TBR News December 5, 2019
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. December 5, 2019:“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.
Commentary for December 5: “I am constantly genuinely appalled at the sociological failures of the so-called ‘Milleneals.’
They dress like Arkansas farmers, carry all kinds of electronic toys in their pockets so they can keep in touch with other failures in, as you say, an attempt to appear somehow important.
The truly awful educational level of these “university graduates” is almost a farce when witnessed close-up.
Oh, and to constant, illiterate text messaging, one can add vaping to the heap of decaying leaves.
These cunning, sociologically forward-moving devices cause serious lung disorders but neither the manufacturers (large tobacco companies) nor the dim-bulbs who use them seem to care.
The public parks are filling up with Millennials who cannot afford the rapidly escalating rents and soon, we will see shuffling armies of them moving from town to town in the United States looking for new dumpsters to feed from, fast-food restaurants looking for lavatory cleaners and, as the north American climate worsens in winter, safe logs under which to install their tattered and stained sleeping bags.
There are, official concocted numbers aside, over 96 million (!) unemployed in America today.
The White House is occupied by a mental case with the intellect of a chicken and everywhere, rampant decay is growing daily.”
The Table of Contents
• Trump cuts short Nato summit after fellow leaders’ hot-mic video
• Nearly 700,000 Americans to lose food stamps under new Trump policy
• FactChecking Trump’s NATO Remarks
• 10 of the Biggest Threats to Human Existence
• Scientists Predict New Ice Age By 2019 As Sun ‘Goes Blank’
• The Season of Evil
Trump cuts short Nato summit after fellow leaders’ hot-mic video
US president cancels press conference after video captured group of leaders apparently ridiculing him
December 4, 2019
by Patrick Wintour and Rowena Mason
The Guardian
A furious Donald Trump cut short his attendance at the Nato summit in London after a group of leaders, including Boris Johnson, was caught on video ridiculing the US president at Buckingham Palace for staging lengthy press conferences.
The notoriously thin-skinned Trump cancelled a planned press conference and branded the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, “two-faced” after he was revealed on video leading the laughter at Trump’s expense together with other US allies.
Trump said the Canadian leader was probably angry because he called him out over Canada’s failure to meet the Nato target of spending 2% of its GDP on defence, a figure that has developed a shibboleth status in the president’s eyes and underlines his transactional approach to the western defence alliance.
Footage emerged late on Tuesday that appears to show world leaders joking about Trump at the summit, which has been marked by sharp disagreements over spending and future threats, including Turkey’s role in the alliance and China, as well as a clash of personalities that triggered a flurry of incendiary language being deployed by leaders.
The video shows leaders including Trudeau, Johnson, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, and Princess Anne at the Buckingham Palace event on Tuesday evening.
Johnson asks Macron: “Is that why he was late?” before Trudeau interjects: “He was late because he takes a 40-minute press conference off the top.”
Trudeau adds: “Oh, yeah, yeah yeah. He announced … ” before he is cut off by Macron, who speaks animatedly to the group. Macron’s back is to the camera and his words are inaudible.
After an edited cut in the film, the footage later shows an incredulous Trudeau telling the group: “You just watched his team’s jaws drop to the floor.”
The US president was sitting alongside the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, on Wednesday when a reporter asked about Trudeau’s apparent remarks.
“Well, he’s two-faced,” Trump said of Trudeau, before going on to make a reference to the defence spending of Nato allies who commit less than the agreed 2% to defence.
“I find him to be a very nice guy but you know the truth is that I called him out the fact that he’s not paying 2% and I can see he’s not very happy about it. He’s not paying 2% and he should be paying 2%. Canada – they have money.”
Apparently aware of how his actions would be interpreted, Trump was then himself caught on a hot mic saying: “Oh, and then you know what they’ll say. He didn’t do a press conference. He didn’t do a press conference. That was funny when I said the guy’s two-faced, you know that.”
The US president later tweeted: “When today’s meetings are over, I will be heading back to Washington … We won’t be doing a press conference at the close of Nato because we did so many over the past two days. Safe travels to all!”
On Wednesday evening he tweeted: “The Fake News Media is doing everything possible to belittle my VERY successful trip to London for NATO. I got along great with the NATO leaders, even getting them to pay $130 Billion a year more, & $400 Billion a year more in 3 years. No increase for U.S., only deep respect!”
Overall the episode is only likely to underline the sense that the supposed leader of the free world is privately viewed with a mixture of mirth and alarm.
Asked at his own press conference about the video footage, Johnson shook his head and said: “That’s complete nonsense. I don’t know where that’s come from.”
Pressed again, he said: “I really don’t know what’s being referred to there.” Johnson’s aides would not say whether he had seen the video, but claimed he had been “very busy” at the summit.
Privately Downing Street will be relieved that the unpredictable Trump did not face the international media again, fearing that under questioning he might rescind his commitment not to include the NHS in any future trade talks or repeat his criticisms of the terms of Johnson’s Brexit deal.
With Trump seen as electorally toxic in the UK in the final days of the election campaign, it is notable that few public images of the two men together have been released, despite the pair attending events at both Buckingham Palace and No 10 on Wednesday, as well as having their own bilateral meeting.
Johnson also sidestepped the opportunity to praise Trump personally when asked if he thought the president’s leadership was good for the west and for Britain, replying by praising the US as a nation.
Trudeau also tried to play down the laughter at the president’s expense. He said: “We had a great meeting yesterday between me and the president … Last night I made a reference to the fact there was an unscheduled press conference before my meeting with President Trump, I was happy to take part in it but it was certainly notable,” Trudeau said.
Trump had startled his aides on Monday by holding two lengthy impromptu freewheeling press conferences, one with the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, and another with President Macron. At the first he launched a tirade against Macron, calling the French president’s remarks that Nato was “brain dead” as “very, very nasty” and “insulting”.
At the second event, he was personally polite to Macron but clashed with him over France’s refusal to take back its foreign fighters from Syria, and then threatened trade sanctions against countries that did not reach the Nato defence target, so putting Germany in his sights.
Ironically until his abrupt walkout, Trump had shown a new relative warmth to Nato, claiming credit for the recent rise in European defence spending and praising the institution in the face of Macron’s criticisms. He even said: “There’s a great spirit. A lot of people are putting up a lot of money.”
The comments had marked a change of tone from sentiments he voiced at the outset of his presidency, when he dismissed the alliance as obsolescent and questioned the value of article 5, the collective defence clause that requires Nato members to come to each other’s military aid if under attack.
