion of one? Men are best kept in those cages they cannot feel or touch.
Only Britain is starting to look like a rather disturbing democratic devolution.
Britain sold its war to parliament; bullying its MPs into playing the establishment’s game, thus denying the public the luxury of a real democracy.
Police stand guard as anti-war protestors demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament in London, December 2, 2015. © Peter Nicholls / Reuters
In all fairness, war in Syria was always going to happen! It is likely Cameron and Co. would have found other means and arguments to back, push and legitimize their calls for more military intervention, should Jeremy Corbyn have presented a stronger front.
Never mind the collateral damage and lives such a decision will ultimately cost, and never mind the petty legalities if it means conglomerates are there to earn a profit.
Britain was going to have its war regardless … Britain’s hawks were always going to engineer those narratives which would permit war to become a seemingly worthy alternative - not even a well-meaning Jeremy Corbyn could ever have hoped to bring sanity in a system which strives on irrationality.
And though many in Britain will feel betrayed by Mr. Corbyn, to his credit, he did play by democracy’s rules, allowing his party members to act according to their beliefs, and not political obligation.
At the end of the day, war won the argument, stealing the very narrative which should have cemented political cooperation over military intervention.
“We are here faced by fascists,” Hilary Benn, the Shadow Foreign Secretary told MPs on Wednesday. No argument there …
He went on: "Not just their calculated brutality but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us in this Chamber tonight and all of the people that we represent. They hold us in contempt. They hold our values in contempt. They hold our belief in tolerance and decency in contempt.”
This is the speech which drew MPs to tears and allowed for Syria’s life to be sentenced away.
So I’m asking: whose fascism, and whose terror? Who is holding who in contempt when it is Western capitals which refuse so categorically to value those foreign lives they perceive as lesser than their own?
There is no legitimate ground for war in Syria - not when it means bypassing its sovereignty, not without risking turning into those very radicals we claim to oppose.
There are more than one form of fascism and more than one form of radicalism - and where Daesh holds the religious ground, Britain and other Western powers certainly have claimed ultra-capitalism their own.
If few will indeed argue that terror needs to be addressed, should be destroyed and more importantly ought to be crushed, if ever, peace and stability are to be restored to the Middle East, the jury remains very much out when it comes to identifying those servants of terror.
This war in Syria serves unfettered capitalism interests, not democracy. This war on Syria was declared so that corporations could better carve and chop at those resources, those political holdings capitalist view as their birthrights.
The UK, like many other Western capitals, are increasingly acting like a despot against their own people, using a language of fear and ostracization to push their policies.
Let’s not speak Democracy when policies continue to be driven, dictated and directed by financial conglomerates.
LISTEN MORE: ...
by conniption » Wed Dec 09, 2015 8:09 am
counter punch
December 8, 2015
Syria: Ultimate Pipelineistan War
by Pepe Escobar
Syria is an energy war. With the heart of the matter featuring a vicious geopolitical competition between two proposed gas pipelines, it is the ultimate Pipelinestan war, the term I coined long ago for the 21st century imperial energy battlefields.
It all started in 2009, when Qatar proposed to Damascus the construction of a pipeline from its own North Field – contiguous with the South Pars field, which belongs to Iran – traversing Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria all the way to Turkey, to supply the EU.
Damascus, instead, chose in 2010 to privilege a competing project, the $10 billion Iran-Iraq-Syria, also know as «Islamic pipeline». The deal was formally announced in July 2011, when the Syrian tragedy was already in motion. In 2012, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed with Iran.
Until then, Syria was dismissed, geo-strategically, as not having as much oil and gas compared to the GCC petrodollar club. But insiders already knew about its importance as a regional energy corridor. Later on, this was enhanced with the discovery of serious offshore oil and gas potential.
Iran for its part is an established oil and gas powerhouse. Persistent rumblings in Brussels – still unable to come up with a unified European energy policy after over 10 years – did account for barely contained excitement over the Islamic pipeline; that would be the ideal strategy to diversify from Gazprom. But Iran was under US and EU nuclear-related sanctions.
That ended up turning into a key strategic reason, at least for the Europeans, for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear dossier; a «rehabilitated» (to the West) Iran is able to become a key source of energy to the EU.
Yet, from the point of view of Washington, a geostrategic problem lingered: how to break the Tehran-Damascus alliance. And ultimately, how to break the Tehran-Moscow alliance.
