UPDATED (1/1/021): Syrians, Kurdish, Turkish Realignment: Regional Conflicts Require Regional Solutions

America, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Middle East, Military, War

The Syrian, Kurdish, Turkish realignment is not “a moment of geopolitical whiplash.” But rather, a return—we hope—to regional politics in the Middle East.

America thinks that it must and can be a decisive force for good in the Middle East. However, the region’s players march to their own drumbeat. Always have.

in fact, the move had been in the works for more than a year. Fearing U.S. abandonment, the Kurds opened a back channel to the Syrian government and the Russians in 2018, and those talks ramped up significantly in recent weeks, American, Kurdish and Russian officials told The Associated Press.

[Via AP]

In Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1789-1923, Efraim and Inari Karsh marshal prodigious scholarship to show that, “Twentieth-century Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate.” The trend continues.

Keep it regional. The Kurds are safest aligning with regional power players against Turkey.

* Image courtesy of VOA.

UPDATED (1/1/021):  Bashar al-Assad is one wise Alawite traditionalist. But America’s foreign policy and Pentagon primitives are forever striving to remove him and install a less traditional, more democratic man of the people (namely an Islamist Jihadi).

Assad on neoliberalism:

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UPDATED (10/22/019): Homeless In Seattle, Part 2: Tech Sucks The Soul Out Of The City

Business, IMMIGRATION, Labor, Regulation, Technology

NEW COLUMN IS “Homeless In Seattle, Part 2: Tech Sucks The Soul Out Of The City.” It’s on Townhall.com, WND.COM and The Unz Review.

An excerpt:

Trust the late Anthony Bourdain, the Kerouac of cooking, to blurt out the truth when nobody else would.

Following his Jack Kerouac wanderlust, Bourdain had arrived in Seattle to spotlight the manner in which high-tech was changing the city, draining it of its character and of the many quirky characters that made Seattle what it was. 

“Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Expedia, and Amazon are the big dogs in town,” mused  Bourdain. “A flood of them—tech industry workers, mostly male, derisively referred to as tech boys or tech bros—is rapidly changing the DNA of the city, rewiring it to satisfy their own newly-empowered nerdly appetites.”

That the “tech boys” “are so dull,” as members of a Seattle band say—and sing—in no way assuages their heated effect on the housing market. A street artist called “John Criscitello … told Bourdain how the high-tech influx has driven up housing costs and forced artists [like himself] out of the neighborhood.”

Yes, Big Tech is exacerbating homelessness in Seattle and the surrounds. While correlation is not causation, the ongoing and never-ending, annual importation of a sizable feudal elite from China and India must be factored in the homelessness equation.

“Buoyed by the city’s thriving technology industry, Seattle has consistently been the hottest housing market in the nation.” Commensurate with the explosion in the number of Seattle neighborhoods in which homes cost $1 million has been an explosion in the region’s homeless population.

“Households must earn about $140,000 a year to afford mortgage payments – nearly double the city’s typical income,” but on par with the “average base pay” of a software engineer in the Seattle, WA area. …

…   “Unabashed liberal” outfits like the Economist, the Brooking Institute and the Seattle Times blame inadequate supply for the housing crisis, ignoring the demand side of the supply-and-demand housing equation whereby, “Big Tech is permitted to petition The State for permission to import The World at a price heavily subsidized by the disenfranchised American taxpayer. Through government immigration policies, a ceaseless demand for housing has been generated.”  (See “Homeless In Seattle, Part 1.”) ….

… READ ON. NEW COLUMN, “Homeless In Seattle, Part 2: Tech Sucks The Soul Out Of The City,” is on Townhall.com, WND.COM and The Unz Review.

* Image courtesy of The Unz Review.

UPDATED (10/22/019):

POTUS On Heartbreak At The Dover Air Force Base

Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Military, War

President Trump spoke movingly and poignantly today about comforting families waiting on the bodies of their dead boys at the Dover Air Force Base. POTUS mentioned Eisenhower’s prophetic warning against the power of the military-industrial-complex to launch and sustain wars.

In 2013, I wrote about the achingly beautiful ceremonies at Dover:

Watch this ceremony at the Dover Air Force Base. Soldiers receive the coffined body of a slain comrade on its arrival in Dover. They handle it with exquisite care, hands clad in white gloves. What a stark, pathos-filled, sad ceremony, every move so tender and respectful.

Yes, “every move so tender and respectful.”
And every death so futile.

‘How Dare You’: Greta Thunberg Thunders Death Metal. Growl on Grrreta.

Education, English, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Kids, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Music

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This is a keeper.

In defense of this poor, singularly charmless girl, Greta Thunberg’s facility with English and her terse, to-the-point compositional skills are way better than those of her “high-achieving,” verbally diarrhetic and ungrammatical American peers.

Growl on Grrreta.