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Best of the Web: Kurds face stark options after US pullback

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
Mon, 14 Oct 2019 21:10 UTC
kurd syria
© AFP / Delil SouleimanSyrian Arabs and Kurdish civilians arrive to Hassakeh city after fleeing bombardment on Syria's northeastern towns along the Turkish border on October 10, 2019 amid fears of a new humanitarian crisis.
In the annals of bombastic Trump tweets, this one is simply astonishing: here we have a President of the United States, on the record, unmasking the whole $8-trillion intervention in the Middle East as an endless war based on a "false premise." No wonder the Pentagon is not amused. Trump's tweet bisects the surreal geopolitical spectacle of Turkey attacking a 120-kilometer-long stretch of Syrian territory east of the Euphrates to essentially expel Syrian Kurds. Even after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cleared with Trump the terms of the Orwellian-named "Operation Peace Spring," Ankara may now face the risk of US economic sanctions.

The predominant Western narrative credits the Syrian Democratic Forces, mostly Kurdish, for fighting and defeating Islamic State, also known as Daesh. The SDF is essentially a collection of mercenaries working for the Pentagon against Damascus. But many Syrian citizens argue that ISIS was in fact defeated by the Syrian Arab Army, Russian aerial and technical expertise plus advisers and special forces from Iran and Hezbollah.

As much as Ankara may regard the YPG Kurds - the "People's protection units" - and the PKK as mere "terrorists" (in the PKK's case aligned with Washington), Operation Peace Spring has in principle nothing to do with a massacre of Kurds.

Comment: See also:

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Bad Guys

Best of the Web: Pepe Escobar: Behind Hong Kong's black terror

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
Mon, 14 Oct 2019 21:16 UTC
Hong Kong black bloc
© The Yomiuri ShimbunA radical protester throws a molotov cocktail at a government building in Hong Kong on Sept. 15, 2019.
"If we burn, you burn with us. Self-destruct together." (Lam chao.)
The new slogans of Hong Kong's black bloc - a mob on a rampage connected to the black shirt protestors - made their first appearance on a rainy Sunday afternoon, scrawled on walls in Kowloon.

Decoding the slogans is essential to understand the mindless street violence that was unleashed even before the anti-mask law passed by the government of the Special Administrative Region (SAR) went into effect at midnight on Friday, October 4.

By the way, the anti-mask law is the sort of measure that was authorized by the 1922 British colonial Emergency Regulations Ordnance, which granted the city government the authority to "make any regulations whatsoever which he [or she] may consider desirable in the public interest" in case of "emergency or public danger".
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Yellow Vest

Best of the Web: Spain sentences Catalonia independence leaders to 13 years imprisonment for sedition - Protests erupt in Barcelona - UPDATE: Airport occupied


RT
Mon, 14 Oct 2019 13:07 UTC
barcelona protest referendum
© REUTERS / Rafael MarchantePeople march through Via Laetana Avenue during a protest after a verdict in a trial over a banned independence referendum.
Former Catalan Vice President Oriol Junqueras has been sentenced to 13 years in prison by Spain's Supreme Court for his role in the attempted secession by authorities in Barcelona in 2017.

Junqueras was among nine separatist leaders who were sentenced to between nine and 13 years in prison for sedition for their part in the region's failed 2017 independence bid which captured headlines around the world.

A further three defendants were found guilty of disobedience but were not handed prison sentences for their participation in both the banned referendum and short-lived independence declaration. All defendants were acquitted of the most serious charge of rebellion.

Comment: Update 21:45 CET

Barcelona resembles Hong Kong today, with police going all-in to clear protesters who have gathered at the airport:











It's not just the airport either; protests have erupted across Barcelona and the whole Catalonia region. Here people are banging pots and pans out their windows as a form of 'prison protest' in support of the jailed leaders:


We can confirm that Spanish police are firing 'flash-balls' at them - the same thing the French police used to suppress Yellow Vest protesters:


Macron, Merkel, MSM, corporate media, alt-media, et al... any comment?? Should Spain not be "respecting the democratic rights" of Catalans? Should it not be "engaged in political dialogue"? Y'all have so much to say about Hong Kong ought to be run...

Or is this latest symptom of the 'Western House Divided on Itself' all Russia's doing?!

What's deliciously ironic about this development is that pro-independence Catalans were probably watching what has been happening in HK, what was happening in the Spanish courts, and hand planned beforehand to storm Barcelona's airport when their leaders' sentences were handed down...

They were thus inspired by pro-independence Hong Kongers, who were trained and at least partially funded by Western NGOs... and so it all feeds back into the system against the system itself.