It is not the first time Trump has had a run-in with Trudeau. Last year he withdrew US support for a G7 declaration prepared for a summit in Charlevoix, Quebec. Trudeau’s hard work in preparing the communique unravelled after Trump, who left early, tweeted from Air Force One that Trudeau was “very dishonest and weak” following criticism from the prime minister of US steel and aluminium tariffs. As a result, France at this year’s G7 tried to pare the communique down to a minimum.
Trump is due to chair the next G7 at Camp David next year. He had originally scheduled to hold the high security event at his Doral Miami resort in Florida, but agreed to shift the venue in wake of criticism that it was inappropriate to use his own property for such a purpose.
Nearly 700,000 Americans to lose food stamps under new Trump policy
Move will limit states from exempting work-eligible adults from having to maintain steady employment to receive benefits
December 4, 2019
AP
Hundreds of thousands of Americans who rely on the federal food stamp program will lose their benefits under a new Trump administration rule that will tighten work requirements for recipients.
The move by the administration is the latest in its attempt to scale back the social safety net for low-income Americans. It is the first of three proposed rules targeting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as Snap, to be finalized. The program feeds more than 36 million people.
The plan will limit states from exempting work-eligible adults from having to maintain steady employment in order to receive benefits.
The agriculture department estimates the change would save roughly $5.5bn over five years and cut benefits for roughly 688,000 Snap recipients. That’s down from its original estimate that 750,000 people would lose benefits.
Under current rules, work-eligible able-bodied adults without dependents and between the ages of 18 and 49 can currently receive only three months of Snap benefits in a three-year period if they don’t meet the 20-hour work requirement. But states with high unemployment rates or a demonstrable lack of sufficient jobs can waive those time limits.
The new rule imposes stricter criteria states must meet in order to issue waivers. Under the plan, states can only issue waivers if a city or county has an unemployment rate of 6% or higher. The waivers will be good for one year and will require the governor to support the request.
The final rule will go into effect in April.
The agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue, said the rule will help move people “from welfare to work”.
Congressional Democrats and advocates for the poor were quick to condemn the administration’s actions.
Senator Debbie Stabenow said the plan will only serve to punish workers whose jobs are seasonal or unreliable.
“This administration is out of touch with families who are struggling to make ends meet by working seasonal jobs or part time jobs with unreliable hours,” said Stabenow, the top Democrat on the Senate committee on agriculture, nutrition and forestry.
Robert Greenstein, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the rule would disproportionately affect minorities. He urged better job training and a higher minimum wage instead.
“Denying them basic food and nutrition is not the route that a fair and compassionate administration of either party should take,” he said in a statement.
Over the past year the agriculture department has proposed three significant changes to the food stamp program. In addition to restricting time limit waivers, the USDA has proposed eliminating broad-based categorical eligibility, a measure that allows recipients of certain non-cash public benefits to automatically qualify for food stamps, and changing how utility costs are factored into benefit calculations.
Brandon Lipps, the deputy under secretary for the US Department of Agriculture’s Food Nutrition and Consumer Services, did not say when the department will finalize the other two proposed rules.
The Urban Institute in a study released last month estimated that taken together, the three measures would affect roughly 2.2m households, and 3.7 million individual beneficiaries.
James D Weill, the president of the Food Research and Action Center, said the plan is “deeply flawed and ill-conceived“ and would lead to higher rates of hunger and poverty.
“The final rule would cause serious harm to individuals, communities and the nation while doing nothing to improve the health and employment of those impacted by the rule,” he said.
FactChecking Trump’s NATO Remarks
December 3, 2019
by Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson, Robert Farley and D’Angelo Gore
Factcheck
President Donald Trump repeated a slew of false claims to an international audience at the annual NATO summit:
The overwhelming majority of captured Islamic State fighters are from Iraq and Syria. They are not, as Trump claimed, “mostly from Europe.”
Although about half of the territory once held by the Islamic State was regained under President Barack Obama, Trump again wrongly claimed that, “When I came in, it was virtually 100%. And I knocked it down to zero.”
The U.S. trade deficit with the European Union has gone up under Trump, contrary to his suggestion that he had reduced it “fairly rapidly.” And as he has done many times, he inflated the amount of that trade deficit.
The president wrongly claimed that other NATO member countries’ spending on defense was “heading down” three years ago. That spending went up in 2015 and 2016. And he claimed countries that spent a low percentage of their GDP on defense were “delinquent.” They don’t owe NATO, or other countries, any money.
Trump said the U.S. “never used to win” World Trade Organization cases “before me,” which is not so. The U.S. has historically won most of the cases it has brought to the WTO against other nations.
He falsely claimed that South Korea was only paying “$500 million a year” under a cost-sharing deal that helps fund U.S. military forces stationed there. South Korea was already paying over $800 million a year when it agreed earlier this year to increase its contribution by 8.2%.
A June 2018 joint statement from Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un didn’t say Kim “will denuclearize,” as Trump claimed.
Japan pays $1.7 billion to $2.1 billion per year toward the cost of having U.S. troops stationed in the country, while the U.S. spends $1.9 billion to $2.5 billion. But Trump falsely implied that Japan isn’t sharing the cost of the U.S. military presence.
The president made his claims in two press appearances during NATO meetings in London on Dec. 3: one appearance with French President Emmanuel Macron and a second with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
Captured ISIS Fighters
Trump wrongly claimed that captured Islamic State fighters being held in Syria are “mostly from Europe.” But, as Macron quickly and rightly pointed out, most of the Islamic State, or ISIS, prisoners are from Syria and Iraq.
Trump’s incorrect claim – which we have fact-checked before — came when a reporter asked Trump if France had stepped up in taking back foreign ISIS fighters from France.
“We have a tremendous amount of captured fighters – ISIS fighters over in Syria,” Trump said. “And they’re all under lock and key. But many are from France, many are from Germany, many are from UK. They are mostly from Europe.”
Trump said he had not yet spoken to Macron about that, and then turned and jokingly said to the French president, “Would you like some nice ISIS fighters? I can give them to you. You can take every one you want.”
Macron quickly corrected Trump.
“Let’s be serious,” Macron said. “A very large number of fighters you have on the ground are fighters coming from Syria, from Iraq and the region. It’s true that you have foreign fighters coming from Europe, but it is a tiny minority of the overall problem we have in the region. And I think the No. 1 priority – because it is not finished – is to get rid of ISIS. This is our No. 1 priority. And it is not yet done. I’m sorry to say that.”
Macron is right about most of the captured ISIS fighters being from Iraq and Syria, not Europe.
A report from the inspectors general of the Department of Defense, the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development said that, based on information provided by the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in mid-June, the Syrian Democratic Forces held about 10,000 ISIS fighters in detention centers across northeastern Syria. Of those, about 8,000 were nationals of Iraq and Syria. The remaining 2,000 were “foreigners from more than 50 countries,” including “about 800 … believed to be from European nations.” The rest, the report says, “are mainly from former republics of the Soviet Union; the Middle East and North Africa; and South and Southeast Asia.”