The «Assad must go» obsession in Washington is a multi-headed hydra. It includes breaking a Russia-Iran-Iraq-Syria alliance (now very much in effect as the «4+1» alliance, including Hezbollah, actively fighting all strands of Salafi Jihadism in Syria). But it also includes isolating energy coordination among them, to the benefit of the Gulf petrodollar clients/vassals linked to US energy giants.
Thus Washington’s strategy so far of injecting the proverbial Empire of Chaos logic into Syria; feeding the flames of internal chaos, a pre-planed op by the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with the endgame being regime change in Damascus.
An Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline is unacceptable in the Beltway not only because US vassals lose, but most of all because in currency war terms it would bypass the petrodollar. Iranian gas from South Pars would be traded in an alternative basket of currencies.
Compound it with the warped notion, widely held in the Beltway, that this pipeline would mean Russia further controlling the gas flow from Iran, the Caspian Sea and Central Asia. Nonsense. Gazprom already said it would be interested in some aspects of the deal, but this is essentially an Iranian project. In fact, this pipeline would represent an alternative to Gazprom.
Still, the Obama administration’s position was always to «support» the Qatar pipeline «as a way to balance Iran» and at the same time «diversify Europe’s gas supplies away from Russia.» So both Iran and Russia were configured as «the enemy».
Turkey at crossroads
Qatar’s project, led by Qatar Petroleum, predictably managed to seduce assorted Europeans, taking account of vast US pressure and Qatar’s powerful lobbies in major European capitals. The pipeline would ply some of the route of a notorious Pipelineistan opera, the now defunct Nabucco, a project formerly headquartered in Vienna.
So implicitly, from the beginning, the EU was actually supporting the push towards regime change in Damascus – which so far may have cost Saudi Arabia and Qatar at least $4 billion (and counting). It was a scheme very similar to the 1980s Afghan jihad; Arabs financing/weaponizing a multinational bunch of jihadis/mercenaries, helped by a strategic go-between (Pakistan in the case of Afghanistan, Turkey in the case of Syria), but now directly fighting a secular Arab republic.
It got much rougher, of course, with the US, UK, France and Israel progressively turbo-charging all manner of covert ops privileging «moderate» rebels and otherwise, always targeting regime change.
The game now has expanded even more, with the recently discovered offshore gas wealth across the Eastern Mediterranean – in offshore Israel, Palestine, Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. This whole area may hold as much as 1.7 billion barrels of oil and up to 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. And that could be a mere third of the total undiscovered fossil fuel wealth in the Levant.
From Washington’s point of view, the game is clear: to try to isolate Russia, Iran and a «regime-unchanged» Syria as much as possible from the new Eastern Mediterranean energy bonanza.
And that brings us to Turkey – now in the line of fire from Moscow after the downing of the Su-24.
Ankara’s ambition, actually obsession, is to position Turkey as the major energy crossroads for the whole of the EU. 1) As a transit hub for gas from Iran, Central Asia and, up to now, Russia (the Turkish Stream gas pipeline is suspended, not cancelled). 2) As a hub for major gas discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean. 3) And as a hub for gas imported from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq.
Turkey plays the role of key energy crossroads in the Qatar pipeline project. But it’s always important to remember that Qatar’s pipeline does not need to go through Syria and Turkey. It could easily cross Saudi Arabia, the Red Sea, Egypt and reach the Eastern Mediterranean.
So, in the Big Picture, from Washington’s point of view, what matters most of all, once again, is «isolating» Iran from Europe. Washington’s game is to privilege Qatar as a source, not Iran, and Turkey as the hub, for the EU to diversify from Gazprom.
This is the same logic behind the construction of the costly Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, facilitated in Azerbaijan by Zbigniew «Grand Chessboard» Brzezinski in person.
As it stands, prospects for both pipelines are less than dismal. The Vienna peace process concerning Syria will go nowhere as long as Riyadh insists on keeping its weaponized outfits in the «non-terrorist» list, and Ankara keeps allowing free border flow of jihadis while engaging in dodgy business with stolen Syrian oil.
What’s certain is that, geo-economically, Syria goes way beyond a civil war; it’s a vicious Pipelineistan power play in a dizzying complex chessboard where the Big Prize will represent a major win in the 21st century energy wars.
