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You Are How You Spend Your Time

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How do we balance the time spent on work, personal relationships, education, culture, leisure and rest? What do we prioritize? These are some of the questions raised by IESE professor Santiago Álvarez de Mon in a 2017 book that aims to help us “rethink our relationship with time.”

The author uses time as a reliable clue to reach a state of deeper self-knowledge. In this vein, an agenda serves as an essential tool for diagnosis and self-improvement on the subject of living in the present and focusing on the here and now.

Establish the Essentials, Discard the Superfluous

The quality of our leadership, relationships, professional careers, leisure and even health depends heavily on our relationship with time, Álvarez de Mon asserts. Our use of this most finite of resources explains the true nature and scope of our values and priorities.

This is precisely why we need to conduct a full review of our hourly calendar. Such a review may offer us some balance in order to enable us to wrap our minds around the activity at hand. And we may learn what our habits, achievements, interests and dreams say about us.

Returning to business, after taking this realistic, honest and humble look at our calendar, we need to reflect on the roles and responsibilities inherent in our professional performance. Which tasks are essential? Which decisions need to be made? Which responsibilities must be assumed?

Then, we must look at what we need to stop doing. It is essential that we learn to say no. Saying yes all the time can be an easy shortcut to avoiding conflict, but an apropos and reasonable “no” can lay the foundations for a mature relationship. Saying “no” does nothing to isolate or diminish us; in fact, it contextualizes all the times we have said “yes,” making them more valuable.

With the unnecessary or impossible eliminated, what remains is a list of personal and professional duties, projects and challenges that have been on hold all this time; important issues that had not yet become urgent.

Leisure, understood as an opportunity to cultivate our own personality and character, also contains a wealth of diagnostic information. Our tastes, pastimes, hobbies, and relationships with family, friends and wider society collectively paint a crisp yet nuanced portrait.

The balance is to be found in plurality. Work and leisure are two sides of the same vital coin, and we must share our time between them.

The Here and Now

In the overstimulated digital world, in which mental channel-surfing is the norm, exercising memory, sustaining attention and focusing on the present count as true accomplishments.

Intelligently developing a fresh and harmonious relationship with time, where we can live in the present and also work toward our future aims, is an act of willpower that demands a continuous exercise of character, explains Álvarez de Mon.

The author insists that the best medicine is to tackle one thing at a time, keeping in mind the factors that can improve concentration and maintain energy:

  • We are more likely to focus if an activity is connected to our preferences, abilities and tastes.
  • When we lose our focus, the best thing to do is acknowledge it, go back to where we got off track, and refocus.
  • It is helpful to take short breaks to recharge our batteries. Without scheduled pauses, our minds tend to wander.

Álvarez de Mon also recommends that we train our mental, emotional and spiritual abilities, just as we train physically. This might include:

  • Ordering options in terms of importance.
  • Turning decisions into concrete actions, defined in time and space.
  • Practicing and repeating, to transition sporadic behavior to ingrained good habits.


Moreover, a key skill is developing patience, which makes time a trusted ally rather than a capricious tyrant.

Living in the present means keeping our focus on the process of our actions, not the result. We must weigh the consequences, but without obsessively trying to understand every aspect of them.

Accustomed to looking forever forward and backward, we often focus on the length of our lives rather than on the breadth that each day can offer us. And as the author reminds us, the broader it is, the more people and learning can fit into it, and the more chances we have for a long and fruitful journey.


Trump Is Obama’s Legacy: Will This Break Up Democratic Party? – Analysis

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Nobody yet can tell whether Donald Trump is an agent of change with a specific policy in mind, or merely a catalyst heralding an as yet undetermined turning point. His first month in the White House saw him melting into the Republican mélange of corporate lobbyists. Having promised to create jobs, his “America First” policy looks more like “Wall Street First.” His cabinet of billionaires promoting corporate tax cuts, deregulation and dismantling Dodd-Frank bank reform repeats the Junk Economics promise that giving more tax breaks to the richest One Percent may lead them to use their windfall to invest in creating more jobs. What they usually do, of course, is simply buy more property and assets already in place.

One of the first reactions to Trump’s election victory was for stocks of the most crooked financial institutions to soar, hoping for a deregulatory scythe taken to the public sector. Navient, the Department of Education’s knee-breaker on student loan collections accused by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) of massive fraud and overcharging, rose from $13 to $18 now that it seemed likely that the incoming Republicans would disable the CFPB and shine a green light for financial fraud.

Foreclosure king Stephen Mnuchin of IndyMac/OneWest (and formerly of Goldman Sachs for 17 years; later a George Soros partner) is now Treasury Secretary – and Trump is pledged to abolish the CFPB, on the specious logic that letting fraudsters manage pension savings and other investments will give consumers and savers “broader choice,” e.g., for the financial equivalent of junk food. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos hopes to privatize public education into for-profit (and de-unionized) charter schools, breaking the teachers’ unions. This may position Trump to become the Transformational President that neoliberals have been waiting for.

But not the neocons. His election rhetoric promised to reverse traditional U.S. interventionist policy abroad. Making an anti-war left run around the Democrats, he promised to stop backing ISIS/Al Nusra (President Obama’s “moderate” terrorists supplied with the arms and money that Hillary looted from Libya), and to reverse the Obama-Clinton administration’s New Cold War with Russia. But the neocon coterie at the CIA and State Department are undercutting his proposed rapprochement with Russia by forcing out General Flynn for starters. It seems doubtful that Trump will clean them out.

Trump has called NATO obsolete, but insists that its members up their spending to the stipulated 2% of GDP — producing a windfall worth tens of billions of dollars for U.S. arms exporters. That is to be the price Europe must pay if it wants to endorse Germany’s and the Baltics’ confrontation with Russia.

Trump is sufficiently intuitive to proclaim the euro a disaster, and he recommends that Greece leave it. He supports the rising nationalist parties in Britain, France, Italy, Greece and the Netherlands, all of which urge withdrawal from the eurozone – and reconciliation with Russia instead of sanctions. In place of the ill-fated TPP and TTIP, Trump advocates country-by-country trade deals favoring the United States. Toward this end, his designated ambassador to the European Union, Ted Malloch, urges the EU’s breakup. The EU is refusing to accept him as ambassador.

Will Trump’s victory break up the Democratic Party?

At the time this volume is going to press, there is no way of knowing how successful these international reversals will be. What is more clear is what Trump’s political impact will have at home. His victory – or more accurately, Hillary’s resounding loss and the way she lost – has encouraged enormous pressure for a realignment of both parties. Regardless of what President Trump may achieve vis-à-vis Europe, his actions as celebrity chaos agent may break up U.S. politics across the political spectrum.

The Democratic Party has lost its ability to pose as the party of labor and the middle class. Firmly controlled by Wall Street and California billionaires, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) strategy of identity politics encourages any identity except that of wage earners. The candidates backed by the Donor Class have  been Blue Dogs pledged to promote Wall Street and neocons urging a New Cold War with Russia.

They preferred to lose with Hillary than to win behind Bernie Sanders. So Trump’s electoral victory is their legacy as well as Obama’s. Instead of Trump’s victory dispelling that strategy, the Democrats are doubling down. It is as if identity politics is all they have.

Trying to ride on Barack Obama’s coattails didn’t work. Promising “hope and change,” he won by posing as a transformational president, leading the Democrats to control of the White House, Senate and Congress in 2008. Swept into office by a national reaction against the George Bush’s Oil War in Iraq and the junk-mortgage crisis that left the economy debt-ridden, they had free rein to pass whatever new laws they chose – even a Public Option in health care if they had wanted, or make Wall Street banks absorb the losses from their bad and often fraudulent loans.

But it turned out that Obama’s role was to prevent the changes that voters hoped to see, and indeed that the economy needed to recover: financial reform, debt writedowns to bring junk mortgages in line with fair market prices, and throwing crooked bankers in jail. Obama rescued the banks, not the economy, and turned over the Justice Department and regulatory agencies to his Wall Street campaign contributors. He did not even pull back from war in the Near East, but extended it to Libya and Syria, blundering into the Ukrainian coup as well.

Having dashed the hopes of his followers, Obama then praised his chosen successor Hillary Clinton as his “Third Term.” Enjoying this kiss of death, Hillary promised to keep up Obama’s policies.

The straw that pushed voters over the edge was when she asked voters, “Aren’t you better off today than you were eight years ago?” Who were they going to believe: their eyes, or Hillary? National income statistics showed that only the top 5 percent of the population were better off. All the growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) during Obama’s tenure went to them – the Donor Class that had gained control of the Democratic Party leadership. Real incomes have fallen for the remaining 95 percent, whose household budgets have been further eroded by soaring charges for health insurance. (The Democratic leadership in Congress fought tooth and nail to block Dennis Kucinich from introducing his Single Payer proposal.)

No wonder most of the geographic United States voted for change – except for where the top 5 percent, is concentrated: in New York (Wall Street) and California (Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex). Making fun of the Obama Administration’s slogan of  “hope and change,” Trump characterized Hillary’s policy of continuing the economy’s shrinkage for the 95% as “no hope and no change.”

Identity Politics as anti-labor politics

A new term was introduced to the English language: Identity Politics. Its aim is for voters to think of themselves as separatist minorities – women, LGBTQ, Blacks and Hispanics. The Democrats thought they could beat Trump by organizing Women for Wall Street (and a New Cold War), LGBTQ for Wall Street (and a New Cold War), and Blacks and Hispanics for Wall Street (and a New Cold War). Each identity cohort was headed by a billionaire or hedge fund donor.

The identity that is conspicuously excluded is the working class. Identity politics strips away thinking of one’s interest in terms of having to work for a living. It excludes voter protests against having their monthly paycheck stripped to pay more for health insurance, housing and mortgage charges or education, or better working conditions or consumer protection – not to speak of protecting debtors.

Identity politics used to be about three major categories: workers and unionization, anti-war protests and civil rights marches against racist Jim Crow laws. These were the three objectives of the many nationwide demonstrations. That ended when these movements got co-opted into the Democratic Party. Their reappearance in Bernie Sanders’ campaign in fact threatens to tear the Democratic coalition apart. As soon as the primaries were over (duly stacked against Sanders), his followers were made to feel unwelcome. Hillary sought Republican support by denouncing Sanders as being as radical as Putin’s Republican leadership.

In contrast to Sanders’ attempt to convince diverse groups that they had a common denominator in needing jobs with decent pay – and, to achieve that, in opposing Wall Street’s replacing the government as central planner – the Democrats depict every identity constituency as being victimized by every other, setting themselves at each other’s heels. Clinton strategist John Podesta, for instance, encouraged Blacks to accuse Sanders supporters of distracting attention from racism. Pushing a common economic interest between whites, Blacks, Hispanics and LGBTQ always has been the neoliberals’ nightmare. No wonder they tried so hard to stop Bernie Sanders, and are maneuvering to keep his supporters from gaining influence in their party.

When Trump was inaugurated on Friday, January 20, there was no pro-jobs or anti-war demonstration. That presumably would have attracted pro-Trump supporters in an ecumenical show of force. Instead, the Women’s March on Saturday led even the pro-Democrat New York Times to write a front-page article reporting that white women were complaining that they did not feel welcome in the demonstration. The message to anti-war advocates, students and Bernie supporters was that their economic cause was a distraction.

The march was typically Democratic in that its ideology did not threaten the Donor Class. As Yves Smith wrote on Naked Capitalism: “the track record of non-issue-oriented marches, no matter how large scale, is poor, and the status of this march as officially sanctioned (blanket media coverage when other marches of hundreds of thousands of people have been minimized, police not tricked out in their usual riot gear) also indicates that the officialdom does not see it as a threat to the status quo.”[1]

Hillary’s loss was not blamed on her neoliberal support for TPP or her pro-war neocon stance, but on the revelations of the e-mails by her operative Podesta discussing his dirty tricks against Bernie Sanders (claimed to be given to Wikileaks by Russian hackers, not a domestic DNC leaker as Wikileaks claimed) and the FBI investigation of her e-mail abuses at the State Department. Backing her supporters’ attempt to brazen it out, the Democratic Party has doubled down on its identity politics, despite the fact that an estimated 52 percent of white women voted for Trump. After all, women do work for wages. And that also is what Blacks and Hispanics want – in addition to banking that serves their needs, not those of Wall Street, and health care that serves their needs, not those of the health-insurance and pharmaceuticals monopolies.

Bernie did not choose to run on a third-party ticket. Evidently he feared being accused of throwing the election to Trump. The question is now whether he can remake the Democratic Party as a democratic socialist party, or create a new party if the Donor Class retains its neoliberal control. It seems that he will not make a break until he concludes that a Socialist Party can leave the Democrats as far back in the dust as the Republicans left the Whigs after 1854. He may have underestimated his chance in 2016.