During a briefing on Aug. 1, James Jeffrey, Trump’s special envoy to the global coalition to defeat ISIS, echoed those figures, saying about 10,000 “terrorist fighters” are “under lock and key in northeast Syria.” And he said, “Most of them, about 8,000, are Iraqi or Syrian nationals.”
ISIS Caliphate Reduced by Half Before Trump Took Office
In his meeting with NATO’s secretary-general, Trump again wrongly claimed too much credit for reducing “virtually 100%” of the territory held by the Islamic State. According to figures provided by Trump’s own administration, about half of ISIS’ territory had been regained under his predecessor, Barack Obama.
Trump: We’ve defeated the ISIS caliphate. Nobody thought we could do that so quickly. I did it very quickly. When I came in, it was virtually 100%. And I knocked it down to zero.
As we wrote a week ago when Trump made a similar claim, Trump is discounting ISIS territory reclaimed under Obama.
In a Dec. 21, 2017, briefing, Brett McGurk, then-special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter ISIS, said that about 98% of the Islamic State land had been recovered by coalition forces, and 50% of that recovery had happened in 2017. “And significantly, 50 percent of all the territory that ISIS has lost, they have lost in the last 11 months, since January,” McGurk said.
Conversely, that would mean about half of the territory had been recaptured before January 2017, under Obama.
About a month before Trump was sworn in, the U.S. commander of the coalition operation said that “almost three million people and more than 44,000 square kilometers of territory have been liberated” from ISIS in 2016. That’s nearly 17,000 square miles.
Estimates of the Islamic State-held land vary. Figures from IHS Markit, an analytics and consultancy firm, show a smaller percentage of land recovered under Obama, but still refute Trump’s claim that ISIS’ territory was at its largest (“virtually 100%”) when he took office. IHS Markit’s estimates put the recovery under Obama at 33%. The rate of recapture did accelerate under Trump, according to the firm’s figures, and in March, the Syrian Democratic Forces announced that ISIS’ final stronghold in eastern Syria had been retaken.
U.S.-European Union Trade Balance
Trump made two false claims about the U.S. trade deficit with the European Union.
In his meeting with Stoltenberg, Trump falsely implied that he has reduced U.S. trade deficits with the EU. Trump said that “the deficit for many, many years, has been astronomical … [a]nd I’m changing that, and I’m changing it fairly rapidly.”
In fact, the trade deficit under Trump has gone up 24% — not down.
In his meeting with Macron, Trump also exaggerated the size of the U.S. trade deficit with the EU, both currently and before he took office.
“I came into a position where the European Union was making anywhere from $100 [billion] to $150 billion in deficits to the United States,” Trump said. “[W]e have a very unfair trade situation where the U.S. loses a lot of money for many, many years with the European Union — billions and billions of dollars. I mean, to be specific, over $150 billion a year.”
Here are the facts: When Trump took office, the U.S. had a total trade deficit in goods and services with the European Union of $93 billion – not $100 billion to $150 billion — and it has gone up under Trump. The deficit has exceeded $100 billion only three times in the last 10 years, and two of those years were under Trump.
The total deficit was $101 billion for 2017 and $115 billion in 2018, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
False NATO Repeats
Trump falsely said that the amount other NATO member countries spent on defense “was really heading in the wrong direction — three years ago was heading down.” Before Trump took office, NATO Europe and Canada had increased defense spending in 2015 and 2016.
He also claimed that “a lot” of countries are “delinquent” in their payments. But countries make their own decisions on what percentage of their gross domestic product to spend on their own defense. They don’t owe NATO money if they spend less than other countries choose to do.
The president made his claim about overall defense spending during his appearance with Macron and similarly said in his meeting with Stoltenberg that defense spending for NATO members “was going down for close to 20 years. If you look at a chart, it was like a rollercoaster down, nothing up. And that was going on for a long time.”
Spending declined from 2009 to 2014, before rising again from 2015 to 2019.
Trump has made similar claims before. As we’ve written, Trump likes to take credit for increased spending by other NATO countries — which have upped their spending on defense by $40 billion, or 15%, from 2016 to 2019 — but he’s wrong to claim spending was “heading down” before he took office. Other countries had increased their defense spending by $12 billion or 4.8% from 2014 to 2016, according to the NATO report.
In his appearance with Stoltenberg, Trump also claimed: “And yet, you still have many delinquent — you know, I call them ‘delinquent’ when they’re not paid up in full. And then, I asked the other question: When they don’t pay up in full, what happens to the past year? So let’s say Germany is at 1% and they stay at 1% and another 1. … Because, you know, it’s not like, ‘Oh, gee. Let’s start a brand-new year.’ A lot of countries haven’t paid. And you could make the case that they haven’t paid. They’re, really, delinquent for 25, 30 years.”
But NATO countries don’t owe money to anyone else if they spend less on defense than other member countries.
In 2006, NATO countries made a commitment to aim to spend 2% of their GDP on their own defense. A NATO spokesman at the time said: “Let me be clear, this is not a hard commitment that they will do it. But it is a commitment to work towards it. And that will be a first within the Alliance.”
A 2014 NATO declaration after a summit in Wales again said that countries that weren’t meeting the 2% goal would “aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade.”
So, they have until 2024 to meet that target. As of the November NATO report, nine of the 29 member countries met the 2% goal in 2019.
Germany will spend an estimated 1.38% of its GDP on its defense in 2019, while the United States will spend 3.42%.
WTO Falsehood
Trump wrongly claimed that the U.S. “never used to win,” or “very rarely” won, cases before the World Trade Organization prior to him becoming president.
Trump: As you know, we won — in the World Trade Organization, we won seven and a half billion dollars. We never used to win before me, because, before me, the United States was a sucker for all of these different organizations. And now they realize — the World Trade Organization realizes that my attitude on them: If they don’t treat us fairly, well, I’ll tell you someday what will happen.
And we’ve been winning a lot of cases at the World Trade Organization. We virtually — very rarely did we ever win a case. They took advantage of the United States.
Trump is referring to the WTO announcement on Oct. 14 that it was authorizing the U.S. to impose tariffs of up to $7.5 billion a year on European Union goods and services because the EU had failed to remove subsidies for the European aircraft manufacturer Airbus that were inconsistent with a trade agreement and harmed Airbus’ U.S. rival, Boeing.
But Trump was wrong when he said the U.S. has dramatically improved its record on winning WTO cases during his presidency. As we have written, the U.S. has historically won the vast majority of cases it brings, and lost most of the cases brought against it. (That’s generally how other countries fare before the WTO as well.)
