The “That's Funny” Story in Iran Comes More Into Focus

Back when I posted the original story last week, I deliberately avoided speculation that it was an Israeli operation.  That was when there was just the one incident in the Alborz mountains, just east of Tehran, seemingly from the Khojir Missile Base in Iran.  Still the topic came up in the comments.

Since then there have been more apparent attacks, some of which appear to have targeted allegedly civilian facilities (not that defense work can't take place in such facilities). They include an explosion on June 30 at a medical center in northwestern Tehran, a huge fire on July 3 in the city of Shiraz, and an explosion at a power plant on July 4 in the city of Ahvaz.  There have also been anomalous explosions and fires in Iranian military facilities and news is starting to come out.  That PJ Media story links to a story on Radio Farda, the Iranian service of the American Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcasters.

A mysterious explosion or fire in the early hours of July 2 destroyed a building at Natanz enrichment facility and many believe it was an Israeli operation, whether through a cyberattack or some sort of air strike. There have also been other mysterious explosion and fires both at military and vital economic facilities.

In one of the essential analysis, Israel's Channel 13 TV military analyst Alon Ben-David cited the country's officials as saying the explosion at Natanz nuclear facility has postponed Tehran's efforts to enhance its uranium enrichment capacity by two months.

"The facility, where Iran develops its more advanced centrifuges, took a substantial hit; the explosion destroyed the lab," Ben-David said, adding, "Those were centrifuges that were supposed to be installed underground at the Natanz facility; they were intended to replace the old centrifuges and produce a lot more enriched uranium, a lot more quickly."

Israeli military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai, told Radio Farda that “by using the new generation of centrifuges Iran could have acquired a nuclear bomb with staggering speed, within weeks or months.”  Instead, Iran is suddenly far behind their previous capabilities.

On Monday, Israel’s Channel 12 News said the “attack on the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran, credited to Israel, had managed to set back Tehran’s uranium enrichment program by two years, citing Western intelligence estimates.”

While Iran hasn't officially blamed Israel, they have apparently tried to “reach out” to a few Israeli officials.  Israel's premier intelligence agency, the Mossad, claims to have broken up planned or attempted Iranian attacks on Israeli diplomatic missions in Europe and elsewhere, according to a report Monday.

The main reason I was slow to go down the road of saying it must be Israel is the fact that nothing I came across last week had Iran blaming Israel or the US (the little Satan or the Great Satan) for the attacks.  There might be something else going on, too: anti-regime forces from Iran itself.  I'm reluctant to pass on this story because it's from the New York Times, a source I consider completely unreliable, but that sometimes, accidentally, does actual journalism.  Take it at face value.  Right after the Natanz blast, the Times reported, staff members of the BBC’s Persian service said they

received an email from a previously unknown group, which referred to itself as the Homeland Cheetahs, before news of the fire became public. The group claimed responsibility and said it was composed of dissidents in Iran’s military and security apparatus. They said [their attacks] would target above ground sections of…facilities so that the Iranian government could not cover up the damage.

Even if it wasn't this homegrown Iranian group doing the operations, but simply helping either Israeli or US operators, that seems it could be an important development.  We've heard that the Iranian people are fed up with the mullahs and want to be rid of them; could this be a turning point?

 Natanz centrifuges, 2019 photo. AP photo from Radio Farda.

Behind The Virus Shock, The Oil Price War

As I'm sure most of you know, about a month ago as the US started grappling with responses to the Kung Flu, an oil price war broke out at an OPEC meeting in Vienna when Russia and Saudi Arabia turned the world's oil markets into the World's Highest Stakes Game of Chicken.  Since they can't exactly hang a sign at the airports saying, “we will not be undersold!!!” this erupted as nations informed the markets of how much oil they would export per day.  From that linked article at Foreign Policy, dated March 14th:

One week ago, as Saudi Arabia and other big OPEC countries and Russia gathered in Vienna to plan production cuts that could put a floor under falling prices due to the outbreak of coronavirus, crude was trading at more than $50 a barrel. That’s when Moscow decided to blow up a three-year-old pact to manage global oil supplies, refusing to sign on to Saudi Arabia’s proposed cuts, sending the price of oil sharply down.

Riyadh responded not with unilateral cuts of its own but in the opposite direction: It slashed selling prices for its oil and later announced plans to massively increase oil output, further driving down the price of oil that was already plunging due to the disease outbreak and its toll on the global economy. Oil trades today around $33 a barrel.

For Russia and Saudi Arabia, both more or less dependent on oil sales to fund their national budgets, it was—and still is—a dangerous game of chicken.

For example, on March 3rd, just before this began, West Texas Intermediate Crude was selling for $47.18/barrel (bbl.) and that was low.  Today it closed at: $20.48. 

The Oil and Gas Industry news website I link to in the right sidebar has nervous projections of $10/bbl oil.

Like all games of chicken, this is a gamble between Vladimir Putin (who routinely has political opponents disappear on him) and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (who had a questioning reporter (Jamal Khashoggi) assassinated, his body sliced, diced, and carried out in suitcases) over who flinches and quits first.  It's like two James Bond movie villains in real life.

Russia figured that it could afford to walk away from its informal cooperation with Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries, even if that meant crashing the price of oil, for a few simple reasons. First, it has tucked lots of money away in the years since the last oil-price crash, giving it a big financial cushion. Second, the biggest losers in any oil-price war, Russia figures, will be high-cost U.S. shale producers; driving the price down would both inflict economic harm on the United States and undermine its ability to wield its favorite tool of international coercion: sanctions.

Ironically, the US shale oil producers are the common enemy of Russia and all of OPEC.  But when suppliers aren't dumping oil at well below their cost, the market self-regulates - which markets are well-known to do.  When OPEC tried to smother it in 2014 and 2015 with a flood of cheap oil, as prices fell, U.S. production fell just enough to get prices up, and then rigs start pumping again.  While the U.S. oil industry may have less cushion now than before, it's open to question whether or not Putin or MBS could ruin it.  It seems like the very worst they could do is drive companies out of production, but as soon as the oil price got back to where Russia and Saudi Arabia could make a profit - if not sooner - the American industry would figure out how to produce at a profit.

Remember the oil geologist who said it was best to consider the Permian Basin (under Texas and New Mexico) as a permanent resource - as close to infinite as we can approximate? 

The story at Politico is an interesting read.  Russia claims to have put aside a Wealth Fund full of enough cash to survive oil prices between $25 and $30 a barrel for up to a decade.  But that's still political and while Putin has apparently gotten laws put in to make him President for Life, he's still a politician. 

Putin rode the oil boom of the early 2000s to a strong economy and huge popularity—but that’s a harder act to maintain when oil prices plummet. With economic growth a focal point of Putin’s current presidential term—and with his time in office now possibly extending until 2036—big increases in infrastructure investment and social spending are central to his future and key to promises to help turn around long-stagnant living standards.

