Einsteinian Insanity: US, Saudi Arabia Pledge To Provide More Guns, Ammo To Syrian Proxy Armies

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/25/2015 09:32 -0400

Secretary of State John Kerry and Saudi King Salman agreed to increase support for Syrian forces fighting Islamic State militants while backing international diplomatic efforts to begin a political transition in Damascus, U.S. and Saudi officials said.

The U.S. diplomat and Saudi monarch also coordinated on their countries’ joint efforts to fight the Islamic State terrorist organization that has gained control over large sections of Syrian and Iraqi territory in recent months.

“The secretary thanked the king for Saudi Arabia’s support to multilateral efforts to pursue a political transition in Syria…and reaffirmed our mutual goal of achieving a unified, pluralistic and stable country for all Syrians,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said after Mr. Kerry’s meeting on Saturday night with the Saudi monarch.

Note the hypocrisy there. In fact, allow us to spell it out. Compare and contrast:

• Secretary of State John Kerry and Saudi King Salman agreed to increase support for Syrian forces.
• “The secretary thanked the king for Saudi Arabia’s support to multilateral efforts to pursue a political transition.”

So on the one hand, Kerry and Salman are paradropping more guns and ammo into Syria, and on the other, they’re patting themselves on the back for pursuing “a political transition.”

In any event, back to WSJ:

The U.S. and Saudi Arabia provide arms and training to rebel armies fighting in Syria. Washington, though, has refrained from backing insurgents who are directly fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

That’s an interesting assessment, because we could swear that the Free Syrian Army has been the target of Russian (i.e. pro-regime) airstrikes, and we could also swear that the US provided them with more weapons just last week.

The American media can't even keep Washington's lies straight anymore.

Here’s a bit more from Reuters:

The United States and Saudi Arabia agreed to increase support to Syria's moderate opposition while seeking a political resolution of the four-year conflict, the U.S. State Department said after Secretary of State John Kerry met King Salman on Saturday.

Kerry was in Riyadh for meetings with the Saudi monarch, crown prince, deputy crown prince and foreign minister - the last stop in a trip that also included Vienna, where he met counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Russia.

"They pledged to continue and intensify support to the moderate Syrian opposition while the political track is being pursued," the State Department statement said after Kerry's meetings in Saudi Arabia. It did not spell out what kind of support would be offered.

Rebels have appealed for more military support from foreign backers, including Saudi Arabia, to confront major Syrian army offensives. Those offensives are backed by Lebanese Hezbollah and Iranian fighters and Russian air strikes.

The United States and Saudi Arabia, together with other states opposed to Assad, already provides some military support to Syrian rebels. That includes training by the Central Intelligence Agency and anti-tank missiles.

So, coming full circle, Washington is once again doubling down on a strategy that has not only been a demonstrable failure, but has i) served to propel the rise of brutal terrorist organizations, ii) fomented discord on the way to sparking a civil war that's cost hundreds of thousands of lives and left millions displaced, and iii) now threatens to ignite a world war, as the US and its regional allies are effectively encouraging the rebels to kill Iranian soldiers battling under cover of Russian air support.

Need we say more?

(ZeroHedge)

Things Fall Apart

Originally posted at EconomicNoise.com,

“Things fall apart” is an apt sub-title for historians to apply to the first half of the 21st century. The phrase properly describes the collapse of the domestic and foreign policy of the United States. Further, it also is appropriate to describe the happenings in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Things fall apart describes the economy of every developed nation and the balance of power that the world has known since the end of World War II.

The powers that be have lost control. After almost a century of playing the Wizard of Oz, the curtain is disintegrating. Institutions to ensure control, stability and prosperity are failing. People and markets were not to be trusted and most of these institutions were established to protect against such freedom. Bureaucrats, central planners and big governments were to be the answers for a better world.

