Islamic Terrorism Is Disappearing | Everybody’s Lying About Islam 20

This is the funniest video I have ever made. It’s a tremendously satisfying video as well. It’s nice to see one of my predictions pan out. One of the central messages of this channel is that we shouldn’t be as panicked about the state of the world as everybody wants us to be. Exhibit one in the case against the pro-panic media is Terrorism, by which the media generally means Terrorism associated with Islam. Since I launched my “Everybody’s Lying About Islam” series in April I’ve gotten many more pro-fear comments than anti-fear ones. People seem to believe that the media isn’t pro-fear enough when it comes to Islam and terrorism.

These cowardly commenters have two main sources. The first is Bill Warner, a charlatan who travels the world hating on Islam. If you’re interested you can read a Quora take-down I put together on his work recently. The second is a website called “The religion of peace” that I won’t deign to link here. These clowns desperately want the public to be more freaked out about Islam. It’s absolutely delightful to be using their data to help people calm down. And that’s why this is the funniest video I’ve ever made.

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Yemen’s Disaster: Not Entirely Our Fault | Yemen 2 | ELAI 19

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Yemen is having a pretty horrific time. But it’s not as straightforward as some of the Middle East’s other disasters. Yemen’s fall has been expected for quite some time. That’s the most striking thing about every account I’ve read of Yemen over the past few months. Everybody saw this coming. Which is a pretty horrible thing when you think about it. If everybody knew what was coming, why didn’t anybody do anything to stop it?

That’s one of the many questions that we start to answer with this second video in my quickly ballooning Yemen series. I hope you enjoy it. These videos are taking a ton of work, but they’re also very rewarding. My hope is that peeling back the layers of Yemen’s disaster will help us avoid similar disasters in the future. Let me know what you think!

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Why We Never Hear About Yemen | Yemen 1 | Everybody’s Lying About Islam 18

We never hear about Yemen. Endless amounts of ink and pixels have been spent on the conflict in Syria. “Innocents are dying!” is the constant refrain. Well, innocents are dying in Yemen too, and we never hear about it. I’m not saying that information on Yemen is censored in our newspapers. It’s censored by the combatants, but that’s not tremendously different from what goes on in Syria, and is not what I’m getting at.

We do know that Yemen is a disaster, but our government and media doesn’t do anything more than issue the facts. There are no government ultimatums or red lines. There is no daily “above the fold” update. When the UN or some other NGO issues a new report full of outrages, it is dutifully published on page 27 or the online equivalent. No time is invested in Yemen either, in the halls of government or on the opinion pages. That’s an outrage.

Today’s video explains why that is and starts my small effort to raise awareness about Yemen.

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Why Is Turkey’s Relationship With the West Falling Apart Now?

This one answers a very specific question. Turkey has been acting in ways that the US and the EU disapprove of for at least four years now. Elements of the problem go much farther back, but up until the Gezi park protests in 2013, and the accompanying crackdown, the West was pretty much on board. That hasn’t been the case for quite a while now. But it’s only recently, in the past few months that real cracks between Turkey and Western countries have become visible. Why did it take so long?

As I have pointed out before, I think it has a lot to do with Syria.

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4 Dead In Ohio, Our Selective Memory of the 1960s | Civil War II

I can’t recommend Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of A President and the Fracturing of America enough. Perlstein is a left wing fella, who has set himself the task of documenting the rise of the right in the United States. I have the suspicion that his books get less useful and balanced as he gets closer to the modern day, but the balance in this book between historical detail and rage is perfect. It’s an almost day to day account of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The book was a revelation for me, and set off a long path of reappraisal and research that led in a roundabout way to this video.

We have a certain idea of the 1960s in the US that I refer to in the video. It’s all Woodstock and civil rights and triumphing over Vietnam. What Nixonland helped me to understand was what a godawful shit-show it all was. I hope to get some of that across in this video, and in the process make you feel a bit better about where we are today in the United States.

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Is The United States Heading For Civil War!?!? | Civil War I

No, The United States is not headed for a new civil war. But the idea keeps popping up. I’d argue that it is a topic of discussion because of the bias towards the present that most of our pundits have. If you don’t know much about history, everything can seem unprecedented, and it can feel like everything is falling apart in a new and awful way. But all of this really has happened before, and back then it was so much worse. With today’s video, the first of two parts, I lay this all out.