The Wealth Fund is only so big and he can't spend it forever.  That budget surplus can be gone in flash if he doesn't watch it.

The Saudis think they can make life uncomfortable enough for Putin to outlast him.  They announced more oil exports today, lowering the price farther. 

Earlier this month, the Kingdom said it was intent on unleashing growing crude oil volumes on the market, aiming to significantly boost its crude oil exports to a record-breaking more than 10 million bpd in May. 

Can they really do 10 million barrels per day?  There are talks about oil facilities drowning in oil due to demand cratering to record lows.  If Saudi Arabia even can produce 10 million bpd (they're never done it before) they may have to pay to store it!  Sort of like negative interest rates for oil.  

My local 7-11/Exxon Mobil gas station is selling regular for $1.97/gal - I can't recall the last time I saw gas for less than $2/gal.  As others have said, with forced social isolation, we're seeing record low gas prices and have nowhere to go.  There's plenty of misery in the oil and gas industries, but not all of it is coming from the virus.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, on Jun. 28, 2019. Jacques Witt/AFP/Getty Images

On The September Saudi Oil Field Attacks

Reports at the time claimed these were drones, slightly bigger/better payloads than hobbyist drones, but not sophisticated weapons.  Geostrategy Direct (paywall warning) has a very different take on this, as excerpted on Free Pressers.

On Sept. 14, 2019, Iran attacked Aramco oil facilities in Saudi Arabia with cruise missiles. However, the Iranian cruise missile used in the attack was previewed in a Feb. 17, 2018 Iranian TV report from Imam Hossien University, shown next to Chinese missile designs.

The Iranian cruise missile was similar to the Chinese Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) C-705 export cruise missile.

CASIC has a longstanding record of cruise missile sales to Iran.

This view of the damage at the Saudi Abqaiq facility.  These are Liquified Natural Gas storage tanks, and each has puncture in essentially the same spot.  Despite last weeks' Iranian attacks on Iraqi facilities showing extremely poor results, they can clearly hit targets precisely when they want to.  Defense Update reports. 

The damage from the September 14 attack seems to be caused by a small explosive shaped charge, (guided weapons?) rather than large cruise missiles such as the Soumar. The Iranians do have small, stealthy suicide drones that can cause such effects or drones that carry multiple PGM that would cause this damage. However, flying such drones over this protected site would be extremely difficult. Photo: DigitalGlobe.

The truth is probably not a question of small drones vs. cruise missiles, it's probably both.  The Geostrategy Direct column's emphasis is that Iran isn't acting completely alone as the agents provocateur in the middle east; Iran is teaming up with China.

China has used disinformation to conceal its role in promoting conflict with Iran in the wake of the spike in Persian Gulf and even global military tensions following the Jan. 3 American drone strike in Baghdad, Iraq, that killed Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani.

Two days later, on Jan. 5, Chinese state media organ Global Times stated: “China won't use proxy warfare in the Middle East or coerce countries in the region to choose sides. China's joint naval drill with Russia and Iran is not an attempt to seek its sphere of influence, pursue military expansion, or fight against other countries in the region. China is seeking amity with all Middle Eastern countries, engage in cooperation with them and contribute to regional security.”

These claims are all false; since the 1980s China has been a principle backer of Iran’s radical Islamic regime, providing decades of military technology and assistance, while becoming the principle source of foreign revenues as the largest customer for Iran’s petroleum. Iran, in turn, gives Chinese weapons to terrorist groups in Lebanon and Yemen, which respectively, are fighting Israel and Saudi Arabia. 

China claims to be seeking ‘amity with all Middle Eastern countries’ but starting on Dec. 27, 2019 it sent a major Chinese Navy warship to exercise with Iran’s Navy, showing clear support for Iran.  Free Pressers photo. 

It seems to be common belief that this was an attack that the Houthi rebels in Yemen carried out - with the implication that it was unsophisticated, and that any determined street gang could duplicate it.  It wasn't.  It was disguised to look like that - if one doesn't look too closely. 

B.F. Skinner And A Million After Him Said

In plain English (translated to Redneck), you get more of behaviors you reward and less of behaviors you punish.  B.F. Skinner, of course, was the preeminent behavioral psychologist of his day. 

Charlie Martin at PJ Media provides an otherwise unremarkable article but makes it clear that what we're seeing from Iran is exactly the kind of responses expected when training a lab animal.  On a night (east coast time) when missiles are raining down on Iraqi air bases that are home to American troops, it's helpful to remember the setup for this goes back a long way, not just to last Thursday.

I think there's a larger point here, something that BF Skinner showed with pigeons but that goes for people too: when you reward a behavior, you get more of it.

Looking back over the last 10 years, we've seen the Obama Administration ignoring Iranian provocation to get the "Nuclear Deal", sending them billions of dollars in cash — and releasing this same Soleimani from previous sanctions, something John Kerry tried to explain by saying it wasn't this Soleimani, but another guy of the same name (which was a lie by the way), and then ignoring blatant violations of the agreement they were so proud of making, while Iran continued to attack the Iraqi government and kill civilians.

When you reward a behavior, you get more of it. And we have: since the Obama deal, Iran has increased its military budget using the money the Obama deal supplied; support for terrorism has actually increased.

Of course, this is what we'd expect: we keep rewarding the Iranian government, they keep doing what gets them rewarded.

Skinner noted that negative reinforcement (punishment) would work to discourage a behavior but it has to hurt, or at least be unpleasant.  The US in particular and the international community in general has been rather weak at administering negative reinforcement.  From stories in the media, Soleimani had grown accustomed to doing anything he wanted.  He was the Instagram Selfie terrorist leader.  He fully believed either we couldn't or wouldn't do anything to him; in a word, complacent.  There's a story that a recent defector from his Quds force (Quds is their word for Jerusalem) brought piles of documents on what he was up to.  While they say surveillance went up, intelligence probably knew his location at all times for a while.

Twitter user TheLastRefuge tweets the following picture which might help explain things - if true.  (Found on Rantingly)

I only know three are true off the top of my head: the ones involving Obama, Valeri Jarrett, and John Kerry.  Lisa Page, Peter Strozk, and Huma Abedin are new to me. 


 

Did Mad Dog Nominate A Muslim Brotherhood Supporter?

I ran across word on PJ Media that Secretary of Defense Mattis has recommended the appointment of Anne Patterson to be the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.  The author of that piece, Raymond Ibrahim, went so far as to call her a Muslim Brotherhood Stooge.  Is she really a Brotherhood stooge, or is she just a career State Department wonk who was in Egypt at that time?