Trump’s effect on U.S. political party realignment

During Trump’s rise to the 2016 Republican nomination it seemed that he was more likely to break up the Republican Party. Its leading candidates and gurus warned that his populist victory in the primaries would tear the party apart. The polls in May and June showed him defeating Hillary Clinton easily (but losing to Bernie Sanders). But Republican leaders worried that he would not support what they believed in: namely, whatever corporate lobbyists put in their hands to enact and privatize.

The May/June polls showed Trump and Clinton were the country’s two most unpopular presidential candidates. But whereas the Democrats maneuvered Bernie out of the way, the Republican Clown Car was unable to do the same to Trump. In the end they chose to win behind him, expecting to control him. As for the DNC, its Wall Street donors preferred to lose with Hillary than to win with Bernie. They wanted to keep control of their party and continue the bargain they had made with the Republicans: The latter would move further and further to the right, leaving room for Democratic neoliberals and neocons to follow them closely, yet still pose as the “lesser evil.” That “centrism” is the essence of the Clintons’ “triangulation” strategy. It actually has been going on for a half-century. “As Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere quipped in the 1960s, when he was accused by the US of running a one-party state, ‘The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them’.”[2]

By 2017, voters had caught on to this two-step game. But Hillary’s team paid pollsters over $1 billion to tell her (“Mirror, mirror on the wall …”) that she was the most popular of all. It was hubris to imagine that she could convince the 95 Percent of the people who were worse off under Obama to love her as much as her East-West Coast donors did. It was politically unrealistic – and a reflection of her cynicism – to imagine that raising enough money to buy television ads would convince working-class Republicans to vote for her, succumbing to a Stockholm Syndrome by thinking of themselves as part of the 5 Percent who had benefited from Obama’s pro-Wall Street policies.

Hillary’s election strategy was to make a right-wing run around Trump. While characterizing the working class as white racist “deplorables,” allegedly intolerant of LBGTQ or assertive women, she resurrected the ghost of Joe McCarthy and accused Trump of being “Putin’s poodle” for proposing peace with Russia. Among the most liberal Democrats, Paul Krugman still leads a biweekly charge at The New York Times that President Trump is following Moscow’s orders. Saturday Night Live, Bill Maher and MSNBC produce weekly skits that Trump and General Flynn are Russian puppets. A large proportion of Democrats have bought into the fairy tale that Trump didn’t really win the election, but that Russian hackers manipulated the voting machines. No wonder George Orwell’s 1984 soared to the top of America’s best-seller lists in February 2017 as Donald Trump was taking his oath of office.

This propaganda paid off on February 13, when neocon public relations succeeded in forcing the resignation of General Flynn, whom Trump had appointed to clean out the neocons at the NSA and CIA. His foreign policy initiative based on rapprochement with Russia and hopes to create a common front against ISIS/Al Nusra seemed to be collapsing.

Tabula Rasa Celebrity Politics

U.S. presidential elections no longer are much about policy. Like Obama before him, Trump campaigned as a rasa tabla, a vehicle for everyone to project their hopes and fancies. What has all but disappeared is the past century’s idea of politics as a struggle between labor and capital, democracy vs. oligarchy.

Who would have expected even half a century ago that American politics would become so post-modern that the idea of class conflict has all but disappeared. Classical economic discourse has been drowned out by their junk economics.

There is a covert economic program, to be sure, and it is bipartisan. It is to make elections about just which celebrities will introduce neoliberal economic policies with the most convincing patter talk. That is the essence of rasa tabla politics.

Can the Democrats lose again in 2020?

Trump’s November victory showed that voters found him to be the Lesser Evil, but all that voters really could express was “throw out the bums” and get a new set of lobbyists for the FIRE sector and corporate monopolists. Both candidates represented Goldman Sachs and Wall Street. No wonder voter turnout has continued to plunge.

Although the Democrats’ Lesser Evil argument lost to the Republicans in 2016, the neoliberals in control of the DNC found the absence of a progressive economic program to less threatening to their interests than the critique of Wall Street and neocon interventionism coming from the Sanders camp. So the Democrat will continue to pose as the Lesser Evil party not really in terms of policy, but simply ad hominum. They will merely repeat Hillary’s campaign stance: They are not Trump. Their parades and street demonstrations since his inauguration have not come out for any economic policy.

On Friday, February 10, the party’s Democratic Policy group held a retreat for its members in Baltimore. Third Way “centrists” (Republicans running as Democrats) dominated, with Hillary operatives in charge. The conclusion was that no party policy was needed at all. “President Trump is a better recruitment tool for us than a central campaign issue,’ said Washington Rep. Denny Heck, who is leading recruitment for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).”[3]

But what does their party leadership have to offer women, Blacks and Hispanics in the way of employment, more affordable health care, housing or education and better pay? Where are the New Deal pro-labor, pro-regulatory roots of bygone days? The party leadership is unwilling to admit that Trump’s message about protecting jobs and opposing the TPP played a role in his election. Hillary was suspected of supporting it as “the gold standard” of trade deals, and Obama had made the Trans-Pacific Partnership the centerpiece of his presidency – the free-trade TPP and TTIP that would have taken economic regulatory policy out of the hands of government and given it to corporations.

Instead of accepting even Sanders’ centrist-left stance, the Democrats’ strategy was to tar Trump as pro-Russian, insist that his aides had committed impeachable offenses, and mount one parade after another. “Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio told reporters she was wary of focusing solely on an “economic message” aimed at voters whom Trump won over in 2016, because, in her view, Trump did not win on an economic message. “What Donald Trump did was address them at a very different level — an emotional level, a racial level, a fear level,” she said. “If all we talk about is the economic message, we’re not going to win.”[4] This stance led Sanders supporters to walk out of a meeting organized by the “centrist” Third Way think tank on Wednesday, February 8.

By now this is an old story. Fifty years ago, socialists such as Michael Harrington asked why union members and progressives still imagined that they had to work through the Democratic Party. It has taken the rest of the country half a century to see that Democrats are not the party of the working class, unions, middle class, farmers or debtors. They are the party of Wall Street privatizers, bank deregulators, neocons and the military-industrial complex. Obama showed his hand – and that of his party – in his passionate attempt to ram through the corporatist TPP treaty that would have enabled corporations to sue governments for any costs imposed by public consumer protection, environmental protection or other protection of the population against financialized corporate monopolies.

Against this backdrop, Trump’s promises and indeed his worldview seem quixotic. The picture of America’s future he has painted seems unattainable within the foreseeable future. It is too late to bring manufacturing back to the United States, because corporations already have shifted their supply nodes abroad, and too much U.S. infrastructure has been dismantled.

There can’t be a high-speed railroad, because it would take more than four years to get the right-of-way and create a route without crossing gates or sharp curves. In any case, the role of railroads and other transportation has been to increase real estate prices along the routes. But in this case, real estate would be torn down – and having a high-speed rail does not increase land values.

The stock market has soared to new heights, anticipating lower taxes on corporate profits and a deregulation of consumer, labor and environmental protection. Trump may end up as America’s Boris Yeltsin, protecting U.S. oligarchs (not that Hillary would have been different, merely cloaked in a more colorful identity rainbow). The U.S. economy is in for Shock Therapy. Voters should look to Greece to get a taste of the future in this scenario.

Without a coherent response to neoliberalism, Trump’s billionaire cabinet may do to the United States what neoliberals in the Clinton administration did to Russia after 1991: tear out all the checks and balances, and turn public wealth over to insiders and oligarchs. So Trump’s his best chance to be transformative is simply to be America’s Yeltsin for his party’s oligarchic backers, putting the class war back in business.

What a truly transformative president would do/would have done

No administration can create a sound U.S. recovery without dealing with the problem that caused the 2008 crisis in the first place: over-indebtedness. The only one way to restore growth, raise living standards and make the economy competitive again is a debt writedown. But that is not yet on the political horizon. Obama’s doublecross of his voters in 2009 prevented the needed policy from occurring. Having missed this chance in the last financial crisis, a progressive policy must await yet another crisis. But so far, no political party is preparing a program to juxtapose to Republican-Democratic austerity and scale-back of Social Security, Medicare and social spending programs in general.

Also no longer on the horizon is a more progressive income tax, or a public option for health care – or for banking, or consumer protection against financial fraud, or for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, or for a revived protection of labor’s right to unionize, or environmental regulations.

It seems that only a new party can achieve these aims. At the time these essays are going to press, Sanders has committed himself to working within the Democratic Party. But that stance is based on his assumption that somehow he can recruit enough activists to take over the party from Its Donor Class.

I suspect he will fail. In any case, it is easier to begin afresh than to try to re-design a party (or any institution) dominated by resistance to change, and whose idea of economic growth is a pastiche of tax cuts and deregulation. Both U.S. parties are committed to this neoliberal program – and seek to blame foreign enemies for the fact that its effect is to continue squeezing living standards and bloating the financial sector.

If this slow but inexorable crash does lead to a political crisis, it looks like the Republicans may succeed in convening a new Constitutional Convention (many states already have approved this) to lock the United States into a corporatist neoliberal world. Its slogan will be that of Margaret Thatcher: TINA – There Is No Alternative.

And who is to disagree? As Trotsky said, fascism is the result of the failure of the left to provide an alternative.

Notes:

[1] Yves Smith, “Women Skeptical of the Women’s March,” Naked Capitalism, February 10, 2017.

[2] Radhika Desai, “Decoding Trump,” Counterpunch, February 10, 2017.

[3] “Pelosi denies Democrats are divided on strategy for 2018,” Yahoo News, February 10, 2018. https://www.yahoo.com/news/pelosi-denies-democrats-are-divided-on-strategy-for-2018-194337876.html

[4] Ibid.

Saudi Arabia’s Diplomatic Offensive Kicks Into High Gear – Analysis

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President Donald Trump’s elaborate lunchtime meeting with Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammad bin Salman last week highlighted one of the great surprises of Trump-era foreign policy: in spite of a virulent campaign rhetoric that never wasted a chance to bash key U.S. allies, the new administration has turned out to be a boon for the Saudis.

After a tense relationship with the Obama White House, which was further poisoned by the Iran deal, Riyadh is now poised to regain its position as America’s foremost Middle Eastern ally. But the Kingdom is not putting all its eggs into one (US-made) basket.

On the face of it, the meeting was an important milestone for both sides. Prince Mohammad is the first leader from the Gulf states to have met with Trump, while the embattled White House surely appreciated the photo op in the same week its revised “Muslim ban” was once again rejected by the courts. Discussions at the meeting clearly included Iran, whose erstwhile rapprochement with the U.S. now appears dead and buried, but also covered the economic reforms the prince is pushing part of the larger Vision 2030 plan to diversify Saudi Arabia’s oil-dependent economy. Mohammad took advantage of the opportunity to speak with Trump about trade and investment opportunities going in both directions.

On this front, Saudi Arabia already appears to have successfully tailored its message to a Trumpian audience: their promise to jointly invest $45 billion into a $100 billion investment into American tech firms with Japan’s SoftBank has already been praised by Trump as one of the early successes of his policies. This is a far cry from last year, when the U.S. Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act reduced the scope of sovereign immunity and allow families of those killed in the September 11th attacks to sue Saudi Arabia, to which the Saudis responded by threatening to sell U.S. assets worth $750 billion. That diplomatic dispute now appears over, as Mohammad bin Salman pursues his second U.S. visit in a year and the Saudi national oil company considers New York as a location for its initial public offering.

Washington is not the only Western capital rethinking its approach to the Saudi monarchy. Just one month after Trump’s election, British Prime Minister Theresa May attended the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit in Bahrain, meeting with regional leadership to cover the region’s touchstone topics: trade and security. May told GCC leaders she hoped to “forge a new trade arrangement for the whole of the Gulf area,” while several high-level UK delegations have visited the Gulf states in recent weeks and months.

The buzzwords may sound familiar, but there is a key distinction to be made between May-style and Trump-style outreach to Saudi Arabia and its neighbors. As Britain begins to trigger the Brexit process to break from the EU as early as spring of 2019, trade with the Gulf states forms a key pillar of May’s post-EU economic plans. The British government is no doubt hoping that boosting trade relationships with the Gulf monarchies will help offset the losses to be inflicted by the break with Europe, especially rich if Donald Trump’s unpredictable foreign policy ultimately ends up weakening the U.S. position in the region.

