Sense about Syria, from Jimmy Carter?

Could it be? Take a look:

Jimmy Carter: A Five-Nation Plan to End the Syrian Crisis

[...] In May 2015, a group of global leaders known as the Elders visited Moscow, where we had detailed discussions with the American ambassador, former President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, former Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov and representatives of international think tanks, including the Moscow branch of the Carnegie Center.

They pointed out the longstanding partnership between Russia and the Assad regime and the great threat of the Islamic State to Russia, where an estimated 14 percent of its population are Sunni Muslims. Later, I questioned President Putin about his support for Mr. Assad, and about his two sessions that year with representatives of factions from Syria. He replied that little progress had been made, and he thought that the only real chance of ending the conflict was for the United States and Russia to be joined by Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia in preparing a comprehensive peace proposal. He believed that all factions in Syria, except the Islamic State, would accept almost any plan endorsed strongly by these five, with Iran and Russia supporting Mr. Assad and the other three backing the opposition. With his approval, I relayed this suggestion to Washington.

For the past three years, the Carter Center has been working with Syrians across political divides, armed opposition group leaders and diplomats from the United Nations and Europe to find a political path for ending the conflict. This effort has been based on data-driven research about the Syrian catastrophe that the center has conducted, which reveals the location of different factions and clearly shows that neither side in Syria can prevail militarily.

The recent decision by Russia to support the Assad regime with airstrikes and other military forces has intensified the fighting, raised the level of armaments and may increase the flow of refugees to neighboring countries and Europe. At the same time, it has helped to clarify the choice between a political process in which the Assad regime assumes a role and more war in which the Islamic State becomes an even greater threat to world peace. With these clear alternatives, the five nations mentioned above could formulate a unanimous proposal. Unfortunately, differences among them persist.

[...]

The involvement of Russia and Iran is essential. Mr. Assad’s only concession in four years of war was giving up chemical weapons, and he did so only under pressure from Russia and Iran. Similarly, he will not end the war by accepting concessions imposed by the West, but is likely to do so if urged by his allies.

Mr. Assad’s governing authority could then be ended in an orderly process, an acceptable government established in Syria, and a concerted effort could then be made to stamp out the threat of the Islamic State. [...]

I'm not a Jimmy Carter fan. But if you read the whole thing, for the full context, it actually makes sense. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Carter may be right about this. It should be seriously considered.

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Is "Human Trafficking" Unimportant to India?

From the Times of India:

Wayne’s world: Was expelled US official a bleeding heart or an ugly American?

WASHINGTON: The US official who was expelled in a tit-for-tat diplomatic battle over Devyani Khobragade was nearing the end of his posting in India, scheduled to leave New Delhi in February. But in their three years in India, Wayne May, who headed the US embassy's security team in New Delhi, and his wife Alicia Muller May, who worked as the embassy's community liaison officer, revealed conflicting impulses and contradictory outlook towards the people and country they served in.

On the one hand, it was evidently their bleeding heart concern for housekeeper Sangeeta Richard, whose in-laws worked with them and a succession of US embassy officials, that led them to "rescue" the nanny's husband and children from the strong-arm tactics of the Indian judicial and police system that diplomat Devyani Khobragade unleashed on them after Sangeeta fell out with her. On the other hand, their facetious comments about a stereotypical India abounding in chaos and filth, which some might see as offensive, shows them as the archetypal "ugly Americans".

They laid out their opinions and views quite guilelessly on social media through photographs and comments that were quickly seized on and distributed by bloggers and trolls ever sensitive to any perceived insult of India. Although the comments are often flippant, the kind many people make on social media without fear of consequence, they sound extremely offensive now given the fraught context of the diplomatic spat. Their profiles, pictures and comments were removed and their social media presence sanitized soon after they were discovered, but not before the online warriors had saved and uploaded them on other social media sites, portraying them as "racist American diplomats". [...]

You can read the rest of the article, to see the offensive facebook posts. They might have been insensitive, in the strictest sense, but they were also truthful. I think many Americans do find India to be a place of contradictions.

I found it interesting how the article kinda glosses over the "the strong-arm tactics of the Indian judicial and police system", and the way it puts the word "rescue" in quotes, and then proceeds to hype the facebook comments. But honestly, which is more serious: Comments on a facebook page, or Human Trafficking?

All the articles I've read in the Indian press, seem to completely ignore the accusations against Devyani Khobragade. Are they really so unimportant and irrelevant?

It's not like she and her family are squeaky clean. It seems there is some scandal in India, regarding politics and realestate.