Becoming Undersecretary of Defense for policy would make Patterson the third highest official in the Pentagon, and the only one of the top three (the other being Deputy Secretary Robert Work, an Obama appointee holding over until he's replaced) to not be a retired career officer.  Politico describes the problem this way:

As ambassador to Egypt between 2011 and 2013, Patterson worked closely with former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and his Islamist government. She came under fire for cultivating too close a relationship with the regime and for discouraging protests against it -- and White House officials are voicing concerns about those decisions now. 

The emphasis of the Politico piece is that Mattis keeps nominating people whom he knows and has some regard for, and the Trump administration keeps refusing them.  Middle East Briefing seems to back that up, at least partly, simply reporting that Mattis and Patterson worked together when he was still a general.

General Mattis’ choice of Patterson for the top policy post at the Pentagon is the result of their close working relationship when Patterson was serving as Ambassador to Pakistan from 2007-2010, and later during her posting in Cairo. General John Kelly, the Secretary of Homeland Security, who headed the U.S. Southern Command before taking the Trump cabinet post, and is a close collaborator of Defense Secretary Mattis, also knew of Patterson’s earlier career as Ambassador to El Salvador (1997-2000) and Colombia (2000-2003). She served, briefly, in Colombia during the presidency of Alvaro Uribe, who took a hard-line stance against the FARC (Armed Forces for the Liberation of Colombia). As head of Southcom, General Kelly had been a strong promoter of aggressive action against the Colombian drug cartels, including the leftist FARC.

The PJ Media piece is more negative about Patterson.

Back during the months leading to the June 30, 2013 revolution, Patterson -- the “Brotherhood’s Stooge” as she was called by all, from news analysts to the Egyptian street -- was arguably one of the most hated individuals by the millions of Egyptians who took to the streets against Morsi and the Brotherhood. Not only did her face regularly appear next to Obama’s in placards; it sometimes appeared alone, indicating just how closely she was seen as supporting the Brotherhood.

Ibrahim includes several photographs of protests in Egypt directly attacking Patterson.  For example:

There are more of these, as well as quotes from Egyptian sources who seem to be uniformly against Patterson.  There are allegations that she's Muslim Brotherhood agent, and more.  Is it just because she was the visible face of a very unpopular Obama policy? 

As I mentioned, Politico seems to emphasize the conflict between Trump and Mattis, saying that several of his appointments for assistants have been refused. 

The skirmish surrounding Patterson’s nomination is the latest in a series of personnel battles that have played out between Mattis and the White House, with each side rejecting the names offered up by the other while the Pentagon remains empty. The White House has yet to nominate a single undersecretary or deputy secretary to the Defense Department, while Work, Mattis’s deputy, is an Obama administration holdover who only agreed to stay on until the secretary taps a deputy of his own.

...
But it is Mattis who’s dug in most stubbornly, insisting on staffing his own department. “Mattis is a guy who cares very much about personnel,” said a Mattis friend. “He doesn’t want people off the tracks that he has laid down and that he’s running his train on.”

Which indicates that he feels he can trust and work with Anne Patterson.  The above quote from Middle East Briefing implies that General John Kelly of Homeland Security also likes and trusts Patterson.  Middle East Briefing continues:

The harshest criticisms of Patterson center on her close relationship with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and their former President, Mohammed Morsi, when she was Ambassador in Cairo from 2011-2013.

...
Patterson arrived as Ambassador to Egypt four months after the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, and she immediately established strong ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, while also keeping lines of communication open to the ruling armed forces. She became the emblem of the Obama Administration’s policy of courting the Muslim Brotherhood as a “moderate” force within “political Islam,” which had been enshrined in President Obama’s Presidential Study Directive-11 (PSD-11) of August 2010, and the later Presidential Decision Directive-13 (PDD-13) of February 2011, which set forth a policy of opening to Muslim Brotherhood organizations in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Syria. In the spring of 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had announced a public opening to the Muslim Brotherhood, and she later approved a visit to Washington by a delegation of Muslim Brotherhood leaders from all over the Middle East and North Africa.

It's being reported that Trump and the administration are opposed to Anne Patterson's nomination, and they will probably win that argument.  My respect for Mad Dog Mattis leads me to believe that if he feels he can work with her and trust her, that's probably adequate vetting.  On the other hand, everyone makes mistakes.  It really comes down to the question of whether Anne Patterson is really a Muslim Brotherhood supporter, or is she just a career diplomat handed a crappy job and trying to make her boss look like not-quite so big an idiot as he is?  Yet another question looming is if there will be Brotherhood ties into the Trump administration as there were into Obama's, where they were apparently embedded from top to bottom.

Anne Patterson (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Obama's Fundamental Transformation of Israel and the Mideast

Much has been said and much ink has been spilled about the US not preventing UN resolution 2334 condemning Israel from passing 10 days ago.  There has been much less talk about the way the resolution fundamentally transforms the region by overturning almost 50 years of established law. 

Caroline Glick, deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, has a different perspective that makes for an interesting read.  It was a featured column at Townhall last Saturday, New Year's Eve.  While it's a bit long, I would recommend anyone with interest in the area read and understand it.  Essentially, 2234 is the fundamental transformation of Israel.  Resolution 2334 doesn't stop with an attack on Israel, it undoes much of the legal basis for Israel's internal decisions since the Six Day War in 1967.  It undoes UN Resolutions 242, 338, and the Oslo Accords at a minimum.  A little background according to Glick:

Resolution 242 anchored the ceasefire between Israel and its neighbors at the end of the Six Day War. It stipulated that in exchange for Arab recognition of Israel’s right to exist in secure and defensible borders, Israel would cede some of the territories it took control over during the war. 242 assumed that Israel has a right to hold these areas and that an Israeli decision to cede some of them to its neighbors in exchange for peace would constitute a major concession.

242 is deliberately phrased to ensure that Israel would not be expected to cede all of the lands it took control over in the Six Day War. The resolution speaks of “territories,” rather than “the territories” or “all the territories” that Israel took control over during the war.

Resolution 2334 rejects 242’s founding assumptions. 2334 asserts that Israel has no right to any of the lands it took control over during the war. From the Western Wall to Shiloh from Hebron to Ariel, 2334 says all Israeli presence in the areas beyond the 1949 armistice lines is crime.

Given that Israel has no right to hold territory under 2334, it naturally follows that the Palestinians have no incentive to give Israel peace. So they won’t. The peace process, like the two-state solution ended last Friday night to the raucous applause of all Security Council members.

As for the boycott campaign against Israel, contrary to what has been widely argued, 2334 does not strengthen the boycott of “settlements.” 2334 gives a strategic boost to the boycott of Israel as a whole.

2334 calls on states “to distinguish in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.” Since no Israeli firms make that distinction, all Israeli economic activity is now threatened with boycott. [Bold added - SiG]

A rather interesting interpretation, and one I'm especially interested in (compared to all the others) because it seems to ask the question you never hear politicians talk about: "and then what?"  Politicians and political hack writers almost never talk about unintended consequences of laws (or in this case, resolutions) that are passed.   Caroline Glick's column is about the unintended consequences.  You'll recall Secretary of State Horse Face talking about the two state solution and "land for peace" last week; the unintended consequence that he's unaware of is that by passing 2334, the UN effectively killed the entire "peace process" - if Caroline Glick is right.

I should point out that Glick believes there's more afoot here.  She maintains that before he leaves office Obama will put forward (or not prevent the passage of) another resolution in the UN.

Finally, sometime between January 17 and 19, Obama intends for the Security Council to reconvene and follow the gang at the Paris conference by adopting Kerry’s positions as a new Security Council resolution. That follow-on resolution may also recognize “Palestine” and grant it full membership in the UN.

Then what?  With no recognition of the right to hold territory it took in the six-day war, Israel's entire relationship with the PLO and her other neighbors changes.

As for the Palestinians, resolution 2334 obligates Israel to reconsider its recognition of the PLO. Since 1993, Israel has recognized the PLO despite its deep and continuous engagement in terrorism. Israel legitimized the PLO because the terror group was ostensibly its partner in peace.

Now, after the PLO successfully killed the peace process by getting the Security Council to abrogate 242, Israel’s continued recognition of the PLO makes little sense. Neither PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas nor his deputies in Fatah – convicted, imprisoned mass murderer and terror master Marwan Barghouti and Jibril Rajoub who said he wishes he had a nuclear bomb so he could drop it on Israel and tried to get Israel expelled from FIFA — have any interest in recognizing Israel, let alone making peace with it. The same of course can be said for the PLO’s coalition partner Hamas.

This second paragraph is an important point.  Hamas' charter calls for the destruction of Israel as do the symbols (flags, etc.) of both groups.  Now that they've succeeded in killing the peace process by convincing the Security Council to destroy it's basis in international law (UNSC Res. 242), is there any reason to believe the PLO and Hamas will do anything other than try to destroy Israel?  It could be argued that in taking away the "buffer" that Israel surrounded itself with in 1967, the UN is encouraging another war to re-establish safety zones; perhaps bigger, perhaps different safety zones.  At the least, Israel should decide how to handle matters in its own borders with its own best interest in mind. 

Finally, there are the territories themselves. For 50 years, Israel has used the land for peace paradigm as a way not to decide what to do with Judea and Samaria. Now that 242 has been effectively abrogated, Israel has to decide what it wants. The no brainer is to allow Jews to build wherever they have the legal right to build. If the UN says Israel has no rights to Jerusalem, then Israel has no reason to distinguish between Jerusalem and Elon Moreh. [Bold added - SiG; Elon Moreh is a settlement on the West Bank (Samaria) apparently used as a way of saying this settlement is just like old city in Jerusalem to the UN]

The western or Wailing Wall, a Jewish holy site in the old city of Jerusalem.  My photo.  UNSC 2334 doesn't recognize this site or the Jewish quarter of the old city as belonging to Israel.  It has been continuously occupied by a Jewish population for centuries, except for the brief interval between the formation of Israel in 1948 and the 1967 war that recaptured it.

9/11 15 Years After

While sipping my coffee this morning, I was watching the annual ceremony of the reading of the names of the 9/11 victims in the WTC.  I don't know why it surprised me to see as much crying as I saw, but I was struck by how raw the wounds from that day still are.  From the way most mass media talks about it, it's like dim distant past, something the country is completely over.  Easy to say if it's not your loved one, coworker, or other friend that died that day. 

In going over my years on this blog, I find I've written only a few posts on 9/11.  I suppose I try to contribute something that other people don't and with the superb writers that are here in the blogosphere, I'm not sure I have much to say that's worthwhile.  I find it's one of those few days in my life where I instantly can vividly recall where I was, what I was doing, and all of the things we saw and heard.  

On that bright Tuesday morning, I was out of the office at a company that we contracted to do some testing on our radios.  As the technician and I were setting up the test, the company's secretary/receptionist came in and said the radio had a bulletin that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center.  My first reaction, perhaps strangely, was that radio navigation systems can't be that wrong, it must have been a terrible accident.  Act of war did not enter my mind.  As the morning went on, a TV set was put in place and large antenna hooked up outside (there are no local TV channels).  We watched the second plane hit and quickly realized this was no accident.  That's when the thoughts of Pearl Harbor and other acts of war started.  I've heard it credited to Ian Fleming as his character Auric Goldfinger, but the saying goes, "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action".  And so it appeared that day. 

In the days that followed, I learned that friends were affected by the events of 9-11, but weren't involved.  A co-worker was on business at Boeing, and had to rent a car to drive home.  A very close friend was waiting at JFK airport to fly home, and saw the attacks in real time.  He also had to rent a car and drive home.  A cousin lives within viewing distance and watched it. And now I have friends who have sons in the armed forces in Afghanistan, and others who have been in Iraq.  We need to remember we are at war, even if our enemy isn't a convenient nation-state.  You can pretend we're not at war if you'd like, but if someone swears to destroy you, it's prudent to believe them.

This post shouldn't be about me.  It's in memory of all those who died that day, and since then.  Let us really never forget.  This poster is several years old, but it'll have to do.  Remember the fallen. 

As We Enter "The Holiday Season"

With Hat Tip to Michael Bane's blog:

The words to listen to in the political gobbledygook going by are "Article 5" especially if those words are accompanied by the word NATO.   Article 5 of the NATO treaty is the "collective defense" article; the one that says an attack on any NATO member is viewed as an attack on them all.  You can be sure that Putin is aware of that and it's being figured into his gaming.  If there were any Warsaw pact left to counter it, they might well have thought the same of Turkey's action.  To quote from Tam:

• This has the potential to spin right the f*** out of control before anybody involved realizes what they're doing.

To the suggestion that Russia would just continue to punk NATO with no response:

• Yeah, see, sooner or later some individual fighter pilot or other trigger puller isn't going to understand that he's supposed to be punked.

There are a lot of people saying we're in the early days of WWIII, we just don't know it.  I think we'll be finding out.  I don't think that Russia has the military strength to go down the road of pushing NATO.  Strategy Page noted this weakness in numbers the other day (H/T to BRM)

The Russian intervention in Syria involves some 4,000 troops and about fifty warplanes and helicopters. The small size of this force exposes a sad fact of post-Cold War Russia; the military no longer has much in the way of combat capability and few post-Cold War weapons. Thus Russia has few smart bombs and is mostly relying on unguided bombs built in the 1980s,  ...  The Russian air force and navy are now less than ten percent of their Cold War strength and the army has fewer combat brigades than it did armies during the Cold War.

