Year: 2016

The Stupid, It Just Never Ends

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It appears that Donald Trump has decided not to make John Bolton Assistant Secretary of State.

It appears that he did not get the job because the Donald does not like facial, and the American Mustache Institute is pissed off:

The American Mustache Institute is bristling at President-elect Donald Trump’s reported prejudice against facial hair.

Addressing allegations that former United Nations ambassador John Bolton was passed over for secretary of state because of his mustache, the AMI staff banded together to defend one of their own and denounce the rumored act of discrimination. After referencing Trump’s long history of superficial statements — from his hosting of “The Apprentice” to his misogynistic comments about former pageant queen Alicia Machado — the AMI let things get hairy.

“The paradox, of course, is that Mr. Trump’s orange face and spaghetti squash mane would, theoretically through his own Clark Gable paradigm — who ironically had a mustache — would make Mr. Trump himself unfit to serve in a position of leadership,” the AMI staff wrote. “But beyond the esthetic and ongoing pattern of his embrace of an alt-right-like discrimination, the Mustached American community is deeply troubled by a new administration erecting yet another obstacle towards a level playing field for people of Mustached American heritage.”

The AMI added that “our quarrel is not political as we are a non-partisan institution of learning, thought and facial hair militancy.”

I honestly cannot tell the difference between reality and parody any more, but I think that this is real, only it sounds like a parody.

We live in Bizarro world.

Doctor Who – “The Ballad of Russell and Julie” Wrap Party Special – YouTube

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You may recall the image of David Tennant, Doctor number 10, smoking many cigarettes simultaneously.

Frequently, it is a GIF, with a caption of “I can’t do it!”

It turns out that it was a part of a video, a musical number, done with Catherine Tate (Donna Nobel) and John Barrowman (Captain Jack Harkness) as an appreciation to Russell T. Davies and Julie Gardner when they left the series,

And here is the video:

Quote of the Day

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There are unquestionably many factors behind this result. But I want to focus on the biggest one that was completely under Democrats’ control. It is the same thing that killed the Republicans of Hoover’s generation: gross mishandling of an economic crisis. Democrats had the full run of the federal government from 2009-10, during the worst economic disaster in 80 years, and they did not fully fix mass unemployment, nor the associated foreclosure crisis. That is just about the most guaranteed route to electoral death there is.

—Ryan Cooper

From the beginning, the Obama has been more concerned with coddling Wall Street, as opposed to dealing with problems that the banksters caused for Main Street.

In terms of the foreclosure crisis, they actually aided and abetted the criminals.  (See Geithner, Timothy, “Foaming the runway.”)

Much like Hoover, they continued to insist that the economic orthodoxy that caused the economic meltdown was the solution to the problems.

Obama actually went softer on corporate criminals than George W. Bush.

Is it any wonder that the Democratic Party is a political Super Fund site right now?

This is Literally the Smallest Surprise of the Year

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Remember when Barack Obama said that Snowden should have gone through “Proper channels” to report abuses by the NSA?

Well, it turns out that Snowden’s “Proper Chanel” was just fired for illegal retaliation against a whistle-blower:

NSA oversight and whistleblowing through proper channels: both pretty much worthless.

Members of the intelligence community and members of its supposed oversight have said the same thing repeatedly over the past few years: oh, we’d love to cut Edward Snowden a break, but he should have taken his complaints up the ladder, rather than outside the country.

………

During a day-long conference at the Georgetown University Law Center, Dr. George Ellard, the inspector general for the National Security Agency, spoke for the first time about the disclosures made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In addressing the alleged damage caused by Snowden’s disclosures he compared Snowden to Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent and convicted spy who sold secrets to the Russians.

[…]

“Snowden, in contrast, was manic in his thievery, which was exponentially larger than Hanssen’s. Hanssen’s theft was in a sense finite whereas Snowden is open-ended, as his agents decide daily which documents to disclose. Snowden had no background in intelligence and is likely unaware of the significance of the documents he stole,” Ellard suggested.

These are the words of the “proper channel.” Ellard went on to state that had Snowden approached him with his concerns he would have pointed to the series of judicial rubber stamps that backed up the government’s post-9/11 national security assertions as they approved more and more bulk surveillance.

That Inspector General — the official channels, the oversight — is now (mostly) on his way out of the agency for actions undertaken in direct conflict with his position, as reported by the Project for Government Oversight.

[L]ast May, after eight months of inquiry and deliberation, a high-level Intelligence Community panel found that Ellard himself had previously retaliated against an NSA whistleblower, sources tell the Project On Government Oversight. Informed of that finding, NSA’s Director, Admiral Michael Rogers, promptly issued Ellard a notice of proposed termination, although Ellard apparently remains an agency employee while on administrative leave, pending a possible response to his appeal from Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.

“Bring your complaints through the proper channels,” said the proper channel, all the while making sure whistleblowers regret blowing the whistle. Ellard still has an appeal left to reclaim his position as a dead end for whistleblowers, but it seems unlikely the agency will be interested in welcoming a liability back into the fold. Ellard didn’t just violate standard government policies on workplace retaliation but a fairly-recent presidential directive as well.

It’s a pity that there isn’t criminal liability attached to such behavior.

Oh Snap

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Doubtless, you have heard various right wingers suggesting that we should replace the income tax with a VAT (Value Added Tax), and they have explained that a VAT is basically a national sales tax.

The truth is that while it is similar in overall effect, a VAT is administered in a very different way:  Rather than levying a tax at the time of retail sale, they levy a tax on each amount of value added at each step of the process, so there is a paument when the ore is mined from the ground, then a payment on the value added by refining, and a payment on (in this case) a steel mill making sheet and plate, and so on, and so on, and so on, until you have (in this case) a car.

It is structured that way because there is a real problem with tax evasion in many European countries, and a VAT is almost impossible to evade.

Well, as a result of the decision of the London Employment Tribunal to classify Uber drivers as employees 8 weeks ago, it appears that the serial criminal of the taxicab industry is going to get completely hosed on unpaid and future VAT:

………

 But it also has a further – and rather more fundamental – tax problem.

Let me explain. And for clarity I’ll reduce the argument to its essentials:

  1. before the Employment Tribunal, Uber contended that it simply acted as a booking agent for drivers. The Tribunal disagreed. It found, applying a normal contractual analysis, that Uber engaged drivers and supplied transportation services to passengers;

  2. what does this mean in terms of VAT? Well, for VAT, you start with the normal contractual analysis. But national tax authorities can also go beyond that analysis to discern the underlying “economic and commercial reality of the transactions” (as the case law puts it). I don’t, for the purposes of my argument, need to take that extra step. If the VAT analysis follows the contractual analysis then the following points apply. But the VAT test is wider than the contractual one – and even if Uber’s appeal against the Employment Tribunal decision succeeded it could still have a VAT problem;
  3. as things stand, and applying the reasoning of the Employment Tribunal decision, Uber seems to be making VATable supplies to passengers of transportation services. And those services are standard rated. In practice, this means that, of every £100 charged to an Uber customer, Uber would have a so-called ‘output’ tax liability of £16.67 (being the VAT on such sum net of VAT as, when VAT is added, gives you £100). And it would need to hand that sum over – less any ‘input’ tax – to HMRC;
  4. output tax is the VAT you charge your customers. And input tax is the tax you are charged by your suppliers. It’s the difference – the tax on the value that you add – that you hand over to HMRC. But does Uber have any input tax? Your employees don’t charge you input tax. Uber might have some external costs on which VAT has been charged – but not many. On the assumption (see (1) and (2) above) that the VAT reality of Uber’s business is that it is engaging drivers and supplying transport services to passengers, the vast majority of its expenditure will be the money it pays to drivers. But (with perhaps a tiny number of exceptions) drivers don’t charge Uber VAT on their fares. Indeed, they are incentivised to earn less than the VAT registration threshold. If they earned more, they would have to hand over 16.67% of their profits to HMRC in VAT;
  5. if you assume that Uber has no material input tax to set against its output tax, that would mean that, of every £100 of fares Uber has collected, it has a liability to pay VAT to HMRC of £16.67. It seems as though Uber racked up about £115m in fares last calendar year. This would mean it had a VAT liability of just under £20m for London for that year. But HMRC can go back four years or, sometimes, more. There is no suggestion in the accounts of the relevant Uber entity – Uber London Limited – that it was aware it had this risk;

    6. ………

  6. we should watch with care what actions, if any, HMRC take. I should have absolute confidence that HMRC will properly investigate the potential NIC and VAT liabilities of the Uber structure. I don’t.

I’m inclined to agree on item 9.

The psychopaths at Uber seem to have the ability to make regulatory and tax authorities look the other way, which is a pity.

Linkage

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Why PETA Is A Giant Nest Of Lies: (They lie about much of what they do in horrific ways)

Seriously, 90% kill rates in their shelters?

Different Priorities

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Blah, blah, blah!


Detail of Weapons Bay

The Japanese are working on their own stealth fighter, and they appear to be favoring a large weapons load over agility: (Paid subscription required)

With each published design iteration, Japan’s proposed indigenous fighter appears to be large, perhaps matching the size of the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor.

 Actually, it is even bigger.

 Drawing up a concept that emphasizes weapon load and endurance over maneuverability, designers at the Japanese defense ministry have come up with an aircraft that is longer than the F-22 and has a considerably greater wingspan. It is low in profile, however, to minimize radar reflections from the side.

 ………

 Official drawings of the proposed aircraft and the model used for weapon-ejection testing show that 26DMU has few differences from the previous iteration, 25DMU. Bulges under the wing roots have been given a revised shape, maybe for aerodynamic reasons. On the model the tips of the main plane are straight, compared with a slightly pointed design on 25DMU. But the major features are unchanged. The design still has two belly bays each holding three big missiles, side bays with one short-range missile each, a wide and shallow fuselage, heavily canted tail surfaces and a large wing of high aspect ratio for efficient cruise and loitering.

 ………

 The miniature missiles in the left belly bay of the model, which had an opened door for the tests, were Meteors with cropped fins, presumably of the design developed by MBDA for internal stowage in the Lockheed Martin F-35. The bay was only just large enough to hold three Meteors, mounted side by side and slightly staggered for tighter lateral packing. If Japan were willing to accept a rocket-propelled air-to-air weapon, the bay could also accommodate three missiles using the airframe of the Mitsubishi Electric AAM-4. Based on the Raytheon AIM-7 Sparrow, the AAM-4 has about the same length as the Meteor, 3.7 m (12 ft.).

Note that the AAM-4 and AIM-7 Sparrow are larger than the AIM-120 AMRAAM, having a body diameter of roughly 200mm, as opposed the 175mm.

The superior range of the AIM-120 comes from two things: Improvements in propellant, which could apply to the larger missiles as well, and improvements in flight profile during flight (more the 2nd than the first. By way of example, by updating avionics, the range of the SM-2 Standard was doubled by avionics changes which allowed it to take an indirect path to the target).

I guess is that the Japanese expect to deal with an opponent **cough** China **cough** at a significant distance from base without tanker support, so they need to carry more fuel and carry more missiles, because of potential threats from both long range interceptors (J-20 and Flanker derivatives) as well as very long range surface to air missiles (one would assume something north of 300 km, as the Russian SA-21 [S-400] exceeds 400 km).

By contrast, the F-22 was designed to fly from bases in the UK , the Netherlands, and Germany to engage Warsaw Pact aircraft at or behind the East-West German border, so there is a greater priority on agility.  (Then again, the Raptor didn’t enter service until after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, which says something about how weapons procurement programs take on a life of their own.)

Hubris — Ate — Nemesis*

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There is new information about the Clinton campaign emerging, and it reveals profound arrogance juxtaposed with an inability to find their ass with both hands. One would hope that this would bear negatively on future employment prospects in electoral politics for senior campaign staffers:

Ever since election night—when Hillary Clinton tanked and Donald Trump became the next leader of the free world—the most prominent allies and alumni of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign have maintained a succinct message for Team Hillary: We. Told. You. So.

In the final months of the brutal and chaotic 2016 campaign, there were plenty of Democratic activists freaking out about Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania (the three states that ultimately cost the Democrats the White House) and Clinton’s fatal shortcomings there. Many of them were envoys of the Sanders camp who wanted to help fix those problems, including Clinton’s difficulties with the block of the mythical “white-working-class,” economically anxious voters who Sanders had championed during the primaries.

“They f%$#ing ignored us on all these [three] battleground states [while] we were sounding the alarm for months,” Nomiki Konst, a progressive activist and former Sanders surrogate who served on the 2016 Democratic National Committee platform committee, told The Daily Beast. “We kept saying to each other like, ‘What the f%$#, why are they just blowing us off? They need these voters more than anybody.’”

According to Konst and multiple other people involved with these discussions, the Clinton campaign agreed to a meeting with a cadre of Sanders surrogates during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in July. The purpose of the meeting, which included Clinton’s national political director Amanda Rentería and Team Hillary’s progressive outreach coordinator (and former Sanders senior aide) Nick Carter, was to address the concerns many Sanders camp alums were voicing about Clinton’s strategy going into the general election against Trump. Carter declined to comment on this story.

………

“We were saying we are offering our help—nobody wanted [President] Donald Trump,” Konst continued, noting that the “Bernie world” side was offering Clinton’s team their plans—strategy memos, lists of hardened state organizers, timelines, data, the works—to win over certain voters in areas she ultimately lost but where Sanders had won during the primary.

“We were painting them a dire picture, and I couldn’t help but think they literally looked like they had no idea what was going on here,” she continued. “I remember their faces, it was like they had never f%$#ing heard this stuff before. It’s what we had been screaming for the past 9 months… It’s like [they] forgot the basics of Politics 101.”

………

Assurances were then made with various Clinton senior staffers that they would follow through with subsequent meetings and phone calls to address these gaps and warnings. Instead, meetings were canceled and “rescheduled” into oblivion.

“We not only screamed about this, we wrote memos, we begged,” Jane Kleeb, Nebraska Democratic Party chair and another Sanders booster who was at the DNC meeting, said. “I spent a good chunk of time writing memos about how [Bernie’s surrogates] could be utilized on the campaign trail, about ‘issue voters,’ about the environment, Black Lives Matter, Dakota Access Pipeline, rogue cops, you name it… I was [also] talking specifically about rural communities, and how [Hillary] completely ignored and abandoned anything that we cared about.”

………

“The Clinton campaign believed they had the strongest and brightest people in the room… and they had no concept of why people would choose Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton,” Kleeb continued. “They mocked us, they made fun of us. They always had a… model that was supposed to save the day. We were street activists and they don’t get that. And that’s a fundamental divide. They ran a check-the-box, sanitized campaign. And voters don’t think like that. You don’t win elections that way.”

………

“A ham sandwich could beat Donald Trump,” Melissa Arab, a Michigan delegate for Sanders, told The Daily Beast during a protest outside the Democratic convention in July. “And Hillary cannot beat Donald Trump.”

(%$# mine)

“Strongest and brightest” is not the proper term. The proper term is “Best and the brightest”, who, after all did SUCH good job in Vietnam.

I suppose that I could psychoanalyze why this happened, but I am an engineer, not a psychologist, dammit.‡

*The cycle of the classic Greek tragedy: Hubris — Ate — Nemesis translated to Arrogance — Insanity — Destruction.†
†Apologies to fans of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, etc. for conflating their works and the Clinton campaign.
‡I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

My Heart Bleeds Borscht for You C%$# Suckers

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It appears that the advertising industry is having a major butthurt over EU requirements that people have a modicum of control over information that is collected about them:

Europe’s new privacy regime is likely to disrupt global digital advertising by preventing companies from using an individual’s data unless they have direct consent from the consumer.

 The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) doesn’t come into force until May 2018, but when it does it will have a profound effect on businesses. The regulation will apply to data about every one of the EU’s 500 million citizens, wherever in the world it is processed or stored.

 Stephan Loerke, CEO of the World Federation of Advertisers, said, “I’m surprised more marketers have not woken up to the implications of GDPR. The new regulations will be a significant challenge for the ecosystem and it’s difficult to forecast how technology will adjust.”

 Put simply, targeting and tracking companies will need to get user consent somehow. Everything that invisibly follows a user across the internet will, from May 2018, have to pop up and make itself known in order to seek express permission from individuals.

 ………

 Companies can be fined as much as 4% of global revenues for breaching the regulations. They must also report hacking incidents within 72 hours and ensure parental consent for under-16s.

This is all common sense stuff, and it’s done everywhere else, but the only folks don’t want to do it, because ……… Internet.

Would you like some cheese with that whine?

I am With Marcy Wheeler on This

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In the New York Times, noted national security journalist Marcy “Emptywheel” Wheeler observes that. “I Despise Donald Trump, but He’s Right to Be Skeptical of C.I.A. Leaks.”

She also calls out the Gray Lady for its fake news in the lead-up to the Iraq war, in its own pages.

I’m thinking that the editors had a fit over that:

………
 Trump is not quite right when he claims that, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” Neither the entire intelligence community nor even everyone at the C.I.A. was wrong about the Iraq intelligence. Rather, leaks like the ones we’re seeing now ensured elected officials didn’t hear from the skeptics who got it right.

That time, as members of Congress were demanding the Bush administration show its case for war, anonymous officials told this newspaper that aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq could only be used for nuclear enrichment. By the time Congress got a report, a month later, saying that might not be the case most members never read it; they had already been convinced that the case for war was a “slam dunk.” 

 ………

These leaks are important. By all means, take them seriously. But they raise questions about why the C.I.A. wants to short-circuit the deliberation Obama ordered as much as they raise alarm about Putin’s role in Trump’s victory. Letting the C.I.A. dictate outcomes with leaks corrupts any democratic accountability it has.

Putin must not get to pick our next president. At the same time, elected representatives — whether Congress, President Obama, the 538 electors or the person who takes a vow to protect and defend the Constitution on Jan. 20 — must maintain control over our powerful intelligence community, even while alarming leaks attempt to wag the dog. 

(emphasis mine)

Her theory (see her blog) is that someone in the CIA is trying to obscure the likely origins of Russian operations: Hostile actions taken by the US state security apparatus, particularly the CIA, intended to destabilize and overthrow Russian allies.

It’s pretty clear that the CIA never stopped making war on Moscow after the end of the USSR, and it appears that the Russian state security apparatus is now returning the favor.

Tweet of the Day

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Democrats in the Obama years pic.twitter.com/Wy3v74cQhi

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) December 19, 2016

As much as I hate the hacks at Morning Joe, they are right.

Barack Obama was a catastrophe for the Democratic party.

So was Bill Clinton. (lost the house for the first time in nearly 40 years)

So was Jimmy Carter. (Lost the Senate for the first time in over 20 years)

We need to stop electing people who spend all their time pretending to be Republicans.

Linkage

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Walter White as Trump’s nominee to run the DEA:

They’ve Been Working This for Years

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The tough part is integrating unsteady combustion in a constant flow turbine


The detonation front moves helically around the combustion chamber

Conventional turbine engines use combustors that rely on deflagration (burning).

Theoretically, if you can burn the fuel through detonation (explosions), you can get a significant improvement in efficiency.

That being said, this is hard to do, but Aerojet Rocketdyne has a new way to approach detonation technology: (paid subscription required)

For over 70 years, jet engines have powered airplanes ever more safely and efficiently. But, despite higher core temperatures and pressures, and the introduction of efficient propulsion concepts like the geared fan, conventional gas turbines may be running out of runway.

 A fundamental change in the way a gas turbine combusts air and fuel in its core could open a path to a new era of jet engine development, however. Long pursued by propulsion researchers as a potential game-changing thermodynamic technology for gas turbines, the concept of pressure-gain combustion appears to be finally making headway.

 ………

 Unlike current gas turbines in which air is compressed, mixed with fuel and combusted at a constant pressure, the air and fuel mixture in a pressure-gain engine is detonated in a wave that rapidly compresses the mixture and adds heat at a constant volume. Because detonations produce extremely high pressures, the unsteady constant volume combustion process creates pressure gain in the burner, offering potential improvements of more than 15% in thermal efficiency and fuel consumption.

 But getting a detonation engine to deliver these efficiencies is extremely difficult. Despite at least two decades of experimentation with various pressure-gain combustion devices, researchers have yet to demonstrate a detonation engine that operates in a practical way, either as a means of augmenting current gas turbines or as a propulsion system in its own right.

 Now, Aerojet Rocketdyne hopes to change this with the RDE. To be studied with the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) of the U.S. Energy Department, the RDE is a simple combustion chamber contained in an annular ring that uses most of the compression for efficiency gains by allowing the detonation wave to propagate continuously around the curved edge of the chamber.

 ………

 Proving the ability of the unsteady combustor to interact efficiently with the turbine is crucial to the viability of the RDE, which differs from some alternative pressure-gain concepts such as tube-configured pulse detonation engines (PDE). These configurations fire intermittently because the fuel/air mixture needs to be renewed between detonation waves. Although PDEs have been developed and even were test-flown in 2008, Aerojet Rocketdyne selected the RDE as a more promising option because it is “a very elegant solution,” says Claflin. “It has minimal moving parts and the combustion process is continuous, unlike a PDE, which has valves cycling on and off at high rates.”

Most of the work on PDEs has dealt with their being a successor to conventionally combustion ramjets, though it’s rather similar to the pulse jets used on the V-1 “Buzzbombs”.

The RDE comprises an annular ring with nozzles at the inlet end that inject a mixture of fuel and air axially from a high-pressure plenum. The mixture is ignited once to begin the detonation process, which propagates circumferentially around the combustion chamber. The gas expands in azimuth and axially, while the exhaust and injection systems both operate axially. Because the detonation propagates in azimuth around the annular chamber, the kinetic energy of the inflow is reduced and the RDE uses most of the compression for gains in efficiency. “It is an unsteady process, but the axial flow is continuous and we end up with very-high-power densities because of it,” adds Claflin.

I rather think that the first applications will be for stationary equipment, power plants and the like, but until we see some real complete hardware out there doing actual work, whether it’s generating electricity or powering an aircraft.

Until then, I take it as a technology that is always just around the corner.

Tru Dat

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Juan Cole notes that much of the reason for the imminent defeat of the insurgents in Aleppo is because they are largely a foreign presence who is doing the bidding of there Sunni extremists supports, which runs counter to the cosmopolitan and non-sectarian nature of Syrian society:

Syria was in a better position to attain peace last spring, when a ceasefire had unexpected success. It would have been better if the rebels had been able to keep East Aleppo and the rest of their territory, and the regime had been forced to dicker with them in order to put the country back together again. Someday it might even have been possible for East Aleppo to elect representatives to the Syrian parliament who represented their point of view.

The fall of the East Aleppo pocket dooms such a negotiated outcome of the civil war. The regime of Bashar al-Assad will be emboldened, as it has pledged, to try to take back over all the territory militarily, and to re-institute its seedy one-party state replete with intensive domestic spying, arbitrary arrest and torture.

That said, the rebel forces in East Aleppo do bear some of the blame for their defeat. It seems a harsh thing to say at a time of heart-wrenching scenes of noncombatants waiting in the cold for an evacuation that only seems to come in fits and starts. But it is necessary for us to understand what is happening and not only to feel it. Because al-Assad is understandably hated in democratic societies, there is a tendency to see the reassertion of the regime there as purely an act of brutal force.

………

But this brutality cannot explain what happened. Revolutions and civil wars don’t work that way, however. You can think of lots of movements that couldn’t be quelled by massive brute force, including that of the Viet Cong in the 1960s and 1970s. If we want to understand why Russian aerial bombardment was so effective, we have to take politics into account.

Syria is a very diverse society. Here are some guesstimates for its ethnic and sectarian make-up.

  • Alawite Shiites: 14%
  • Christians: 7%
  • Druze: 3%
  • Ismailis: 1%
  • Twelver Shiites: 0.5% [The most common form of Shia]
  • Kurds: 10%
  • Secular Sunni Arabs: 30%
  • Religious Sunni Arabs: 34.5%

The Syrian youth revolution of 2011 appealed to virtually all these groups except maybe the Alawite Shiites, who depend on the al-Assad regime for their prominent position and prosperity in Syrian society. The early Syrian revolutionaries talked about a democratic society in which all these groups would have representation. I met with Syrian revolutionaries in Istanbul in 2012 and they were praising all of these religious and ethnic groups for having members standing up to the regime, even Alawite villagers and movie stars.

………

Many of the fighters in the rebel opposition were Muslim Brotherhood, a relatively moderate fundamentalist group in Syria which nevertheless does want to impose a medieval version of Islamic law on the whole country. But the best fighters and the best-funded fighters were Salafi Jihadis like Jaysh al-Islam, the Freemen of Syria, the Nusra Front, and Daesh (ISIS, ISIL).

It was the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front that in 2013 nearly succeeded in using Homs and Qusayr to cut off the southern capital of Damascus from re-supply via the northwestern Mediterranean port of Latakia. This plan by Salafi Jihadis was forestalled by the intervention of the Twelver Shiite Lebanese party-militia, Hizbullah on behalf of the regime.

It was a Nusra Front-led coalition that in spring of 2015 managed to take the city of Idlib and all of that province, and to begin an advance on Latakia to the west, with the same strategic goal in mind. Latakia is a heavily Alawite Shiite region, so for hard line Sunni fundamentalists to take it would have entailed massive massacres and ethnic cleansing. This plan by the Salafi Jihadis was forestalled by Russian intervention.

It is true that Russia has subjected the Sunni Arab rebels, many of them just Muslim Brotherhood, to intense aerial bombardment. But it has especially gone after al-Qaeda (the Nusra Front, now styling itself the Levantine Conquest Front).

Under the conditions of 2011, the other rebels would have rushed to the aid of a besieged anti-al-Assad group.

That did not happen during the past 3 years, for a simple reason. Most people in Syria don’t trust the Muslim Brotherhood and they really, really dislike the Salafi Jihadis.

………

And the fact is that the fundamentalist rebels have repeatedly denounced and threatened the leftist Kurds. (It is these fundamentalists that Western politicians often call “moderates.”)

The supposedly moderate Freemen of Syria put al-Qaeda in charge of the Druze villages of Idlib in 2015. Druze are an offshoot of Ismaili Shiism and are deeply hated by al-Qaeda. They were forcibly converted to Sunni Islam and nevertheless some of them were killed or their property confiscated by the Nusra Front.

So as the Syrian opposition ratcheted farther and farther to the Sunni religious right, and as the most effective fighters came to be drawn from that sector, they lost the good will and support of most Syrians.

………

So you get 70% of the people in the country who, having been given the unpalatable choice between the Baath regime of al-Assad and being ruled by Salafi Jihadis, reluctantly chose al-Assad.

That is why the Aleppo pocket fell. There had been 250,000 Sunni Arabs of a more religious mindset and from a working class background living there under rebel control since 2012. But next door in West Aleppo, which our television stations won’t talk about, were 800,000 to a million people who much preferred to be under the rule of the regime. This numerous and relatively well off population took occasional mortar fire from the slums of East Aleppo. They weren’t in the least interested in saving the rebels from the Russians or the Iraqi Shiite militias or from the regime itself.

The Kurdish forces likewise didn’t rush to the defense of the Sunni Arab fighters in the East Aleppo pocket.

By militarizing the revolution and by moving ideologically to the religious far right, the rebel fighters deprived themselves of support among most Syrians.

………

But they sometimes formed battlefield alliances of convenience with al-Qaeda or with Salafi jihadis, and as time went on they showed less and less no interest in human and civil rights for women and minorities.

Syria is much more diverse a country than it might seem from cold social statistics. Hard line Salafis never had any chance of attracting enough support to take over the whole country, and even just very conservative Sunnis did not, either. The strategic thinkers in Ankara and Riyadh completely misread the situation.

That is why the East Aleppo pocket is falling to the regime. Not because aerial bombardment or brute force work magic in and of themselves. But because the Salafis and Muslim Brotherhood were unable to cumulate resources from other groups and attract broad support.

We are on the wrong side:  The House of Saud and its ilk are a path to instability, sectarianism, and more terrorism.

The depressing thing about Syria is that there really is no frght side.

Today’s Go F%$# Yourself Goes To………

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Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, better known as “Kos”:

Daily Kos publisher and Vox Media co-founder Markos “Kos” Moulitsas, an influential voice in liberal politics, published a blog post (Daily Kos, 12/12/16) that captures just how terribly leading Democratic pundits are taking Hillary Clinton’s unexpected defeat. In the wake of this loss, some of the more hardcore Clinton partisans have chosen, in lieu of self-examination and internal criticism, to simply lash out at the voters they failed to win over.

 With the punitive glee of a medieval executioner, Moulitsas proclaimed: “Be Happy for Coal Miners Losing Their Health Insurance. They’re Getting Exactly What They Voted For”:

Mr. Moulitsas really needs to get over himself.

Former Insys Officials Charged in Scheme to Push Its Painkiller – The New York Times

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I have been suggesting that Pharma was conspiring with doctors to get people hooked on opioids.

It appears that certain elements in the Department of Justice agree:

Federal prosecutors brought racketeering charges on Thursday against several former executives of Insys Therapeutics, a small Arizona drug company, saying they were part of a scheme that involved aggressive sales of the powerful and highly addictive pain drug fentanyl.

Criminal charges are unusual in cases involving pharmaceutical companies, and prosecutors said they intended to put companies on notice.

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According to the indictment, the six former employees, including the former chief executive, Michael L. Babich, and regional sales directors, offered bribes and kickbacks to pain doctors in various states in exchange for getting them to prescribe more of the company’s product, Subsys, a spray form of fentanyl. Subsys is supposed to be used only by cancer patients who are already on round-the-clock pain drugs.

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Prosecutors said executives at Insys began to aggressively market Subsys soon after it arrived on the market in 2012, and they were frustrated because it was not performing well against several similar fentanyl products that were already on the market. So over the next few years, they set out to woo pain doctors who had a track record for prescribing large quantities of fentanyl, enticing them with speakers’ fees, lavish dinners and in some cases going so far as to hire their relatives.

Seriously, these guys are no different from the drug dealer on the corner, except for the fact that much of their money comes from government subsidies (patent) and direct payments from social programs (Medicare and Medicaid).

Maybe it’s time to rethink those government subsides and direct payments.

This Is a Refreshing Change from the Usual Hagiography

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Finally, an article about the guys who parlayed white male privilege and luck into multibillion dollar fortunes which concludes that they are not all that:

In February 2012, after Facebook announced what was in time to become the largest IPO in the history of internet firms, The Economist put a parody of Mark Zuckerberg’s profile page on its cover. Next to an insipid, beaming profile picture of the young CEO, there was a status update: “VENI VIDI VICI!!! Am I richer than Bill yet? lol.” They were not the first magazine to draw the comparison. In October 2010, Vanity Fair beat them to it, declaring Zuckerberg the No. 1 most influential person in the United States and calling him “our new Caesar.”

Zuckerberg, of course, had not conquered Gaul. He had not scattered the German armies nor subjugated Britain, nor crossed the Rubicon and become first consul. He had not visited death and terror upon a continent, nor brought an end to an old republic, setting off a chain of intrigues that would birth the mightiest empire in the history of the world. No. Mark Zuckerberg had made a sh%$ ton of money.

By April of this year, Facebook stock was worth more than $116 a share, up from its initial offering of $38. The social network had made its early investors even richer than they had ever anticipated. That same month, The Economist put Zuckerberg on its cover for the second time but now without detectable irony. His face appeared on a marble statue of Augustus, seated in cape and laurel crown beside a tiny globe. “IMPERIAL AMBITIONS” roared the headline. Mark’s outstretched arm gave the imperial thumbs-up. He liked it.

The press enjoys excitedly praising tech titans by comparing them to fantastical and mythical figures. Zuckerberg is Caesar. Elon Musk, a wizard. Peter Thiel, who believes that he lives in the moral universe of Lord of the Rings, is a vampire. I do not know if these men believe that they have the supernatural powers the media claims. Maybe they do. I do know that they do not mind the perception, or at least have done nothing to combat it, even among those critics who believe that they’re cartoon villains.

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Let us state the obvious: None of these men are Roman Emperors, and they haven’t got the wherewithal to “blow up” anything but a stock market bubble. They are not Lex Luthors or Gandalfs or Stalins. Their products do not bring about revolutions. They are simply robber barons, JP Morgans and Andrew Mellons in mediocre T-shirts. I have no doubt that many are preternaturally intelligent, hardworking people, and it is a shame that they have dedicated these talents to the mundane accumulation of capital. But there is nothing remarkable about these men. The Pirates of Silicon Valley do not have imperial ambitions. They have financial ones.

I think that a lot of this comes back to the Pilgrims, who were Calvanists, and as such saw financial success as a sign of God’s favor.

This attitude has carried forward, and wealth is still seen as a sign of virtue.

It is a poison at the core of most of our problems as a society.