Candidate Trump (2016): Count Donald Trump among the ranks of those who don’t think too much of the stock market as a sound place to put money. A day after making a widely watched public address on his economic plan, the Republican presidential nominee advised against betting on Wall Street. The big problem, as Trump sees it: The low interest rate environment fostered by the Federal Reserve that has coincided with a 227 percent market gain since the financial crisis lows. “If rates go up, you’re going to see something that’s not pretty,” the billionaire businessman told Fox News during a...
CONFIRMED: Legalization Turns Mary Jane Into a Square Drug Kids Don't Want to Try
The results are in and they're just what you would expect. After eight US states decriminalized marijuana, and another twenty allowed it to be smoked as medicine, its use by adolescents has fallen to an all-time low. Nobody should be surprised by this. Without being illegal cannabis is about as cool as Ed Sheeran, except it's even more boring. The chance it might get you chased by cops is literally the only fun thing about weed. Legalize it, and take that bit of excitement away and there is literally no excuse for anyone who is not Jamaican or in a jazz band to be seen within ten feet of...
Killing of 17-Year-Old Galvanizes Opposition to Duterte's Drug War
When the Philippine drug was brought back this March it wasn't supposed to be like this. Supposedly the police hoped the second stage of the resurrected drug war would be all but bloodless. After all Duterte had already fulfilled his promise of a lethal drug war. The campaign that lasted from his inauguration in mid 2016 through January 2017 had produced some 2,500 bodies (the oft-cited 7,000 figure is an exaggeration), overwhelmingly shot by police while "resisting arrest". There was no urgent political need for more bodies. It was not to be. Instead the new campaign gradually broke new...
McMaster, Mattis Purge Dangerous Flynn Crazies From the NSC
The purged crazies were pushing for open warfare against Syria to "confront Iran" Beloved of the establishment for all the predictable, horrible reasons the war criminal H.R. McMaster has nonetheless done at least something right. He has succeeded in throwing out two very dangerous Flynn-appointees from the National Security Council. In mid-June Foreign Policy reported that two top National Security Council officials, Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Derek Harvey, were pushing for the US to broaden its war in Syria. The US was to go on an offensive against the Syrian army and allied militias in...
The First Shots of America’s New War for Eastern Syria Have Already Been Fired
If Trump admin officials have their way, the next US war will be to block the Syrian army from retaking Syria's Euphrates valley When the US shot down the Syrian Su-22 jet Sunday this may have been intended as a warning to Syria that US intends to take eastern Syria for itself -- and that a Syrian push into eastern Syria will be violently opposed. As late as April the Americans still assumed eastern Syria -- city of Raqqa and the entire Euphrates valley down to Iraq -- was theirs for the taking. The Syrian army they assumed was too far away, too weak, and too busy, to try to liberate these...
US Fighting for AND Against All Sides in Syria’s 4-Sided Civil War
November 10 US State Department clarified al-Qaeda in Syria is a terror group despite its rebranding from ‘Jabhat al-Nusra’ into ‘Jabhat Fath al-Sham.’ On the same day Obama ordered the Pentagon to track down and kill its leaders. November 18 US drone strike killed an al-Qaeda leader in Syria’s Idlib province on Turkish border. Like it or not al-Nusra is a central and elite part of the Syrian Islamist rebellion. By waging war against it US is — exactly like Russia — waging war against a component of the anti-Assad rebellion, and a crucial one at that. This incidentally means that US (unlike...