So they'll likely do something more subtle to hit Turkey, perhaps something like Col. Ralph Peters suggests in this video. 

May you live in interesting times, indeed.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving, folks!

Headline of the Day

From Reuters:  Honduras detains 5 Syrians heading for U.S. with stolen Greek passports-police 

The report in its entirety says:

Honduran authorities have detained five Syrian nationals who were trying to reach the United States using stolen Greek passports, but there are no signs of any links to last week's attacks in Paris, police said.

The group of Syrian men was held late on Tuesday in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa on arrival from Costa Rica and they were planning to head to the border with neighboring Guatemala. The passports had been doctored to replace the photographs with those of the Syrians, police said.

The men later told the police they had planned to cross Guatemala after exiting Honduras, then Mexico before crossing the southern border in the US.  Unlike the US, the countries of Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras all have genuine border security and caught the five Syrians.  Plus, they consider crossing with invalid passports to be a crime.  Their journey will be interrupted at least a little while.

Don't worry; I'm sure they were coming to audition for a church choir somewhere.  Maybe the Mormon Tabernacle?  One of the big Texas mega-churches? No?

In other news, president Obama is right: ISIS has been contained.  There has not been one single ISIS attack on the moon or another planet.  They have been contained to Earth, where they're pretty much like cockroaches and are found everywhere.   

 (US Border Patrol agent)

What ISIS Really Wants

In March of this year, the Atlantic magazine published a fascinating, in-depth article by that name, on the real nature of ISIS and what we can really expect the organization to try to do.  Hat Tip to Self Sufficient Mountain Living who says a British friend mailed it to him.

It's easy for Western minds to dismiss these radical Islamists as insane, trying to establish conditions exactly the way their prophet ordered it in the Koran.  They are far from insane; they're methodically reconstructing the seventh century world as they believe they're commanded to.  They are perfect Muslims in their minds and attack anyone who believes in anything their spiritual leaders say is wrong.  In short, in the words of the subtitle of that piece:

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse.

I've stated before in various places that Islam is Satanic.  I realize that probably sounds inflammatory, especially to non-evangelicals, but all it means is that it follows tenets that are anti-Christian. Among those beliefs is that phrase "...it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse".  Christians don't believe God requires us to create the apocalypse.  God could end the world in an instant if He desired.  If you compare the biblical book Revelations to Islamic stories of the return of the 12th Imam - the Mahdi - from a well in Iran, I think it can easily be envisioned that they're talking about a similar story but from opposite sides.  Unlike the Christian end-times talk, Muslims who follow this theology believe they need to go on such a killing spree as to wash the world in blood before their leader will return.  

I'll be honest: I haven't finished the article, but I think it's worthwhile reading - if not mandatory for understanding the world in 2015.  I'll excerpt some pieces here that particularly made me take notice:

• Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world. 
• In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.
• The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.
  ...
  Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.
• Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common victims. Exempted from automatic execution, it appears, are Christians who do not resist their new government. Baghdadi permits them to live, as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in dispute.
• According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time.” He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.” Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. “And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”
• The Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only punishments permitted for enemies of Islam. ... Leaders of the Islamic State have taken emulation of Muhammad as strict duty, and have revived traditions that have been dormant for hundreds of years. “What’s striking about them is not just the literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these texts,” Haykel said. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness that Muslims don’t normally have.”
• If al-Qaeda wanted to revive slavery, it never said so. And why would it? Silence on slavery probably reflected strategic thinking, with public sympathies in mind: when the Islamic State began enslaving people, even some of its supporters balked. Nonetheless, the caliphate has continued to embrace slavery [including sex slavery - SiG] and crucifixion without apology. “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” Adnani, the spokesman, promised in one of his periodic valentines to the West. “If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.”
• The biggest proponent of an American invasion is the Islamic State itself. The provocative videos, in which a black-hooded executioner addresses President Obama by name, are clearly made to draw America into the fight. An invasion would be a huge propaganda victory for jihadists worldwide: irrespective of whether they have given baya’a to the caliph, they all believe that the United States wants to embark on a modern-day Crusade and kill Muslims.
• Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing. No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the engine of God’s will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken, and fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is what it looks like.
• The Islamic State awaits the army of “Rome,” whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse. [All bold emphasis added - SiG]

That's probably too much to have excerpted here, but these are important pulls.  There is no negotiation with the Islamic State.  All you have to look at is their imagery: the crucified men and children; the beheaded prisoners, including little girls barely beyond toddler age; prisoners drowned en masse, burned to death, or beheaded in lines along the beaches.  Then we find their own doctrine forbids negotiation or making peace in any way.  No, their doctrine ensures that the only response proper for the Islamic State is the same as for an invasive cancer.   Every single cell must be killed.  The author of that piece offers as one of his conclusions that a slow, continuous bleeding of ISIS might be the best of the bad solutions to dealing with them.

(by Scott Stantis)

This Changes Things

The Times of Israel reports that significant amounts of oil have been discovered in the tiny country, specifically in the Golan Heights region in the north of the country, bordering Syria.

The layer is ten times larger than the average oil find worldwide, Bartov said, “and that’s why we’re talking about significant amounts. What’s important is to know that there’s oil in the rock, and this we know.”

They note:

Three drilling sites on the Golan have uncovered what is potentially billions of barrels of oil, enough to fulfill the Israeli market’s 270,000-barrel-per-day consumption for a very long time, the report claimed.

You might recall that a couple of years ago, Israel announced they had discovered a deep offshore oil and gas deposit offshore from the city of Haifa, named the Tamar and Leviathan fields.  At that time, the press were saying:

“The quantity of gas discovered in the licenses, and the high probabilities, make it the third largest offshore discovery to date,” according to Israel Opportunity chairman Ronny Halman, quoted by Globes.

He added, ”This quantity guarantees Israel's energy future for decades, and makes it possible to export Israeli gas, and boost the state's revenues without worrying about gas reserves for domestic consumption."

Sounds like Israel is poised to move from net energy importer to net exporter. Which has to have an effect on global geo- and petropolitics.

Drilling test holes on the Golan Heights. 

The Saudi Plan To Bankrupt American Oil

15 months ago, if you'll recall, oil was $102/bbl.  A moment ago, a check showed it at $47.35.  In between these lies a story and some lessons.

The first thing to note is that when oil had been around $100 for a while, everyone thought the days of sub-80 or $90 oil were long gone and they'd never be seen again.  Today, you'll read pundits saying that oil will stay below $60 and we'll never see $100 oil again.  That epic shortsightedness is lesson #1. 

