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Trouble in Putin’s Neighborhood Chaos in Russia’s near-abroad shows the limits of Kremlin power.

Posted By on October 20th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trouble-in-putins-neighborhood-11603149025?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Changes to the Russian constitution approved earlier this year allow Vladimir Putin to remain president well into his 80s. While he has consolidated power at home, one of the little-remarked events of the year has been the authoritarian’s inability to stop disorder in Russia’s near-abroad.

In 2005 Mr. Putin said “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” More than a decade later, the former KGB officer mused that if he could go back in time he would prevent the 1991 collapse. The USSR isn’t coming back, but the Russian Federation still tries to maintain stability on its periphery through deep economic, military and cultural ties with former Soviet Republics.

This project hasn’t been going well, even in countries that generally view Moscow favorably. The latest headache comes from Russian ally Kyrgyzstan. Opposition parties accused ruling elites of voter fraud after Oct. 4 parliamentary elections, and chaos continued even after the results were annulled last week.

President Sooronbai Jeenbekov announced his resignation Thursday. The nationalist Sadyr Japarov, newly sprung from prison, has become prime minister and acting president. But a Kremlin spokesman said Thursday that Russia would pause economic support for Bishkek because “there is no government as such, as far as we see.” Mr. Putin has reason to worry about instability in the resource-rich country, which hosts a strategically important Russian air base.

BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Crosswinds’ Review: Middle East Balancing Act An exploration of the Saudi temper that has both the interpretative heft of scholarship and the anecdotal brilliance of literary travelogue. By Martin Peretz

Posted By on October 20th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/crosswinds-review-middle-east-balancing-act-11603149873?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

Search for recent news articles about Saudi Arabia and the first name certain to appear is that of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist and inside player of Saudi power politics who was exiled from the kingdom, became an outspoken critic of the House of Saud, and in October 2018 met his gruesome end in an ambush inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul—an attack about which Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman denies any foreknowledge. The Khashoggi incident was met by world-wide revulsion; it’s been a blow to Saudi Arabia’s reputation that, in comparison to those of the kingdom’s neighbors, is warranted but not deserved. Every day, for example, more evidence surfaces of the top-down human-rights abuses in Iran and the unending human wreckage caused by the Syrian genocide. Still, Khashoggi’s fate has become a more potent symbol than either of these, emblematic of an increasingly hardline, conservative regime that the American foreign-policy establishment, and much of the American public, dislikes and distrusts.

Actions don’t exist outside of contexts. Insisting on a less myopic look at Saudi Arabia doesn’t mean excusing Khashoggi’s murder, but it does mean contextualizing it, bringing to it an analytical commitment to complexity too often attenuated in our times. This is the indirect achievement of “Crosswinds,” a posthumous book by Fouad Ajami that makes sense of the Saudi kingdom on its own terms—terms dense and tense with possibilities.

The Lebanon-born Ajami, who died in 2014 at age 68, was director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and America’s most prominent pragmatic idealist about the possibilities of liberalization in the Middle East. “Crosswinds,” completed in 2010 and drawing on 30 years of anecdote and analysis, attempts to gauge those possibilities in Saudi Arabia, not as an apologia for the kingdom but as a corrective to facile critiques.

In this work, more penetrating than argumentative and more deepening than sweeping, Ajami shows that behind its deliberately opaque exterior, modern Saudi Arabia has been defined by the calibration of tensions between competing forces: deep conservatism and yearnings for modernity; the ferocity of radicalism and the dependability of oil revenues; pressures from America to move left and from Iran to move right. The role of the monarchy in negotiating these crosswinds implicitly repudiates the brutal despotic repressions of regional neighbors like Iran and Syria: the Saudis may be authoritarians but they are also pragmatists.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

U.S.-Sponsored Arab-Israeli Rapprochement Gaining Steam By P. David Hornik See note please

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/p-david-hornik/2020/10/19/u-s-sponsored-arab-israeli-rapprochement-gaining-steam-n1067479

David Hornik is one of the best commentators and writers in Israel today. He is also a wonderful writer of fiction and his new novel is: “And Both Shall Row.”

On September 15, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain signed a U.S.-sponsored deal in Washington on normalizing relations between Israel and the two Arab Gulf states.

Since then things have been moving fast. On Sunday, at a ceremony in Bahrain’s capital of Manama, Israel and Bahrain inked an agreement formally establishing diplomatic ties between them. It was accompanied by memoranda on cooperation in a wide range of fields from aviation to agriculture. The U.S. was represented by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who called the signings “a remarkable accomplishment.”

Things are moving forward with the UAE as well. Also on Sunday, Israel and the UAE agreed to enable 28 weekly flights between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi. Calling it “one of the first, important fruits of the peace agreement,” Israel’s Transportation Ministry said the flights would smooth the way to “tourism, trade, and business between the countries.”

It’s all a far cry from the days of the “Arab-Israeli conflict,” when the Arab states were perceived — not entirely accurately, but considerably so — as a united bloc of hostility toward Israel.

With the Trump administration claiming it’s hard at work on further normalization deals between Israel and Arab countries, speculation centers on which of those countries may be next.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Election Interference? Big Tech Censored Trump More Than 60 Times, Left Biden Unscathed By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/10/19/election-interference-big-tech-censored-trump-more-than-60-times-left-biden-unscathed-n1068955

Is Big Tech interfering in the 2020 election? If so, tech companies did not start with the suppression of The New York Post‘s Hunter Biden bombshell story last week — although that act was arguably the most egregious.

Facebook and Twitter have censored President Donald Trump or his reelection campaign 65 times but have not censored Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his campaign a single time, according to a new report from the Media Research Center’s (MRC) Techwatch.

Techwatch analyzed two years of social media posts from Trump, Biden, and their respective campaigns, between May 2018 and October 16, 2020. The analysis did not include any ads from political action committees (PACs) or super PACs in support of Trump or Biden. It also focused on social media posts, not paid advertisements, from the campaigns.

Twitter

Twitter labeled, fact-checked, and removed tweets from the president and his campaign 64 times since Trump’s election in 2016. The company appears to have ramped into high gear this past May.

Twitter put “public interest” notices on Trump’s tweets about mail-in voting, COVID-19, and the Black Lives Matter protests. The company deleted a satirical video retweeted by the president following a fact-check from the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact. The company also deleted three Trump tweets about hydroxychloroquine on July 28, 2020.

Twitter has also cracked down on memes that Trump tweeted or retweeted. The company removed a meme from his June 30 tweet showing the president saying, “In reality, they’re not after me. They’re after you.” Logan Cook, a meme creator who goes by the handle Carpe Donktum, made a video mocking the Democrats’ reaction to Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address. After Trump retweeted it, Twitter removed the video following a copyright complaint. Twitter also removed a Carpe Donktum video showing two toddlers hugging one another with fake CNN chyrons at the bottom after Trump retweeted it.

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Pennsylvania Rejects 372,000 Mail-in Ballot Applications, as Voters Err By Matthew Vadum

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pennsylvania-rejects-372k-mail-in-ballot-applications-as-voters-err_3543483.html

The presidential election battleground state of Pennsylvania has rejected 372,000 requests for mail-in ballots, a development that is causing confusion among election officials and the voting public.

Pennsylvania is among the most hotly contested states for the Nov. 3 presidential election. President Donald Trump narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2016 by 44,292 votes out of more than 6 million cast. The Republican candidate secured 48.2 percent of the popular vote in the state, beating Democrat Hillary Clinton, who won 47.5 percent, according to Ballotpedia.

Pennsylvania has 20 electoral votes out of the 270 needed to be elected president.

Voting-by-mail, whether by absentee ballot or by the military overseas, has been around for many years, but the current pandemic has made it a significantly more popular means for discharging one’s democratic duty. It allows the voter to take action without risking exposure to the CCP virus that causes the disease COVID-19 by attending a polling place in person.

The revelation of the rejected ballot applications highlights the reportedly widespread public anxiety about using the U.S. Postal Service as a primary means of conducting elections in the country, something that has never been attempted before.