The damage of nearly a century of this nonsense is suddenly becoming evident. Things fall apart is characterized by institutions that no longer are trusted or believed in. Few institutions are seen to work and when they do they are increasingly seen as favoring the elites at the expense of the masses. No institution is under greater scrutiny as the cloak of wisdom is being destroyed by the hard facts of reality is that of central banking, the corner piece of socialism even at the height of the Thatcher–Reagan movement back toward markets. The Daily Bell writes about the US Federal Reserve, although other central banks are incurring similar doubts and distrust:

Things Fall Apart Around Janet Yellen

By Daily Bell Staff – October 16, 2015

Fed policymakers downplay divisions on U.S. rate hike … Federal Reserve policymakers are not as divided as it may appear and are generally operating under the same framework for determining when to raise interest rates, one Fed official said on Thursday, while another said the differences of opinion reflect the countervailing economic data. Many Fed watchers are exasperated by the mixed messages from the U.S. central bank in recent weeks. Fed Chair Janet Yellen and other officials have said they expect a rate hike will be needed by the end of this year, but two Fed governors this week urged caution. – Reuters

Dominant Social Theme: Everything is OK. Janet Yellen is OK. The Fed is OK. Inflation is OK. The data is OK. It’s OK, man!

Free-Market Analysis: But maybe it’s not … Of course the mainstream media – as represented above by Reuters – is going to emphasize the normalcy of the process. There should be no doubt that the Federal Reserve has weathered worse crises and as soon as the numbers prove out one way or another, Fed officials will figure out the next move.

On the other hand, maybe, just maybe, we are seeing the final days of the Fed as a credible institution. Often in autocratic societies, power centers become dysfunctional long before they are retired or crumble into dust and blow away. This is part of how a society dies – when the people abandon the institutions in which they are supposed to believe.

So the Fed’s quandary is a serious one. Nobody is going to shut the place down, certainly not right away, but once credibility has leaked away what’s left? Big buildings, gilt furniture … and a dying mythology that adherents have abandoned.

This is the Fed’s REAL danger. Its painfully-won credibility – the product of a vast, intergenerational campaign of intimidation, bribery and misinformation – is beginning to crumble in earnest. It is harder and harder to insist with any seriousness that a few good, gray men in expensive surroundings can figure out the direction and value of money for a US$15 trillion economy.

They will keep insisting, of course. Mainstream mouthpieces like Reuters will quote higher-up Fed officials with the seriousness one associates with oracular statements from the Pantheon of the Gods. See here:

New York Fed President William Dudley, who repeated his view that a rate hike was likely by year’s end … downplayed the differences that existed among officials. “At the end of the day people are exaggerating” the divisions, Dudley said in response to a question after a panel presentation in Washington on Thursday. “We are all pretty much on the same page.”

In fact, Dudley can’t seem to keep track of his own statements. CNBC recently featured an article with the headline, “Fed’s Dudley: The economy may be slowing.” The article quoted Dudley as admitting that recent data suggest the economy is slowing – and certainly this conclusion would lead one to surmise that rate hikes are off the table, at least for this year.

The same article mentioned a Fed report claiming that US labor markets were “tightening.” One wonders if the data was collected before or after Walmart announced hundreds of layoffs at its Arkansas headquarters.

Perhaps iconoclastic, libertarian trend-follower Gerald Celente has a more accurate perspective on the Fed. In an article posted at LewRockwell.com and entitled, “Is the Fed Lying, or Not Telling The Truth?” Celente points out that the “expectation on the Street, based on the Fed’s bullish growth, inflation and equity market forecasts, was for the first round of interest rate hikes to begin by mid 2015.”

He then goes on to observe, “The Fed was wrong. The Street was wrong.”

And Celente does us the favor of unwrapping what just happened in mid-September when the Fed blinked once again.

Faced with plunging commodity prices, plummeting currencies, battered equity markets and a global deflationary cycle, the FOMC, concerned that China’s economy was slowing and the global economy risked falling into recession, did not raise interest rates.