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I Am A Racist | Charlottesville

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This one has been percolating for quite a while. I think the way we discuss Race, and “Racists” in the United States has some real problems. These issues were thrown into high relief by the events in Charlottesville this month. The Tiki-Torch White Supremacists are of course awful, but they are also a distraction. We LOVE to pick out examples of evil, and point to racists as something evil and different. Everybody can get on board the vilification train. The Alt-Right protesters are very deserving of our contempt, but that’s not always the case with our scapegoats. We get hung up on the evil of individuals, and we ignore our own faults and failings. This is a shame, because it’s the racism we all participate in that is the real problem.

I am very pleased with this one. It manages to throw together George Orwell, Steven Pinker, Jack Kirby and just a sprinkling of Jesus Christ. Good stuff as far as I’m concerned. More than anything else, the thoughts in this video can be credited to Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature, a fantastic book on the civilizing process, the decline of war and about a million other things. You should start reading it today. It’s been at least five years since I read it, so it’s fair to assume the ideas have shifted on the way to this video…

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Why Obama Failed Syria, and Trump Will Too | MIC 13 | Syria 14

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Obama failed Syria, and Trump is going to fail Syria too. This video explains why. Most people will tell you that the US didn’t do enough in Syria. Actually it’s the complete opposite. We are now on our second president who doesn’t want us involved in Syria. Presidents can win elections, but they can’t beat the Military Industrial Complex.

This video is super depressing. But I’m excited that it lets me continue two of my best series, that have lain fallow for a while now. This is the 14th installment of my series on Syria, and it up-dates the story, incorporating some developments, like the disclosure and apparent end of Timber Sycamore, that I have been itching to discuss for weeks. It also returns in a big way to my Military Industrial Complex series. When I started the series over two years ago now, I had an end in mind. Still haven’t gotten there. We’ll see if I can pull it together!

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California Secession Is A Deeply Silly Idea | Calexit

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I understand frustration with Donald Trump. But over the past six months, in California and elsewhere, I’ve heard about Calexit. That’s nuts. In this video I lay out the many reasons an attempt at California secession makes no sense at all. Leaving aside the impossibility of getting Washington, DC to let California go, the economic proposition just doesn’t make sense. Let me know what you think of the video!

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Why Turkey Will Never Be Allied With Russia

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I’M AN IDIOT EDIT: No Istanbul is not the Capital of Modern Turkey. Sorry. It’s Ankara.

I’m a little sick of hearing about how powerful Russia is. It’s become an obsession in the US. Russia has become the new boogieman, despite having very little in the way of real 21st century global power or accomplishments. Many of my friends are holding desperately to the idea that Putin gave us Donald Trump, when it was clearly the Democrat’s choice of Hillary Clinton as a nominee that did that. Russia’s “victory” in Syria is heralded everywhere, despite the fact that they’ve barely managed to keep one of their only allies together, in the face of a not particularly committed effort on the part of the United States to destroy the country. I’ve made videos about Russian weakness before, but I think there’s a need for more. That’s part of what I accomplish with today’s video.

Today I deal with the fantastical idea that Turkey and Erdogan might find enough common ground to threaten the west. This theory only requires avoiding about 500 years of history between the two countries. It’s just as dumb as imagining that Russia and China might be able to find real common ground. These countries are too threatened by each other to band together. I find analysis that claims otherwise infuriating.

There may be a fundamental mismatch between world-views here. Folks at major US news outlets seem to think that any diversion at all from the Washington, DC party line is a Cold War level threat. This strikes me as ridiculous. Turkey has committed to buying a couple billion dollars worth of air defense systems from Russia. This is pretty clearly intended to piss off Turkey’s NATO allies. But it’s not the end of the Alliance, and it’s not the end of the world. Turkey and Russia signed an agreement for a Nuclear plant in 2010 and they still haven’t broken ground yet, seven years later. These new systems are easier to deploy, but there is no guaranteeing that they will be deployed. And if they are, it’s hard to see how it could conceivably threaten US or European security. A real alliance would require Turkey to want a stronger Russia. They will never want that.

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