It also highlights the difficulties in switching from largely voting in person to voting by mail, without sufficient time allowed to educate the public about how to complete the sometimes confusing mail-in balloting paperwork properly.

Pennsylvania officials blame the denials largely on duplicate requests initiated by voters who recently applied for mail-in ballots without knowing that they had already applied for the ballots during the June primary elections.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Biden Corruption Scandal Isn’t About Hunter, It’s About Joe The Hunter Biden scandal indicates that Joe Biden, while vice president of the United States, knowingly allowed his son to sell access to the Obama administration, then lied about it.By Margot Cleveland

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/19/the-biden-corruption-scandal-isnt-about-hunter-its-about-joe/

Hunter Biden’s addiction is not the issue. Joe Biden’s addiction is: His addiction to power and money. And it is the evidence of the former vice president’s corruption, and the national security risk our country would face by electing Biden, that is the story of the MacBook hard drive, not the salacious, verified photographs and videos of Hunter Biden.

For nearly a week, corporate media successfully ignored or downplayed news of the trove of Hunter Biden’s emails, texts, photographs, and videos recovered from a laptop abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store. Then confirmation of the authenticity of the materials first reported in the New York Post, and the release of a second set of emails — also confirmed— from another source finally forced the press to acknowledge the issue.

On Friday evening, CBS News’ Bo Erickson asked Joe Biden about the New York Post story as the Democrat candidate for president departed from a campaign stop in Michigan. “I have no response. It’s another smear campaign — right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask,” Biden snipped at the long-time reporter.

With more details coming out daily, this non-answer will not placate even a compliant press for long. Nor will the “Russia disinformation” narrative pushed by Biden’s media boosters suffice because multiple confirmations of the evidence establish this story is not disinformation.

It’s Not about Hunter’s Addiction, It’s about Joe’s

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Jeffrey Toobin Suspended by The New Yorker After Exposing Himself on Zoom Toobin claims he thought his camera was off:By Bonnie Stiernberg

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/internet/jeffrey-toobin-new-yorker-suspended

We’ve all accidentally left ourselves on mute during a Zoom meeting before, but this is, uh, a bit more extreme. Vice reports that the New Yorker has suspended reporter Jeffrey Toobin after he exposed himself on a Zoom call last week between members of the publication and WNYC radio that’s being referred to as the “Zoom Dick Incident.”

Toobin insists it was an accident, claiming he thought his camera was turned off (though he offered no explanation for why his dick would be out during a work call in the first place).

 “I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera,” he said in a statement to Vice. “I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers. I believed I was not visible on Zoom. I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me. I thought I had muted the Zoom video.”

Toobin’s Conde Nast email has been disabled, and he has not tweeted since Oct. 13. New Yorker spokesperson Natalie Raabe confirmed he has been suspended, saying, “Jeffrey Toobin has been suspended while we investigate the matter.”

He did, however, appear on CNN, where he is the network’s chief legal analyst, as recently as Saturday. The network told Vice that Toobin has been granted leave. “Jeff Toobin has asked for some time off while he deals with a personal issue, which we have granted,” CNN said in a statement.

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Will we ever know the truth about Russiagate? Every revelation, though it sheds some local light, actually makes the whole picture murkier Roger Kimball

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://spectator.us/ever-know-russiagate-truth-biden/

Writing in mid-October, anno domini 2020, it is sobering to speculate that when the results of a certain upcoming political contest are finally decided, an item that has captivated the public’s attention for nearly four years might be about to evaporate without trace. I refer, of course, to that great long-running entertainment, the Trump-Russia Collusion Delusion.

As I write, the latest morceaux are the revelations from John Ratcliffe, the newly installed Director of National Intelligence, to the effect that Russian intelligence believed that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan ‘to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services’ during the 2016 presidential campaign. Why? Typical campaign dirty tricks, in part. But then there was also the bulletin, sent from the CIA to Peter Strzok, disgraced lovebird and then head of the FBI’s counterespionage section, minuting ‘Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server’.

The watercress around those revelations were some heavily redacted handwritten notes by John Brennan regarding a meeting with President Obama, former FBI head James Comey and national security adviser Susan Rice about Hillary’s Russian dressing.

What was the recipe for that dressing? Take one washed-up former MI6 spy, Christopher Steele. Pay him through a complicated cutout to dig up, or at least make up, dirt about Donald Trump and ‘the Russians’. Include allegations of financial shenanigans, but for hot sauce include micturating Russian prostitutes hopping up and down on a hotel bed in Moscow in front of Donald Trump. Get your main ingredients from a suspected Russian spy named Igor Danchenko, formerly of the Brookings Institution. Bake until golden brown and then leak this steaming pile of opposition research, covertly bought and paid for by Hillary’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee as intelligence ‘findings’ rather than what they were: unbridled, malicious fabrication used as ‘evidence’ for several FISA warrants against Carter Page, a US citizen whose surveillance provided a back door into the Trump campaign.

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Covid-19 launches the Fourth Industrial Revolution In China- David Goldman

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/covid-19-launches-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/

Deploying diagnostic tech, detecting patterns with AI, Asian countries suppressed pandemic with little testing

China has a big edge on the rest of the world when it comes to AI and data analysis. Photo: AFP/Peter Steffen/DPA

Some wars are won by attrition with roughly similar casualties on both sides. Others are unequal contests in which superiority in technology or organization leaves the losing side with most of the casualties.

Ancient battles with edged weapons, in which the side that turns and runs takes most of the damage, reflect superior organization.

Modern battles with unequal outcomes mostly reflect superior technology – Prussia’s breech-loading cannon in 1870, Japan’s long-range naval artillery in 1905 or Israel’s avionics advantage in 1982.

But the superior organization also achieved unequal outcomes in modern warfare, for example, Germany in 1940, Japan in Singapore in 1942 and Israel in 1967.

Covid-19

China has won what probably will be recorded as the decisive battle for hegemony with the United States over Covid-19, employing a combination of superior organization and technology. China, South Korea and Taiwan demonstrated the effectiveness of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies using artificial intelligence and big data.

Germany and Japan, which did not employ electronic contact tracing or apply AI to the analysis of patterns of contagion, did almost as well in controlling the disease with conventional public health methods.

Unlike China, Taiwan and South Korea, though, Germany and Japan have not succeeded in returning economic and civic life to normal.

No one expected, or planned for, this battle. Indeed, when it began neither side saw it as a battle. Nor is China the only winner: All of East Asia displayed more or less the same prowess in suppressing the pandemic, along with Germany, the sole winner among the major Western economies.

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The Bidens: Media Selling A Preposterous Alternate Reality Francis Menton

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-10-18-the-bidens-media-selling-a-

It was Wednesday October 14 that the New York Post broke its big story about the Hunter Biden laptop and emails, confirming Joe Biden’s personal involvement in Hunter’s Ukraine/Burisma corruption. The big news the following day was the efforts of social media giants Facebook and Twitter to limit the circulation of this story on their platforms. But how about the rest of the media? Clearly, they were all aware of this story. So, how would they report it? Could they really just ignore a story of this significance in the final stages of a presidential election campaign?

With the passage of a few days, the answer to that question is now in. An official talking point was developed, and somehow got adopted by every single organ of the Democrat media. The official talking point is that the emails are a “possible disinformation campaign” put out by the Russians on behalf of Trump. Yes, it’s the return of Russia, Russia, Russia! Somehow, dozens of media organs adopted this exact same talking point within hours of each other. Is there a source? I’ve gone through about a dozen of these pieces, and every single one that I have found attributes the story to some anonymous source. The sources are not all the same, but supposedly every single one seems to have demanded anonymity. Odd, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, the indications that the emails are genuine have greatly strengthened. I’ll get to that in a bit. But first let’s look at a sample showing the official mainstream media talking point:

From USA Today, October 17: “A tabloid got a trove of data on Hunter Biden from Rudy Giuliani. Now, the FBI is probing a possible disinformation campaign.” Excerpt: “Less than three weeks before one of the most contentious presidential campaigns in history, federal authorities are investigating whether the material supplied to the New York Post by Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, is part of a smoke bomb of disinformation pushed by Russia.” Source: “according to a person familiar with the matter.”