I spent more than a decade interviewing people all over the world, sometimes on the phone and via email, but most of the time in person on the other side of the world. I’ve interviewed every type of person imaginable, from military commanders and heads of state to war refugees and homeless people who sleep outside in slums.
Trust me on this: government officials are almost always the worst sources and interview subjects. That’s true everywhere in the world. They live in rarefied bubbles. They lie. They leave things out, sometimes because they want to and sometimes because they have to. They’re often incompetent and even more often shockingly ignorant. Everyone has opinions, and lots of people have agendas, but nobody has an agenda the way government officials have agendas.
It has never even occurred to me to an interview a government official in one country about what’s happening in another country.
There are exceptions. Occasionally I’ve been delighted by government officials in the most unlikely places, including in Cairo. In general, though, they’re the least interesting and the least reliable.
The last person you should be talking to, in other words, is Ben Rhodes.
Bill’s Wife
The Kremlin is debating on when it should release over 20,000 emails they got off @HillaryClinton server
Vlad is going to bring her down— AppSame (@AppSame) May 10, 2016
If Obama doesn’t beat them to it.
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
A good piece, as always by Richard Fernandez;
President Obama is not like a fictional president, he is a fictional president. When Obama described himself as a blank screen on which anyone was free to project his fantasies, the public should have listened. What makes the present absurd situation possible is that a critical mass of voters have agreed to go along with the make-believe.
A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran
So smart, they can’t help bragging about it – Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru Boasts of How the Administration Lied to Sell the Iran Deal
Samuels’s profile is an amazing piece of writing about the Holden Caulfield of American foreign policy. He’s a sentimental adolescent with literary talent (Rhodes published one short story before his mother’s connections won him a job in the world of foreign policy), and high self regard, who thinks that everyone else is a phony. Those readers who found Jeffrey Goldberg’s picture of Obama in his March Atlantic profile refreshing for the president’s willingness to insult American allies publicly will be similarly cheered here by Rhodes’s boast of deceiving American citizens, lawmakers, and allies over the Iran deal. Conversely, those who believe Obama risked American interests to take a cheap shot at allies from the pedestal of the Oval Office will be appalled to see Rhodes dancing in the end zone to celebrate the well-packaged misdirections and even lies–what Rhodes and others call a “narrative”–that won Obama his signature foreign policy initiative.
[…]
In Rhodes’s “narrative” about the Iran deal, negotiations started when the ostensibly moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected president, providing an opening for the administration to reach out in friendship. In reality, as Samuels gets administration officials to admit, negotiations began when “hardliner” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was still president. It was Rhodes who framed the Iran deal as a choice between peace and war, and it was Rhodes who set up a messaging unit to sell the deal that created an “echo chamber” in the press. “[Al Monitor reporter] Laura Rozen was my RSS feed,” says Tanya Somanader, the 31-year-old who managed @TheIranDeal twitter feed. “She would just find everything and retweet it.”
Take a gravol before you tackle this one.
A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran
Just last week, for example, Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said Iran is preparing for all-out war with the U.S. and its allies, and has vowed Iran will continue advancing and testing its ballistic missile program.
Speaking at a gathering of senior IRGC commanders in Tehran Tuesday, Jafari declared that the U.S, “would not be able to do a damned thing” in the face of Iranian advances, according to the official Tasnim News Agency.
This echoed an earlier speech by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who, in response to Washington’s latest plea for new talks about the ongoing Iranian ballistic missile tests, coldly said: “Those who say the future is in negotiations, not in missiles, are either ignorant or traitors.”
[…]
Those who laugh off Iranian braggadocio might wish to rethink their light-heartedness. All indications are that Tehran is deadly serious, and has been all along.
“On Friday, the authorities stripped security badges from several workers “
The investigation into this week’s deadly attacks in Brussels has prompted worries that the Islamic State is seeking to attack, infiltrate or sabotage nuclear installations or obtain nuclear or radioactive material. This is especially worrying in a country with a history of security lapses at its nuclear facilities, a weak intelligence apparatus and a deeply rooted terrorist network.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
Germany Will Need 1,000 Wind Turbines To Replace This Workhorse Nuke Plant:
Replacing Grohnde will not likely come from gas generation since so much gas generation is being intentionally lost. Instead, it will likely come from building several thousand new wind turbines at a cost of at least $12 billion, not including back-up capacity which is likely to come from brown coal.
European utilities have been calling for capacity payments to avoid shutdown of too much thermal generation and causing an upheaval in grid reliability and energy security, but proposals for a capacity market were rejected just last year in 2015. According to Germany’s Bundesverband der Energie- und Wasserwirtschaft, more than half of Germany’s planned power plants are at risk because of government policies on renewables.
So even though Grohnde is the little reactor that could, its life will be cut short before it reaches its peak. And only for political reasons, not even the arbitrary economic pressure that is closing the new gas plants.
On the other hand, Germany has lots of brown coal, and is buying electricity from surrounding nations at elevated prices when it needs grid stability.
So not to worry.
If only Germany could do something to make their natural-gas plants more profitable.
It’s Probably Nothing
North Korea’s Nuclear Missile Threat
The mainstream media and their stable of “experts” consistently underestimate North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapon capabilities. The gap between how the media report on the North Korean nuclear missile threat and the reality of the threat has become so wide as to be dangerous.
In the aftermath of North Korea’s latest nuclear test on January 6, 2016, for instance, and its launch of a mock satellite on February 7, 2016, the American people were told that North Korea has not miniaturized a nuclear warhead for delivery by missile nor could the missile strike the U.S. with any accuracy.
Mirren Gidda, for example, writing in Newsweek, inexplicably claims “International experts doubt that North Korea has manufactured nuclear weapons small enough to fit on a missile.”
Yet this commonplace assertion that North Korea does not have nuclear-armed missiles is simply untrue.
h/t Adrian
The Loyal Opposition
A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran
Surprise! Commander of Iran’s Army Major General Ataollah Salehi says the country will enhance its missile capabilities despite US-led efforts to curb them.
A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran
If you’re negotiating a deal with a hostile party, it behooves you to ask who’s having who for breakfast.
The United States, as the world’s sole remaining superpower, should have had the Iranian rulers for breakfast. We should have eaten their lunch, too, while we were at it, but nope. Iran gets 100 billion dollars and we get…nothing.
Peace For Our Time
This Is Awkward
"Today, President Park and I are reaffirming that our nations will never accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state." —@POTUS
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) October 16, 2015
OOPS! A large tremor near North Korea’s nuclear test facilities is suspected to be an explosion, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency has reported.
A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran
Reuters: Iran will not accept any restrictions on its missile program, the defense minister was quoted as saying by state media on Wednesday, after sanctions monitors said Tehran had violated a U.N. Security Council resolution by test-firing a missile.
A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran
Iran has once again tested a mid-range ballistic missile in an apparent breach of United Nations Security Council resolutions forbidding them from doing so, according to Fox News.
“Iran has carried out a new medium-ranged ballistic missile test, and that missile they say, is capable of carrying a nuclear weapon,” Shepherd Smith announced Monday afternoon. “This is a breach of not one but two U.N. Security Council resolutions.”
U.S. officials told the news organization on Sunday the test was held Nov. 21 in the port city of Chabahar near the country’s southern border with Pakistan. The missile test occurred at a well-known site by the Gulf of Oman.
The missile, called the Ghadr-110, has a range up to 1,200 miles and is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran
Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium has increased in the past three months even though Tehran is supposed to reduce it significantly under a deal with major powers, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) determined in a confidential report Reuters saw on Wednesday afternoon.
Iran has also started to dismantle uranium enrichment centrifuges at its Natanz and Fordow nuclear facilities, the IAEA report states. Under the deal with major powers reached in July, Iran is supposed to reduce the number of centrifuges it has in operation.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
Moron Meltdown
He seems nice:
Dana Durnford is charged with two counts of criminal harassment for online videos attacking researchers Ken Buesseler of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and Jay Cullen of the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
In expletive-laden recordings available until recently on the Internet, Durnford rails against the pair and other leading scientists and calls for their deaths.
“Every university, every academic, every nuclear scientist will be hunted down and f—ing murdered,” he declares in one video. “We want you dead.”
Ironically finishing off the job Fukushima never did.
A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran
Iran has stopped dismantling centrifuges in two uranium enrichment plants, state media reported on Tuesday, days after conservative lawmakers complained to President Hassan Rouhani that the process was too rushed.