Senate rebukes Trump’s plan to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, Afghanistan https://www.washingtonpost....
The vast majority of Senate Republicans backed Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday in a rebuke of President Trump’s rationale for withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan, voting to declare that the Islamic State’s continued operations in both countries poses a serious threat to the United States. … Democrats who voted against the measure characterized it as a commitment to endless war.

… While the Senate’s Thursday vote does not carry the weight of law or prevent the president from pursuing his plans, it puts congressional Republicans on the record as being at odds with Trump’s Middle East policy. In the past, the Senate has backed similar bipartisan measures expressing support for NATO in the face of Trump’s criticisms and threats to withdraw from the alliance. Earlier this month, the House overwhelmingly passed a measure to prevent Trump from using any federal funds to execute a withdrawal from NATO.
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When Trump was elected, I wondered if the "forever war" was too deeply entrenched in the borg/deep state or even someone like Trump to be able to push back against it. I wondered if there were any realists left In significant enough numbers to be willing to stand with Trump and buck their borg compadres. Because I knew Trump couldn't do it alone. The Borg is many-tentacled and yuuuuge!

Looks to me like the neocon/neolibs imperialists are not going to let Trump do what he was elected to do. Most Americans of both parties would welcome less war but that appears to be irrelevant to the political class.

Couldn't agree more Valissa. The wording is utterly astonishing, conflating al-Qaeda and ISIS with Iranian and Russian influence - pure Ziocon drivel. Troops must remain until the Administration can "..certify that conditions have been met for the enduring defeat of al Qaeda and ISIS..". I'd like Sen. McConnell to show me a historic example of an ideology that was enduringly defeated (without the complete extermination of the host population). So depressing that over 2/3 of the Senate felt the need to support this garbage.

Trump's only chance seems to be to ensure the withdrawal(s) are completed before this amendment is added to the bill and it becomes law. WaPo don't even include a link, so here it is for anyone with the stomach to read it:

https://www.congress.gov/co...

Here's Trump's response to the Senate vote:

https://twitter.com/realDon...

DC is addicted to endless wars. What I find so amazing is how they always use the same propaganda and language to characterize these interventions that have only resulted in societal scale destruction in those countries.

Now Trump is getting into the same game that he decries with his intervention in Venezuela. Neocons Bolton & Pompeo are champing at the bit. They get to do their own regime change and are so excited by the prospect, you can feel it in their tweets.

An Irish documentary about the 2002 coup in Venezuela titled "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised":
https://www.youtube.com/wat...

https://twitter.com/sahoura...

Great Read!

The Great Dying, the Little Ice Age, and Us
By Gwynne Dyer

The Black Death killed about 30% of the European population in a few years in the middle of the 14th century. A century and a half later the native people of the Americas were hit by half a dozen plagues as bad as the Black Death, one after another, and 95% of them died. The plagues of the ‘Great Dying’ had much less terrifying names like measles, influenza, diphtheria and smallpox, but they were just as efficient at killing.

When the tens of millions of native Americans died, the forests grew back on the land they used to farm. All those forests absorbed so much carbon dioxide that the average global temperature dropped, and what would otherwise have been a minor cyclical cooling became the Little Ice Age. It got so cold that lots of Europeans starved to death – so maybe there is such a thing as ‘climate justice’ after all.

The lead researcher of the team at University College London who joined up all these dots is doctoral candidate Alexander Koch. (He hasn’t even got his PhD yet.) He borrowed the phrase ‘The Great Dying’ from the paleontologists, who use it to describe the mass extinction event at the end of the Permian era 252 million years ago, the worst of them all. It works just as well for human beings.

When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, there were about 60 million people living in the Americas, and 99% of them were already farmers. Eurasian civilisations had a bit of a head-start on them – iron tools, ocean-going ships, even gunpowder – but their numbers and their economies were very similar: there were 70 or 80 million Europeans, and most of them were farmers too.

A century later there were only 6 million native Americans left: a 90% fatality rate. Yet at that time, there were still only about a quarter-million Europeans in the Americas. They clearly couldn’t have killed the other 54 million natives – but their diseases did.