Despite the positive tones coming from these two key longtime partners, the Saudis are clearly hedging their bets. Sending his son Mohammad to reach out to the Trump administration, King Salman instead embarked on a month-long tour of Asia (where demand for Saudi oil is on the rise). His stops have been in Muslim-majority ASEAN members such as Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as China and Japan. The Saudi oil industry is competing with Iran and Russia to supply the growing demand for energy in Asia, which is expected to expand by one million barrels a day this year alone. Beyond oil, Saudi Arabia is looking toward Asia and particularly China to help diversify its oil-centric economy as opposed to focusing its attention entirely on the West.

On this front, Salman’s kingdom is probably in luck. His plans happen to align well with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “One Belt, One Road” plan to strengthen China’s ties to countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The Chinese also have competition: visiting Tokyo, King Salman reaffirmed a longstanding relationship in which Japan has depended on Saudi Arabia to supply most of its oil demand for decades. The tour demonstrates Saudi intentions to move beyond its historically close relationship with the U.S. when it comes to soliciting outside help in jumpstarting a struggling economy and managing the Middle East’s explosive security risks.

Given the current course of the Trump administration, this is probably a sound strategy. Although Prince Mohammad was received warmly in Washington, Trump is still unpredictable and has repeatedly proven his readiness to break with decades-old policy consensus on foreign relations. The world is facing the most dangerous American presidency in decades, and every foreign government will be at pains to sort out its economic and diplomatic policy in the age of Trump. Where there is risk, though, there is also opportunity for America’s rivals: could China, for example, move to supplant the U.S. as the key Middle East powerbroker? Based on his travel itinerary, King Salman appears to be taking that question seriously.

*David Meijer is a senior security analyst based in Amsterdam specialized in trans-national contraband.

Belarusian Triangle: Lukashenka, Putin And Belarusian People – OpEd

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Saturday and Sunday, Belarusians are slated to take part in the largest anti-Lukashenka demonstrations since at least 2010, an event that has prompted predictions ranging from the overthrow of the Lukashenka regime to the military intervention of Vladimir Putin to the survival of Alyaksandr Lukashenka.

Because the situation in Belarus is a revolutionary one – the powers that be appear divided and unable to act in a consistent way to defend their own interests in survival and the population is no longer prepared to put up with Minsk’s repressive and economically backward policies – the situation could move in any of these directions or perhaps others.

But one thing is clear, and it should be kept in mind as the events of the next 72 hours unfold: each of the actors in this drama is constrained by what he believes the other two are likely to do, and thus, all are engaged in a complicated calculus because what may strengthen them against one opponent could lead to their being weakened relative to another.

The Belarusian people and its leaders in the opposition want to secure Lukashenka’s departure in a non-violent way that will preclude any Russian intervention and that will open the way for the country to move toward democracy, freedom and integration with Europe, all goals that Putin and Moscow very much oppose.

Thus, the opposition if one may lump everyone from the longtime political opponents of the Lukashenka regime to those in the population who have simply “had enough” together has an obvious interest in avoiding violence even if that limits its ability to push Lukashenka out and an equally obvious one in pursuing its goals in an understated way.

Revolutionary movements are seldom able to go very far when they forswear all violence and prevent their demands in a form far more restrained than many of their supporters like. But if the Belarusian movement violates either of these limits, there is a real danger that either Lukashenka will crack down so hard that recent gains will be lost or that Moscow will intervene.

Lukashenka also finds himself caught between the people and Moscow. If he makes too many concessions, the opposition will demand more; if he doesn’t and uses force instead, he will destroy what remaining popular sympathy he has and, what is more important for him, any chance that he can win the Western support he needs to play the game he has with Moscow.

If he appears too weak, pro-Moscow forces within his own regime may decide that they have to move to overthrow him; and Moscow may conclude that it has more to gain than lose by intervening. Similarly, if Lukashenka cracks down too hard, Moscow may decide the Belarusian president has destroyed the basis of his independence rather than made himself stronger.

In either of those cases, at least some in Moscow would likely push for an intervention to install someone more malleable in Minsk while the situation remains or can be presented as being more fluid and undefined.

At the same time, Moscow is constrained as well by both the rise of the Belarusian people and the actions of Lukashenka. The Kremlin is certainly frightened by the prospect that the second Slavic republic has shown that its people want democracy and independence from Russia and would like to teach them a lesson.

At the same time, the price of doing so would be high regardless of whether it consisted of supporting a gelded Lukashenka now willing to do Moscow’s will or the installation of a Russian gauleiter. Either would undermine any chance for an agreement with the West and likely would lead to an expansion of sanctions.

Because of this complexity – one created after Russian intervention in Ukraine following the Maidan there – the balance of the small analytic community that focuses on Belarus has shifted from the assumption of radical change either by Lukashenka’s departure or Moscow’s intervention to one that suggests this weekend’s demos will mark the high point in this round of national rebirth.

Among those taking that view is Andrey Kazakevich who suggests that a decline in activism among the Belarusian people is “inevitable” after Sunday (eurobelarus.info/news/society/2017/03/24/andrey-kazakevich-spad-volny-aktsiy-neizbezhen-situatsiya.html). But the complexity of the situation makes any such prediction problematic.

Lukashenka may or may not survive; the Belarusian people may or may not triumph; and Russia may or may not intervene. But one thing is certain: the rise of the Belarusian nation has changed the political calculus for all concerned; and if it does not lead to radical changes now, it almost certainly will in the future.

Arab Summit To Focus On Syria, Palestine And Iran

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By Hani Hazaimeh

The crisis in Syria, the Palestinian issue and Iran’s claimed interference in the region will be key issues at this week’s Arab League summit.

King Salman and other Arab leaders and diplomats will participate in the March 29 Arab Summit, which will also be attended by UN Secretary-General António Guterres and the UN envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura.

Jordan’s government spokesperson and Minister of Information Mohammed Momani held a press conference on Saturday, in which he said that Mistura will attend the Arab foreign ministers’ meeting on Tuesday, adding that the UN official will brief the meeting on the latest developments in the Geneva talks between the Syrian regime and opposition representatives.

Momani also said the Arab Summit will host representatives from Russia, the US and France, with officials from those countries set to meet their Arab counterparts.

Momani referenced the fact that several Arab states have been hit by terrorism, including Jordan and Saudi Arabia, adding that the Arab states are requested to rally their efforts to stand in the face of this epidemic.

“Our response to terrorism must be in kind. We have to face it not only militarily, but also ideologically and present the right image of Islam, which (is a) faith of tolerance and moderation,” he said.

The summit is expected to discuss pressing issues, including the Palestinian cause, the Syrian crisis and Iran’s involvement in Arab affairs, as well as other serious developments taking place in the region.

Tareq Momani, editor in chief of the Al Rai newspaper and president of the Jordan Press Association, told Arab News that the summit is being held amid serious challenges facing the Arab region.

“Arab unity is an issue of paramount importance that will be discussed during the meeting. Serious subjects will be on the table for discussion, including the Palestinian cause and Israel’s ongoing violations in the occupied Palestinian territories, the Iranian intervention and meddling in Arab affairs, and above all, the Syrian crisis and its repercussions on the neighboring countries, in terms of the number of refugees who fled the violence,” Momani said.

The summit aims to rekindle the ambitions and hopes of the Arab people who have been living in desperation due to the violence in several countries, Momani said.

The permanent delegates of the Arab League on Saturday met and agreed draft resolutions to be raised for discussion by the Arab foreign ministers as they embark on Monday’s preparatory meeting of the Arab Summit.

Among the most important draft resolutions to be drawn up is one on the Palestinian cause and the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the developments in Jerusalem, the Israeli settlements and segregation wall, according to a statement distributed by the summit’s organizing committee.

The draft also includes the issue of refugees and the efforts by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to alleviate the suffering of the refugees, as well as support for the host countries and for the Palestinian Authority’s budget.

The permanent representatives will also discuss developments in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan.

Discussions on Iran’s occupation of three islands in the Arabian Gulf — the Greater and Lesser Tunbs and Abu Musa — and the claimed Iranian interference in the internal affairs of the Arab countries will figure prominently on the agenda of talks.

Delegates are set to adopt a draft resolution stressing the Arab position on Turkish forces’ alleged violation of Iraqi sovereignty, a draft reaffirming the need to maintain Arab national security and continue the fight against terrorism, and a draft resolution on the proposed periodic Arab-European summit.

Samih Maaytah, former Jordanian minister of information and government spokesperson, told Arab News that an Arab consensus on critical issues is a key concern of the summit.

These issues include the Syrian crisis and the need for a political solution to the war, as well as Iran’s activities in some Arab states.

“Those two files are rather controversial, as there are some countries that believe that Syrian President Bashar Assad must not have a role in any political settlement to the Syrian crisis. With regard to Iran, there are some countries that still enjoy warm relationship with Tehran, which might pose an obstacle to taking a strong position to curb Iranian expansionist ideologies,” Maaytah said.

He added that the Palestinian cause must once again be made a top priority for Arab discussions, due to the stance taken by the new US administration.

UK Universities Cancel Richard Falk Event

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Two British universities have cancelled events planned for the launch of former UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine Richard Falk’s new book.

The professor of international law was scheduled to speak Saturday about his new book, “Palestine’s Horizon”, in Middlesex University. But the London based university followed a decision by the University of East London yesterday to pull the event at the last minute.

Since the cancellation, a pro-Israeli activist group based in the UK has confirmed that the events were pulled following their “intervention”.

Both events had been advertised on the universities’ events pages. East London University cancelled the talk, saying it took “the difficult decision” because “it became clear, the day before the event, that the University’s External Speakers Policy had not been adequately followed”.

The spokesman for East London denied that this was an attack on free speech and told MEMO: “We strongly believe that universities should be a place of debate and free speech. We would consider welcoming Professor Falk to our campus on another occasion if the appropriate policies and procedures were followed.”

Middlesex University press officer told MEMO that “concerns over safety” prompted the decision to cancel the event, while also confirming that the event could be held in the future if safety concerns were met.

While both universities cited logistic and procedural concerns as reasons for cancelling the talk, Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), which claims to be a “volunteer-led charity dedicated to exposing and countering antisemitism through the enforcement of the law” issued a statement announcing that their “intervention” forced the university to cancel the speech.

CAA, which was set up in 2014 following the Israeli bombardment of Gaza to counter the rise of criticism against Israel, said: “The University had insisted the event would take place, but following intervention by Campaign Against Antisemitism, the university has now decided to cancel the event.”

Falk was the co-author of a new UN report which concludes that “beyond a reasonable doubt … Israel is guilty of imposing an apartheid regime on the Palestinian people”.

Speaking at a MEMO event on Monday, Falk said the language around Israel’s occupation of Palestine must change, if Israel’s claim to the land is to be seriously challenged and in order to move towards a more meaningful peace process. Rather than an “occupation”, which he views as an inaccurate term partly due to the length of time that Israel has now held on to the territories conquered in the 1967 war, he affirmed that instead Israel should now be called an “apartheid state”.

Turkey Bans Electronics On Flights To US And UK

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A ban on several electronic devices on many flights to the United States took effect at Turkey’s main international airport in Istanbul on Saturday, local broadcasters reported.

The ban prevents passengers from bringing most electronic items larger than a smart phone – laptops, cameras, and tablets, for example – as carry-on items on non-US carriers such as Turkey’s flagship Turkish Airlines.

New signs have gone up at Istanbul Ataturk Airport to inform passengers of the restrictions.

Broadcaster NTV showed laptops and tablets being carefully wrapped in bubble wrap by ground staff, amid passenger concern for their devices.

The devices were either directly placed inside checked luggage or were placed in a newly created storage box for safekeeping until being handed back upon landing.

Other airports in the Middle East, the area most affected by the new US and British regulations, also began to impose the ban.

Tunisia’s Foreign Ministry called in the British ambassador to express concerns about the ban, one of a number of governments saying the move was done without consultations.

There are concerns the motivation for the ban extends beyond security and touches on issues of trade.

British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson landed in Turkey on Friday for a trade-related visit.

Original source

Stem Cell Therapy Possibly To Repair Lung Damage

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A new study has found that stem cell therapy can reduce lung inflammation in an animal model of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and cystic fibrosis. Although, still at a pre-clinical stage, these findings have important potential implications for the future treatment of patients.

The findings were presented in Estoril, Portugal at the European Respiratory Society’s Lung Science Conference.

Lung damage caused by chronic inflammation in conditions such as COPD and cystic fibrosis, leads to reduced lung function and eventually respiratory failure. Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) therapy is currently being investigated as a promising therapeutic approach for a number of incurable, degenerative lung diseases. However, there is still limited data on the short and long-term effects of administering stem cell therapy in chronic respiratory disease.

The new research investigated the effectiveness of MSC therapy in a mouse model of chronic inflammatory lung disease, which reflects some of the essential features of diseases such as COPD and cystic fibrosis.