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NPC

Best of the Web: Busted! ABC News caught using old gun range footage to push fake news about Turkish 'slaughter' of Syrian Kurds

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Mon, 14 Oct 2019 17:26 UTC
abc fake news gun footage kurds
© ABC News/YoutubeDavid Muir lies through his teeth on 'ABC World News Tonight'
ABC News was just busted using two year old gun range footage while reporting on Turkey 'slaughtering' the Kurds in the wake of a US withdrawal from the region.
This video right here appearing to show Turkey's military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town. The Kurds, who fought alongside the US against ISIS now horrific reports of atrocities committed by Turkish-backed fighters on those very allies" -ABC News

Comment: ABC, YOU ARE FAKE NEWS!

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Light Saber

Best of the Web: CNN in the hotseat: Project Veritas begins drop of massive exposé claiming to uncover 'anti-Trump CRUSADE'


RT
Mon, 14 Oct 2019 17:14 UTC
Cnn james o keefe project veritas
© (L) Getty Images / SOPA Images, (R) ; Getty Images / Washington Post
Project Veritas has dropped what it claims is a bombshell expose on CNN, including secret recordings of staff at editorial meetings which reveal an "anti-Trump crusade" and "bias" at the highest levels.

In the first clip uploaded by PV, a person who is allegedly CNN President Jeff Zucker tells a staff meeting that he wants them to "stay very focused" on President Donald Trump's possible impeachment.

The video also shows Nick Neville, a media coordinator at CNN saying that Zucker has a "personal vendetta" against Trump.

Comment: Dissidents on social media are circling the wagons...



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Sheriff

Best of the Web: Arab media's full interview with Putin: Russia 'does not build alliances against anyone'


RT
Sun, 13 Oct 2019 10:14 UTC

Comment: Among other gems in this interview, Putin said:
"The worst peace is better than the best of wars..."

putin
Russia's President Vladimir Putin sat down with three Arab-language media, including RT Arabic, to discuss Russia's policies and ties in the Middle East and beyond, as well as a looming arms race with the US and NATO's expansion.

In advance of his visit to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Vladimir Putin answered questions from Al Arabiya senior presenter Mohammed Tomaihi, Sky News Arabia senior presenter Mohannad Khatib and RT Arabic Public and Political Programmes Department Head Salam Musafir.


This is the full video and transcript of the interview. Key excerpts are available here, here and here.

Mohammed Tomaihi, Al Arabiya: (retranslated): Dear viewers, welcome to this unique interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which we are recording in Sochi.

With me here today are Mr. Mohannad Khatib, a reporter at Sky News Arabia and Salam Musafir, a reporter at RT Arabic.

Comment: Speaking to the media of the countries a leader is about to visit is a great and diplomatic idea. Once again, Putin sets excellent standards of governance for everyone else to meet.

Putin's strategy, if it can be called that, is by now very clear: Russia strives to be both 'friends' and 'enemies' of no one. In terms of 'grand alliances' against instruments of Western hegemony, like the petro-dollar system, and 'taking sides' in conflicts like that in Syria, Russia should, theoretically, be 'enemies' with the Saudi and Gulf kingdoms.

But that's not what we see. Instead, Putin seeks to show everyone else the benefit of not falling to temptation to take sides in alliances, military and otherwise. It's the only way forward, and pretty much everyone sees that now.

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Mars

Best of the Web: NASA scientist: We found evidence of life on Mars in 1970s, NASA covered it up

Gilbert V. Levin
Scientific American
Thu, 10 Oct 2019 16:43 UTC
Mars marte
© CC0/Pixbay
We humans can now peer back into the virtual origin of our universe. We have learned much about the laws of nature that control its seemingly infinite celestial bodies, their evolution, motions and possible fate. Yet, equally remarkable, we have no generally accepted information as to whether other life exists beyond us, or whether we are, as was Samuel Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, "alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide wide sea!" We have made only one exploration to solve that primal mystery. I was fortunate to have participated in that historic adventure as experimenter of the Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment on NASA's spectacular Viking mission to Mars in 1976.

On July 30, 1976, the LR returned its initial results from Mars. Amazingly, they were positive. As the experiment progressed, a total of four positive results, supported by five varied controls, streamed down from the twin Viking spacecraft landed some 4,000 miles apart. The data curves signaled the detection of microbial respiration on the Red Planet. The curves from Mars were similar to those produced by LR tests of soils on Earth. It seemed we had answered that ultimate question.