“Generally speaking, the US success rate at the WTO is about the same now as it was pre-Trump,” Simon Lester, a trade policy analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute, told us for an October article. “It’s a difficult thing to measure, but based on my assessment, the overall rate has not changed.”
William Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official during the Clinton administration, also said Trump’s boast about an improved record with the WTO is “simply not true.”
“There are different ways to count WTO cases, but the consensus view has long been that our winning record is better than other countries, and we lose less than other countries,” Reinsch told us.
As for the Airbus ruling, the trade experts said the more than decade-old dispute had been breaking the United States’ way for years, and the award would likely have come down as it did no matter who was president.
South Korea’s Defense Sharing Contribution
Trump understated South Korea’s prior contributions to the shared cost of the U.S. military presence in South Korea by several hundred million dollars.
Trump: I met with [Republic of Korea] six, seven months ago — maybe a little bit longer than that. And I said, “You’re not paying enough. It’s not fair.”
They were paying $500 — they were paying less than $500 million a year and it costs us billions. And I said, “It’s not fair. We do a great job. We have 32,000 soldiers there. It cost us, you know, many times what you’re paying. And you have to pay up.”
And they said — again, in a very good way, very fine negotiation. And they were very close to being at the end of their budget, and we agreed to $500 million more, almost — around $500 million. And that got them up to close to a billion dollars from $500 million — really less than $500 million, which has been that number for many, many years — decades. And I got $500 million more a year.
On Feb. 10, South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it had agreed to contribute 1.039 trillion Korean won (which is currently about $873 million) in 2019 as part of a new one-year Special Measures Agreement that helps to offset the cost of maintaining a U.S. military presence in South Korea. The deal, which is only for 2019, was officially signed in March, and went into force in April.
But the Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that amount was only an 8.2% increase from what South Korea paid in 2018 under a previous five-year deal approved in 2014 that expired at the end of last year. That earlier deal, which went into force in June 2014, called for South Korea to contribute 920 billion won in 2014 and then increase its annual payments at the rate of inflation. That worked out to “approximately $830 million per year,” Trump’s own State Department said in March 2018.
And under the five-year deal before that one, South Korea still contributed much more than $500 million a year. As the State Department said on Jan. 15, 2009: “In the agreement signed in Seoul today, the [Republic of Korea] will provide 760 billion won (approximately U.S. $691.5 million based on the 2008 average exchange rate) in 2009 and will increase the funding level in the subsequent years by the rise in the Consumer Price Index, with a maximum four-percent annual cap.”
North Korea-U.S. Nuclear Statement
Trump misstated what North Korean leader Kim Jong Un agreed to do about his country’s nuclear weapons program after their first meeting in Singapore on June 12, 2018.
Trump: [M]y relationship with Kim Jong Un is really good, but that doesn’t mean he won’t abide by the agreement we signed. You have to understand. You have to go and look at the first agreement that we signed. It said he will denuclearize. That’s what it said. I hope he lives up to the agreement, but we’re going to find out.
We looked at the “agreement,” and it does not say that “he will denuclearize.”
Trump and Kim issued a joint statement on June 12, 2018, saying that North Korea “commits to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” It is a statement of goals, not an agreement. The statement — which is just two pages long — contains no agreement on a denuclearization plan or even on the term “denuclearization.”
Prior to Trump’s visit, Mitchell Reiss, director of policy planning at the State Department under President George W. Bush, told Voice of America, “What North Korea means by denuclearization is very different than what the United States and what South Korea traditionally has meant by denuclearization.”
Reiss warned that, in his experience, “it is clear that the United States has to take a number of steps first, such as ending the alliance with South Korea, removing all of its military troops off the Korean Peninsula.”
Six months after meeting with Trump, the official Korean Central News Agency said that North Korea would not dismantle its nuclear weapons program unless the U.S. eliminates its “nuclear threat to Korea.”
“When we refer to the ‘denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,’ it means the removal of all sources of nuclear threat not only from the North and the South but also from all neighboring areas targeting the peninsula,” the Korean news agency said in a published statement a year ago. “The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula should be defined as ‘completely eliminating the U.S. nuclear threat to Korea’ before it can eliminate our nuclear deterrent.”
Japan’s Cost-Sharing
Trump falsely implied that Japan isn’t sharing the cost of the U.S. military presence on Japanese territory.
Trump: Now, in some cases, you have countries that need help that don’t have money. They’re poor and there’s tremendous trauma. There’s tremendous problems and things going on that shouldn’t be going on. And that’s a different situation.
But we have wealthy countries — I’ve asked Japan. I said to Prime Minister Abe — a friend of mine, Shinzo. I said, “You have to — you have to help us out here. We’re paying a lot of money. You’re a wealthy nation. And we’re, you know, paying for your military, essentially. You have to help us out.” And he’s doing — he’s going to do a lot. They’re all going to do a lot. But they were never asked. Now they’re being asked.
Contrary to Trump’s claims, Japan is helping out the U.S. financially when it comes to its own defense.
First a little history, courtesy of a Congressional Research Service report issued in October: “The U.S.-Japan military alliance, formed in 1952, grants the U.S. military the right to base U.S. troops — currently around 54,000 strong — and other military assets on Japanese territory, undergirding the ‘forward deployment’ of U.S. troops in East Asia. In return, the United States pledges to protect Japan’s security.”
During the 2016 campaign, Trump complained about the cost of the U.S. military presence in Japan. However, as we wrote at the time, both countries share the financial burden of this strategic alliance. Japan pays “$1.7 billion-$2.1 billion per year (depending on the yen-to-dollar exchange rate) to offset the direct cost of stationing U.S. forces in Japan,” while the U.S. spends “$1.9 billion-$2.5 billion per year on nonpersonnel costs on top of the Japanese contribution,” the October CRS report said, citing the Department of Defense comptroller.
Those payments were made under a Special Measures Agreement that has been in force since 2016, and is generally renegotiated every five years, CRS said.
10 of the Biggest Threats to Human Existence
by Larry Schwartz
AlterNet
AMC’s “The Walking Dead” is at the top of the cultural zeitgeist these days, one of the most popular television series on the air. In the show, a virus has ravaged the Earth, killing most of humanity, with the dead corpses rising to terrorize the few remaining living souls. While enormously entertaining, it is not a likely scenario for the end of the human race. Donald Trump notwithstanding, zombies aren’t real. The end of humanity, however, could be. While it is difficult to envision a world without “us,” there are multiple scenarios staring at us, right here, right now, not far-fetched, that could wipe out all or most of humanity, leaving a wasteland for Mother Nature to reclaim. Here are some of the possible ways the reign of man- and womankind might end, no zombies needed.