Researchers delivered stem cells intravenously to ?-ENaC overexpressing mice at 4 and 6 weeks of age, before collecting samples tissue and cells from the lungs at 8 weeks. They compared these findings to a control group that did not receive the MSC therapy.

The results showed that inflammation was significantly reduced in the group receiving MSC therapy. Cells counts for both monocytic cells and neutrophils, both signs of inflammation, were significantly reduced after MSC therapy. Analysis of lung tissue revealed a reduction in the mean linear intercept and other measures of lung destruction in MSC treated mice. As well as reducing inflammation in the lung, MSC therapy also resulted in significant improvements in lung structure, suggesting that this form of treatment has the potential to repair the damaged lung.

According to Dr Declan Doherty, from Queens University Belfast, UK, “These preliminary findings demonstrate the potential effectiveness of MSC treatment as a means of repairing the damage caused by chronic lung diseases such as COPD. The ability to counteract inflammation in the lungs by utilising the combined anti-inflammatory and reparative properties of MSCs could potentially reduce the inflammatory response in individuals with chronic lung disease whilst also restoring lung function in these patients.”

“Although further research is needed to improve our understanding of how MSCs repair this damage, these findings suggest a promising role for MSC therapy in treating patients with chronic lung disease,” Doherty said.

Professor Rachel Chambers, ERS Conferences and Research Seminars Director, said, “This paper offers novel results in a pre-clinical model which demonstrates the potential of MSC stem cell therapy for the treatment of long-term lung conditions with exciting potential implications for the future treatment of patients with COPD and cystic fibrosis.”

Chambers added that, “Although, still at an early stage in terms of translation to the human disease situation, this paper is one of many cutting-edge abstracts from the Lung Science Conference, which aims to provide an international platform to highlight novel experimental lung research with therapeutic potential. We rely on high quality basic and translational respiratory science, such as these latest findings, to develop novel therapeutic approaches for the millions of patients suffering from devastating and often fatal respiratory conditions.”


Zika Virus Mosquito Genome Assembled From Scratch

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A team spanning Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, Texas Children’s Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has developed a new way to sequence genomes, which can assemble the genome of an organism, entirely from scratch, dramatically cheaper and faster.

While there is much excitement about the so-called “$1000 genome” in medicine, when a doctor orders the DNA sequence of a patient, the test merely compares fragments of DNA from the patient to a reference genome. The task of generating a reference genome from scratch is an entirely different matter; for instance, the original human genome project took 10 years and cost $4 billion. The ability to quickly and easily generate a reference genome from scratch would open the door to creating reference genomes for everything from patients to tumors to all species on earth. Today in Science, the multi-institutional team reports a method — called 3D genome assembly — that can create a human reference genome, entirely from scratch, for less than $10,000.

To illustrate the power of 3D genome assembly, the researchers have assembled the 1.2 billion letter genome of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which carries the Zika virus, producing the first end-to-end assembly of each of its three chromosomes. The new genome will enable scientists to better combat the Zika outbreak by identifying vulnerabilities in the mosquito that the virus uses to spread.

The human genome is a sequence of 6 billion chemical letters, called base-pairs, divided up among 23 pairs of chromosomes. Despite the decline in the cost of DNA sequencing, determining the sequence of each chromosome from scratch, a process called de novo genome assembly, remains extremely expensive because chromosomes can be hundreds of millions of base-pairs long. In contrast, today’s inexpensive DNA sequencing technologies produce short reads, or hundred-base-pair-long snippets of DNA sequence, which are designed to be compared to an existing reference genome. Actually generating a reference genome and assembling all those long chromosomes involves combining many different technologies at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, because human genomes differ from one another, the use of a reference genome generated from one person in the process of diagnosing a different person can mask the true genetic changes responsible for a patient’s condition.

“As physicians, we sometimes encounter patients who we know must carry some sort of genetic change, but we can’t figure out what it is,” said Dr. Aviva Presser Aiden, a physician-scientist in the Pediatric Global Health Program at Texas Children’s Hospital, and a co-author of the new study. “To figure out what’s going on, we need technologies that can report a patient’s entire genome. But, we also can’t afford to spend millions of dollars on every patient’s genome.”

To tackle the challenge, the team developed a new approach, called 3D assembly, which determines the sequence of each chromosome by studying how the chromosomes fold inside the nucleus of a cell.

“Our method is quite different from traditional genome assembly,” said Olga Dudchenko, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Genome Architecture at Baylor College of Medicine, who led the research. “Several years ago, our team developed an experimental approach that allows us to determine how the 2-meter-long human genome folds up to fit inside the nucleus of a human cell. In this new study, we show that, just as these folding maps trace the contour of the genome as it folds inside the nucleus, they can also guide us through the sequence itself.”

By carefully tracing the genome as it folds, the team found that they could stitch together hundreds of millions of short DNA reads into the sequences of entire chromosomes. Since the method only uses short reads, it dramatically reduces the cost of de novo genome assembly, which is likely to accelerate the use of de novo genomes in the clinic. “Sequencing a patient’s genome from scratch using 3D assembly is so inexpensive that it’s comparable in cost to an MRI,” said Dudchenko, who also is a fellow at Rice University’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics. “Generating a de novo genome for a sick patient has become realistic.”

Unlike the genetic tests used in the clinic today, de novo assembly of a patient genome does not rely on the reference genome produced by the Human Genome Project. “Our new method doesn’t depend on previous knowledge about the individual or the species that is being sequenced,” Dudchenko said. “It’s like being able to perform a human genome project on whoever you want, whenever you want.”

“Or whatever you want,” said Dr. Erez Lieberman Aiden, director of the Center for Genome Architecture at Baylor and corresponding author on the new work. “Because the genome is generated from scratch, 3D assembly can be applied to a wide array of species, from grizzly bears to tomato plants. And it is pretty easy. A motivated high school student with access to a nearby biology lab can assemble a reference-quality genome of an actual species, like a butterfly, for the cost of a science fair project.”

The effort took on added urgency with the outbreak of Zika virus, which is carried by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. Researchers hoped to use the mosquito’s genome to identify a strategy to combat the disease, but the Aedes genome had not been well characterized, and its chromosomes are much longer than those of humans.

“We had been discussing these ideas for years — writing a chunk of code here, doing a proof-of-principle assembly there,” said Lieberman Aiden, also assistant professor of molecular and human genetics at Baylor, computer science at Rice and a senior investigator at the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics. “So we had assembly data for Aedes aegypti just sitting on our computers. Suddenly, there’s an outbreak of Zika virus, and the genomics community was galvanized to get going on Aedes. That was a turning point.”

“With the Zika outbreak, we knew that we needed to do everything in our power to share the Aedes genome assembly, and our methods, as soon as possible,” Dudchenko said. “This de novo genome assembly is just a first step in the battle against Zika, but it’s one that can help inform the community’s broader effort.”

The team also assembled the genome of the Culex quinquefasciatus mosquito, the principal vector for West Nile virus. “Culex is another important genome to have, since it is responsible for transmitting so many diseases,” said Lieberman Aiden. “Still, trying to guess what genome is going to be critical ahead of time is not a good plan. Instead, we need to be able to respond quickly to unexpected events. Whether it is a patient with a medical emergency or the outbreak of an epidemic, these methods will allow us to assemble de novo genomes in days, instead of years.”

Portland Art Museum Features 14th-Century Altarpiece By Ghissi

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The Portland Art Museum presents an exhibition that brings together eight dispersed 14th-century paintings, and a recreated missing panel, so that the altarpiece can be seen and appreciated as one magnificent work of art. This reunion allows visitors to see the Museum’s Resurrection of Drusiana in its original context. Donated by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in 1961, the painting is one of the finest Early Italian narrative scenes in the Pacific Northwest.

“This type of exhibition is staged very rarely, so visitors should take advantage of this special opportunity to see one of the Museum’s early Renaissance paintings in its magnificent original context,” said exhibition curator Dawson Carr, Ph.D., The Janet and Richard Geary Curator of European Art.

Ghissi worked in the Marche, the mountainous Italian region between the Apennines and the Adriatic Sea. The St. John Altarpiece is most extensive ensemble of his work to have survived, but its original location remains a mystery. It was made in the 1370s following a typical format for chapels and small churches, in which a large central image of the Crucifixion is flanked by smaller narrative scenes. In this case, eight episodes are devoted to the life of John the Evangelist, who was most likely the patron saint of the church. True to the spirit of the burgeoning Renaissance, each scene is depicted with great clarity, drama, and humanity, and the ensemble demonstrates that Ghissi was consistently a masterful storyteller.

During the 19th or early 20th century, the altarpiece was dismantled and sawed apart because individual panels could be sold more lucratively to art dealers and collectors. In time, all of the known elements entered U.S. museums. Portland’s painting and three panels in the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) were the gifts of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Three additional panels are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the central Crucifixion is in the Art Institute of Chicago. After more than a century of separation, the paintings are now reunited in this exhibition, first displayed at NCMA last fall, that retells the story of this Early Renaissance masterwork.

Because the ninth painting has never been found, Dutch conservation specialist Charlotte Caspers was employed to re-create it using 14th-century materials and techniques. Caspers worked with NCMA Curator of European Art David Steel and Chief Conservator William Brown to determine the probable subject, composition, coloring, and other details; then she created the panel with the same type of pigments and gilding used by Ghissi 650 years ago. The exhibition includes a video of the process along with an extensive display documenting all of the pigments and other materials used.

The bright, gleaming new panel would look out of place alongside works that had aged for centuries, so Duke University mathematicians developed algorithms to age Caspers’s work digitally using the crack patterns and faded colors of the original panels as a guide. A photograph of the virtually aged ninth panel will be installed to complete the St. John Altarpiece. The Duke team also used Casper’s panel to calculate algorithms to reverse the effect of aging on the original panels. The resulting images will be displayed, along with Casper’s panel, to give visitors an impression of the altarpiece as it would have looked in the 14th century. Videos explaining the work of the mathematicians will be available in the gallery.

“It was a true collaboration between conservators, curators, and mathematicians,” says Steel, who will discuss the process in a public lecture at Portland Art Museum on April 2. “Everyone learned from each other’s research, and it resulted in this fascinating exhibition that combines art history, mathematics, and technology.”

Organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina. Curated in Portland by Dawson Carr, Ph.D., The Janet and Richard Geary Curator of European Art.

President Trump Signs NASA Transition Authorization Act Of 2017 – OpEd

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“Almost half a century ago, our brave astronauts first planted the American flag on the moon. That was a big moment in our history.  Now this nation is ready to be the first in space once again. Today we’re taking the initial steps toward a bold and brave new future for American space flight,” said US President Donald Trump.

This week President Donald J. Trump signed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Transition Authorization Act of 2017, the first comprehensive NASA authorization passed by Congress in more than six years. The bill demonstrates strong bipartisan support for our Nation’s space program and helps ensure that NASA remains at the forefront of exploration and discovery.

The Act, passed unanimously by Congress, authorizes the development and execution of a long-range plan for deep space human exploration; invests in robust science, technology and aeronautics portfolios; and endorses the Agency’s successful efforts to nurture a new commercial market that will boost our economy and create more jobs. Additionally, it guarantees vastly improved health care for the heroes who risk their lives in the exploration of space.

Text of the authorization act can be found here and the full video of President Trump signing the act can be found here.

There Is An ‘Operation Trust’ In Belarus, But Not What Regnum Editor Describes – OpEd

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Like many others, both intelligence professionals and political analysts approach every new situation by drawing on their past experiences, assuming that what worked earlier will work again, with Russian analysts in addition typically projecting on to others what their own intelligence services are doing.

Those two things explain the proclivity of many Moscow analysts of raising the specter of “Operation Trust”-type operations supposedly being conducted by other governments but in fact pioneered by the founder of the Soviet Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, in the first years of Soviet power, and routinely used by the Cheka’s successors since that time.

“Operation Trust” or just “the Trust” was a Soviet false flag operation designed to penetrate, disorder and ultimately hamstring the military wing of the first Russian emigration by suggesting that there was an underground monarchist organization within Soviet Russia that the emigration should take its orders from.

(For a good introduction to the complex history of Dzerzhinsky’s Trust, see the 35-page report at jmw.typepad.com/files/simpkins—the-trust-security-intelligence-foundation.pdf. For a discussion of some more recent Trust-type operations Putin has launched, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/01/putins-active-measures-achieve-second.html.)

 

Most leaders of the Russian emigration and many European intelligence services fell for the Trust operation, but not all did. And when the Trust was exposed for what it really was in 1927, an exposure that it is possible Moscow even played an active part, many assumed that the Russian intelligence services had suffered a serious defeat.