__________
This piece first appeared at Strategic Culture Foundation.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). His latest book is Empire of Chaos. He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
by backtoiam » Sat Dec 12, 2015 7:10 pm
by Nordic » Sun Dec 13, 2015 12:46 am
by Elvis » Sun Dec 13, 2015 12:51 am
Nordic » Sat Dec 12, 2015 9:46 pm wrote:Why do you seem to have this habit of posting right-wing media tropes? This was bullshit that Fox Noise was spouting. If you look at what Putin said, it wasn't about using nukes on ISIS, but using them at all, as in not wanting to ever have to use them. Like a normal person.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Dec 13, 2015 12:52 am
by conniption » Sun Dec 13, 2015 12:54 am
by backtoiam » Sun Dec 13, 2015 1:42 am
by AlicetheKurious » Tue Dec 15, 2015 3:59 pm
Texas plumber wants $1 million from dealership that sold his truck to jihadists
Published time: 14 Dec, 2015 19:48
A December 2014 photo of the Ford truck used by jihadists in Syria. The "Mark-1 Plumbing" sign is clearly visible © Twitter
A Texas plumber has dealt with death threats and abusive phone calls after the Ford truck he sold to a local dealership showed up in the hands of jihadists in Syria ‒ with his company sign intact. Now he is suing for at least $1 million in damages.
Mark Oberholtzer, who runs Mark-1 Plumbing in Galveston, Texas, says that Autonation Ford Gulf Freeway, a dealership in Houston, resold his 2005 Ford F-250 pick-up without removing the decal with his company’s name and phone number. After the truck ended up in the hands of a Syrian rebel group, a photo of it showed up on Twitter and was featured on the final episode of Comedy Central’s ‘Colbert Report’.
Colbert joked that Syria “is going down the toilet, but for the first time, they know who to call to unclog it.”
By the end of that day, “Mark-1's office, Mark-1's business phone, and Mark's personal cell phone had received over 1,000 phone calls from around the nation,” ranging from degrading to expletive-laced death threats, according to the lawsuit filed in Harris County by Oberholtzer’s attorneys. Up to 200 calls per day continued to come in over the next three weeks, and the plumber still gets calls to this day, especially after Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) commits an atrocity somewhere, the lawsuit said.
In the complaint, Oberholtzer says the dealership stopped him from removing the decal, claiming that doing so would damage the paint. At no time did anyone at the dealership inform Oberholtzer that they would “leave the decals on the truck, which would be transferred in some fashion to international jihadists conducting warfare upon innocents in Syria,” the lawsuit stated, calling what happened an “incomprehensible and horrific eventuality.”
Noting that the plumber had sold several of his old trucks to dealerships in Texas over the years, the lawsuit goes on to add: “On none of these occasions have any of those dealers transferred to international jihadists the traded-in vehicle with Plaintiffs’ identifying marking still upon them.”
According to Carfax vehicle history reports, attached to the lawsuit as evidence, the truck was sold at an auction on November 11, 2013. It was exported from Houston and ended up in Mersin, a port in southeastern Turkey. On December 15, 2014, a photo of the truck posted on Twitter showed it being used as a weapons platform by a jihadist group in Syria – with the “Mark-1 Plumbing” sign still there.
The image was tweeted by one Caleb Weiss, who said the F-250 was operated by Chechen fighters in the “Jaish al Muhajireen wal Ansar,” one of the rebel groups fighting against the Syrian government. In November 2013, some of the group’s members had sworn allegiance to IS. Others stayed with the Jabhat Ansar al-Din until September 2015, when they joined the Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra.
The lawsuit identifies Weiss as a “member of Ansar al-Deen, a jihadist group operating near Aleppo in Syria.”
Alerted to this by others on Twitter, Weiss clarified that he is a college student at the University of Illinois in Champaign, and a writer for the Long War Journal. He writes about jihadists in the Middle East, but he is most definitely not one of them, he said.
Intimidated by the abuse, Oberholtzer’s secretary refused to come in to work. The plumber shut down his business for a week and took his family out of town, but still had to deal with the unwanted attention by the government and the media, receiving visits from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.
Oberholtzer’s case is a curious instance of a Ford ending up in terrorist hands. Most of the vehicles converted to weapons platforms by Islamic State and other jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq have been Toyotas, notably the rugged Hilux. In October, Toyota announced it was cooperating with the US Treasury Department probe into terrorist financing and supply chains, adding it had no idea how IS acquired so many of its trucks.
A 2014 Public Radio International investigation found that the US State Department had bought at least 43 Toyotas for the “Free Syrian Army.” Link
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