Last December, I ruminated a bit on the price of oil and what may be going on.  This weekend, I see a summary by Jim Rickards that makes it appear I was right all along.  I wrote:

I think there can be a bigger game going on here, though.  The principal power in OPEC is the Saudis.  The Saudis have no use for the Iranians and are frankly terrified of a nuclear Iran.  You can bet your butt that if Iran goes nuclear, the Saudis will go nuclear as well.  For a country that nominally hates Israel, they've quietly agreed to allow Israel to over fly Saudi territory if needed to attack Iran ("the enemy of my enemy is my friend" in action?).  They also want Assad out of Syria and Russia is propping up both Iran and Syria.  I think it's entirely possible that Saudi Arabia could be playing the game to get Putin out of the area, and try to collapse the governments of both Iran and Syria.  Russia's economy is already showing signs of trouble.  If they collapse Putin himself, get him ousted by ballot, by revolt or worse, I think the Kingdom would view that as a good thing.  I also can't imagine the Saudis would be too upset if they found a price for oil that shut down American shale oil production. 

I included this handy graph of the price to balance the national budgets of several oil producers.

A vitally important piece of information which was missing from this chart was the cost per barrel of fracked oil.  What does it cost to produce a barrel in the American and Canadian oil fields?  The fracking industry assumed oil would remain in a range of $70 to $130 per barrel and based their business model on this. Over $5 trillion was spent on exploration and development, much of it in fields like the Bakken formation and the Colorado/Wyoming Niobrara oil shale.  

As I said last December, OPEC, and particularly Saudi Arabia, found themselves in a tight situation: not making enough profit from their sales to be fully comfortable.  Note I said enough profit.  Saudi Arabia is unique in actually being able to produce oil at a profit for as little as $10/bbl!  One thing was abundantly clear, though, unless they did something to strike back at the American production, they were condemned to low oil prices for the foreseeable future.  As Rickards says, the Saudis could survive with oil at $30, but it would be hell on their budget.  $80 would be good for their budget, but would probably allow the American frackers enough breathing room to stay alive.  Instead, they went for a price comfortably below that $70/bbl price they believed was the price of American oil. 

It turned out that the optimal solution for the Saudi problem was $60 per barrel. A price in the range of $50 to $60 per barrel would suit the Saudis just fine. That was a price range that would eliminate frackers over time but would not unduly strain Saudi finances

Oil at $60 has the added bonus of hurting both Russia and Iran, as well America.  It's win-win-win for the Saudis.  If you look at the records of the past year, the price of oil hit the Saudi target price of $60 per barrel by the end of 2014. But it kept going down. The price hit $45 per barrel in January 2015 and $40 per barrel by this past summer. That was due to normal market overshooting and momentum trading. It was also due to the fact that desperate frackers actually increased production to meet the interest payments on their debt even thought they were in the process of going broke.

Assuming war doesn't break out in the Persian Gulf region, I can see oil staying in the ~$45 to $60 range for a while; specifically, until the American fields are largely shut down and the workers moved back out of North Dakota and other places.  It will stay there until it will take a couple of years for the US industry to get fully mobilized again.  For planning purposes, figure some time in 2017.  

If you have enough Ferengi in you to be wondering how you can make some money out of this, should this all be true and not just fever dreams from your humble blogger (and, strangely, Jim Rickards), consider the following scenario.  In gold and silver mining, companies are broadly sorted by size into what are called juniors and majors.  Juniors are the startups; the hotshot geologist and a small group who go prospecting and find the new deposits to mine.  The majors leave this work to them because it's highly risky.  A lot of juniors go broke working on a deposit that doesn't end up being worthwhile.  On the other hand, once the juniors find a good deposit and start extracting the gold, the majors buy them out.  There's a similar stratification in the oil world, too, with smaller companies and the vast multinational majors. 

In this case, the juniors are likely to get squeezed out.  The small budget American frackers are going to be in trouble.  The big Majors, though, have the resources and intercontinental connections to survive it.  Those companies will go on a buying spree, picking up sources for pennies on the dollar starting soon (if they haven't already) and stretching through '16.  If this happens in 2017 as outlined, they'll start making money at a prodigious rate. 

Standard disclaimer: I'm not an expert in this stuff at all.  I'm just some random dood on the Intertubes with a blog.  I just observe things and think about them.  If you're taking advise from random people on the Web, you deserve what you get.

Brent Crude - one of several benchmark prices for crude oil.  Looks like it's staying in a trading range to me! 

Could Have Been Drawn Yesterday

In the email today, a friend sent this 112 year old cartoon.  Note the 1903 date at the top.

Apparently Judge was a satire magazine of the late 1800s through as late as 1947 when it ceased publication. 

Sunday Wrap Up, Tab Clearing, Miscellany and Whatever ...

This weekend, ISIS let the world know what they think about those COEXIST bumper stickers.  Now, everyone who doesn't have their head up their ass about Islam has known this forever, but it's good to see them tell the truth.  Maybe we can pass this on to those smarmy oh-so-much-better-than-you people with those stickers.  I've always said, "if you're telling me to peacefully coexist, you're talking to the wrong side".

Hat tip to The Blaze for a link to The Site Intel Group who found ISIS critical of "moderate Muslims" who met with Pope Francis. Their term of insult for non-jihadist muslims is "coconuts".

On September 25, 2015, a user by an Arabic-language username translating to “Come Come,” called such Muslims “coconuts,” a term used by jihadists to insult moderate Muslims:

I wonder how many coconuts attended today's inter-religious prayer service led by Pope in NYC. They all need to take shahadah again.

Shahadah is apparently some sort of re-proclamation of their faith, and not a 50s music cover band.  Who would've known?


I've been meaning to recommend a post to you guys for days.  357 Magnum, who regularly brings the smarts on this topic, as well as many others, has a great summary post on the radiation leaks from the Fukshima nuclear power plant.   Fear Killed After Fukushim Daiichi.  Radiation, Not So Much.  If you live with or work around someone who carried on about this like it was going to be some sort of world wide catastrophe, send them to this piece and its links.  I work with a fairly smart guy who has sucked up way too many time-wasting pieces of  YouTube apocalyptic videos.  I'll be sending him this link.

No one has died from radiation associated with Fukushima Daiichi. Say that again. NO ONE has died.

The workers in the plant AFTER the disaster will not develop cancers in measurable difference from the background rate. (Some people develop cancer, even if they have never worked in nuclear power.)

Radiation wasn't the problem, it was government incompetence and fear-mongering. 


Didn't get much done today on the many projects.  We were up at 5 to catch the morning high tide at Sebastian Inlet and after that I had to spend a few hours in cleaning the boat, tackle and everything else, getting it stowed for "next time".  Unfortunately, high tide was all I caught.  Well, that and about a thousand no see um bites.  They were wicked bad this morning.  Mrs. Graybeard, though, caught a silver mullet on a white bucktail jig.  Yes, it ate the jig, it wasn't snagged.  Rare, but I've caught one once. 

Hungary - On The Ground With the "Refugees"

A friend sent a link today to this video posted on September 5th.  Unless you speak Hungarian (I believe), don't bother with audio. 

The incident took place at a train station in Hungary, where police brought water and packages of food to the refugees.  The story was that the food and water were refused because they came from the Red Cross and the packages bore a cross instead being marked as Halal - in their native language I assume.  They would not take aid with a Christian symbol.  Several of the refugees, reported to be Syrian, can be seen throwing water bottles and food onto the nearby train tracks.  Children accepted the food only to have it taken by teens or adults and thrown away.

You will note that the population appears to be almost entirely men of military age.  ISIS?  Some other group?  Nobody knows and nobody is allowed to question that.  Bretibart reports that as this is unfolding in Europe, five of the wealthiest Gulf States have refused to take in one single Syrian refugee. 

Yet amidst cries for Europe to do more, it has transpired that of the five wealthiest countries on the Arabian Peninsula, that is, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain, not one has taken in a single refugee from Syria. Instead, they have argued that accepting large numbers of Syrians is a threat to their safety, as terrorists could be hiding within an influx of people.

We're watching Europe being taken over without a single shot being fired.

Read of the Day

On February 3rd of this year, ISIS released a video of their members executing Jordanian pilot Mu’ath al-Kaseasbeh by burning him alive in a cage.  The world expressed outrage and disgust and then returned to being "concerned" and writing sternly worded letters.  In response, ISIS burned three Iraqis to death.

Sultan Knish points out the Muslims have been burning Jews alive as a matter of policy, and if the west does anything at all it's put pressure on Israel to release the terrorists that do it.  A sample of the stories he tells: 

The Moses family was driving on a pre-holiday shopping trip before Passover when their car was struck by a Muslim firebomb. Ofra Moses, who was five-months pregnant, wasn’t able to get her seatbelt open and burned to death. It took her 5-year-old son Tal another three months to die of his burns.

His 8-year-old sister Adi suffered severe burns as her father rolled her burning body in the sand to put out the flames. “I looked in the direction of our car and watched as my mother burned in front of my eyes,” she recalls.

She still remembers lying bandaged while her little brother screamed in pain in the next room.

Mohammad Daoud, the Muslim terrorist who did this to the family, was given two life sentences and an additional 72 years. But when the PLO demanded his release, Obama and Kerry forced Israel to comply.

This is accepted practice in Islam.  There are fire bombing attacks all the time in Israel. 

The problem is Islam. Go read. 

The 100th Anniversary of the First Holocaust of the 20th Century

Today marks the 100th Anniversary of Armenian Genocide, which is becoming regarded as the first holocaust of the 20th Century.   

Generally, when people speak of The Holocaust, they mean Hitler's WWII mission to kill every Jew on the planet.  There are many Holocaust Museums across the world: the official US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC; a Holocaust Museum in Florida as well as other states; several in Germany and other countries.  I have visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel; in the Western outskirts of Jerusalem. 

In an eerie preview of Hitler's holocaust and its links to Islam, reference Hitler's alliance with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the Armenian Genocide was carried out by Turkish Muslims trying to drive every Christian out of their land.  Because of the size of such a wholesale murder operation, it requires a government to carry out a genocide, and (source):

The Armenian Genocide was centrally planned and administered by the Turkish government against the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. It was carried out during W.W.I between the years 1915 and 1918. The Armenian people were subjected to deportation, expropriation, abduction, torture, massacre, and starvation. The great bulk of the Armenian population was forcibly removed from Armenia and Anatolia to Syria, where the vast majority was sent into the desert to die of thirst and hunger. Large numbers of Armenians were methodically massacred throughout the Ottoman Empire. Women and children were abducted and horribly abused. The entire wealth of the Armenian people was expropriated. After only a little more than a year of calm at the end of W.W.I, the atrocities were renewed between 1920 and 1923, and the remaining Armenians were subjected to further massacres and expulsions. In 1915, thirty-three years before UN Genocide Convention was adopted, the Armenian Genocide was condemned by the international community as a crime against humanity.

An attempt to kill every person of some minority is too big a crime to be committed in one day.  April 24, 1915 is generally considered the starting day because 200 Armenian Christians were rounded up in Constantinople (Istanbul) and arrested that day, a task made easier by having disarmed the Armenians (again, a preview of Hitler's holocaust).  Most of the 200 were summarily executed immediately.

It's generally concluded that 1.5 million Armenians (out of a population of 2 million) were killed  between 1915 and 1923.  In addition to those people, 750,000 Assyrians, and 500,000 Greeks were murdered.  2.75 million Christians were killed in total by Muslims who could not bear to have Christians living in "their" territory.  Likewise, it's generally concluded that the Armenian genocide served as an example for Hitler.  He is quoted as having used the rationalization, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Today, the Islamic State (or ISIS or whatever they call themselves) is in a campaign to bring back the idea of genocide of any non-Islamic groups.  They murder Christians whenever and wherever they can.  They massacre Yazidis, Kurds, anyone that isn't their version of Islam.  Not to mention their taking of women as sex slaves everywhere they go.  Christians and others fleeing the hell of north Africa into Europe are at the root of the migration crisis the EU is facing now. 

And so the 21st century begins as the 20th did: in the violence of a 7th century death cult's world view.  People tell me we have no need to be concerned about ISIS.  They say ISIS isn't here, or it's all made up, like some sort of Hollywood special effects blockbuster. 

(Armenian children on their way to "exile" and likely death).  Look at this long and hard.  This is what they do.  This what we'll get.  WWIII has already started, it's just taking time getting cranked up.  

Time to Put On Some Popcorn

And watch the fight that's starting to break out.   It seems the Hacktivist group that calls itself Anonymous has decided to attack ISIS and cut off their net usage.  (H/T Doug Ross@ Journal) At first thought, that makes sense.  Anonymous appears to be an anarchistic group dedicated to complete open freedom on the net while ISIS is only slightly more oppressive than Kim Jong Un.  Submit to them totally and be 100% compliant with their vision of Islam or die.  ISIS depends heavily on social media and their slickly produced execution videos (snuff pr0n films for Jihadi wannabes).  Cut ISIS off from those things and maybe they whither?  At the least, it can't hurt.

According to Watchdog.Org,

In a series of posts on the website Pastebin over the weekend, purported members of Anonymous vow to continue “Operation Ice ISIS,” taking down websites and social media accounts of groups who assist in terrorist activities.

This new round of online attacks is meant to target individuals who are directly involved with planning and recruiting for attacks against civilians in Iraq and Syria.

“We will hunt you, take down your sites, accounts, emails, and expose you,” said the group in a YouTube video released over the weekend. “From now on, no safe place for you online…you will be treated like a virus, and we are the cure.” The post goes on to list hundreds of links to social media accounts in Arabic, classifying them by their “priority” status.