Even now journalists reporting on this story go on referring to the European ‘genocide’ of the native peoples, but that’s nonsense. The Europeans killed some tens of thousands of Incas, Aztecs and others in various battles, and they took slaves to work their mines and grow their sugar, but why would they cause a genocide?

The problem was that the native Americans had absolutely no inherited resistance to the quick-killer Eurasian diseases that the Europeans brought with them. Those diseases had emerged in the densely populated countries of Europe and East Asia one at a time over thousands of years, passing from the herds and flocks of domesticated animals to their human owners, who now also lived in herd-like conditions.

Each one of these new diseases killed millions before the survivors developed some resistance, but the Asian, European and African populations had time to recover before the next one emerged. The native Americans got all the plagues at once, and they had no comparable plagues of their own to give back to the invaders because they didn’t keep large herds of animals.

The tragedy was inevitable from first contact. If the only Eurasians to reach the Americas had been peace-loving Spanish nuns – or peace-loving Chinese monks, for that matter – the Great Dying would have happened anyway. And the farms of those who died would still have been abandoned.

What really interests Alexander Koch and his colleagues is that this caused the largest abandonment of farmland in all history. The six million survivors didn’t need all those farms, so the forests came back quickly. As they grew they absorbed huge amounts of carbon dioxide, cutting the amount in the global atmosphere by about ten parts per million (10 ppm).

That dropped the average global temperature, which was already a little lower than usual because of cyclical changes in the Earth’s orbit. The Little Ice Age lasted for more than two hundred years and probably caused a couple of million extra deaths in local famines in Eurasia, so at least a little bit of the misery travelled the other way.

But our impact on the environment has now grown so large that a ten ppm cut in our emissions is almost meaningless. We are currently adding around ten ppm of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every four years.

On the other hand, if we were to reforest all the land that was cleared around the world in the past 150 years but is not prime agricultural land, we could sequester 50 ppm of carbon dioxide. That might win us the time we need to get our carbon emissions down without triggering runaway warming.

Instead, the Brazilians elect Jair Bolsonaro to clear-cut the Amazon, and the United States elects Donald Trump to outsource US climate policy to the fossil fuel industry. We know a great deal more than the native Americans did about the elements that would decide their fate, but we may be no better than they were at avoiding it.

At Plymouth in 1620 the colony survived because some European disease had killed 90% of the Indian population in the area. The disease had been contracted from European cod processing "factories" on the Maine coast.

There's absolutely no mention in the US media of Gilets Jaunes in France. No calls for regime change. They're now in their 12th week of protests. Macron responding with what some call brutal police action.

https://twitter.com/SimplyB...

What does this say about the regime change calls by the west? Always claimed on the basis of supporting the oppressed people protesting, labeling the leader of the country as a thug, dictator, tyrant.

Yes, our media is very silent on the protests in France. Doesn't fit with their propaganda agenda.

Do pink slippers go with pink hats? I heard a rumor that Huffington Post laid off all its opion writers. Looks like its true:
https://www.huffingtonpost....

""These giant platforms, they broke our industry. This is an existential challenge for every single publisher." HuffPost Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen on platforms such as Google and Facebook""

I wonder what took her so long in figuring out the obvious.

Interesting developments re Idlib: SF report Cavusoglu as saying 1) some anti-IS coalition partners are supporting HTS and 2) Russia has suggested a joint op with Turkey to remove HTS from Idlib. They do not report what Turkey's response was.

One wonders if 1) may be being introduced as the excuse for Erdogan to declare the Sochi deal as sabotaged by US/other evil forces, ultimately to justify 2). HTS recently cut all road links with Olive Branch territory - do they know what is coming?

https://southfront.org/turk...

"Plans for Russian-Turkish Offensive Against Nusra in Syria’s Idlib"

https://aawsat.com/english/...

SDF has refused an offer by IS to surrender in exchange for safe passage to Idlib and Turkey. Not sure what the Daeshis were thinking about. Idlib would not be a good destination for them right now. And I don't see Erdogan openly welcoming them into Turkey. In the last month many tried to infiltrate out of their last pocket. Some by slipping across the Iraqi border, but Iraqi PMFs have blocked most of them. Some others by posing as civilian refugees fleeing from IS, but the Asayish Police, both Kurd and Arab, screen everyone coming from that area.

http://www.hawarnews.com/en...