1. Global Climate Change
Climate change is the Big Kahuna of all scenarios in which our presence on Earth is ended. Despite what the climate change deniers would have you believe, climate change is real. It is being caused by human beings, with a little help from lots of farting cows emitting methane, plus that giant well of methane lurking under the Arctic ice. As we burn carbon and increase our meat-eating ways, more and more greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere. It is pretty easy to see the end game of this scenario. Grab a telescope and look at Venus, a planet with a thick, heat-trapping atmosphere and a surface temperature high enough to, well, melt lead. A few decades ago, climate scientist James Hanson studied Venus, and saw some parallels with what was happening on Earth. What he saw alarmed him, and he testified in Congress in 1988, warning our government that unless we changed our carbon-burning ways, we were on a course for disaster. Hanson got through to a single senator: Al Gore.
Meanwhile, the carbon keeps burning, the CO2 keeps rising, resulting in a slowly rising average Earth temperature despite the occasional freezing cold winter. On average, Earth’s temperature has been rising steadily since the Industrial Revolution unleashed our carbon-burning frenzy, resulting in a slow-moving train wreck. The hottest years in recorded history have occurred in the last decade. Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben outlines the situation:
“The Arctic ice cap is melting [releasing more greenhouse gases], the great glacier above Greenland is thinning, both with disconcerting and unexpected speed. The oceans are distinctly more acid and their level is rising…The greatest storms on our planet, hurricanes and cyclones, have become more powerful… The great rain forest of the Amazon is drying on its margins… The great boreal forest of North America is dying in a matter of years… [This] new planet looks more or less like our own but clearly isn’t.”
Many environmentalists think we have already passed the point of no return. Once we pass a certain threshold, Earth will continue warming even if we do manage to cut our CO2 emissions. What we do know is that, if we don’t begin reducing the amount of CO2 we are releasing into the air, and at least minimize the damage, a planet-wide disaster is assured.
2. Loss of Biodiversity
If we don’t melt ourselves into extinction, another possible route to end times is partly a byproduct of climate change: loss of biodiversity. Human activity is responsible for massive extinctions of countless species on Planet Earth. Environment News Service reported as far back as 1999 that, “the current extinction rate is now approaching 1,000 times the background rate [what would be considered the normal rate of extinction] and may climb to 10,000 times the background rate during the next century, if present trends continue [resulting in] a loss that would easily equal those of past extinctions.”
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a major environmental report released in 2005, reported 10-30% of mammals, birds and amphibians on the planet are in danger of extinction due to human activity, which includes deforestation (resulting in habitat destruction), CO2 emissions (resulting in acid rain), over-exploitation (such as overfishing the oceans), and invasive species introduction (like boa constrictors in the Florida Everglades). “This rapid extinction is therefore likely to precipitate collapses of ecosystems at a global scale,” said Jann Suurkula, chairman of Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Application of Science and Technology. “This is predicted to create large-scale agricultural problems, threatening food supplies to hundreds of millions of people. This ecological prediction does not take into consideration the effects of global warming which will further aggravate the situation.”
Amphibians, such as frogs and salamanders, are considered “marker species,” meaning they provide important clues to the health of the ecosystem. Right now, the frog population, as well as other amphibians, has been declining rapidly. In any ecosystem, when one species dies, it affects other species, which depended on the now-extinct species for food and perhaps other necessities. When there is a sudden mass extinction of many species, a chain reaction can cause catastrophic results. There have been five mass extinctions in the history of the Earth, and many scientists are saying we are in the midst of the sixth. “We are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change, and exposing organisms to intolerable evolutionary pressure,” states the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), in the biannual State of the Oceans Report. The next mass extinction may have already begun.” What would that be like? Well, in the worst one, 250 million years ago, 96 percent of ocean life and 70 percent of land life perished. What can we expect from mass extinction number six? We probably would prefer not to find out.
3. Bee Decline
Bees are dying—a lot of them, due to CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder. “One of every three bites of food eaten worldwide depends on pollinators, especially bees, for a successful harvest,” says Elizabeth Grossman, author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health. Plants depend on spreading their pollen to produce food. Bees are pollinators. No bees, no food (or at least much less). As many as 50% of the hives in the United States and Europe have collapsed in the past 10 years. The suspect in bee deaths is a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids, pesticides used on a massive scale in commercial farming. It is believed the chemicals impair the bees’ sense of direction, preventing them from returning to the hive.
With reduced pollen in the hive, fewer queen bees are produced, and eventually the colonies collapse. The European Commission has imposed a ban on these pesticides after the European Food Safety Agency concluded that they posed a “high acute risk” to honeybees. The United States, however, has declined to join Europe in banning neonicotinoids, citing other possible causes of CCD, including parasites. Meanwhile, as Nero fiddles, Rome is burning and bees are quickly disappearing. It is not hard to imagine a scenario where resulting acute food shortages bring on mass starvation, war and human extinction.
4. Bat Decline
Bees aren’t the only pollinators dying off. Bats, too, are dropping like flies. As a result of deforestation, habitat destruction and hunting, combined with a fatal fungal disease spreading among the bat population called White Nose Syndrome, bats are disappearing at an alarming rate. Besides contributing to the pollination crisis, the dwindling bat population brings about another possible human extinction scenario. As their habitats are destroyed, bats are increasingly crossing paths with the human population, in search of food and shelter. With bats come bat viruses. “It’s very easy to see how pathogens can jump from animals to humans,” says Jon Epstein, at the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit agency dedicated to conservation and biodiversity. Every year, on average, five new infectious diseases pop up, and about 75% of these new diseases come from animals. It is already suspected that human killers like Ebola emerged from the bat population. Might some new human-killing pathogen mutate from bats to humans and decimate mankind?
5. Pandemic
Which leads us to a related extinction scenario: a worldwide pandemic. New diseases emerge every year. Some have the potential to devastate the population. In 1918, a strain of influenza spread worldwide and killed between 20 and 50 million people—more than were killed in all of World War I. In the past several years, diseases like SARS have come close to igniting into worldwide pandemics, and it is not at all inconceivable that, in our airplane-riding, interconnected world, some other virus could arrive on the scene with the virulence and transmissibility to decimate, if not destroy, the human population. “It is not in the interests of a virus to kill all of its hosts, so a virus is unlikely to wipe out the human race,” says Maria Zambon, a virologist with the Health Protection Agency Influenza Laboratory. “But it could cause a serious setback for a number of years. We can never be completely prepared for what nature will do: nature is the ultimate bioterrorist.”