You're the virus and I'm the cure?  Didn't Ahnold say that in one of his movies?  Big talk.  Still, Watchdog.org says they've made at least a cursory glance at the list and find that most, if not all, the Twitter and Facebook accounts mentioned by Anonymous have indeed been suspended.  Watchdog continues:

And by attacking the Islamic terror group at its central nervous system, that of social media, Anonymous has dealt a more devastating blow to ISIS than the 21 countries currently spending millions of dollars dropping bombs and stationing troops in parts of Iraq and Syria could ever hope to do. Where the military strategists are lacking, the computer hackivists are gaining ground.

Personally, I think ISIS needs to be destroyed and this won't do that ... but it's a good start.  Especially if they could really get their hands on Jihadi John, a man with an obvious and severe plumbous deficiency, like they depict in their Twitter post.   The whole organization is suffering from that deficiency, though. 

I think this would make an entertaining thing to watch, if we actually could. 

Do You Share This with Obama?

Over the last few years, I've been coming to realize virtually everything I came away from high school and the first years of college knowing - with the precious exceptions of some science and math - was utter bullshit.

One of the worst was my knowledge of the crusades, where I must admit to being as tragically uninformed as the president.  I had previously thought the only thing I had in common was Obama was bipedalism. 

For starters, get yourself over to Sense of Events to read "Not Every Christian is Perfect"; a link to this.  "Not every Christian is perfect. Jesus was. Not every Muslim is a terrorist. Muhammad was."

To borrow a quote,

The crusades were completely defensive, reactionary response to CENTURIES of a Muslim onslaught by jihadists. The purpose of the crusades were to free Christians. The purpose of jihad (Islam’s march) was to conquer and kill the kaffir (non-muslims).

There is absolutely no moral equivalence between the two.

How About A Bit More Chaos?

Good Lawd, what a week!!  Could we get more chaos?   Could we put any more pressure on global systems that are creaking worse than the most awful wooden floors or stairs ever seen?

To begin with, just over a week ago, the Swiss unpegged their Franc from Euro.  Long the most stable currency in Europe, they finally dropped their peg (a fixed exchange rate) and the move immediately shook the financial world.  It triggered a rush to Swiss assets for safety.   EU and German banks got hammered.  The Euro's exchange rate immediately dropped 30% .  Gold went back up to $1300 and silver jumped to $18.  (BTW, both metals are off to pretty big starts this year.)

In light of this (IMO) the European Central Bank announced a new round of bond buying - quantitative easing or monetary creation.  The ECB said it would combine purchases of government bonds with an existing smaller program of private bond purchases, to create 60 billion euros a month through September 2016.  All told, the program will amount to 1.1 trillion euros ($1.16 trillion).  The aim, of course, is to revive the EU economy.  As many have pointed out, they're going to fix the problem of over extended credit by extending more credit - exactly the same as fixing a hole by digging it deeper.   

The Euro is down against the dollar, it's almost 1:1 and I don't recall it ever being there, there's virtually a full tilt currency war going on, and the dollar is the 800 pound gorilla in the room.  Strange that it seems to have started with Obama essentially declaring he was going to crash the dollar.  Weaken it to the point where our exports increased greatly.  The problem with currency wars is that no one wins and everyone loses. Currency wars don’t create growth; they just steal it.  Growth  is stolen from trading partners until those trading partners steal it back with their own devaluations.

Yemen has collapsed as a nation - to the extent that it really was one to begin with.  Worse yet, it appears that Iran is involved. 

Saudi Arabia has lost one King and gotten another.  The combination of Yemen and Saudi Arabia pushes the region further into some deeply disturbing directions. Last week, John Robb posted a plausible scenario of how ISIS leverages a successful assassination of Saudi general into collapse of the Kingdom and how that could prompt global economic collapse - today's sub-$50 oil bounds up to $150 within a few months.  The death of King Abdullah probably makes that even more likely, as Robb reports today.   Even worse, he sees the possibility that ISIS captures and flips the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia!

PS:  If this doesn't occur, ISIS missed the opportunity, and we're all better off for their mistake.

PPS:  ISIS is a theocratic network of networks that is both entrepreneurial and dynamic. The KSA is a theocratic hierarchy that's risk averse and inflexible.  Which one wins?

One of the more plausible explanations for the Saudis driving oil prices down is that it pressures their old enemies: Iran and Syria (Sunni vs. Shia, round 9 million).  It punishes Russia for helping Iran, both of whom are economically hurting from it, and it also hurts ISIS who gets funding from selling their stolen oil.  If the Saudi hand is ripped off that figurative valve by the ISIS jihad, do you think $50 oil stays? 

Iran!  Like many others have said, Iran and other countries see us as a weak country now and are likely to be thinking they need to take their action against Israel or us soon, before a stronger leader takes the reigns again.  I think the Iranian general that the Israelis took out this week could have been in the vanguard of putting plans into action.

Iran’s brazenness, or audacity, goes further. While a desperate-looking US administration tries to advance talks over the Iranian nuclear program, the regime in Tehran continues to run a wild foreign policy throughout the Middle East. Though the regime’s income has fallen dramatically in the wake of the drop in oil prices, Tehran is still investing huge sums of money taking control of new assets in the region, from Afghanistan to Libya — almost the territory of the ancient Persian empire of Ahaseurus.

Hezbollah, for its part responded to the Israeli strike by saying they're preparing for war in the Galilee region of Israel.  Galilee is in the northern part of Israel, near the Golan Heights and Syria.  I spent a few days there last August. 

“If the highest level of Hezbollah commanders were in the Golan Heights and the high level of Iranians, it means that their idea, [what] they’re planning could be a kind of operation, an act against Israel on a high level,” Reuven said during a conference call Monday organized by the Israel Project (TIP). “It’s significant, the high level of this meeting, of this reconnaissance of the Iranians and Hezbollah.”

In the meantime, Obama has transferred almost $12 billion of your tax money to Iran; no doubt helping fund their development of atomic weapons.   This past Wednesday they paid $490 million in cash assets to Iran and will have released a total of $11.9 billion to the Islamic Republic by the time nuclear talks are scheduled to end in June.  Good thing we keep paying them even when oil is down, or they might not be able to arm Hezbollah to keep killing Israelis and whatever US troops they can get to.  

With all that chaos going on in just the last week to 10 days, what more could we pile on?  Mandatory $15/hr minimum wage increases?  That ought to throw a good sized quake through the economy.  Increasing spending?  Taking away programs that encourage saving for college?  Increasing taxes on the people who already pay the most?  The image of the Fabian Socialists was that the world needed to be heated up so that it could be re-forged and remolded to their desires. 

Hot enough for ya?