I don't know if the accusations made against her in New York are true, but a trial would have revealed that, but she didn't stick around to defend herself. Was she mistreated? That would have been explored/exposed in a trial also, but she left. Was it because she didn't want the truth to be revealed? Perhaps she would have been exonerated from some charges, but not others, and chose not to risk that?

I can't help but wonder if this really is more about something going on between the India and USA governments, some sort of power play, and this incident is just a symptom of something larger that we're not hearing about? Is there any foundation to the charges against Khobragade? Why, or why not? Real journalists might ask questions like these, but there don't seem to be any anymore, anywhere. Instead, we get the tit-for-tat stuff, because it sells newspapers, I guess. It seems their newspapers are just as rubbishy as ours. More hype than content.


Update 01/15/14: Also see:

Timeline: The case of Devyani Khobragade and Sangeeta Richard
A timeline of the facts?

Claim Against Indian Diplomat Has Echoes of Previous Cases
NYC unionized workers take the side of the maid. At the end of the article, local Indian merchants in NYC are quoted, saying the maid should have been grateful, because she would have been treated much worse in India.

Since she claims she was forced to work from 6am to llpm everyday, without being paid, with only two hours off on Sunday to go to church, I guess that "Worse in India" must be really, really bad.

Devyani Khobragade incident
Wikipedia provides it's version of the facts. Which seems more or less what I've read elsewhere.
     

Intervention in Syria = American Military

And here are some good reasons why it shouldn't happen:

West must not intervene militarily in Syria

(CNN) -- Some of the bravest, noblest women and men I have met are members of the United States armed forces. To them, military intervention is not about winning a debate on television or sounding smart on Twitter. With the United Nations ruling out support for military options to stop the bloodbath in Homs in Syria, leading U.S. commentators are calling for NATO and the Arab League to intervene militarily.

In reality, this would mean the United States would once again carry the heavy burden of war. In NATO's recent operation in Libya, the United States provided 75% of the reconnaissance data, surveillance, intelligence and refueling planes. Syria is not Libya, and NATO without the United States is not up to the job.

The Arab League is no match for a brutal Syrian regime backed by Russia, China and Iran.

In essence, therefore, we must stop pretending about NATO or the Arab League intervening and accept that it is not "international intervention," but U.S. military intervention that is being sought in yet another Muslim-majority country. The Muslim dimension is important because the lessons of Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan are that, invariably, intervention leads to occupation, which leads to varying degrees of Islamist radicalization.

Whatever the motivations to advance U.S. military intervention, we need to address the following questions before contemplating placing U.S. armed forces in harm's way again, and demanding the U.S. taxpayer foot the bill. [...]

The author goes on to spell it out. He has spent time living in Syria, and has many good insights, on both Syria and the larger picture.


Also see:

Syria: Alawites, Sunnis, the Russia factor...
     

U.N. Global Small Arms Treaty threatens your right to self defense

EDITORIAL: The U.N. gun grabber

American gun owners might not feel besieged, but they should. This week, the Obama administration announced its support for the United Nations Small Arms Treaty. This international agreement poses real risks for freedom both in the United States and around the world by making it more difficult - if not outright illegal - for law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms.

The U.N. claims that guns used in armed conflicts cause 300,000 deaths worldwide every year, an inordinate number of which are the result of internal civil strife within individual nations. The solution proposed by transnationalists to keep rebels from getting guns is to make the global pool of weapons smaller through government action. According to recent deliberations regarding the treaty, signatory countries would be required to "prevent, combat and eradicate" various classes of guns to undermine "the illicit trade in small arms." Such a plan would necessarily lead to confiscation of personal firearms.

This may seem like a reasonable solution to governments that don't trust their citizens, but it represents a dangerous disregard for the safety and freedom of everybody. First of all, not all insurgencies are bad. As U.S. history shows, one way to get rid of a despotic regime is to rise up against it. That threat is why authoritarian regimes such as Syria, Cuba, Rwanda, Vietnam, Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone endorse gun control.

Political scientist Rudy Rummel estimates that the 15 worst regimes during the 20th century killed 151 million of their own citizens, which works out to 1.5 million victims per year. Even if all 300,000 annual deaths from armed conflicts can be blamed on the small-arms trade (which they cannot), governments are a bigger threat to most people than their neighbors. [...]

Which is why we have the 2nd Amendment. And why we have to fight to keep it.

     

Utopian Socialism and the damage it inflicts

The Dangerous Return of Utopian Socialism

Jeffrey Sachs is senior economist at the UN and author of the bestseller "Common Wealth" and the controversial Time essay "The Case for Bigger Government". In a recent interview in the Brussels newspaper De Tijd Jeffrey Sachs blames “unbridled American market capitalism” for the financial crisis and pleads in favor of the Swedish social model as an alternative. His ideological argument is revealing for the dominant utopian-socialist mind at the top of the UN.

The Swedish social model, which Sachs would like to introduce, has not the only the largest Size of Government of Western World, but also the weakest economic performance of the OECD. In 1970, Sweden still was the fourth wealthiest nation in the world. Thirty years later, Sweden had fallen to rank 17 with catastrophic social consequences. In the meantime the U.S. consistently managed to remain the second or third for more than half a century. So there is not much socio-economic wisdom to be learned from the Swedish Social Model.


Sachs also argues that "unbridled capitalism" is the cause of the current crisis. The reality is that during the last twenty years central planning progressively intruded Western economies who now bear the burden of governments spending 40% to 55% of GDP. Entrepreneurs face ever more crippling restrictions, licensing schemes, quotas and price and quality controls. Businessmen endure tens of thousands of pages of new rules and regulations each year, all written in a lawyers slangy that totally undermines the legal certainty of the free market and which transformed business into a gamble on the next political caprice and on judicial interpretations of the legal jargon. Size of government, computerized control and dirigisme has now reached a level plan economists of the Soviet Union could only dream of. Not the capitalistic system failed, but excessive dirigisme is to blame for the crisis. [...]

The article also looks at and factors in Monetary Policy, the New Monetary system, Kyoto and Emission rights, and the Market oriented Alternative. Utopian socialism is the culprit, not capitalism.


In another article, George Handlery sums it up well:

[...] Government directed and politically inspired planning and democracy do not mix well. Those condemned by government pressure or their self-inflicted errors to drink the mixture of political power and economic dominance are likely to choke while ingesting it. The foul taste comes about because the plan will be misguided and because its correction will prove to be more than difficult. That will be because concentrated political and economic power will lack the checks and balances that the ability to correct errors presumes. Political power will be devoid of checks and balances because the difficulties of the economy to deliver its promises will create a resistance that will have to be suppressed. Furthermore, the separation of economic and political power is a precondition of lived liberty. Once this separation of powers is undermined, the resulting centralized power will become openly tyrannical. That will happen because dictatorship will be possible and, due to various deficiencies, most necessary.

Spanish "Art" compared to Sistine Chapel

Who barfed on the ceiling? Here is a good example of how socialists waste taxpayer's money, and their poor taste in "Art":


Europe’s Multiculturalists: Reaching for the Marmalade Skies

[...] In the last few days the European headquarters of the United Nations has unveiled its new ceiling, decorated by Miquel Barceló, and funded to the tune of 20 million Euros by Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. It drips with large, boldly colored stalactites, and is the sort of art that one might see in a kindergarten classroom – made of papier-mâché – though it is of course much grander in scale. But aside from the size of the work, it compares poorly with the abstract painting of Mark Rothko or the water lilies of Monet.

[...]

With its omnipresent fluffiness and unreality of color, Barceló asks us not to think, to provoke or be provoked, but to accept – to forego reason and immerse ourselves instead in childish dreaminess. Unlike Guernica, the Sistine Chapel, or the reliefs of the US Supreme Court building, it is a work in which dialectic cannot be discerned, nor from which it is possible to initiate debate. It is a work in which there is no hint of parliamentary opposition, no right versus wrong, no good or evil. It represents the vision of men who have neither gravitas nor substance. If we can discern its provenance, it leads back only so far as the 1960s, to the Beatle’s lyrics of “marmalade skies,” “tangerine trees,” and “nothing is real.” It is an LSD trip, or Futurism extra light.

Barceló’s ceiling is thus the perfect backdrop to Europe’s Prozac politics – the religio-political cult of multiculturalism – in which all difficult questions, all dissent, all real content, can be dissolved not by rational argument, but by the invocation of paint-box clichés.

Ouch! But richly deserved, methinks. The room is described as a "negotiating room". Can you imagine negotiating, while having colorful junk like that (100 TONS of paint) hanging over your head? It would be a bit distracting, I would think. And mentally, kind of chaotic. It reminds me of some chinsey fake cave in one of those amusement park boat rides for little children. 20 million Euros is a lot to pay for a chinsy fake cave.

Spain’s ‘New Way’ of Doing Diplomacy

Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has just unveiled Spain’s latest contribution to fostering global peace and security. No, his government will not be sending more troops to help rebuild Afghanistan. And no, Spain will not be providing more vaccines to help needy children in Africa. Instead, the Zapatero government is the proud sponsor of a lavish decorative ceiling at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva.

Miquel Barceló, one of the world’s most highly paid abstract artists, was commissioned by Spain to redecorate “Room XX” and its ellipsoidal dome at the Palais des Nations. He used more than 100 tons of paint to turn the negotiating room into a cave dripping with thousands of 50-kilo multicolored artificial stalactites. [...]

Follow the link for more details, and links to more photos.
     

The next best thing to Stopping the U.N.

... is to go over their heads. To start an organization of Democratic countries that don't kow-tow to Dictatorships and Theocracies, as John McCain is proposing:

McCain proposal for joint action gains support

WASHINGTON - Gaining ground this political season is a proposed League of Democracies designed to strengthen support for the next president's overseas agenda and ensure a global leadership role for the United States.

John McCain, the virtually certain Republican presidential nominee, has endorsed the concept of a new global compact of more than 100 democratic countries to advance shared views and has discussed the idea with French and British leaders.

"It could act where the U.N. fails to act," he said last month, and pressure tyrants "with or without Moscow's and Beijing's approval."

McCain said the League might impose sanctions on Iran, relieve suffering in the Darfur region of Sudan and deal with environmental problems. [...]

The article goes on to say how some people favor the formation of such a political body, to limit the military power of the United States, while still others fear it would be used by the U.S. to circumvent and compete with the U.N.

A bit of competition for the U.N. might be a good thing, because sure are ineffective the way they are. As for limiting U.S. military power, aren't plenty of countries already trying to do that anyway? It's nothing new. Those who wish to do so will keep trying, no matter what.

If we can't actually disban the U.N., then we need something as a counter balance to make it shape up or get kicked. This could be it.
     

"Sagebrush Rebellion" in Oregon

The voters in eastern Oregon's Grant county (7,800 residents in a county the size of Connecticut) passed a measure restricting U.N. intervention in their affairs:

Welcome to Grant County, Oregon: A ‘U.N.-free Zone’

It's not as kooky as it might sound, they have actual reasons for fearing direct interference by the U.N. in their county:

[...] The measure was sparked by residents who worry that the U.N. might designate land in Grant County as a "United Nations World Heritage" site or a Biosphere Reserve, which would provide the U.N. a foothold into the county and lead towards greater regulation of remaining private land.

While that might sound crazy to some in the county, who believe the new law will make them a laughingstock, voters passed the measure 1,326 in favor to 959 against. Herb Brusman, who drafted the measure, told the East Oregonian, "It basically was a statement to be made. . .The less we have contact with (the United Nations) the better."

Fear of U.N. control is not uncommon for many Westerners who are quick to resist any perceived government intrusion — foreign or domestic — into their independent way of life, which they feel is in danger of extinction.

Farmers, ranchers and loggers are constantly faced with increased land and water restrictions on behalf of the snail darter, spotted owl or whatever’s next on the Endangered Species list. Westerners are skeptical of government scientists whose findings are later disproved -- with alarming regularity — or shown to have been manipulated.

Last summer, irrigation water was cut off to 1,400 farmers during a severe drought in the Klamath River Basin near the California-Oregon border to protect endangered salmon and sucker fish. This bankrupted many valley farms, cost the regional economy more than $130 million, and almost led to an armed insurrection; Federal agents had to be called in to stop farmers from forcing open the head gates to the river. In the end, a report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) found "no sound scientific basis" for the government's decision to cut off the water. In fact, the report suggests that high river flows in the Klamath Basin might actually be lethal to the salmon.[...]

(bold emphasis mine) As if that's not bad enough, there's more, an investigation conducted by the Department of the Interior proved that federal and state wildlife workers submitted false evidence of endangered lynx habitat in order to enforce restrictions on land use. Read the whole thing. It made me angry, because I see similar BS happening around here too. We live in Sagebrush territory, it's the only "culturally sagebrush" part of the US West coast. I support the "Sagebrush Rebellion", count me in.

Pat told me at breakfast this morning that he also posted about this, his link is here:

Oregon county declares itself a ‘U.N.-free Zone’

UPDATE 05-21-08: It's been pointed out to me that this article was originally posted in 2002. Well I never claimed it was breaking news ;-)

It's still relevant today, as the issues it brings up continue to be of concern to many rural Oregonians. The "sagebrush" culture is still alive and kicking... and unfortunately, so are the attempts by government to smother it.