6. Biological /Nuclear Terrorism
In the interim, there are plenty of down-and-dirty, run-of-the-mill terrorists and the grand prize they all hope to get their hands on is a weapon of mass destruction like a nuclear bomb or a vial of smallpox virus. “Today’s society is more vulnerable to terrorism because it is easier for a malevolent group to get hold of the necessary materials, technology and expertise to make weapons of mass destruction,” says Paul Wilkinson, chairman of the advisory board for the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrew. “The most likely cause of large scale, mass-casualty terrorism right now is from a chemical or biological weapon.The large-scale release of something like anthrax, the smallpox virus, or the plague, would have a huge effect, and modern communications would quickly make it become a trans-national problem. There is a very high probability that a major attack will occur somewhere in the world, within our lifetimes.”
As for the nuclear threat, with increasing numbers of unstable countries like Pakistan and North Korea in possession of atomic weapons, the availability to terrorists seems only a matter of when and not if.
7. Super-Volcanoes
There are volcanoes, and then there are super-volcanoes. “Approximately every 50,000 years the Earth experiences a super-volcano. More than 1,000 square kilometers of land can be obliterated by pyroclastic ash flows, the surrounding continent is coated in ash and sulphur gases are injected into the atmosphere, making a thin veil of sulphuric acid all around the globe and reflecting back sunlight for years to come. Daytime becomes no brighter than a moonlit night.”
This lovely scenario is brought to us by Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Center at University College London. About 74,000 years ago, the most powerful super-volcano eruption in human history occurred in Indonesia. It was close to the equator, and thus gases quickly passed into both hemispheres. Sunlight was blocked, and temperatures on Earth dropped worldwide for the next five to six years, below freezing even in the tropical regions. A super-volcano eruption is 12 times more likely than an asteroid hitting the Earth. Known super-volcanoes exist in Yellowstone National Park in the U.S. and Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. And then there are the unknown ones….
8. Asteroid Impact
Recent films like Deep Impact and Armageddon have dramatized this human extinction scenario, an asteroid hitting the Earth. Hollywood is Hollywood, but in 2013, a real-life asteroid appeared without warning in Chelyabinsk, Russia. About 20 meters wide, it hurled into the Earth’s atmosphere at over 40,000 miles per hour. Only the angle it came in at and its relatively small size prevented damage and destruction on a massive scale. But what would happen if a not-at-all uncommon mile-wide asteroid hit the Earth at this speed? Quite probably it would wipe out the human race. The tremendous explosion it would cause upon impact would fling so much dust into the atmosphere that the sun would be completely blocked off, plant life and crops would die, severe acid rain would kill ocean life, and fiery debris would cause firestorms worldwide.
This has already happened at least once. The likely reason you don’t see any dinosaurs around the neighborhood is that they were wiped out by just such an incident. Donald Yeomans of NASA: “We expect an event of this type every million years on average.”
9. Rise of the Machine
We look to Hollywood again to dramatize our next scenario. The Terminator movies entertained us with killer androids from a future where war was being waged on man by super-intelligent machines. OK, we are not there yet, but as we program more and more intelligence into our computers, exponentially increasing their capabilities every year, it is only a matter of time before they are smarter than we are. Already we entrust computers to run our stock markets, land our planes, correct our spelling, Google our trivia, and calculate our restaurant tips. In development are robots that look like us, talk like us and recognize our facial movements. How long before they are us, as we download our thoughts and memories into our hard drives, the so-called “singularity”? How long before these machines are self-aware?
Futurist and author Ray Kurzwell believes computers will be as smart as us by 2029, and by 2045 will be billions of times smarter than us. What then? Will they decide we are superfluous? Or maybe we ourselves will decide. Sounds far-fetched, I know, but some very smart people buy into this scenario; people like genius physicist Stephen Hawking: “The danger is real that they [super-computers] could develop intelligence and take over the world.”
10. Zombie Apocalypse
I know. I said zombies aren’t real. But there is a parasite called toxoplasmosa gondii. This terrifying little bug infects rats, but it can only reproduce inside the intestines of a cat, so it evolved a nifty little trick wherein it actually takes over the rat’s brain and compels it to hang out around cats. Naturally, the cat eats the rat. The cat is happy. The parasite is happy because it gets to reproduce in the cat’s intestines. The rat? Not so happy, one would suppose. Why should we care about unhappy rats? Because rats and humans are actually very similar, which is why we conduct so many medical experiments on rats. And humans are infected with the toxoplasmosa gondii parasite. About half the population of the Earth, in fact. Now it so happens that toxoplasmosa gondii does not affect humans the way it does rats. But what if it did? Viruses mutate. Viruses are manipulated in bio-weapons laboratories. Suddenly half the population would have no instinct for self-preservation. Half the population unable to think in a rational manner. Half the population suddenly very much resembling zombies. Nah. Couldn’t happen. Could it?
Scientists Predict New Ice Age By 2019 As Sun ‘Goes Blank’
Unilad
A series of images released by NASA have sparked concerns that the Earth could be heading for a mini ice age.
Photographs of the sun show that the star’s sunspots have vanished, with the normally volatile surface appearing relatively calm, reports the Daily Star.
This is the fourth time this year the sun’s face has appeared smooth, with experts saying solar activity is falling more rapidly than any time in the last 10,000 years.
This large reduction in sunspot activity could mean the Earth is about to enter a cold phase – the last time sunspots vanished at such a rapid rate marked the centuries-long ‘ice age’ that began in the 15th century.
Meteorologist Paul Dorian believes this sharp decline in solar activity could be a sign another ice age is coming.
He said:
It is safe to say that weak solar activity for a prolonged period of time can have a cooling impact on the troposphere, the bottom most layer of Earth’s atmosphere – where we all live.
Dorian’s views are backed up by research headed by Professor Valentina Zharkov of Northumbria University suggesting a cold snap will hit Earth between 2020 and 2050.
Prof Zharkov said:
I am absolutely confident in our research. It has good mathematical background and reliable data, which has been handled correctly.
Our results can be repeated by any researchers with the similar data available in many solar observatories, so they can derive their own evidence.
The Season of Evil
by Gregory Douglas
Preface
This is in essence a work of fiction, but the usual disclaimers notwithstanding, many of the horrific incidents related herein are based entirely on factual occurrences.
None of the characters or the events in this telling are invented and at the same time, none are real. And certainly, none of the participants could be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be either noble, self-sacrificing, honest, pure of motive or in any way socially acceptable to anything other than a hungry crocodile, a professional politician or a tax collector.
In fact, the main characters are complex, very often unpleasant, destructive and occasionally, very entertaining.