At one level that may have been true, but at another, it definitely was not. The exposure of the Trust as a Soviet operation discredited all those who had believed in it, most prominently perhaps V.V. Shulgin who was manipulated by it and whose influence in the emigration never recovered. And that gave Moscow a second victory, even if many didn’t see it at the time.

In an article provocatively entitled “May Failed at an Operation Trust,” Baranchik suggests that the Belarusian foreign minister has misled his president, cooperated with Ukrainian radicals, protected them against the legitimate actions of Alyaksandr Lukashenka, and otherwise undermined the unity of the Minsk regime (regnum.ru/news/polit/2254462.html).

What he does not do is to say exactly who recruited Vladimir May or whom May recruited and under what false flag. Instead, Baranchik insinuates that some dark forces are behind all this and counts on using the emotionally resonant language about a “Operation Trust” to disorder the Belarusian regime and reduce its ability to function.

The Regnum news agency editor has good reason to be angry at May: the latter forced him to leave Belarus and sought his extradition from Russia, something Moscow wasn’t prepared to give, because of Baranchik’s pro-Russian and anti-Belarusian reporting, much of it unsubstantiated.

And Baranchik has another reason to employing the “Trust” language: There are Operation Trust-like actions going on in Belarus, but they have nothing to do with the collection of insinuations he offers. They are organized by Russian intelligence officers presenting themselves as Belarusian radical nationalists in order to be able to promote disorders.

That is what Moscow’s special services did in Ukraine and they are doing it again in Belarus so that they can promote violence when it suits them, either to force Lukashenka to crack down harder than he otherwise might or to provide a justification that some might accept for a Russian intervention in the name of stability.

The Belarusian opposition and the angry Belarusian nation behind the current round of demonstrations is committed to precisely the kind of peaceful change that Moscow doesn’t want to see happen. It would make such activities too much of a threat to Russia’s own authoritarian regime, and so it is Moscow not May who has an interest in a new Operation Trust.

Praise For Gorsuch’s Record Of Building Unity On Religious Freedom

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By Matt Hadro

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch received a strong voice of support Thursday from a lawyer at a major religious liberty firm, who said that he shows a record of consensus building and protecting religious freedom for all.

In addition to ruling on some high profile cases, Gorsuch also defended the religious freedom of religious minorities and prisoners, “some of the most politically powerless in our society,” said Hannah Smith, senior counsel with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

Smith testified about Gorsuch before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Gorsuch sits on the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was nominated by President Donald Trump in February to be an associate justice at the U.S. Supreme Court.

In her testimony, Smith pointed to Gorsuch’s ruling in favor of a Native American inmate’s request to have access to a sweat house at his prison, for religious use.

Gorsuch wrote in that Yellowbear case, “While those convicted of crime in our society lawfully forfeit a great many civil liberties, Congress has (repeatedly) instructed that the sincere exercise of religion should not be among them – at least in the absence of a compelling reason. In this record we can find no reason like that.”

He also was “a remarkable consensus-builder,” Smith added, “in an area of jurisprudence that can be quite contentious.”

Smith said she studied 40 religious freedom cases where Gorsuch, appointed to the Tenth Circuit by President George W. Bush, either wrote an opinion or took a position. She found that “judges appointed by a Democratic president agreed with him in 80 percent of those cases.”

Where Gorsuch authored an opinion in a religious freedom case, she added, he “produced a unanimous decision every single time.”

“My assessment is that Judge Gorsuch, as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, would be a jurist committed to protecting this vital freedom,” Smith said of religious liberty. “None of his religious liberty opinions has ever been reversed by the Supreme Court.”

Judge Gorsuch was a Marshall Scholar who received his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, studying under Natural Law scholar John Finnis while there. He clerked for Supreme Court justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy before working as the principal deputy associate attorney general at the Justice Department under President George W. Bush.

In 2006, President Bush appointed Gorsuch to the Tenth Circuit. In his time on the circuit, he weighed in on major religious freedom cases including those of Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor against the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate.

He was nominated by President Trump on Feb. 1 to fill the vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. Senate Democrats, however, have announced their intent to hold up his confirmation through filibuster, which would require the votes of 60 senators to override.

Republicans, who hold the majority in the Senate, have not yet announced if they will invoke the “nuclear option” where the Senate rules would be altered to allow for a simple majority vote in the 100-seat chamber rather than a three-fifths, or 60-seat, vote.

Smith, in her testimony on Thursday, also pointed to Gorsuch’s rulings in recent prominent religious freedom cases.

As a judge, Gorsuch wrote a concurrence with the majority decision in favor of Hobby Lobby, and joined the dissent in the case that went against the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, saying they were exempt from the contraceptive mandate, which “substantially burdened” their religious exercise and was not the “least-restrictive” means of ensuring access to contraceptives.

Later, in the middle of deciding the Little Sisters case, the Court called for the nuns and the government to outline alternative ways of allowing cost-free coverage of contraceptives while respecting the religious freedom of the nuns. After both parties submitted their answers, the Court sent the case back to the lower courts and instructed the parties to come to an agreement.

Ultimately, Smith said, Gorsuch’s record makes it clear that he will uphold the religious liberty of all people.

“His jurisprudence demonstrates an even-handed application of the principle that religious liberty is fundamental to freedom and to human dignity,” she said, “and that protecting the religious rights of others – even the rights of those with whom we may disagree – ultimately leads to greater protections for all of our rights.”

Fishing The Radioactivity Out Of Nuclear Waste

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Cleaning up radioactive waste is difficult and often dangerous, especially when uranium is involved. In order to solve the problem of safely handling nuclear waste, a better understanding of uranium is needed.

The EU-funded UNCLE project, which closed in 2014, focussed on improving the clean up process with a study on how uranium undergoes chemical bonding and the effect this has on reactivity. As a result of this work, UNCLE researchers concluded that uranium nitride and oxo-complexes are essentially the same, the only difference being the swapping of a single nitrogen atom in nitride for an oxygen one in oxo-complexes. Researchers realised that the symmetry of the complexes and oxidation state of the uranium ions, rendered them ideal systems from which to develop quantitative models.

The problem, however, is that moving from qualitative to quantitative approaches requires a large family of molecules. To overcome this barrier, researchers identified a reliable new way to make uranium nitride complexes that allows for the preparation of a large family of molecules.

Gone fishing, with arsenic bait

Using the UNCLE-developed quantitative model, and its understanding of how elements like thorium and uranium interact with elements from around the periodic table, researchers have discovered how arsenic molecules can be employed to ‘fish out’ the most toxic elements from radioactive nuclear waste. According to findings due to be published soon in ‘Nature Communications’, researchers report the first examples of thorium with multiple bonds to arsenic existing under ambient conditions on multi-gram scales. Prior to the research, this has only been accomplished on very small scales and at temperatures approaching that of interstellar space (i.e. 3 – 10 Kelvin).

What this means is that the decommissioning of nuclear power plants could soon become safer and more effective, also offering hope for cleaner energy. ‘Nuclear power has the potential to produce far less carbon dioxide than fossil fuels, but the long-lived waste it produces is radioactive and needs to be handled appropriately,’ says researcher Elizabeth Wildman. ‘We need to reduce the volume of nuclear waste in order to make it easier to handle and process it to remove benign elements or separate the high level from low level waste.’

Potential in soft donor atoms

The ultimate goal is to use organic molecules to selectively extract metal ions from the ‘soup’ of nuclear waste and fish out the more radioactive and toxic ones, leaving the rest behind. ‘This requires an understanding of chemical bonding and how the organic extracts bind to different metals,’ says the UNCLE Project Coordinator, Stephen Liddle who was also involved in the latest research. ‘We can then exploit this knowledge to achieve separation by having them selectively bind to one type of metal and remove it from the soup.’

According to Liddle, there is mounting evidence that the best way of doing this is with molecules containing soft donor-to-metal binding. ‘Arsenic is a soft donor, so we have prepared model complexes with it to understand the nature of the bonding,’ he explains. ‘Here, we have made molecules in multi-gram quantities, which are stable under ambient conditions and thus allow us to study them more straightforwardly.’

With the new knowledge and understanding that researchers hope to gain from this latest work, UNCLE’s findings may soon be applied to an operational system.

Cordis Source: Based on project information and media reports

Thousands March In London Against Looming Brexit

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(EurActiv) — Tens of thousands of pro-EU protesters took to London’s streets on Saturday, in defiance of the terror threat, to mark the bloc’s 60th anniversary just days before Brexit begins.

Organisers said around 80,000 people had joined the march calling for Britain to stay in the European Union, even as Prime Minister Theresa May prepares to start the withdrawal process on Wednesday.

A sea of blue EU flags stretched down Piccadilly and past Trafalgar Square, interspersed by signs saying “I am European” and “I’m 15 – I want my future back!”

The crowd fell silent as it filed into Parliament Square, the scene of terror this week when a homegrown killer drove a car through crowds of people before crashing into parliament and stabbing a policeman.

“Terrorism won’t divide us – Brexit will,” said one banner held aloft, while another said: “Stop sleepwalking, stop this madness.”

There were calls to cancel the march after Wednesday’s attack, which left four people and the perpetrator dead, but organisers said: “We will not be intimidated.”

Police said that “an appropriate policing plan is in place” but an AFP reporter said security was discreet.

In a referendum on 23 June, Britons voted by 52% to end their four-decade membership of the EU.

But 48% voted to stay – and are unhappy with May’s plans to leave the EU’s single market in order to cut immigration, and her refusal to guarantee the rights of three million Europeans living in Britain.

“I was told I could settle down, marry a Brit and make my life here,” said Joan Pons, a Spanish nurse who has lived in Britain for 17 years.

“Yet today I am told I’m a foreigner and should go back where I come from.”

On Wednesday, the prime minister will trigger Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, starting a two-year countdown to Britain’s exit.

She declined to attend celebrations in Rome on Saturday marking the EU’s creation, when six founding states signed the Treaty of Rome on 25 March 1957.


Russia Creates Alternative To SWIFT Banking Payment System – OpEd

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The grand order of things could be undergoing some major overhauls.

To put it more bluntly, a war to reset the global financial order is about to be unleashed.

Preparations inside Russia are being made in case the ultimate banking sanctions are placed on them, cutting off commerce inside the all-encompassing Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecomm SWIFT system – which runs credit, debt, and banking card transactions across a real time global network.

As it would be doled out by the banking elites, the price for misbehavior at the Kremlin could be ostracization from this global commerce vehicle.

But that isn’t the end of the story… Putin is readying his people to divorce from the international banking system altogether, and start over with a nationalistic platform, backed by thousands of tons of gold, and growing alliances with Europe, China and the BRICS nations, the Middle East and several emerging powers.

A major attempt to bring Russia under heel could result in the greatest schism the global system of finance has ever seen. Then what?

Via Russia Insider:

Russia has successfully developed and implemented an alternative should it be excluded from international banking systems, according to a recent report.

As far as western sanctions go, by far Russia’s largest vulnerability is in its banking sector, which for better or for worse is tied to the hip with international banking.

If Russia wishes to maintain the status quo, there’s not much that can be done about this dependency. But shortly after sanctions were announced in 2014, Moscow set out to prepare for the worst-case scenario: being cut off from the Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) system.

In layman’s terms, SWIFT allows for fast and (allegedly) secure international financial transfers. In fifty years when you are able to use your Bank of America debit card on the Moon (for a low fee of 2,000 moon rubles), it will be because of SWIFT or a system similar to it.

There are two issues surrounding SWIFT “cut-off” for Russia: 1. Is it likely to happen? and 2. Is Russia prepared for it?

…cutting Russia from SWIFT would be a disaster.

According to Nowotny:

Such a move “we would see as very problematic because it could perhaps undermine confidence in this system,” the governor of Austria’s central bank told reporters… Of course, this hasn’t stopped Europe and Washington from threatening to pull the SWIFT plug.

While it isn’t clear if this is going to happen, threats have been made since the beginning of the issues with Crimea and Ukraine.

And as a result, Putin has overseen the creation of a survival plan from which it could grow stronger. As RT reports:

“There were threats that we can be disconnected from SWIFT. We have finished working on our own payment system, and if something happens, all operations in SWIFT format will work inside the country. We have created an alternative,” Nabiullina said at a meeting with President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday.

She also added that 90 percent of ATMs in Russia are ready to accept the Mir payment system, a domestic version of Visa and MasterCard.

Izvestia daily reported that as of January 2016, 330 Russian banks had been connected to the SWIFT alternative, the system for transfer of financial messages (SPFS).

[…]

The central bank’s website says the system was established “as an alternative channel for interbank cooperation with the aim of ensuring the guaranteed and uninterrupted provision of services for the transmission of electronic messages on financial transactions.”

Will there be economic wars, or outright World War III? Nobody knows for sure, but things could get very tense very quickly. Already, loose allegations are flying at an unprecedented rate. Somebody wants to egg this thing on.