But just one week later the story changed. The reason not to raise rates was no longer the reason. Instead, a rate hike was on the near horizon.

Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen, speaking at the University of Massachusetts, signaled that the Fed may raise rates before year’s end, because inflation was set to rise and the Fed “is monitoring developments abroad, but we do not anticipate the effects of these recent developments to have a significant effect.”

It doesn’t end here. On October 8, FOMC minutes were released and showed clearly that the committee was “deeply concerned” over volatile market indexes. “Over the intermeeting period, the concerns about global economic growth and turbulence in financial markets led to greater uncertainty among market participants about the likely timing of the start of normalization of the stance of U.S. monetary policy,” the minutes stated.

Celente has encapsulated the credibility problem that the Fed faces. Central bankofficials were quite certain that rates would be raised in 2015. But the year is almost over and the Fed hasn’t acted. When rates remained static, after the September meeting, Fed officials let it be known that the Chinese market meltdown had stayed their hands.

A week later, Yellen was once more stating that a rate hike loomed. Meanwhile, FOMC minutes explain that the prospect of a rate hike spooked officials who anticipated that even a minuscule hike could lead to considerable market “turbulence.”

After summarizing all this, Gerald Celente writes the following:

Is the Fed afraid to do anything considering the possible implications of raising rates at a time of “concerns about global economic growth and turbulence in financial markets,” thus the mixed messages? Or is this just another round of Fed ineptness?

Celente then answers his questions by suggesting that Fed officials really do not know what to do. And perhaps due to this miasma of doubt, Celente is sticking to his forecast for a “major equity market correction by year’s end.”

Our conclusion would be a bit broader than Gerald Celente’s. Regardless of what the Fed does or doesn’t do, and regardless of the reasons for it, the ineptness that the Fed is showing is incredibly damaging to the institution. Policymakers are giving virtually contradictory statements and as Celente has shown us, even the justifications for Fed actions change from week to week.

Recently we wrote the Fed’s dithering may be purposeful. The idea is to act paralyzed while the market sells off piecemeal, allowing the Fed eventually to raise rates without a market “event.” But even this speculation doesn’t take the Fed off the proverbial hook. People are going to be angry regardless, as this upcoming recession – really a continuation of the 2008-2009 slump – is simply too much to bear.

The dotcom disaster of 2001, the subprime bubble that ate the world’s economy only seven years later and now a further looming “recession” that comes on the heels of a Great Recession that never dissipated is a concatenation of disasters that will undermine the Fed in ways that the enemies of central banks have never been able to do in the modern era.

People don’t necessarily believe what they read, but they do trust their own eyes, ears and bellies. Whether the Fed hikes or doesn’t hike at this point is almost immaterial. The plot itself has been mislaid and the ramifications will haunt the Fed as its reputation unravels.

This is serious business. Without speculating on the “whys,” one can certainly anticipate that a crisis of confidence in the monetary system will create uncertainty about the dollar and about the sustainability of Western economies generally.

This is not to say that markets will inevitably crack asunder. There may be several more boom years as central banks do everything they can to raise the averages and sustain the appearance of prosperity. But at some point, a creeping crisis of confidence will begin to destroy what’s left of middle-class wealth and prosperity in ways central bankers can’t counteract because they will be seen as primary instigators of the problem.

Lasers may ease pain for 'napalm girl' in AP photograph

By JENNIFER KAY21 hours ago

MIAMI (AP) — In the photograph that made Kim Phuc a living symbol of the Vietnam War, her burns aren't visible — only her agony as she runs wailing toward the camera, her arms flung away from her body, naked because she has ripped off her burning clothes.

More than 40 years later she can hide the scars beneath long sleeves, but a single tear down her otherwise radiant face betrays the pain she has endured since that errant napalm strike in 1972.

Now she has a new chance to heal — a prospect she once thought possible only in a life after death.

"So many years I thought that I have no more scars, no more pain when I'm in heaven. But now — heaven on earth for me!" Phuc says upon her arrival in Miami to see a dermatologist who specializes in laser treatments for burn patients.

Late last month, Phuc, 52, began a series of laser treatments that her doctor, Jill Waibel of the Miami Dermatology and Laser Institute, says will smooth and soften the pale, thick scar tissue that ripples from her left hand up her arm, up her neck to her hairline and down almost all of her back.

Even more important to Phuc, Waibel says the treatments also will relieve the deep aches and pains that plague her to this day.

View gallery

FILE - In this June 8, 1972, file photo taken by Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong "Nick …

With Phuc are her husband, Bui Huy Toan, and another man who has been part of her life since she was 9 years old: Los Angeles-based Associated Press photojournalist Nick Ut.

"He's the beginning and the end," Phuc says of the man she calls "Uncle Ut." ''He took my picture and now he'll be here with me with this new journey, new chapter."

It was Ut, now 65, who captured Phuc's agony on June 8, 1972, after the South Vietnamese military accidentally dropped napalm on civilians in Phuc's village, Trang Bang, outside Saigon.

Ut remembers the girl screaming in Vietnamese, "Too hot! Too hot!" He put her in the AP van where she crouched on the floor, her burnt skin raw and peeling off her body as she sobbed, "I think I'm dying, too hot, too hot, I'm dying."

He took her to a hospital. Only then did he return to the Saigon bureau to file his photographs, including the one of Phuc on fire that would win the Pulitzer Prize.

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In this June 8, 1972, photo, television crews including ITN reporter Christopher Wain and South Viet …

Phuc suffered serious burns over a third of her body; at that time, most people who sustained such injuries over 10 percent of their bodies died, Waibel says.

Napalm sticks like a jelly, so there was no way for victims like Phuc to outrun the heat, as they could in a regular fire. "The fire was stuck on her for a very long time," Waibel says, and destroyed her skin down through the layer of collagen, leaving her with scars almost four times as thick as normal skin.

While she spent years doing painful exercises to preserve her range of motion, her left arm still doesn't extend as far as her right arm, and her desire to learn how to play the piano has been thwarted by stiffness in her left hand. Tasks as simple as carrying her purse on her left side are too difficult.

"As a child, I loved to climb on the tree, like a monkey," picking the best guavas, tossing them down to her friends, Phuc says. "After I got burned, I never climbed on the tree anymore and I never played the game like before with my friends. It's really difficult. I was really, really disabled."

Triggered by scarred nerve endings that misfire at random, her pain is especially acute when the seasons change in Canada, where Phuc defected with her husband in the early 1990s. The couple live outside Toronto, and they have two sons, ages 21 and 18.

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FILE - In this May 25, 1997 file photo, Phan Thi Kim Phuc holds her son Thomas, 3, in their apartmen …

Phuc says her Christian faith brought her physical and emotional peace "in the midst of hatred, bitterness, pain, loss, hopelessness," when the pain seemed insurmountable.

"No operation, no medication, no doctor can help to heal my heart. The only one is a miracle, (that) God love me," she says. "I just wish one day I am free from pain."

Ut thinks of Phuc as a daughter, and he worried when, during their regular phone calls, she described her pain. When he travels now in Vietnam, he sees how the war lingers in hospitals there, in children born with defects attributed to Agent Orange and in others like Phuc, who were caught in napalm strikes. If their pain continues, he wonders, how much hope is there for Phuc?

Ut says he's worried about the treatments. "Forty-three years later, how is laser doing this? I hope the doctor can help her. ... When she was 18 or 20, but now she's over 50! That's a long time."

Waibel has been using lasers to treat burn scars, including napalm scars, for about a decade. Each treatment typically costs $1,500 to $2,000, but Waibel offered to donate her services when Phuc contacted her for a consultation. Waibel's father-in-law had heard Phuc speak at a church several years ago, and he approached her after hearing her describe her pain.

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This undated photo shows Associated Press photojournalist Nick Ut in South Vietnam. Minutes after a …

At the first treatment in Waibel's office, a scented candle lends a comforting air to the procedure room, and Phuc's husband holds her hand in prayer.

Phuc tells Waibel her pain is "10 out of 10" — the worst of the worst.

The type of lasers being used on Phuc's scars originally were developed to smooth out wrinkles around the eyes, Waibel says. The lasers heat skin to the boiling point to vaporize scar tissue. Once sedatives have been administered and numbing cream spread thickly over Phuc's skin, Waibel dons safety glasses and aims the laser. Again and again, a red square appears on Phuc's skin, the laser fires with a beep and a nurse aims a vacuum-like hose at the area to catch the vapor.

The procedure creates microscopic holes in the skin, which allows topical, collagen-building medicines to be absorbed deep through the layers of tissue.

Waibel expects Phuc to need up to seven treatments over the next eight or nine months.

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In this Sept. 26, 2015 photo, Dr. Jill Waibel, left, applies a laser to the arm of Kim Phuc to reduc …

Wrapped in blankets, drowsy from painkillers, her scarred skin a little red from the procedure, Phuc made a little fist pump. Compared to the other surgeries and skin grafts when she was younger, the lasers were easier to take.

"This was so light, just so easy," she says.

A couple weeks later, home in Canada, Phuc says her scars have reddened and feel tight and itchy as they heal — but she's eager to continue the treatments.

"Maybe it takes a year," she says. "But I am really excited — and thankful."

___

Associated Press reporter Joshua Replogle contributed to this report from Ajax, Ontario.

Friday, October 23, 2015

Iceland sentences 26 bankers to a combined 74 years in prison

Iceland is putting bank CEOs where they belong.

Unlike the Department of Justice, Iceland is focusing on prosecuting the CEOs rather than low-level traders.

In a move that would make many capitalists’ head explode if it ever happened here, Iceland just sentenced their 26^th banker to prison for their part in the 2008 financial collapse.

In two separate Icelandic Supreme Court and Reykjavik District Court rulings, five top bankers from Landsbankinn and Kaupping — the two largest banks in the country — were found guilty of market manipulation, embezzlement, and breach of fiduciary duties. Most of those convicted have been sentenced to prison for two to five years. The maximum penalty for financial crimes in Iceland is six years, although their Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments to consider expanding sentences beyond the six year maximum.

After the crash in 2008, while congress was giving American banks a $700 billion TARP bailout courtesy of taxpayers, Iceland decided to go in a different direction and enabled their government with financial supervisory authority to take control of the banks as the chaos resulting from the crash unraveled.

Back in 2001, Iceland deregulated their financial sector, following in the path of former President Bill Clinton. In less than a decade, Iceland was bogged down in so much foreign debt they couldn’t refinance it before the system crashed.

Almost eight years later, the government of Iceland is still prosecuting and jailing those responsible for the market manipulation that crippled their economy. Even now, Iceland is still paying back loans to the IMF and other countries which were needed just to keep the country operating.
When Iceland’s President, Olafur Ragnar Grimmson was asked how the country managed to recover from the global financial disaster, he famously replied,

“We were wise enough not to follow the traditional prevailing orthodoxies of the Western financial world in the last 30 years. We introduced currency controls, we let the banks fail, we provided support for the poor, and we didn’t introduce austerity measures like you’re seeing in Europe.”

Meanwhile, in America, not one single banking executive has been charged with a crime related to the 2008 crash and U.S. banks are raking in more than $160 billion in annual profits with little to no regulation in place to avoid another financial catastrophe.

- See more at: http://www.viralalternativenews.com/2015/10/iceland-sentences-26-bankers-to.html#sthash.ivlarfPK.dpuf