To those who would say that the majority of humanity has nothing in common with the characters depicted herein, the response is that mirrors only depict the ugly, evil and deformed things that peer into them
There are no heroes here, only different shapes and degrees of villains and if there is a moral to this tale it might well be found in a sentence by Jonathan Swift, a brilliant and misanthropic Irish cleric who wrote in his ‘Gulliver’s Travels,”
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most odious race of little pernicious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
Swift was often unkind in his observations but certainly not inaccurate.
Frienze, Italy
July 2018-August 2019
Chapter 18
It was raining in Seattle when they checked in at their hotel and the view of Puget Sound from their suite was gray and funereal.
Not trusting the safety of the locked hotel garage, they had brought bags and boxes of money up in the elevator. The rest of their loot was safe enough in the packed trunk and as far as Chuck was concerned, it was easy come, easy go.
Seattle television was filled with stories of the Great Counterfeit Ring now being effectively dealt with by the ever-vigilant agents of the Welsh singing society and Chuck was sitting in the suite’s living room engaged in counting their proceeds.
He was especially pleased when an announcer, referring to an official RCMP statement released only an hour before, spoke of the ‘incredible boldness’ of the gang who actually took their counterfeit money to the banks! This was viewed, and quite properly Chuck felt, as an act of almost lunatic boldness. That it had proved to be incredibly profitable was not mentioned.
It was not considered politically correct for any branch of the media to either glorify crime or publicize tips on how to be successful in criminal endeavors.
In the final reckoning, they had made a net profit of almost two hundred thousand dollars, minus the cost of the hotels and three dinners.
The uproar in Vancouver took many weeks to quiet and in the end, over a hundred and fifty people were convicted of being a part of the gang and sentenced to prison. Small children and the aged were usually let off with fines and suspended sentences but the others were shipped off in busses to the penitentiary at New Westminster to begin serving long sentences.
Chief Inspector (Counterfeiting Section) Morgan returned to Ottawa filled with satisfaction in a job well done and was personally congratulated on his arrival by the Prime Minister himself as well as his own immediate superiors. He always remembered his time in Vancouver with pleasure, not only because of his brilliant work in rounding up the counterfeiters but in the heart warming occasion when he met a great singer who actually understood Welsh music..
Safe in his luxurious suite in one of Seattle’s newest and most expensive hotels, Chuck was whistling “Men of Harlech” while he was stacking up the bills by denominations and making notes in his pocket journal.
Eventually, Lars grew tired of listening about himself and picked up the room service menu while Chuck put his bulging suitcases into the closet in his bedroom.
Later, while they were enjoying fresh lobster, duchesse potatoes and asparagus with a very good Hollandaise, the subject turned towards the future.
“What are we going to do now, Chuck?”
Chuck’s lobster had come with drawn butter laced with sherry and he was wiping his greasy fingers on his napkin while watching a ferryboat crossing Puget Sound.
“I have no idea, Lars. What would you like to do?”
“I was thinking…I suppose you’ll laugh at me…”
“Probably. You want to buy a day care center? Open a camp for Girl Scouts? How about a talent agency for wee ones? I promise not to laugh at you.”
“You already have, Chuck. You can be very unkind to me, you know.”
“You did a good job in Vancouver, Lars, so I won’t be mad.”
“I would like to buy a farm in Minnesota, Chuck.”
Chuck snorted. He could see Lars chasing lumbering cows around a pasture with a jar of lubricant in one hand and God knows what in the other.
“A farm? A working farm?”
“Land is pretty cheap up in the northern part of the state, Chuck and I’ll bet we could get a really beautiful place up above Duluth.”
“Wicked winters there.”
“But nice springs and summers.”
“Yes, for two weeks. I knew a girl in Superior once, in the Biblical sense, and I agree that the area has its charms. Bad winters and have you ever experienced a November storm on Lake Superior?”
“I have never been on the Lake, Chuck. I get seasick. But it is really peaceful and beautiful there.”
The ferry had docked and Chuck got up and pulled the curtains across the picture windows.
“Almost no one lives up there except for Scandinavians and Poles. Nice looking people but not too bright. No offense, Lars, but your ancestors are not known for superior intellect. Looks, yes, but not brains. Still, California is full of pseudo intellectuals and I do not like California. You might have a good idea in spite of yourself. We could fly out there and rent a car for a week or so. To tell you the truth, I hate to go off and leave all our money hidden in our nice apartment. I don’t like the looks of the broad that runs the place. OK, why not go and take a look at jar head paradise?”
“We are not jar heads. I really wish you wouldn’t be so crude. Just because I didn’t go to a fancy school like you did…”
“I did not go to a fancy school. People only think I did. My cousin went to a fancy school because his father inherited all the money. Not that it did him a lot of good in the end.”
Five years before, when Chuck was managing a beachfront motel in Venice, California, he used to have his mail delivered to a post office box in a Santa Monica substation that was located in a fancy apartment complex.
One day he found himself very busy cleaning up a unit where a frustrated CPA had blown his girl friend’s head off with a shotgun before turning the weapon on himself.
Between arguing with the Guatemalan maid that she should simply pretend the mess on the walls and ceiling was pink oatmeal and answering an endless series of useless questions from a number of reporters, police detectives and hysterical tenants, he did not have the time to go to the post office.
Because he had gone there the night before, after it was closed, and found a yellow slip indicating that there was a package too large for the box, he sent a local alcoholic known only as Armpit Charlie to retrieve his package.
About an hour after the shambling derelict shuffled up the Speedway in the direction of Santa Monica, a heavy detonation shook the air, followed by a sudden exodus of all the local police.
It appeared that a bomb had exploded in a shabby cocktail bar in Venice, blowing the front and all of the customers out into the street in various stages of disintegration.
One of the fragmented drinkers was Armpit Charlie and later the next day, when Chuck went to the post office to check on his package, he discovered from a clerk that Charlie had indeed come by the day before and signed for it.
It was Chuck’s considered opinion that Charlie had taken the package into the bar and, expecting to find something of value with which he could obtain alcohol, opened it.
Nothing in the hitherto insignificant life of the fragrant wino had quite matched his leaving of it.
The clerk told Chuck that a student had been in the post office a week before trying to get a physical description of the person who had rented the box. Although this information was supposed to be confidential in nature, a female clerk had been impressed with the physical appearance of the questioner and was more than cooperative.
“I seen him,” said the clerk, “a great big guy with a blonde crew cut and a UCLA jacket. Malvina got all wet just looking at him. Are you OK buddy?”
Chuck was not. The person described was his cousin, Teddy, whom he knew was attending UCLA on an athletic scholarship.
Neither Teddy nor his father were people Chuck wanted to have any contact with due to a ferocious family feud that had been raging for a number of years.