When the Viking Molecular Analysis Experiment failed to detect organic matter, the essence of life, however, NASA concluded that the LR had found a substance mimicking life, but not life. Inexplicably, over the 43 years since Viking, none of NASA's subsequent Mars landers has carried a life detection instrument to follow up on these exciting results. Instead the agency launched a series of missions to Mars to determine whether there was ever a habitat suitable for life and, if so, eventually to bring samples to Earth for biological examination.

Comment: See also:

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Bullseye

Best of the Web: Paul Joseph Watson: The Truth About Extinction Rebellion

Paul Joseph Watson
Summit News
Fri, 11 Oct 2019 20:33 UTC
Extinction Rebellion
Extinction Rebellion: This is an upper-middle-class death cult and we should ridicule it out of existence.
You've never seen eco-extremism this bad.

A bunch of smug, sanctimonious, privileged, hypocritical idiots lecturing working class people on how to live their lives.

Oh, and their demands are utterly INSANE.


Comment: See also:

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People

Best of the Web: How feminism has wrecked our views on gender

John Barry
Quillette
Thu, 10 Oct 2019 19:44 UTC
Feminist sticker
This week Melinda Gates said that she is committing $1 billion to promote gender equality by doing things like dismantling "harmful gender norms." To many people, this sounds like a wonderful idea, but in reality, how effective are gender equality strategies that blame inequality solely on social factors such as gender norms and stereotypes?

Professor Alice Eagly, in her paper "The Shaping of Science by Ideology: How Feminism Inspired, Led, and Constrained Scientific Understanding of Sex and Gender,"1 explores the ways in which feminism helped to create the now widely held misconception that gender is simply a product of social influence.

This feminist misconception is not simply a dry academic fossil from the nature-nurture debate — it's a flawed notion that has become central to how we treat men and women in all areas of life. This one-sided view of gender has caused problems in a range of areas, including therapy, the workplace, sports, and the law. Much of Eagly's expertise relates to workplace psychology, so this is the area on which she focuses.

The central problem highlighted by Eagly, who is herself a feminist, is that ignoring the biological influence on gender has "allowed mainstream feminist psychology to produce a description of the phenomena of women's disadvantage as rooted in the external environment — in the patriarchal structures of families, task groups, organizations, and nations. In this understanding, the individual psychological attributes of women have little, if anything, to do with disadvantage." (Eagly 2018, p.877)
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Bullseye

Best of the Web: CIA's war on Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks

Kevin Gosztola
Medium
Fri, 04 Oct 2019 00:00 UTC
CIA emblem
© Lance Page/truthout/wikimedia
On behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency, a Spanish security company called Undercover Global spied on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange while he was living in the Ecuador embassy in London.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais reported on September 25 that the company's CEO David Morales repeatedly handed over audio and video. When cameras were installed in the embassy in December 2017, "Morales requested that his technicians install an external streaming access point in the same area so that all of the recordings could be accessed instantly by the United States."

Technicians planted microphones in the embassy's fire extinguishers, as well as the women's bathroom, where Assange held regular meetings with his lawyers — Melynda Taylor, Jennifer Robinson, and Baltasar Garzon.

Morales' company was hired by Ecuador, but Ecuador apparently had no idea that Morales formed a relationship with the CIA.

The world laughed at Assange when it was reported in a book from David Leigh and Luke Harding that he once dressed as an old woman because he believed CIA agents were following him. It doesn't seem as absurd now.

Comment: From RT, 9/10/2019: Security firm at Ecuadorian embassy created 'profiles' on Russian and American visitors to Assange - gave info to CIA
The Spanish security firm hired to guard the Ecuadorian Embassy in London during Julian Assange's stay there gathered information on his Russian and American visitors and handed it to US intelligence, according to a new report.

David Morales, owner of security contracting firm Undercover Global SL, allegedly ordered his employees to keep extensive records on anybody coming to meet with Assange during his nearly seven-year residency at the diplomatic compound.

Former employees at the firm told El Pais the CIA was also granted access to a web server where those records were stored, which included "profiles" containing all manner of personal information on the individuals. American and Russian visitors were reportedly given the highest priority, especially lawyers and those working in media.

All guests were required to hand over phones and computers to embassy security before entering the compound, potentially giving Undercover Global - and, in turn, US intelligence - access to any files stored on the devices.

Interest in Assange's meetings with Russians may have been piqued by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), which accused the cyber activist of cooperating with Russian intelligence to leak Hillary Clinton's emails, among other pilfered documents, prior to the 2016 US election - a claim Assange has fervently denied and which the DOJ has never backed up with evidence.


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