Stephan: If you ever wanted to know what treason looks like, it looks like this. Then place this report in the context of Putin paying $100,000 bounties for the murder of American service personnel in Afghanistan, and Trump's utter indifference and non-response to that. Does that make it a little clearer? How any American could vote for Traitor Trump is beyond my comprehension. Ask your Trumper friends, if you have any, how they will justify voting for him.
Trump and Putin Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty
Why would the Russian government think it could get away with paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers? One answer to that question may be the extraordinary response that Moscow received when the Trump administration learned of a precursor to the bounty operation. From mid-2017 and into 2018, Pentagon officials became increasingly confident in intelligence reports that the Kremlin was arming the Taliban, which posed a significant threat to American and coalition forces on the ground in Afghanistan.
President Trump’s actions in the face of the Russia-Taliban arms program likely signaled weak US resolve in the eyes of Putin and Russian military intelligence.
Three dimensions of Trump’s response are described in detail in this article, based on interviews with several former Trump administration officials who spoke to Just Security on the record.
First, President Trump decided not to confront Putin about supplying arms to the terrorist group. Second, during the very times in which U.S. military officials publicly raised concerns about the program’s threat to U.S. forces, Trump undercut them. He embraced Putin, overtly and […]
Stephan: Just because we are in the middle of a Pandemic that now involves at least one percent of the American population doesn't mean that climate change is taking some time off. As I have been warning my readers since the early 90s, water is destiny, and we are going to have three big internal migrations: 1) Away from coasts because of too much water; 2) out of the Southwest because of temperature increase and insufficient water; and, 3) out of the central states because of violence weather events like tornadoes.
Well, here's a little update.
Colorado drought Credit: Colorado Springs Gazette
LOVELAND PASS, COLORADO — Here at 12,000 feet on the Continental Divide, only vestiges of the winter snowpack remain, scattered white patches that have yet to melt and feed the upper Colorado River, 50 miles away.
That’s normal for mid-June in the Rockies. What’s unusual this year is the speed at which the snow went. And with it went hopes for a drought-free year in the Southwest.
“We had a really warm spring,” said Graham Sexstone, a hydrologist with the United States Geological Survey. “Everything this year has melted really fast.”
The Southwest has been mired in drought for most of the past two decades. The heat and dryness, made worse by climate change, have been so persistent that some researchers say the region is now caught up in a megadrought, like those that scientists who study past climate say occurred here occasionally over the past 1,200 years and lasted 40 years or longer.
Even a single season of drought is bad news for the Southwest, where agriculture, industry and […]
Stephan: This is a fascinating new discovery, one of several recent sites discovered on deep under the sea. It is not Atlantis, at least not the Atlantis of the Theosophists, Edgar Cayce, or Rudolf Steiner, although is close to where Cayce placed Atlantis. But it will reveal whole new chapters of Human history. I particularly want to point out something not really focused on in this piece. This site is estimated to be 1968 feet to 2296 feet beneath the ocean surface. For that to be true there had to have been a massive shift in the tectonic plates and, I think, we should take that as a cautionary warning of what can happen, because it has happened. As the ice of Greenland, and the poles melt millions of tons of weight on the plates beneath that ice will vanish. No one has any real idea what that could mean.
Underwater archaeological complex off the coast of Cuba
The remains of what may be a 6000-year-old city immersed in deep waters off the west coast of Cuba was discovered by a team of Canadian and Cuban researchers.
Offshore engineer Paulina Zelitsky and her husband, Paul Weinzweig and her son Ernesto Tapanes used sophisticated sonar and video videotape devices to find “some kind of megaliths you ‘d find on Stonehenge or Easter Island,” Weinzweig said in an interview.
“Some structures within the complex may be as long as 400 meters wide and as high as 40 meters,” he said. “Some are sitting on top of each other. They show very distinct shapes and symmetrical designs of a non-natural kind. We’ve shown them to scientists in Cuba, the U.S., and elsewhere, and nobody has suggested they are natural.”
Map showing the location of the supposed ancient city discovered by Paul Weinzweig and Pauline Zalitzki.
Moreover, an anthropologist affiliated with the Cuban Academy of Sciences has said that still photos were taken from the videotape clearly show “symbols and inscriptions,” Mr. Weinzweig said. […]
Stephan: America has a horrifying history of law enforcement and imprisonment. We have 4.23% of the world's population and 22% of the world's prisoners; that works out to be 716 men and women per 100,000. By comparison, Norway's incarceration rate is 72 per 100,000; Germany is 79, France is 98, the entire United Kingdom is 348. We hear about how large and dreadful the prisons of North Korea, Russia, or China are, but the truth is no other country on earth has anything like the American gulag. And the gulag exists because our entire law enforcement system has been militarized and although police departments have slogans like "protect and serve" the real operational philosophy is "selectively repress and punish"
This is a deliberate strategy that was created as a result of the anti-war protests of the Vietnam era, combined with the awakening of the 60s brought on by marijuana usage and LSD. It began with Democratic president Lyndon Johnson War on Drugs but really kicked into high gear during the administration of Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. There is something in the Republican soul, perhaps the overactive right amygdalas so many Republicans have, that seeks to inflict punishment rather than fostering rehabilitation. It is completely irrational, of course, and counter to all facts.
Other nations understand that rehabilitation is better for society as a whole, produces more productive outcomes, and is ever so much cheaper. Here is a story that should awaken the country, the tale of a small city that followed the European model, and what the data shows about pursuing this course of action.
Oct 17, 2020; Eugene, OR, USA; Eugene Police officer Bo Rankin, left, meets with Cahoots administrative coordinator Ben Brubaker and emergency crisis worker Matt Eads, right, after working a shift together as part of the Community Outreach Response Team in Eugene. Mandatory Credit: Chris Pietsch/The Register-Guard/USA TODAY
Around 30 years ago, a town in Oregon retrofitted an old van, staffed it with young medics and mental health counselors and sent them out to respond to the kinds of 911 calls that wouldn’t necessarily require police intervention.In the town of 172,000, they were the first responders for mental health crises, homelessness, substance abuse, threats of suicide — the problems for which there are no easy fixes. The problems that, in the hands of police, have oftenturnedviolent.Today, the program, called CAHOOTS, has three vans, more than double the number of staffers and the attention of a country in crisis.CAHOOTS is already doing what police reform advocates say is necessary to fundamentally change the […]
Charles King, Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University - Foreign Affairs
Stephan: History is very clear: no empire lasts forever, or in geologic terms no more than a couple of heartbeats. We have been watching the dismantlement of America's international stature under the psychopath we have as president. Is this the end of the American era? This essay provides some insights.
Protestors in Moscow in 1991 at the end of the Soviet Union
On November 11, 1980, a car filled with writers was making its way along a rain-slick highway to a conference in Madrid. The subject of the meeting was the human rights movement in the Soviet Union, and in the vehicle were some of the movement’s long-suffering activists: Vladimir Borisov and Viktor Fainberg, both of whom had endured horrific abuse in a Leningrad psychiatric hospital; the Tatar artist Gyuzel Makudinova, who had spent years in internal exile in Siberia; and her husband, the writer Andrei Amalrik, who had escaped to Western Europe after periods of arrest, rearrest, and confinement.
Amalrik was at the wheel. Around 40 miles from the Spanish capital, the car swerved out of its lane and collided with an oncoming truck. Everyone survived except Amalrik, his throat pierced by a piece of metal, probably from the steering column. At the time of his death at the age of 42, Amalrik was certainly not the best-known Soviet dissident. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had published The Gulag Archipelago, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and immigrated to the United States. Andrei Sakharov had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which he was forced to accept in absentia because […]
