As Kurds Tracked ISIS Leader, U.S. Withdrawal Threw Raid Into Turmoil

Stephan:  The betrayal of the Kurds by Donald Trump will go down in history as an American infamy. And the truth of this story will make the man's incompetence and moral turpitude historic.

A funeral for Kurds killed by Turkish-led forces in Syria this month after President Trump pulled American troops out of the way. The move left the Kurds feeling betrayed.
Credit…Delil Souleiman/Agence France-Presse — Getty

QAMISHLI, Syria — When the international manhunt for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, zoomed in on a village in northwestern Syria, the United States turned to its local allies to help track the world’s most-wanted terrorist.

The American allies, a Kurdish-led force that had partnered with the United States to fight ISIS, sent spies to watch his isolated villa. To confirm it was him, they stole a pair of Mr. al-Baghdadi’s underwear — long, white boxers — and obtained a blood sample, both for DNA testing, the force’s commander, Mazlum Abdi, said in a phone interview on Monday.

American officials would not discuss the specific intelligence provided by the Kurds, but said that their role in finding Mr. al-Baghdadi was essential — more so than all other […]

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What white nationalists and incels have in common: Blaming feminism

Stephan:  This is the push back from those who cling to a dying trend, the Abrahamic view that men are dominant, and women should know their submissive place and be happy in it. The stress created by this change has pushed these men to align male dominance with White nationalism, as this story lays out.

White nationalist attend a rally on October 28, 2017 in Shelbyville, Tennessee. The event billed as a White Lives Matter rally is hosted by Nationalist Front, which is a coalition of several white supremacist organizations.
Credit; Scott Olson/Getty /Salon

For Jessica Reaves, the journey into the most hateful reaches of the internet began after the 2018 van attack in Toronto. A white male in his 20s plowed his vehicle into a crowd of pedestrians, killing 10 and injuring 16. After he was arrested, the driver told police that an online community of involuntary celibates, or “incels,” had radicalized him.

“That was definitely not the first time that we’d seen someone who identifies as an incel . . . act out against women violently, strike out against them, murder them,” says Reaves, who, as editorial director at the Center for Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), monitors extremists across the ideological spectrum. “But it was a sort of turning point in the sense that people were starting to really pay attention to this […]

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There are more wealthy Chinese than Americans for the first time

Stephan:  Here is a very interesting statistic comparing the U.S. and China that illustrates why I think China is going to be the dominant culture of the world in the last half of the 21st century because of America's self-sabotage of its own wellbeing.
Tech billionaires dominate China's rich list. Some pig farmers also had a good yearLONDON — For the first time, there are more rich Chinese than Americans in the top 10%.
A new report from Credit Suisse (CS) shows that wealth in China is ticking up, and the country now accounts for 100 million of the richest 10% of people in the world. There are 99 million Americans in the same category.
The United States still has many more millionaires — 18.6 million, or 40% of the world’s total, versus 4.4 million in China. It’s also adding to the millionaire count at a faster clip. The report credits low interest rates and Republican tax cuts for the country’s 11th consecutive year of rising wealth.
The average American is also still much richer than their Chinese counterparts, with US wealth per adult at $432,365 compared with $58,544 in […]

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How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America

Stephan:  I have been speaking at a number of conferences recently and what has struck me is the difference in questions and attitudes between Baby Boomers and Millennials. I do not belong to either group, so I have no bias one way of the other, but there is a clear difference and this article presents pretty much what I have been experiencing. I think this is an important issue worthy of attention. it provides an interesting explanation for several of the most notable quirks in each generation.

Hippies dancing during an anti-war demonstration staged by the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam at Golden Gate Park’s Kezar Stadium on April 15, 1967. Credit: Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty

Everyone likes to bash millennials. We’re spoiled, entitled, and hopelessly glued to our smartphones. We demand participation trophies, can’t find jobs, and live with our parents until we’re 30. You know the punchlines by now.

But is the millennial hate justified? Have we dropped the generational baton, or was it a previous generation, the so-called baby boomers, who actually ruined everything?

That’s the argument Bruce Gibney makes in his 2017 book A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. The boomers, according to Gibney, have committed “generational plunder,” pillaging the nation’s economy, repeatedly cutting their own taxes, financing two wars with deficits, ignoring climate change, presiding over the death of America’s manufacturing core, and leaving future generations to clean up the mess they created.

I spoke to Gibney […]

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We Have No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe

Stephan:  I confess that I am not clear about the health implications of 5G. There is so much nonsense on both sides of the argument that it is hard to pin down actual facts. This report presents the debate pretty well, I think.

5G Sunset Cell Tower: Cellular communications tower for mobile phone and video data transmission
Credit: Getty

The telecommunications industry and their experts have accused many scientists who have researched the effects of cell phone radiation of “fear mongering” over the advent of wireless technology’s 5G. Since much of our research is publicly-funded, we believe it is our ethical responsibility to inform the public about what the peer-reviewed scientific literature tells us about the health risks from wireless radiation.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently announced through a press release that the commission will soon reaffirm the radio frequency radiation (RFR) exposure limits that the FCC adopted in the late 1990s. These limits are based upon a behavioral change in rats exposed to microwave radiation and were designed to protect us from short-term heating risks due to RFR exposure.

Yet, since the FCC adopted these limits based largely on research from the 1980s, the preponderance of peer-reviewed research, more than 500 studies, have found harmful biologic or health effects […]

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