When Chuck’s maternal grandfather had died, he had left his very large estate in a trust with his eldest son as administrator. There were pages of restrictions on the use of this trust but Chuck’s uncle had found many and devious means of circumventing his late father’s wishes. He lived and worked in Chicago where bribery of corrupt politicians had been raised to a fine art, seldom seen outside of Third World countries.
Five years after the grandfather’s death, there were only three heirs alive; the uncle, Charles, his son Edward and Chuck, originally christened as Cyril. If the latter had opened his package, there would only be two heirs to inherit what amounted to an enormous amount of money and property.
After he recovered from the shock of nearly being turned into seagull food, Chuck came to the conclusion that if he did not take steps to neutralize his cousin, there might well be another such attempt. Venice was filled with dubious characters, almost any of whom would cheerfully assassinate him for the price of a good lunch at a four star restaurant.
He had little difficulty in locating his cousin’s residence in Beverly Hills because it was in the student directory at the University. It was a very expensive condominium that Chuck discovered by searching the title was once owned by a Mexican drug dealer. It was the discovery of this fact that gave Chuck the means by which he would remove a six-foot five athlete, otherwise viewed as a stone, from his shoe.
The drug dealer had been raided by federal agents and his budding empire effectively destroyed. One of the denizens of Venice, well known to Chuck, was Angel Ortiz, a former senior player in the now-vanished powdered happiness emporium.
Ortiz, who was heavily tattooed and had the cold eyes of a lizard, frequented a Mexican cantina two blocks from Chuck’s motel and a week after the bomb outrage, the two met in the small patio in the rear of the building.
“I have heard,” Chuck said in the Mexican patios, after downing a luke-warm cervesa, “that some rich Anglo has taken over the Mendez action.”
“What have you heard?”
“I have heard that this Anglo has much money behind him and that the Federals here are using him as a front to round up the rest of the family.”
Ortiz flicked ash from his cigarette into his pant’s cuff, something he had learned in jail where smoking was prohibited.
“Who is this man?”
Chuck took out a business card from a local gym and wrote a name and address on the back.
Angel read it and put into his sock top.
“You are certain about this?”
“One of my regular guests who comes in here once, twice a week is a drug agent. He’s been trying to get me on board as a snitch but I can’t give him anything because I don’t know anything he could use. He wants me to have confidence in him and he told me yesterday about this man. I am supposed to meet with this new man and help him get into the local action here.”
“You ain’t into drugs, Bobby.”
For the time being, Chuck was Bobby.
“No and didn’t I tell Ernie when I found out about that raid last month?”
“You did do that, Bobby. We know that. I have to see someone about this. You want to pay for the beer?”
“Why not.”
Nothing was heard about this subject for three weeks and four days and then Chuck was having lunch in a small coffee shop when he picked up a copy of the ‘Times’ another customer had left on the stained table.
There was the usual front page article about the reawakening of a vibrant, new downtown Los Angeles, a hopeless project that was being sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce in a very vain attempt to stop the flight of white, middle class citizens to Arizona, Nevada, Oregon and Utah.
On the second page was an article about a juvenile actor who had been sentenced to two months at the jail farm for selling three kilos of cut heroin to a local narcotics agent. The actual sale was ten kilos of uncut heroin but by the time the police and prosecutor’s staff had taken their share, three kilos were all that was left and most of that was about forty percent milk sugar.
The actor had finished a picture about a boy who rescued a family of five from certain death by a gang of Lesbian vampires and he and the producers were now guaranteed of enough publicity to assure positive action at the box office.
On the third page was a fuzzy picture of his cousin Teddy under the caption:
“UCLA Athlete, Press Heir, Found Dead in Pool”
According to the text, one Edward Arthur Rush, 24, a student at UCLA and a member of the swimming team, had been found in a thoroughly deceased condition at the bottom of the pool at his residence in Beverly Hills. Police reported that Mr. Rush had been shot several times before his throat was cut.
Mention was made of his father, Charles Rush, who now controlled the media empire built up by his late father, Arthur.
Police believed that the murder was somehow drug-related and, as usual, arrests were expected momentarily.
Chuck thoroughly enjoyed the rest of his lunch and took the folded paper with him when he left.
There were now two heirs to the estate of Arthur Rush but not the two that his uncle had no doubt envisioned.
The newspaper did not mention, because it did not know, that at the present moment, Charles Rush was screaming with rage over the murder of his son and was offering a reward of a million dollars for the apprehension of the killers. The distraught father neglected to mention that his own nephew, Cyril, the outcast of the family, was a very viable choice as the probable killer. To discuss this with anyone might have disclosed the earlier attempt on the life of this worthless individual and questions might be asked that could not be satisfactorily answered.
A search of the late Edward Rush’s lavish rooms disclosed a considerable quantity of Simex explosive stored in a closet but the Beverly Hills police, out of courtesy to the father, decided that the killers had brought it with them for reasons not fully understood.
The bereaved father had also sent several of his employees to Los Angeles for the sole purpose of supplementing the police investigations and, he hoped, being able to collect the reward for themselves without unduly bothering the authorities.
Chuck knew nothing of this and spent the next two weeks either improving his tan on the beach that lay just outside the front of his motel or in visiting the music department of UCLA looking for old opera scores to copy. Given the atmosphere in Chicago before the recent problems, Chuck had put any thoughts of a singing career on a temporary hold.
One very hot July morning while he was wandering around the beach hoping to encounter a young lady he had met the previous day, Chuck noticed a small crowd of beach people clustered around something in the sand.
This turned out to be a human body which, from the stench, had been buried in the sand for at least a week. It was little more than a receptacle for maggots but Chuck recognized a complicated tattoo on what was left of a leg.
There was no question in his mind that the reeking remains were those of Angel Ortiz. The county pathologist’s report subsequently indicated that Ortiz had been badly beaten and then buried alive but Chuck didn’t know that for several days.
He turned to someone standing next to him, hand over his nose, and remarked that there was now another angel in heaven.
Immediately after this, he packed his suitcases and left Venice as quickly as he could. He reasoned that someone had killed Angel because of what he knew. Or perhaps because of a drug deal gone bad although the usual method of adjusting such business arguments was simply to shoot the offending party wherever he was found.
Chuck changed his papers again, this time using the name of his recently deceased other cousin, and quickly found work in the Brentwood shop of Estelle and Art where he soon became their top salesman.
Several months later, Chuck saw an article in the newspaper that the new manager of his old motel had been found bludgeoned to death in his office. This could have been a robbery but Chuck had his doubts and no longer visited the music department at UCLA nor did he ever go to the Santa Monica beach again.
(Continued)
This is also an e-book, available from Amazon: