The seemingly endless amount of apps available in the App Store on my iPhone amazes me. Everyday I use Facebook, YouTube, Pandora and more. They keep me entertained, informed and, hopefully soon, healthy!
Skin cancer can look very harmless to the untrained eye. Luckily for us, there’s an app called SkinVision that analyzes pictures of the spots on a person’s skin and determines whether the person is at a low, medium or high risk of skin cancer using a dermatologist-approved algorithm that checks skin for irregularities in color, texture and shape.
This is welcome news considering skin cancer is the most commonly diagnosed type of cancer among men and women. Skin cancer accounts for nearly half of all cancers combined. Melanoma is the most deadly form of skin cancer and its rates have been on the rise for the past 30 years.
SkinVision isn’t currently available in the U.S., but the company says it will be soon. I encourage everyone to get this app as soon as it becomes available. Though an app like SkinVision can’t take the place of an in-person visit to the dermatologist, it encourages people to examine their skin regularly and can help the untrained eye detect potentially dangerous moles or skin cancers.
While waiting for the SkinVision app to be available in the U.S., it’s important to get to know your skin very well and to recognize any changes in the moles on your body. Look for the ABCDE signs of melanoma, and if you see one or more, make an appointment with a physician immediately. Asymmetry — One half doesn’t match the appearance of the other half. Border irregularity — The edges are ragged, notched or blurred. Color — The color is not uniform. Shades of tan, brown and black are present. Dashes of red, white and blue add to a mottled appearance. Diameter — The size of the mole is greater than 1/4 inch (about the size of a pencil eraser). Any growth of a mole should be evaluated. Evolution — There is a change in the size, shape, symptoms (such as itching or tenderness), surface (especially bleeding) or color of a mole.
There’s also been a big win for natural medicine in the fight against skin cancer. A common vegetable extract has been proven effective as a skin cancer treatment… Eggplant extract, or BEC5, is especially potent against skin cancer. It bonds to a receptor on the surface of the cancer cell, making itself available as “food” for the cancer cell. However, as soon as the cancer cell digests the health benefits of eggplant extract, the BEC5 causes the cell to rupture. Once the cancer cell destroys itself, the body simply reabsorbs it.
And in terms of skin cancer prevention: Vitamin A supplements could reduce the risk of developing melanoma. The reduced risk is more pronounced in women than men. Vitamin A is found in foods such as sweet potato, carrots, spinach, milk, eggs and liver. A form of vitamin B3 called nicotinamide is a cheap and readily available vitamin supplement appears to reduce a person’s risk of non-melanoma skin cancers. The vitamin supplement also appeared to reduce the numbers of thick, scaly patches of skin that can become cancer. Nicotinamide is very different from a more commonly known form of B3, niacin. People who take high doses of niacin can suffer from headaches, flushed skin and low blood pressure. None of these side effects were seen with nicotinamide.
The Homer Junior High School Lady Mustangs celebrate after earning the IESA Sectional Championship on Dec. 7.
8th Grade Girls Basketball team headed to State Compete Saturday in Macon
The Homer Junior High School 8th grade girls basketball team is headed to State!
The Lady Mustangs defeated Romeoville’s Lukancic Middle School on Dec. 7 with a score of 35-22, earning them a trip to Illinois Elementary School Association (IESA) State Tournament this weekend.
The Sectional Champs will play New Lenox’s Liberty Junior High School at 11:30 a.m. Saturday (Dec. 10) at Macon Meridian High School, 728 S. Wall St, Macon. You can follow the games here.
The Mustangs enter the tournament with a record of 23-2 while the Patriots enter with a record of 18-8.
I began publishing my monthly newsletter The Bob Livingston Letter™ (subscription required) in 1969. The following appeared in the December 1997 issue. Way back then I was alerting readers to growing militarization of federal agencies. This activity expanded rapidly under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. As I reported to you readers of Personal Liberty, now even NOAA and the Federal Reserve have armed troopers. The EPA and FDA have both deployed their own SWAT teams to shut down activities as benign as collecting rainwater and selling raw milk. Even the Department of Education and National Institutes of Health have SWAT teams. In 1996 there were 60,000 armed federal agents. Today there are more than 200,000. Is this not evidence the U.S. is a police state at war with its own people?
The U.S. Government has been quietly deploying unregulated agency armies against its own citizens. It is part of the ongoing invasion of our nation from within, by mass deceit and mass, uninformed consent. According to Joseph Farah of the Western Journalism Center:
In 1996 alone, at least 2,349 new federal cops were authorized to carry firearms… As a result of that record one-year surge, there are nearly 60,000 armed federal agents representing departments as diverse as the FBI, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Postal Service.
Among the others packing heat against you and me are the agents of the seemingly innocuous U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army Corps of Engineers. In fact, there is no such thing as a harmless federal agent nor agency. Just ask the surviving members of the Randy Weaver family.
Farah adds that the reason these feds are armed is that they are “in the business of seizing people’s personal property” on any pretense. It is not exactly benign behavior for a group supposedly sworn to preserve the blessings of liberty and our posterity. In this way, the federal armies among us are unregulated, doing what is unlawful under the color of law by the authority of bureaucratic agency rules. They are eating out our substance, precisely what the colonists complained of in their Declaration of Independence submitted to King George III.
Other agencies, if not actually using their guns, use the implied power of the gun to turn entire institutions and states to the federal or globalist will. These include the IRS and the Department of Justice. How bad is it? Benjamin Stein is the actor who does the “Clear Eyes” commercial on TV. He says:
Why was life so bad in Russia? I guess because people were not free. Life was fixed by quotas and government orders. You were who the government said you were, not who you could be… I wonder if some smart fellow… has ever studied the similarities between the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division recently and… the KGB. A very different approach to conflict resolution, to be sure, but certain similarities in the world view.
To be sure, there is indeed a similarity in world view because it is the religio-political world view of global collectivism. Yet there is more. The “conflicts” supposedly resolved by the federal government are not genuine but are set-ups in order to consolidate federal and globalist power over individuals.
The State grand jury in Oklahoma City is now considering evidence in this regard. According to the testimony of former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) informant Carol Howe of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the government was aware of the pending attack on the Murrah Federal Building. Additional evidence points to deeper federal awareness and possibly even involvement in the bombing of its own.
Such a scenario is reminiscent of the maneuverings of Josef Stalin. He consolidated Soviet, communist, and personal tyranny by manufacturing conflicts and then brutally resolving them. There is a “velvet glove” covering similar abuses by the globalists, their U.N., and the U.S. government. After all, the feds are not communist, in name at least, but democrats. They are nevertheless revealed to be tyrants because of their official policy of bearing arms in every imaginable capacity against people who are ostensibly, again in name only, their fellow citizens.
The United States of America was founded as an extraordinary experiment in freedom balanced by an almost universal worldview — the Christian or biblical worldview — which supplied inward moral constraints and rendered heavy handed government unnecessary and even repugnant.
But today, over 240 years later, America is a battlefield of opposing worldviews: secular humanists who have no transcendent truth to constrain them, versus people of faith who still embrace a biblical worldview. That biblical worldview includes exhortation to all manner of good and godly works and attitudes.
But what of The Left? Those with no moral compass who subscribe to the situational ethics school of thought? How can Progressive leaders and gatekeepers motivate their followers? Simple: fear.
People, in general, are either motivated by love or fear. Many times a healthy dose of fear is not a bad thing: ask the parent who loves their child unconditionally, yet understands the efficacy of fear of consequences.
Consider the notorieties of The Left and some of their chronicled pronouncements intended to evoke fear.
National Review columnist David Frenchwrites of fearmonger Al Gore:
In January, 2006 — when promoting his Oscar-winning (yes, Oscar-winning) documentary, An Inconvenient Truth — Gore declared that unless we took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a “point of no return” in a mere ten years. He called it a “true planetary emergency.” Well, the ten years passed today, we’re still here, and the climate activists have postponed the apocalypse. Again.
Director Davis Guggenheim eloquently weaves the science of global warming with former Vice President Al Gore’s personal history and lifelong commitment to reversing the effects of global climate change in the most talked-about documentary of the year.
An audience and critical favorite, An Inconvenient Truth makes the compelling case that global warming is real, man-made, and its effects will be cataclysmic if we don’t act now. Gore presents a wide array of facts and information in a thoughtful and compelling way: often humorous, frequently emotional, and always fascinating. In the end, An Inconvenient Truth accomplishes what all great films should: it leaves the viewer shaken, involved and inspired.
Notice the hyperbolic language — cataclysmic — and the ultimate goal of the movie, “An Inconvenient Truth accomplishes what all great films should: it leaves the viewer shaken, involved and inspired.” Shaken. Indeed. Trembling with fear. Now that’s some motivation!
Now consider the collective works and declarations of Hollywood heavyweight (pun intended) Michael Moore. Take a look at the PR description of Moore’s 2009 film, Capitalism: A Love Story:
Filmmaker Michael Moore explores corporate greed, the global economic meltdown, and their disastrous effect on American lives. As he travels from the Heartland to the financial epicenter of New York and the halls of government in Washington, Moore delves into the price the country pays for its love of capitalism.
Moore’s earlier 2002 movie, Bowling for Columbine, delivers a foreboding message concerning guns in America:
Political documentary filmmaker Michael Moore explores the circumstances that lead to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre and, more broadly, the proliferation of guns and the high homicide rate in America. In his trademark provocative fashion, Moore accosts Kmart corporate employees and pleads with them to stop selling bullets, investigates why Canada doesn’t have the same excessive rate of gun violence and questions actor Charlton Heston on his support of the National Rifle Association.
Leftist Moore crafts his documentaries to support his radical worldview: capitalism is unadulterated greed which will destroy America and the globe; guns and the NRA and Charlton Heston are evil and the cause of violence in America. Each of Moore’s films seek to instill fear in the audience.
Another purveyor of fear, Nobel Peace Prize Winning Barack Obama has the bully pulpit and the Progressive mindset to disseminate chilling, but fictitious, dictums. With the looming danger of Islamic terrorism, Obama dons his blinders and preaches:
Today there is no greater threat to our planet than climate change.
. . .
No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.
Secretary of State John Kerry warns:
It is [climate change], indeed, one of the greatest threats facing our planet today.
Even Veep Joe Biden gets in on the “scare-your-pants off with man-caused climate change doom” act:
Climate change is the threat multiplier.
Watch the video below with these and more scary quotes:
Now we all know we should live in fear and trembling of climate change, gun owners and capitalism. But wait, there’s more.
Slow Joe Biden warned the black community in August 2012, replete with his phony “black brother accent:”
[Romney] said in the first hundred days, he’s going to let the big banks write their own rules — unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains.
Thus Americans can add Romney and all Republicans to the list of phobias. But, don’t put down your pen — if you’re taking notes.
President Obama decried flyover folks in 2008:
And when he spoke to a group of his wealthier Golden State backers at a San Francisco fund-raiser last Sunday, Barack Obama took a shot at explaining the yawning cultural gap that separates a Turkeyfoot from a Marin County.
“…And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
So there you go. According to Obama, working class Americans are bitter, God-clinging, gun-clinging, xenophobics who should be objects of suspicion and loathing.
Our universities have been indoctrinating students for several generations with this nonsense, instilling fear of patriots and what were once considered solid American values. Colleges advertise “safe zones” and decry “micro-aggression and trigger warnings.”
Oklahoma Wesleyan University President, Dr. Everett Piper, wrote an excellent rebuttal to all the PC/Lefty nonsense in his 2015 article, This is Not a Day Care. It’s a University!:
At OKWU, we teach you to be selfless rather than self-centered. We are more interested in you practicing personal forgiveness than political revenge. We want you to model interpersonal reconciliation rather than foment personal conflict. We believe the content of your character is more important than the color of your skin. We don’t believe that you have been victimized every time you feel guilty and we don’t issue “trigger warnings” before altar calls.
Oklahoma Wesleyan is not a “safe place”, but rather, a place to learn: to learn that life isn’t about you, but about others; that the bad feeling you have while listening to a sermon is called guilt; that the way to address it is to repent of everything that’s wrong with you rather than blame others for everything that’s wrong with them. This is a place where you will quickly learn that you need to grow up.
This is not a day care. This is a university.
Let’s face it, The Left is motivated by, and only by, feelings — not facts nor solid intellectual argument. With a worldview wherein man is both intrinsically good and, strangely, the enemy of the planet, the best mode of motivation is fear. Pure, unsubstantiated fear.
Contrast that with the Judeo-Christian, the biblical, worldview. Those who revere the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, those who read the Bible and try to live out its precepts. Those people of faith believe in right and wrong, in sin and mercy and grace. And they believe in absolute, transcendent truth.
If The Left motivates through fear, how does The Right, Conservatives of faith, motivate? Love.
There are over 360 passages in the Bible which tells us to “fear not.” And with great clarity the apostle John writes:
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. 1 John 4:18
We are fragile mortals, given to fears of every sort. We have a built-in insecurity that no amount of whistling in the dark can mollify. We seek assurance concerning the things that frighten us the most.
The prohibition uttered more frequently than any other by our Lord is the command, “Fear not …” He said this so often to His disciples and others He encountered that it almost came to sound like a greeting. Where most people greet others by saying “Hi” or “Hello,” the first words of Jesus very often were “Fear not.”
Our culture may be a war zone as we wrestle against principalities and powers who wield fear as a weapon of control.
The antidote for that fear is truth and love. We must be apologists of truth, striking down the nonsense of the fear peddlers. As John Mark penned:
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.
And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.
Sorry fearmongers, you don’t have a chance of winning: perfect love casts out fear.
I was watching Hostage, a typical Bruce Willis action movie, the other night with my wife.
At one point I got up to get a glass of water and she grabbed my hand. When I looked at her she was holding her breath, the suspense was so great.
You need to bear in mind that my wife and I have four daughters, so we don’t watch many macho action movies together. I usually watch them in my man cave, generally, with kids floating in and out as things blow up and people are thrown through glass windows.
After we finished watching the movie, she told me she had watched a Die Hard movie a couple nights before and enjoyed it as well.
This is kind of a shock coming from my wife.
So I got to thinking about all the generalized excitement that has greeted the new Donald Trump presidency. And I started to realize that something new and different is about to happen in U.S. politics — and no one knows what will come of it.
Some believe that it will be awesome. Others believe just as strongly that it will be a nightmare. But the ‘meh’ middle has dried up. Everyone is running with strong feelings one way or the other.
In my younger days I was a playwright on occasion and sometimes someone would ask me if anyone ever told me they hated a show. And I would tell them that I thought the show was successful if people loved it or hated it. As long as they weren’t indifferent about it, I did my job.
What I am seeing collectively, even beyond U.S. borders, is a sense of suspense and anticipation. No one knows what’s coming next.
It’s refreshing in a way. But we’re also seeing this play out in the markets.
We’ve had bank excesses for decades, starting with President Bill Clinton repealing the Glass-Steagall Act in the early 1990s and ending in the financial Armageddon in 2008.
But it hasn’t stopped there. The quantitative easing the Federal Reserve began has kept these ungainly, unhealthy organizations at the top of the food chain by artificial means — central bank policy.
In a “state of nature” these banks would have collapsed and we would have new financial institutions to take their place that were built by modern people, for modern times.
The markets have reflected this era with record low volatility. Basically, what I’m saying is, the markets have been living in a romantic comedy for a very long time.
It’s an artificial reality and it too may be coming to an end.
I expect Fed’s rate rise in December will be the beginning of sure and steady increase in volatility, or in more plain language, risk.
Risk is on the rise. And that’s a good thing. It’s a healthy thing. It’s a necessary thing for capitalism and democracies.
My prediction is that next year at this time, things will be very different in the markets and the economy. And I’m fine with that, for good or ill.
When risk rises back to healthy levels of creative destruction, you need to be well positioned in smart investments. For now, gold and silver are your best bets because they will thrive when market risk is high.
Other than precious metals (and bitcoin) there is nothing worth buying until after the inauguration. — GS Early
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice seeking access to FBI reports of interviews – “302s” – of President Obama, Valerie Jarrett, and Rahm Emanuel. The interviews were taken as part of the FBI’s criminal investigation of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:16-cv-01888)).
In 2008, Blagojevich sought political favors in exchange for deciding who to appoint to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by then-President-Elect Obama. Among the persons Blagojevich approached were the President-elect and his intermediaries. Obama reportedly declined to make a deal. Blagojevich then turned to supporters of Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., offering the U.S. Senate seat in return for a $1.5 million “campaign contribution.” Blagojevich broke off negotiations with Rep. Jackson’s supporters when he learned that he was being wiretapped by federal investigators.
Over the course of two criminal trials in 2010 and 2011, Blagojevich was convicted of 18 separate offenses and, in December 2011, was sentenced to 168 months in jail. In 2015, an appellate court overturned five of Blagojevich’s convictions and affirmed the remainder. On August 12, 2016, Blagojevich was resentenced to the same, 68-month jail term he had received previously.
Judicial Watch had asked the FBI to produce the 302s, pursuant to FOIA, in June 2011. The FBI confirmed the records’ existence in 2012, but denied the request, asserting that the 302s were exempt from disclosure under FOIA Exemption 7(A) because Blagojevich’s criminal case was still ongoing at the time. Judicial Watch filed suit to try to obtain the 302s in May 2016, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Blagojevich’s convictions. It closed that initial lawsuit while Blagojevich was being resentenced. Judicial Watch refiled its lawsuit after Blagojevich was resentenced.
Judicial Watch’s lawsuit asks the court to order the interview reports’ release, noting:
[U]nder the circumstances it cannot be said that release of the requested records could reasonably be expected to interfere with whatever is left of Blagojevich’s criminal prosecution. The public should not be forced to wait any longer to review the FBI 302s of President Obama, former White House Chief of Staff and now City of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, or Senior Advisor to the President Valerie Jarrett while Blagojevich pursues his second, plainly futile appeal.
“The FBI interviewed Barack Obama eight years ago about the selling of his Senate seat. The American people should finally get to see these FBI interview reports,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The public has a right to know precisely how Obama and his senior White House advisors Emanuel and Jarrett responded to Blagojevich’s corrupt attempts sell Obama’s Senate seat.”
Hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, has revolutionized energy production in the United States and cornered OPEC. That cartel is currently attempting to restrict oil production and raise prices, but it faces the reality that American frackers can rapidly expand output. It’s a nightmare if you are a corrupt petro-dictator of any stripe, communist to jihadist.
Now the never-ending quest for new technologies has yielded a potentially revolutionary replacement or substitute for fracking: microwaving shale to extract oil and gas. James Watkins reports in Ozy.com:
As strange as it sounds, producers are experimenting with ways to zap previously unextractable oil resources with microwaves, which has the potential to kick-start an even bigger energy revolution than fracking — and appease environmentalists while they’re at it. This is potentially “a whole shift in the paradigm,” says Peter Kearl, co-founder and CTO of Qmast, a Colorado-based company pioneering the use of the microwave tech. Some marquee names are betting on the play: Oil giants BP and ConocoPhillips are pouring resources into developing similar extraction techniques, which can be far less water- and energy-intensive than fracking.
If producers can find a way to microwave oil shales in the Green River Formation, which sprawls across Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, the nation’s recoverable reserves could soar and energy independence could become more than an election slogan. Even with existing methods — strip-mining the shale and then cooking it, or injecting steam to cook the rock underground (hydraulic fracturing is useless here) — the formation contains enough oil to last the U.S. 165 years at current rates of consumption. Microwave extraction could goose those numbers even higher. After all, there are more than 4 trillion (with a “t”) barrels of oil in the Green River Formation.
Let’s take a deep breath. One formation, previously inaccessible, has a century and half’s worth of oil for America.
Sure, there is technology yet to be fully implemented, but the approach sounds promising, indeed:
Producers would microwave oil shale formations with a beam as powerful as 500 household microwave ovens, cooking the kerogen and releasing the oil. It also would turn the water found naturally in the deposits to steam, which would help push the oil to the wellbore. “Once you remove the oil and water,” Kearl continues, “the rock basically becomes transparent” to the microwave beam, which can then penetrate outward farther and farther, up to about 80 feet from the wellbore. It doesn’t sound like much, but a single microwave-stimulated well, which would be drilled in formations on average nearly 1,000 feet thick, could pump about 800,000 barrels. Qmast plans to have its first systems deployed in the field in 2017 and start producing by the end of that year.
So in another year, we may see production begin. And even greenies would have to concede this is promising:
Fracking can slurp up to 10 million gallons of water per operation — not good, especially in the arid West. “We don’t need water for our process,” Kearl says, “and we don’t have wastewater to dispose of afterward.” In fact, microwave extraction might produce water — one barrel of water for every three barrels of oil. In situ recovery using microwaves also avoids the massive environmental impact of mining and then processing the kerogen. What’s more, natural gas that often is flared off in conventional oil-well production could be used to power the generator that creates the microwaves.
Hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, has revolutionized energy production in the United States and cornered OPEC. That cartel is currently attempting to restrict oil production and raise prices, but it faces the reality that American frackers can rapidly expand output. It’s a nightmare if you are a corrupt petro-dictator of any stripe, communist to jihadist.
If producers can find a way to microwave oil shales in the Green River Formation, which sprawls across Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, the nation’s recoverable reserves could soar and energy independence could become more than an election slogan. Even with existing methods — strip-mining the shale and then cooking it, or injecting steam to cook the rock underground (hydraulic fracturing is useless here) — the formation contains enough oil to last the U.S. 165 years at current rates of consumption. Microwave extraction could goose those numbers even higher. After all, there are more than 4 trillion (with a “t”) barrels of oil in the Green River Formation.
Let’s take a deep breath. One formation, previously inaccessible, has a century and half’s worth of oil for America.
Sure, there is technology yet to be fully implemented, but the approach sounds promising, indeed:
Producers would microwave oil shale formations with a beam as powerful as 500 household microwave ovens, cooking the kerogen and releasing the oil. It also would turn the water found naturally in the deposits to steam, which would help push the oil to the wellbore. “Once you remove the oil and water,” Kearl continues, “the rock basically becomes transparent” to the microwave beam, which can then penetrate outward farther and farther, up to about 80 feet from the wellbore. It doesn’t sound like much, but a single microwave-stimulated well, which would be drilled in formations on average nearly 1,000 feet thick, could pump about 800,000 barrels. Qmast plans to have its first systems deployed in the field in 2017 and start producing by the end of that year.
So in another year, we may see production begin. And even greenies would have to concede this is promising:
Fracking can slurp up to 10 million gallons of water per operation — not good, especially in the arid West. “We don’t need water for our process,” Kearl says, “and we don’t have wastewater to dispose of afterward.” In fact, microwave extraction might produce water — one barrel of water for every three barrels of oil. In situ recovery using microwaves also avoids the massive environmental impact of mining and then processing the kerogen. What’s more, natural gas that often is flared off in conventional oil-well production could be used to power the generator that creates the microwaves.
It’s High Time the US Peacefully Mends Ties with Russia. Here’s Why
With Putin reaching out to Trump, it is imperative the U.S. takes steps to avoid confrontation with Russia, end the bloody civil war in Syria, and help create a better, peaceful world.
Until the United States elected its new president on November 8, the Obama administration and the U.S. foreign policymakers successfully manipulated public perceptions to spread lies about the conflict in Syria, the democratically elected Syrian government, and the possibility of World War III. It was their agenda to rally support for invasive U.S. foreign policy goals in the name of combating terrorism, protecting human rights, and maintaining world peace.
Consequently, the U.S. took over the Syrian skies; Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was declared a dictator, and relations between the United States and Russia reached Cold War temperatures — but the world remained as terrorized, as victimized, and as rattled as before.
However, with the election of Donald Trump, there are hopes the U.S. will stop committing war crimes in Syria, end playing its war propaganda, and work towards mending ties with Russia, China and the Middle East by peaceful means.
The Past
What is the U.S. doing in Syria? Why does it want to overthrow Assad? How do Russian military interventions in Syria annoy the U.S? Is World War III in the pipeline or is it about the Iran-Iraq-Syria natural gas pipeline or the Qatar-Turkey natural gas pipeline?
Well, the U.S. interest in Syria is fueled by geopolitical competition to control Middle Eastern oil and natural gas pipelines — neither is it fueled by chemical weapon concerns, the civil war, massacres of civilians nor human rights violations. The Guardian reports: “In 2009, Assad refused to sign a proposed agreement with Qatar that would run a pipeline from the latter’s North field, contiguous with Iran’s South Pars field, through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria on to Turkey, with a view to supply European markets – albeit crucially bypassing Russia. Assad’s rationale was “to protect the interests of [his] Russian ally, which is Europe’s top supplier of natural gas”. “The following year, Assad pursued negotiations for an alternative $10 billion pipeline plan with Iran, across Iraq to Syria, which would also potentially allow Iran to supply gas to Europe from its South Pars field shared with Qatar.”
The Qatar-Turkey pipeline was backed by the U.S., while the Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline was backed by Russia. Soon after Assad rejected the U.S. backed pipeline, the civil war broke out in Syria; ISIS began wreaking havoc in Syria and the Middle East, and the U.S. launched indiscriminate military strikes against Assad’s forces.
The Present
The Pentagon says the U.S. air strikes “may” have killed 119 civilians since its bombing campaign started in Syria in 2014. But Airwars, a London-based NGO, believes the true figure is much higher. Airwars estimates that U.S.-led coalition air strikes have killed “at least” 1,841 civilians. Although Moscow insists the Russian air strikes have caused no civilian casualty, Airwars “believes” the Russian bombing campaign (started in Syria in 2015) “may” have caused between 7,004 and 8,960 civilian deaths. Meanwhile, the United Nations and Arab League Envoy to Syria estimates approximately 400,000 civilians have died in the Syrian Civil War, so far.
Thanks to the economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the U.S. — over Ukraine in 2014 — as well as rising tensions between Russia and the U.S. over Syria since 2015, speculations are rife that Russia and the U.S. are ready to destroy the Earth with World War III.
The Future
During the election campaign, the U.S. President–elect extolled Russian president Vladimir Putin’s leadership and called for a tempered approach to U.S.–Russian relations. Trump also promised that as the U.S. president, he will not provide military assistance to NATO allies, including the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), if they were invaded by Russia.
The fact that a statement from Trump’s transition team claimed the U.S. President–elect told Putin he looked forward to “a strong and enduring relationship” that dates back over 200 years, after the duo spoke over the phone soon after his shocking victory, any move to lift the 2014 sanctions against sectors of the Russian economy (including financial services, energy, mining and defense) can establish Russia as the political and economic equivalent of the United States.
With Putin reaching out to Trump — in an attempt to improve the relationship between Washington and Moscow by joining efforts to tackle global challenges, and ensure global security and stability — it is imperative the U.S. takes steps to avoid confrontation with Russia — in an attempt to strengthen the non-proliferation regime, fight international terrorism, end the bloody civil war in Syria, and create a better, peaceful world.
Here, “what do you want” is more important than “what do you think.” Will Trump reset U.S.–Russian relations? Will the U.S. and Russia come together to restore the balance of power in international relations? Will war win or will peace be given a chance — in Syria and in the rest of the world?
Twenty years ago today, former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan gave the now-infamous “irrational exuberance” speech.
Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberancehas unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?
Greenspan said he came up with the phrase “irrational exuberance” in the bathtub. And he later said, “I was acutely aware of the fact that that particular phrase was put in that speech to spook the market.”
It did, too. Japan sold off 3% that day. The next day, the Dow Industrials dropped as much as 2.2% during trading.
Of course, the Dow was also trading around 6,400 at the time…
People love to say that Greenspan was basically right, that the stock market was a bubble at the time, and that he was just a little early with his “irrational exuberance” line. Yeah, I guess if you want to call three years and 5,000 points early, you’re welcome to do so. But it’s a pretty lame excuse…
For one, the Dow got creamed when the Asian Tiger economies imploded in late 1997. Between July and September 1997, the Dow fell as much as 16%. That’s a solid correction, enough to temper any irrational exuberance. And if that didn’t do it, the Russian default and subsequent $4.6 billion failure of the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund in 1998 should have helped. The Dow fell 19.5% in just two months, to around 7,500.
I was just starting to learn about economics and the stock market at that time. And I can tell you, it was a bit scary. I sure wouldn’t describe the action as irrationally exuberant. A Rational Market?
Here’s the thing I’ve learned about the stock market: it’s pretty much always irrational. I know, you were probably hoping for something better than that. But how else can you explain the way companies will add or lose billion of dollars in valuation every single day the stock market is open?
Rationally, we know that Apple isn’t really worth $17 billion less today than it was on Friday. And we can easily take it a step further and say that Apple’s $584 billion market capitalization isn’t really a rational number, either. And yet we have no problem seeing Apple’s stock trade $0.35 lower and think, “Yeah, that makes sense.”
Or how about the fact that Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) is worth $50 billion more just because Trump won the election? Does that make sense?
The fact is, the stock market is a human construct, and humans are a little nutso sometimes. Personally, I think the craziest thing you can do as an investor is try to pretend that you’re not crazy. The minute you think you have it all figured out, the market will make a fool of you, guaranteed. Just like it did with Greenspan.
My biggest knock on Greenspan is that he always believed his own BS. He always thought he knew. And he still does. That’s why he made some of the biggest mistakes a Fed Chief has ever made. And yes, I firmly believe we can lay the blame for the 2008–9 financial crisis squarely on Greenspan.
After all, it was Greenspan who said that derivatives actually lowered overall economic risk of higher housing prices because of the way derivatives spread risk around the globe. He thought things like credit-default swaps meant no one entity would be left holding the bag if it all went south. He had it completely, absolutely backwards. Derivatives made sure that everyone was a counterparty, so everyone was left holding the bag.
And perhaps worse than that, Fed governors were talking about a housing bubble in 2004, about a year before real estate prices peaked. Transcripts from 2004 meetings show they said things like:
“…buyers freely admitting that they have no intention of occupying the units… but rather are counting on ‘flipping’ the properties—selling them quickly at higher prices.” “A second concern is that policy accommodation — and the expectation that it will persist — is distorting asset prices.” “The high price of housing worries many in the region who find that hiring the skilled workers they need in health care, for example, is made even more difficult by high housing costs.”
But the minutes from those meetings, which are released shortly after a meeting concludes, do not mention any of these concerns. All discussion of a housing bubble were stricken from the record and show up only in transcripts, which are released a decade later. In one case, a chart that was viewed by the Fed members was left out of the official record because, as the transcripts show, one member said, “I don’t want to leave the impression that we think there’s a huge housing bubble.”
Personally, I find these revelations shocking. Greenspan’s Fed basically lied about what they were seeing. In the official minutes, they deliberately understate their concerns, concluding that “a slowdown might be likely later in the year.”
If that doesn’t tick you off, maybe this Greenspan quote from March 2004 transcripts will:
We run the risk, by laying out the pros and cons of a particular argument, of inducing people to join in on the debate, and in this regard it is possible to lose control of a process that only we fully understand.
That quote right there tells you all you need to know about Greenspan… Keep Your Head in the Game
It is absolutely critical that you be on the lookout for know-it-alls like Alan Greenspan. Anybody who says they have it all figured out is lying to you.
I’ve been watching, trading, and learning the markets for nearly 20 years. And every single day, I find more things that I don’t know. I get taken to school every day, and I love it. And I won’t ever tell you I have it all figured out…
But sometimes I do get a few things figured out. Like, I’ve been trading Bank of America a whole lot since the election. And the stock has donated generously to my bottom line.
I hope you took my advice over the last couple of years to buy shares of BofA. If you didn’t, you can probably wait and get them around $19 in the next few months.
Until next time,
Briton Ryle
The Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton-instigated war on Syria leaned way over the precipice toward World War III earlier this week when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan let slip the real reason behind the NATO assault on Syria is the removal of Bashar Assad. Erdogan said, “We entered [Syria] to end the rule of the tyrant al-Assad who terrorizes with state terror. [We didn’t enter] for any other reason.”
Of course, removing Assad to be replaced by an American puppet regime that would allow a natural gas pipeline across Syria into Turkey was the goal of the Obama/Clinton operation from the beginning. It was the exercise of “soft power” (Clinton’s terminology) as we saw in Libya.
Obama has tried to walk a fine line on Syria ever since the American people rose up and pressured Congress to deny Obama’s request for a military strike on Syria in August of 2013. Obama tried to use the false flag chemical attack on the so-called moderate opposition forces – blamed on Assad but carried out by another group of so-called “moderate” rebels – to pressure Congress to grant him military attack authority. That chemical attack crossed the “red line” Obama had set as a precursor to direct U.S. intervention (as opposed to the then-secret CIA intervention that was ongoing and now continues openly).
Erdogan’s slip of the tongue – if that’s what it was – has been largely ignored by the American media. But it brought a swift response from the Kremlin – Assad’s biggest partner.
RT reported that Erdogan’s statement “caused consternation in the Kremlin.” From RT:
“The statement was indeed news, this is a very serious statement. [It] is in discord with the previous [statements] in general and with our understanding of the situation,”Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday.
“We hope that in the near future there will be explanations on this from our Turkish partners,”he said, adding that Russia is the only country whose armed forces are in Syria on a legitimate basis – at the direct request of the Syrian authorities.
Answering a question as to whether Erdogan’s comments would affect the relations between Moscow and Ankara, Peskov stressed that Turkey is Moscow’s partner and therefore will have to explain its stance before the Russian authorities make any judgments.
“Before making any judgments, we expect that this position will be clarified,” Peskov said.
President Erdogan and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, discussed the situation in Syria in a telephone call on Wednesday, the Kremlin’s press service reported.
Erdogan backtracked Thursday. Or in the words of Al Masdar News, he “retracted his statement” after the conversation with Putin.
“The aim of the Euphrates Shield Operation is not against any country or person but only terror organizations. No one should doubt this issue that we have uttered over and over, and no one should comment on it in another fashion or try to derail it,” Erdogan said at his 30th gathering with village chiefs at the Presidential Palace in Ankara.
Middle Eastern governments friendly to the U.S. – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, Turkey, etc. – financed the operation to overthrow Assad with U.S. assistance. This led to the creation of ISIS, which continues to be funded by those governments with an assist from Israel.
Erdogan’s “slip” may or may not have been intentional. There is evidence that the coup to take him out was a CIA operation to topple him for cozying up to Putin. Both the Turkish lira and the Turkish stock market are tanking. So Erdogan may have been playing games in order to show his allegiance to Washington and/or create a sense of nationalism in order to reverse those negative trends. That’s a ploy that has been used by governments many times.
But with Turkey (NATO member) at the point of the spear in Syria and Erdogan prodding the Russian bear, a Russian response to Turkey’s saber rattling would put the U.S. directly at odds with Russia and bound (by NATO treaty) to assist if Turkey is attacked.
The neocon war machine seems bound and determined to provoke Russia into war. Obama’s neocon-backed and ham-handed Middle East meddling needs to end sooner rather later, lest we fall over the precipice and into full-scale war.
Let’s hope Erdogan can keep his mouth shut until we get some sanity in U.S. foreign policy and the neocon war hawks removed from places of influence.
The seemingly endless amount of apps available in the App Store on my iPhone amazes me. Everyday I use Facebook, YouTube, Pandora and more. They keep me entertained, informed and, hopefully soon, healthy!
I began publishing my monthly newsletter 
I was watching Hostage, a typical Bruce Willis action movie, the other night with my wife.
The Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton-instigated war on Syria leaned way over the precipice toward World War III earlier this week when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan let slip the real reason behind the NATO assault on Syria is the removal of Bashar Assad.