Russia under Putin has seen a significant challenge to a world order that has, for some time, been ultimately controlled by the central banking elite.

The Rothschild presence in Russia has been challenged; Soros-front NGOs have been kicked out, and it seems that only all out war will ever settle these power plays for the dominance or death of the U.S. petrodollar, which is ultimately controlled by the same few hands that steer and control the central banks of nearly all the world’s nations. Only by stealth and monotony have these activities remained in the shadows.

Indeed, the only countries left on the map which have not yielded to yoke of the central bank are the countries that are most at threat of being drawn into war:

–Syria

– Iran

– North Korea

– Cuba

With that list so close to complete, a reversal could be a real blow to global order, and to maintaining orderly deposits.

If Russia moves to drop their central bank, or if they are locked out of the global SWIFT system, it will mean a thudding silence, an unprecedented reversal in the concentration of power.

Russia has prepared to create its own SWIFT-style system as a back up system, that while it is not yet up and running, could one day rival the primary system, and which could provide a meaningful alternative for dissenters and tax evaders alike.

But be aware that behind the scenes, even with this massive and explosive changes in the works, those who control the finances are well aware of the shifts that are taking place, and are in position to reassert their leverage over humanity through new systems, and new centers of power.

Curiously, it cannot be denied that Russia has been a player in the international framework that has been erected. They have been equal partners in covert research and experimentation, and for all the animosity with the U.S., it has also played a willing dance partner for much of what has been going on during the past century.

Vladimir Putin has delicately and masterfully navigated these boundaries, yet he too is woven into the larger fabric. Like George H.W. Bush and the CIA, Putin is a product of the KGB, and remains permanently tied to it.

A monetary power this total does not lose power overnight – and they are not above jumping ship. Only a truly decentralized, private currencies based on mutually beneficial terms for individuals and communities could dissipate that power, and that will not come as easily.

Is the tide turning?

Costa Rica’s Challenge: Maintaining Internal Security Without An Army – Analysis

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By Sanjay Badri-Maharaj

On 1st December 1948, Costa Rica (pop. 4.5 million), under the leadership of President José Figueres Ferrer, abolished the Costa Rican army.1 Figueres, leader of the Social Democratic party had emerged victorious in a 44-day civil war during which time his forces – based in part around the 700 strong Caribbean Legion – defeated Communist guerillas and the Costa Rican army and established an 18-month old provisional junta known as the Junta Fundadora (Founding Junta). This junta enacted a series of far reaching reforms to Costa Rica’s social and political structure before voluntarily demitting office (paving the way for democratic elections).

One of the most far reaching reforms was the abolition of the army which was later enshrined in Article 12 of the Costa Rican Constitution which states:2

The Army as a permanent institution is proscribed.

For the vigilance and conservation of the public order, there will be the necessary forces of police.

Military forces may only be organized by a continental agreement or for the national defense; one and the other will always be subordinate to the civil power: they may not deliberate, or make manifestations or declarations in an individual or collective form.

This single step, never altered by successive governments, has ensured that Costa Rica, unique among the countries of Central America, has never been plagued by the bane of civilian or military dictatorships in its political history post-1948 and has been viewed as having established strong democratic and constitutional credentials supported by independent institutions.3 Through the darkest days of the Cold War when guerilla movements, insurgencies and death-squads plagued many of its neighbours, Costa Rica remained a bastion of stable democratic governance that served as a peacemaker and mediator with its neighbours.

Yet Costa Rica is far from immune to the security challenges that plague South and Central America. The country has become a major hub for transnational crime and drug cartels, moving away from merely being a transit point to becoming a storage and collection point for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels. Colombian cartels ship drugs to Costa Rica where they are stored and then retrieved by such groups as the Mexican Sinaloa cartel.4 With rival Mexican cartels sensing opportunities in a country which lacks an army or a large cadre of paramilitary police and which is mindful about the rights of its citizens, the courts and security establishment of Costa Rica are facing an unprecedented challenge.5

It should be noted that while Costa Rica faces no serious threat of external aggression, it does have a border dispute with its northern neighbour – Nicaragua. Nicaraguan troops have established a camp on Portillos Island which was deemed to be within Costa Rican territory by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a ruling issued on 16th December 2015.6 The new incursion led to Costa Rica approaching the ICJ with a fresh complaint in January 2017.7 However, even this apparent territorial violation has sparked no moves in Costa Rica to develop any sort of viable military capability. This is in perhaps in recognition of the fact that the country would always be overwhelmingly outmatched by the large and well-equipped Nicaraguan army but is perhaps more a reflection of Costa Rica’s view that this dispute is one which should be settled through the arbitration mechanisms of the ICJ.

Costa Rica’s Southern border with Panama is free from such disputes but the peaceful relationship between the two countries as well as a border that has little by way of demarcation has made this frontier a major route for narcotics and human trafficking.8 The thinly spread Policia de Fronteras are unable to do much more than token patrols along this frontier with a free flow of people – legal and illegal – being nearly impossible to halt.

With no tangible external threat, it is understandable that Costa Rica has felt no need to break with its antipathy towards military forces. What is puzzling is the decision not to develop paramilitary police forces to deal with the scourge of narcotics trafficking and the epidemic of violence that inevitably follows. Costa Rica’s decision not to adopt this approach was a conscious one and done with due regard to the country’s concern to preserve the civilian identity of its police force. Indeed, a decree by then President Oscar Arias in 2008 to allow the police to carry automatic weapons was nullified by the courts.9 Costa Rica is therefore unique among its neighbours in having neither an army nor a fully militarised police force.

Since the abolition of the army in 1948, the closest Costa Rica came to reestablishing any form of military force was during the 1980s when, in response to the turmoil in neighbouring Nicaragua, the then Civil Guard provided the nucleus for two USSF-trained border rapid reaction battalions (Relampago, and Binicio Battalions). 10 These two Rapid Intervention Infantry Battalions were followed by a third (Batallón Frontera Sur).11 The Costa Rican Guardia Civil had some M113 APCs, 1 UR-416 APC and 2 M3A1 armoured cars but these have not been seen in use for close to three decades.12 Old 20mm anti-aircraft guns that were briefly deployed to counter aerial incursions by the Sandinista regime’s air force have long been discarded. In the aftermath of the Nicaraguan conflict (which ended in 1990), Costa Rica began a major overhaul of its Guardia Civil and the resulting formation continues to shoulder the security burden of that country.

In 1996, the Costa Rican Fuerzas Publica (FP – Public Force) was formed under the Ministerio de Seguridad Publica (MSP). The FP has grown into a force that combines police, coast-guard, air surveillance and quasi-military functions. With a strength of some 12,600, the FP has incorporated the old Civil Guard, the Rural Guard and the two border security battalions.13 The FP principally functions as a police force and within the region, it enjoys a good reputation for professionalism and while not immune from corruption, is noticeably less so than its counterparts in the rest of Central America.14 The general human-rights environment in Costa Rica is much better than anywhere else in Central America and despite some lapses, the FP is not viewed as a predatory force by the Costa Rican population Nonetheless, the FP suffers from chronic shortages of equipment and despite strenuous efforts to improve and sustain training, the FP is still under-resourced.15 It is noteworthy that the FP is roughly as large as the Mauritius Police Force which is responsible for a population three-times smaller than Costa Rica’s.

Military capabilities of a very modest degree are retained by the successors of the two border security battalions which are now constituted into the Policia de Fronteras which comprises seven border security companies distributed between the Southern and Northern Commands.16 While usually clad in variations on police apparel, the Policia de Fronteras have been known to don military-style camouflage and carry assault rifles and machine guns while being supported by a limited number of 60mm and 81mm mortars. While the Policia de Fronteras has a small but effective riverine force, it lacks organic air support.

The Policia de Fronteras also has control of Costa Rica’s small air and naval components. The latter, termed the Servicio de Vigilancia Aérea (SVA – Air Vigilance Service) has 13 light liaison-cum-transport aircraft and two helicopters. Some of the aircraft were seized from narcotics traffickers and while useful assets, none of the SVA’s aircraft have specialized surveillance equipment.17 The shortage of helicopters is an acute problem given the inaccessibility of some parts of the country and the potential need for rapid deployment of forces to such regions.

The Costa Rican Servicio Nacional de Guardacosta (SNG – National Coastguard Service) comprises 10 obsolete patrol boats, the most capable of which are 3 82-foot Point-class cutters.18 This modest force will receive a significant boost in capability when two Island-class 110-foot vessels are transferred from the United States in 2017.19 While the larger vessels of the SNG can be armed with 0.50-cal M2HB heavy machine guns and/or 20mm Mk68 Oerlikon cannon, it was revealed in 1995 that none of the personnel assigned to the vessels knew how to operate the weapons. It is not known whether this situation has changed.20

Augmenting these units are two elite police special operations units – Comisaria 9 – Unidad de Operaciones Especiales (Special Operations Unit), and Comisaria 5 – Unidad Tactica de Policia (Police Tactical Unit). The former is largely American trained while the latter has close training ties to the Chilean Carabineros.21 These units are akin to elite riot control and Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams and provide support to the FP constabulary units which, while armed, do not normally carry automatic weapons.

Outside the MSP and under the control of the country’s Departamento de Inteligencia y Seguridad (DIS – Department of Intelligence and Security) is Costa Rica’s elite Unidad Especial de Intervención (UEI – Special Intervention Unit) which is a company-sized commando unit with a high standard of training and equipment.22 Despite its militarised nature, the Costa Rican government seeks to downplay its capability and insists it is a police rather than a military unit.23 Yet the UEI has an excellent regional reputation and is one of the region’s finest special forces units and exercises regularly with their Central and North American counterparts where it has consistently proven to be a capable outfit.

As has been noted, Costa Rica is facing a major challenge from violent transnational organised crime largely linked to the trade in illegal narcotics. Though the country registered a decline in homicides between 2010 (527) and 2012 (407), by 2014 that figure had increased to 471.24 This prompted calls for the establishment of a dedicated unit to combat organized crime but to date this has been limited to the 50 strong Policia de Control de Drogas. This unit relies heavily on support from other units – in particular the Policia de Fronteras and the SNG – to deal with the dual threat of Colombian and Mexican cartels using Costa Rica as a transit, storage, collection and trans-shipment point.

In recognition of these challenges, Costa Rica boosted its security budget by 123% between 2006 and 2012.25 However, unlike its neighbours, Costa Rica declined to deploy its elite and/or militarised police units in anything more than a supporting role with the FP constabulary bearing the brunt of the fight against organised crime. This has been accompanied by aggressive social programs in local municipalities aimed at conflict resolution and providing training and employment opportunities.26 Whether this enlightened approach will produce the desired results is as yet an open question but what is not in doubt is that Costa Rica is intent on maintaining a demilitarised approach to internal security challenges, maintaining at all times the country’s reputation of being a stable and democratic country with an enviable reputation for the protection of the human rights of its nationals.

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India. Originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (www.idsa.in) at http://idsa.in/idsacomments/costa-rica-challenge-maintaining-internal-security_sbmaharaj_230317

Was There Ever An Arab Spring? – Analysis

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By K. P. Fabian

The unfolding tragedy in the Arab world began as the Dignity Revolution in Tunisia in December 2010. It led to the fall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, ruler since the bloodless coup of 1987. In turn, the coup of 1987 had removed from office President Habib Bourguiba who had held office for 30 years right from the country’s independence from France in 1957. Subsequently, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt fell in February 2011 after ruling for 30 years. He was followed by Colonel Gaddafi of Libya who, in power since 1969, fell in August 2011 and was brutally shot dead two months later. Finally, President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, in power since 1978, reluctantly resigned in February 2012.

In short, between January 2011 and February 2012, four dictators, who had ruled or misruled for a total of 128 years over 120 million human beings, fell. And more than once, it appeared that President Basher al Assad, in power in Syria since 2000, would also fall. But Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah came in and put him on a life-support system. There is no immediate prospect of his fall.

Was the Arab Spring a Mirage?

When President Hosni Mubarak fell on February 11, 2011 as Egyptians fearlessly called for his resignation from the historic Tahrir Square and elsewhere, many long-time observers of the Arab world recalled the immortal words of Wordsworth about the French Revolution “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!”. But after six springs, a horrendous death toll of about 550,000, and 11 million rendered homeless, we realize how starry- eyed we were. To understand what happened and what went wrong, it is necessary to look at each country specifically.

Tunisia

Tunisia is the only success story, and that too a partial one. Democracy is reasonably rooted with an excellent constitution, easily the most advanced in the Arab world. There was never any serious threat of an army coup, though some reactionary elements invited the military to step in after Egypt saw the fall of democratically elected Morsi in the wake of a popular agitation engineered and promoted by the military and the rest of the Deep State in July 2013.

However, there are some dark clouds in the Tunisian political firmament. Economic progress has been tardy and unemployment remains high at 15 per cent, even higher among the educated at about 30 per cent nationally, and even as high as 35 to 40 per cent in the backward regions. Another matter of grave concern is that 3,000 young Tunisians have joined the Islamic State in Iraq/Syria as fighters, the largest number from any country. The terror attacks on the Bardot Museum (March 2015) and the holiday resort at Sousse (June 2015) have compelled Tunisia to tighten the law to combat terror in a manner that abridges civil liberties.

Egypt

Egypt witnessed a counter-revolution. The Deep State wrested power from the elected president in July 2013. Its hold has only become tighter since then, despite an attempt to have a democratic façade by way of a contrived election that made Field Marshal El Sisi President in June 2014. He banned the Muslim Brotherhood and branded them as terrorists with no justification whatsoever. There was a massacre at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square (August 2013), distressingly reminiscent of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The toll was over 800. Freedom of expression has almost vanished and Egypt has moved away from democracy at a rapid rate. Egypt has serious economic problems. Between 2011 and 2015, GDP growth have averaged at a low of 2.5 per cent a year. Public debt as a percentage of GDP has gone up from 82.1 in 2011 to 88 per cent in 2015.

Libya

The next dictator to fall was Ghaddafi who had seized power in a bloodless coup in 1969. He was inspired by Colonel Nasser of Egypt. A megalomaniac, Gaddafi did a lot of good and even more harm to Libya. He did use the oil revenue to improve the living standard of the people and the infrastructure, but he destroyed institutions and concentrated power in his own hands. When he fell, there was utter chaos and the country went back to the Hobbesian state of nature with everyone fighting with everyone else. Currently, Libya has more than one government. There is no national army, but any number of war lords.

The key question is: why did the West intervene militarily in Libya and that too with such alacrity? President Sarkozy recognized the rebel National Transition Council (NTC) as the sole representative of the Libyan people on March 10, 2011, five days after it was formed, even as the European Union was to meet the next day at summit level to discuss Libya. In an interview to a French TV channel on March 15, 2011, Gaddafi said that he was puzzled that Sarkozy was against him as he only ‘had made him President’ by sending him money for his presidential campaign in 2007. Though Sarkozy has denied accepting money from Gaddafi, it is generally known that as Interior Minister he had visited Gaddafi in 2006 and asked for money for his presidential campaign of 2007. A Libyan document dated December 10, 2006, mentioning a decision to allot up to Euro 50 million to Sarkozy, was accepted as genuine by the Council of State, the highest court in France, on November 6, 2014. The scandal of accepting money from Gaddafi was one of the causes of Sarkozy’s failure to get the nomination for the forthcoming election.

Despite his taking money from Gaddafi and signing big contracts with him, Sarkozy was seriously concerned about Gaddafi’s plans for a new African currency and for establishing a United States of Africa. Both projects would have undercut France’s influence in Africa. By 2010, Gaddafi had ceased to be a friend and had become a threat to France. Obviously, Sarkozy did not want to be ‘exposed’ by Gaddafi and it is believed that it was a French secret agent who fired the shot that killed Gaddafi on October 20, 2011. The Economist and BBC have scrupulously avoided mentioning the scandal of Sarkozy’s taking money from Gaddafi and have sought to explain his action as an instance of R2P (Responsibility to Protect) – a doctrine that was formulated after the US-led West failed culpably to act when the 1994 Rwanda genocide occurred. The BBC took part in a disinformation campaign that invented or exaggerated stories about mass rape by Gaddafi’s soldiers and other atrocities.

Obviously, Sarkozy had the motivation. Mahmoud Jibril, the interim Prime Minister during the civil war and Sarkozy’s primary interlocutor, told the Egyptian TV channel Dream TV that it was a foreign agent who killed Gaddafi. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, the UK’s Daily Telegraph and others have carried reports about a French secret agent killing Gaddafi. Shall we ever know the truth?

Syria

The saddest case is Syria. Initially, if Basher al Assad had responded to the call for his resignation by reaching out to the people and announcing and carrying out reforms, Syria might have been spared the horrors we all have witnessed helplessly. Be that as it may, the intervention of external powers, both in favour of Assad and of the rebels, added fuel to the fire.

The United States under President Obama called on Assad to step down in August 2011 but did not have a policy on Syria. Arms were given to chosen rebels, but never enough to defeat Assad who obtained generous support from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. Washington looked the other way when the Islamic State was capturing territory including Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq (June 2014), based on the wrong assessment that eventually the Islamic State would be a ‘strategic asset’ that could be used against Assad.

Qatar and Saudi Arabia sent arms and money to their chosen rebels. The rebels were never united in fighting Assad and often fought among themselves. As of now, there is no real threat to Assad though he is on a life support system provided by Russia and Iran. Syria is de facto balkanized and Assad’s writ runs only in a third of the country in terms of area though the population is concentrated there. The Islamic State is facing the possibility of military defeat, though one should bear in mind that the toxic ideology can inspire terrorist attacks even after loss of territory.

Yemen

After President Abdullah Saleh reluctantly resigned in February 2012, for a while Yemen moved towards a democratic destination with an approved constitution. But two obstacles came in the way. First, Saleh wanted his son to have a high position and, when that did not work out, he was ready to shake the system. The Houthis with a majority in parts of Yemen did not like the constitution as it reduced their political clout. Saleh, who had influence in the army and bureaucracy, and the Houthis joined together and challenged the government headed by Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, Saleh’s successor. Hadi was not up to the task. The rebels captured the capital and the Saudis, fearing that Iran would gain if the Houthis succeeded, intervened militarily in March 2015. The US and UK sent arms to Saudi Arabia. Egypt and Pakistan declined to send troops despite a request from Riyadh. There is no clear evidence of Iran’s sending arms to Houthis and, in any case, there is a blockade. More than 10,000 have been killed. The Saudis have violated with impunity the international laws on war. The sooner there is a negotiated settlement the better. But Riyadh is still chasing the mirage of a military victory.

Bahrain

Bahrain saw demonstrations, but Riyadh sent in troops and the situation was brought under control, at least for the time being. Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries spent lavishly on welfare and took strict action to put down expressions of dissent. Overall, the monarchies in the GCC as well as in Morocco and Jordan have responded to the political challenge more smartly than the dictators.

The Economic Cost

The turmoil has caused enormous economic destruction. According to the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), the cost of reconstruction will be a mammoth USD 614 billion. Who will pay? The US under President Trump? The GCC with their falling oil earnings? A European Union in disarray with Brexit and much else? The answer is painfully clear.

Conclusion

Though it began as a search for a path to political democracy in Tunisia, the Arab Spring was used or misused by different external powers and some entrenched interests within the Arab world including the Deep State to prevent the march towards democracy. The international community lacks capable leaders who can bring order out of the horrible chaos that is. However, it also showed that people cannot be intimidated by the police state forever.

It is an unfolding play and the end is uncertain. But it is difficult to be optimistic about a peaceful Syria emerging in the near future. The war in Yemen might end sooner as Riyadh realizes the impossibility of a military victory. There are reports that the UAE has already signalled its disapproval of Hadi’s rather uncompromising stand. Abu Dhabi expects Riyadh to bring Hadi round to a negotiated settlement.

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India. Originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (www.idsa.in) at http://idsa.in/idsacomments/was-there-ever-an-arab-spring_kpfabian_230317

Travel Paranoia – OpEd

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How paranoid can one become? Consider the latest laptop ban.

Last Tuesday, the U.S. and U.K. banned people flying from much of the Middle East and North Africa from carrying laptops, tablets and other large electronic devices in the airplane cabin because of concerns about terrorism. While the ban notice states this is not a public regulation but it does request that the Middle Eastern airlines comply within 96 hours of its release, on Tuesday at 3 a.m. Eastern time. Correspondingly, for any airline refusing to obey the order, the U.S. is prepared to work with the FAA to take certificates away to prevent the airline from flying into the United States.

Laptops are being seen as a security threat, especially following a 2016 explosion. A Daallo Airlines flight, originating from Mogadishu, Somalia, had a laptop bomb explode in midair, causing a hole in the side of its fuselage. That bomber was killed, and luckily all the passengers and crew were secure as the plane landed safely.

The nine affected airlines are Egyptair, Emirates Airline, Etihad Airways, Kuwait Airways, Qatar Airways, Royal Air Maroc, Royal Jordanian Airlines, Saudi Arabian Airlines and Turkish Airlines and their affected airports for flights to the U.S. include Cairo, Egypt; Dubai and Abu Dhabi, UAE; Istanbul, Turkey; Doha, Qatar; Amman, Jordan; Kuwait City; Casablanca, Morocco; and Jeddah and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Any device bigger than a smartphone must be checked now into the luggage hold. They operate about 50 flights a day to the US from 10 airports in the mainly Muslim countries, including major hubs such as Dubai and Istanbul.

The UK restrictions apply to six countries affecting all flights out of Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Lebanon. The latter two countries — Tunisia and Lebanon – are not on the U.S. list.

The U.S. officials said intelligence “indicates terrorist groups continue to target commercial aviation” by “smuggling explosive devices in various consumer items.” The officials declined to provide specific information on the threat or why these airports were selected.

This policy is the last of the insane policies adopted by some of the western countries to supposedly lessen the threat from perceived terrorism from Muslim majority countries. Forgotten in this context is — common sense. It does not take an Einstein to realize that if a terrorist were to attack (including blowing himself up) to cause maximum casualty, places like airports (esp. around the security checks), train stations and malls are easy venues for them. And what makes the European airports more secure than those airports in the Muslim world? Did not Ata, one of the 9/11 event makers, come from Germany?

The latest ban on laptops raised some concerns. Naureen Shah, senior director of campaigns at Amnesty International USA, said the ban for flights from majority-Muslim countries “could be yet more bigotry disguised as policy.”

“This could be the latest in what looks set to be a long line of discriminatory measures deployed by the Trump administration against Muslims around the world,” Shah said. “Muslims are once again left in the dark as the U.S administration piles up bans and restrictions against them.”

The British ban applies to any device, including smartphones, larger than 16cm (6.3in) long, 9.3cm (3.7in) wide or 1.5cm (0.6in) deep. However, most phones will be smaller than the limit.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has urged the US and UK to lift the bans as soon as possible.

A twitter remark by Slate directly called out the president, “Trump’s misguided, xenophobic laptop ban is a middle finger to business travelers.”

Aviation experts say the ban could hit airline profits as risks include a fall in passenger numbers, decreasing customer satisfaction and higher costs linked to screening baggage.

If there are concerns about laptops on board being used as explosives, they said, those same risks could exist in checked baggage. Furthermore, many smartphones, which are not banned, have the same capabilities as larger devices.

“It’s weird, because it doesn’t match a conventional threat model,” said Nicholas Weaver, researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you assume the attacker is interested in turning a laptop into a bomb, it would work just as well in the cargo hold. If you’re worried about hacking, a [smartphone] is a computer.”

Bruce Schneier, a US security technologist, said the US rules constituted an onerous travel restriction. “From a technological perspective, nothing has changed between the last dozen years and today,” he said. “That is, there are no new technological breakthroughs that make this threat any more serious today.

“And there is certainly nothing technological that would limit this newfound threat to a handful of Middle Eastern airlines.”

Paul Schwartz, professor at the University of California, Berkeley law school, noted that the 9/11 hijackers had a cell in Hamburg, Germany. “One potential problem with this approach where you single out countries is that you ignore the extent to which the terrorist threat is kind of state-less,” he said. “The terrorists have cells throughout the entire world.”

Mustafa Akyol, a senior visiting fellow at the Freedom Project at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, said the US ban “has something to do with Islamophobia, in the sense of bias and discrimination against all Muslims. Because instead of tracing dangerous individuals, it treats certain Muslim-majority nations as a threat to the US.

“On the other hand, it will be interesting to see how the Turkish government will respond to this decision. So far, Ankara has treated President Trump’s take on Muslims very leniently, to the level of passionately supporting Trump against American liberals. Maybe now they can wake up a bit and realize that Trump’s take on Muslims can be a real problem.”

Yesterday I was flying from Louisville. Before approaching the security gate I removed my belt and emptied out my pockets, which were scanned by the X-ray machine. And yet, I was stopped by a TSA agent after I had gone through the body scan. I don’t know if the latest travel policy had induced him to ask me if my neck was sore. It was a weird question that I never faced in all these years of my frequent flying inside the USA. When I replied that my neck was fine. He asked if he could pat my neck area. When I said, yes, he could, he asked if he could also check the inside collar of my shirt. I said, go ahead.

What a waste of people’s time!

As the latest parliament attack in London has demonstrated once again if a nihilist terrorist wants to commit his crime he need not buy an expensive airplane ticket and a laptop computer to board a flight; he can commit his evil in his own turf rather cheaply.

I wonder what those million-dollar X-ray machines are doing there inside the airports if these can’t do the intended job rightly, thus requiring rechecks by TSA agents! When would the imprudent officers in the TSA realize that they are simply wasting time of every passenger, let alone wasting the tax-payers’ money with such useless checks?
Just consider the fact that because of the lengthy security checks at the airports most air travelers waste at least an extra hour. Most of the commuters on weekdays travel for business reasons who earn no less than $50 per hour.

Per the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (http://www.transtats.bts.gov/), a total of 631,939,829 passengers boarded domestic flights in the United States in the year 2010.  This averages to 1.73 million passengers flying per day. I am sure this figure is much higher today. It can be safely said that the business commuters waste a minimum of a million hours every day because of the security checks, costing the USA at least $50 million daily. Thus, billions of dollars are wasted annually inside the USA for such long security checks.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing when it makes no sense. What is required from the Homeland Security Agency is to rethink their failed policy rather than going paranoid and making everyone’s life miserable.

Would sanity set in when it seems so short in supply in Trump’s America?

Is Globalization A Postmodern Form Of Imperialism? – Analysis

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Since the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the “defection” of the Russian Federation to the “Free World,” and the fall of the Wall of Berlin, the West has been busy marketing what it termed, then, the New World Order. In a way, it was the political declaration of The West and, especially the US that it has won this war and that it has the privilege to write history it own way.

However, the Americans are not interested in writing “past” history, the historians will do it in their own time and terms, as they always did. They want to write “future” history, but “future” history has to be written in the shape of a new cultural model capable to be sold to the rest of the world. This model, they artfully called “globalization”, meaning universal since the world is no more organized in blocks, to sell worldwide their way of life.

In fact, the Americans not only had a cultural model ready to be exported to the world but more importantly they had, also, a very effective “delivery system” which is the information and communication technology ICT: internet, satellite TV, radio, press etc. For this purpose a number of tools were popularized worldwide: Facebook, Twitter, CNN, MTV, etc.

The “subliminal” weapon

Unlike the European colonial powers of the 18th and the 19th century mobilizing physical human strength and weapons and logistics to carry the “enlightment” of European civilization to “barbarian” lands, the Americans are making use of the “subliminal” culture weapon to conquer the world.

What is “subliminal”? The Dictionary.com i introduces this lexical item in the following terms:

sub·lim·i·nal
adjective Psychology.
existing or operating below the threshold of consciousness; being or employing stimuli insufficiently intense to produce a discrete sensation but often being or designed to be intense enough to influence the mental processes of the behavior of the the individual: a subliminal stimulus; subliminal advertising.

As for its historical background it introduces it as follow:

1886, “below the threshold” (of consciousness), formed from sub “below” + L. limen (gen. liminis)”threshold.” Apparently a loan translation of Ger. unter der Schwelle (des Bewusstseins) “beneath the the threshold (of consciousness),” from from Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841), author of a textbook on psychology

Serious commercial experiments with subliminal messaging were conducted in the mid 50-s. On June 22, 1956, the British Broadcasting Corporation experimented with projecting subliminal images on television. Pictures were flashed on the screen too quickly to be seen consciously, but they did make an impression on the subconscious. The BBC experiment was followed by experiments by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Mexico’s Televisa commercial TV and radio network, US TV station WTWO in Bangor and many more.

The most known experiment with subliminal messaging was conducted by a marketing researcher and psychologist James Vicary in 1957 during the presentation of the movie Picnic. Every 5 seconds the words “Hungry? Eat popcorn. Drink Coca Cola” were projected for 0.003 seconds. That is extremely fast. Sales of popcorn and Coke in that New Jersey theater increased 57.8 percent and 18.1 percent respectively. Numerous scientific researches following these experiments confirmed beyond any doubt that subliminal messaging works.

Video-Christian tradition

Often historians make reference to the “Judeo-Christian Tradition” of or pertaining to the religious writings, beliefs, values, or traditions held in common by Judaism and Christianity, it is, also, related to the historical understanding and mutual comprehension between the Jews and the Christians.

To the question what does “Judeo-Christian” mean? Dennis Prager in an article published in the Jewish World Review of March 30, 2004 entitled: “The Uniqueness of America” argues that:ii

“The United States of America is the only country in history to have defined itself as Judeo-Christian. While the Western world has consisted of many Christian countries and consists today of many secular countries, only America has called itself Judeo-Christian. America is also unique in that it has always combined secular government with a society based on religious values.

He goes on to ask the important question of what that inherently means today in our world:

“But what does “Judeo-Christian” mean? We need to know. Along with the belief in liberty — as opposed to, for example, the European belief in equality, the Muslim belief in theocracy, and the Eastern belief in social conformity — Judeo-Christian values are what distinguish America from all other countries.”

Today America is transforming from a Judeo-Christian country into a Video-Christian power force, the flagship of the Western subliminal culture. America, thanks to the “global village” concept envisioned by Marshall Mcluhan in the 60s of the last century in his work:iii

Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.

And made possible by the digital revolution of this millennium.

In the name of globalization, in appearance, a humanistic mission to export goodness, wellbeing and development, America is exporting its way of life and thinking to the rest of the world and thanks to the subliminal approach, the world is receiving this new consumer culture without any resistance whatsoever.

Is this approach ethical? The answer is no because the new culture proposed to the rest of the world involves manipulation, to a large extent, a subconscious manipulation. Indeed, the world is bombarded daily by millions of powerful images of western consumer goods in a subliminal manner creating subconscious needs among world population and pushing them to make unnecessary decisions, at the expense of vital needs of housing, education and health, to satisfy a cultural urge and desire created in the first place by the subliminal manipulation.

Cultural alienation

This subliminal manipulation has terrible effect on the underage children because they are psychologically frail and lack the power of judgment and discernment. The adolescents of today, in the developing countries exposed to the subliminal power, either put pressure on their families to buy them the goods advertized on TV or social networks or resort to petty crime to or in the worst of situations become candidates to illegal immigration and its dire consequences of exposure to all kind of exploitation by ruthless middlemen. Children want to live up to the standards set up by MTV or all slick American series readily available on satellite TV networks. Lots of them unable to live such lives because of poverty slide into depression leading, in many cases, to addiction to deadly drugs.

A lot of young people unable to live by the standards of the Western subliminal culture get alienated and are easily recuperated by religious fundamental zealots who promise them paradise to make up for their earthly deprivations and thus get brainwashed into fighting the West and its “corrupt way life” in the most violent way possible. They are told that if they cannot get the creature comforts offered in the West, and if they fight such an earthly filthiness, they will be gratified in Heaven by all the women they desire and all the wine and food they want and all other possessions. Thus, young people go and blow up themselves in transportation means and buildings to have access to paradise, as soon as possible, and get away from the earthly desires they cannot satisfy.

The subliminal influence is even more effective and dangerous on toddlers and young children. It does dangerously affect their behavior and maybe their education. A good example of this is the commercial campaign of the French cheese spread “La vache qui rit” (Laughing Cow), it is made with catchy music, nice and easy lyrics, colorful scenery, happy good-looking actors and well-choreographed dance scenes. Pediatrics experts in the Arab world have made the observation that when this commercial is screened, children stop all activity they are engaged in and sway with the tunes and at the end, they smile and giggle and then return to their games or else.

Mercantile manipulation

In the light of the above, one wonders if the West is not consciously manipulating the poor countries to buy their products such as Nike, Gap, Ipad, M&Ms, McDonald, Coca Cola, etc. bearing in mind that these countries are endemically poor and are grappling with such basic needs as education, health and housing. Is not such a manipulation unethical and a breach of human rights the Western countries claim to uphold worldwide?

Marshall describes mildly the effect of advertizing manipulation but when this manipulation is subliminal the effect could be disastrous on the ability to decide freely and pretend to have any shadow of choice:iv

The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.

Western subliminal culture

The Western subliminal culture is by all means far superior and attractive than local simple cultures and it is even made more important by glorifying it and sanctifying it incessantly in radio, television, internet and glossy publications.

The Western artists with slick shows are embarking now and then in world tours. An artist like Lady Gaga, no matter how controversial her beliefs and acts are, is better known than a Kazakh singer. Why is that so? The answer is the Kazakh might be a much better artist than Lady Gaga, but he has no cultural support, whereas Lady Gaga has the whole culture apparatus of the West at her disposal. She might look plain and crazy to many but yet her image is blown out of proportion by the Western subliminal culture but the Kazakh singer does not have that kind of support to be become a global icon. If the Kazakh wore steaks on his body for a performance, he would be considered by his own people and the rest of the world out of his mind and good for a psychiatric hospital, but Lady Gaga did and everyone thought it is high art.

So is globalization a new form of Western colonialism and imperialism? The answer to this question is not as simple as it might seem, it is complex.

On the one hand, the West has come up with a very slick and complex cultural model to sell to the rest of the world its attractive civilization, and because of the subliminal manipulation the world has responded favorably to this artful and maybe, somewhat unethical, marketing technique. So the world lives by the standards of New York, Los Angeles and Washington….the culture of these cities has gone global and as such become universal. Even the countries, like France, that resisted, once upon a time, the irreversible advance of American culture in the name of what they called “La spécificité culturelle” and sought to kick out invading American linguistic lexical items from their language, have given up under President Sarkozy this political wish and are whole-heartedly accepting American leadership. They are even Americanizing their educational system.

On the other hand, globalization has erased the boundaries between people worldwide and the Internet has got them closer to each other to exchange ideas, concepts, beliefs, whims and desires. They can also exchange information and research approaches and finds and take their work further ahead.

Also, if it were not for the globalization, the Korean singer Psy would not have sold millions of his Gangnam Style record. His country has been able to use subliminal culture recipes and tools of the Americans to beat them at their game and impose somewhat their singer, cloned along American styles, to the entire world. This is undeniably proof that subliminal culture can be dangerously effective because the individual cannot anymore make his own choices but choices are made for him and packaged and sent through the tube to his psyche.

Overwhelming networks

Millions of people around the world have joined the American social networks such as: Facebook, Twitter etc. and professional networks such as Linked In and Vidaeo and mail systems such as Gmail and Yahoo. In doing so they might have opened the door to NSA (National Security Agency) to eavesdrop on them and keep an eye on their activities, just in case they go violent in their thoughts or beliefs.

NSA is an official institution that safeguards American interests worldwide and protects the country against deviant individuals or rogue states with a violent agenda against American people and their interests and institutions and globalization is nothing but the universalization of the American way of life. Traditionally, it is the privilege of the victor of a given war to write history. After the Second World War, the Allies wrote and rewrote the history of the world in their own terms. In the 90s the Americans won the Cold War and they set out not only to write the history of the world with their New World Order and later Globalization but they are also setting up, at will, the cultural standards and nobody is disputing them that privilege because they are technologically far advanced than the rest of the world.

The globalization imagined by the visionary Marshall McLuhan is not the result of traditional knowledge but that of packaging art:v

Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.

So it is by definition to be subliminal in all forms and aspects because that is what the ad agencies are good for and America is the biggest and most powerful ad agency in the entire planet.

What to make of globalization?

Globalization is a cultural model developed in America, in the aftermath of the end of the confrontation between West and East. It is de facto an American vision and blue print of how the world should be and ought to function, irrespective of difference of culture, belief and geographical location. It is a consumer model based on capitalism, maybe with imperialistic connotations. This model is not proposed to the rest of the world to choose or reject, it is subliminally imposed and thus adopted whole-heartedly with no resistance whatsoever.

In fact, this is only seeing the glass as half empty, so it is a relative reality and has indeed to be taken with a pinch of salt because globalization has truly achieved universality, whether it is the result of subliminal manipulation or not that has to be proved by independent research and not by political or cultural rhetoric. The whole world seems to be sharing in the values of globalization and rather than have local cultures condemned to disappearing, they are given the chance to go global and become universal heritage and that is seeing the glass half full.

Whether globalization is good or bad, whether the culture that underlies it is genuinely humanist or unethical, whether it is bringing peace and understanding to our troubled world or not, the fact is it is changing our world and changing the way we think and live. The world of tomorrow is going to be different; more open, more responsible and more ethical…thanks to the culture of globalization hopefully.

Notes:
i. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/subliminal?s=t
ii. http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0304/prager_2004_03_30_04.php3
iii. Marshall McLuhan, 2001. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Routledge.
iv. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/marshallmc103115.html
v. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marshall_mcluhan_3.html

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