- World's First All-Electric Passenger Plane Unveiled At Paris Airshow
An Israeli startup called Eviation Aircraft unveiled the world’s first commercial all-electric passenger plane last week at the Paris Airshow, reported GeekWire.
Called Alice, the all-electric plane is powered by three rear-facing pusher-propellers, one in the back and two at the wingtips that rotate.
Eviation CEO Omer Bar-Yohay told reporters that the plane seats nine passengers and can travel 276mph at 10,000ft altitude over the distance of about 650 miles. Flight testing is expected in the near term at Moses Lake’s airport in partnership with Seattle-based AeroTEC. The plane is scheduled to enter service by 2022, could transform small distance travel across America.
“This plane looks like this not because we wanted to build a cool plane, but because it is electric,” said Bar-Yohay.
“You build a craft around your propulsion system. Electric means we can have lightweight motors; it allows us to open up the design space.”
Eviation logged its first orders this year from regional airline Cape Air, which runs a fleet of 90 aircraft. Retail price is $4 million per plane, Bar-Yohay said.
He said the new electric plane is being “built the way a plane should be built in the 21st century.”
Clermont Group, a private investment fund of Singapore-based billionaire Richard Chandler, has been the top funder of Eviation since inception. Clermont has given Eviation $76 million in exchange for a 70% stake, according to the latest SEC filing dating January 3.
In a memo, Chandler told his staff that commercial electric planes would “change the culture of air travel for future generations,” and that the aerospace industry is about to enter a new golden era.
“45% of all flights are under 500 miles – approximately the distance from London to Zurich, or New York to Detroit. This puts almost half of all global flights within the range of an electric motor.”
Clermont has also invested millions of dollars into magniX, the firm that manufactures the plane’s electric motors. Bar-Yohay claimed if there was an air-emergency, the aircraft could fly on two engines.
Bar-Yohay said, “This is an exciting accomplishment…especially here on the grounds in Paris, but it’s also very clearly just the beginning.”
If Alice passes upcoming flight tests and goes into production; it could enter service by 2022. By the mid-2020s, the plane could completely revolutionize small distance travel.
- Meotti: The Suicide Of France
Authored by Giulio Meotti via The Gatestone Institute,
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“Frenchness” is disappearing and being replaced by a kind balkanization of enclaves not communicating with one another…. this is not a good recipe.
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The more the French élites with their disposable incomes and cultural leisure cloister themselves in their enclaves, the less likely it is that they will understand the everyday impact of failed mass immigration and multiculturalism.
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The globalized, “bobo-ized [bourgeois Bohemian] upper classes” are filling the “new citadels” — as in Medieval France — and are voting en masse for Macron. They have developed “a single way of talking and thinking… that allows the dominant classes to substitute for the reality of a nation subject to severe stress and strain the fable of a kind and welcoming society.” — Christophe Guilluy, Twilight of the Elites,Yale University Press, 2019.
“Regarding France in 2019, it can no longer be denied that a momentous and hazardous transformation, a ‘Great Switch’, is in the making”, observed the founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, Michel Gurfinkiel. He was mourning “the passing of France as a distinct country, or at least as the Western, Judeo-Christian nation it had hitherto been presumed to be”. A recent cover story in the weekly Le Point called it “the great upheaval“.
Switch or upheaval, the days of France as we knew it are numbered: the society has lost its cultural center of gravity: the old way of life is fading and close to “extinction“. “Frenchness” is disappearing and being replaced by a kind balkanization of enclaves not communicating with one another. For the country most affected by Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, this is not a good recipe.
The French switch is also becoming geographical. France now appears split between “ghettos for the rich” and “ghettos for the poor”, according to an analysis of the electoral map by France’s largest newspaper, Le Monde. “In the poorest sector, 6 out of 10 newly settled households have a person born abroad”, notes Le Monde. A kind of abyss now separates peripheral France — small towns, suburbs and rural areas – from the globalized metropolis of the “bourgeois Bohemians”, or “bobos”. The more the French élites with their disposable incomes and cultural leisure cloister themselves in their enclaves, the less likely it is that they will understand the everyday impact of failed mass immigration and multiculturalism.
A recent European poll reflected these “two Frances that do not cross or speak to each other”, observed Sylvain Crepon of the University of Tours, in analyzing the success of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party in the recent European Parliament election. Le Pen and President Emmanuel Macron, the two winners in the election, speak to completely different sociological groups. In the Paris suburbs — Aulnay-sous-Bois, Sevran, Villepinte and Seine-Saint-Denis — the far-right National Rally has been experiencing a boom. In the cities, Le Pen is largely behind: she came fifth in Paris, third in Lille, fourth in Lyon. According to Crepon:
“[T]hese cities will be protected from the National Rally’s vote by their sociological structuring. It gives credit to the populist talk that diagnoses a disconnected elite. This [view] backs the idea of a sociological break, which is not completely wrong”.
On one side of this break are towns such as Dreux, which Valeurs Actuelles called“the city that prefigures the France of tomorrow”:
“On one side, a royal city with the vestige of a history believing that all things are being changed [millenarian]; on the other, cities imbued with [drug] trafficking and Islam. The bourgeois of the city center vote for Macron, the ‘small whites’ for Le Pen”.
On the other side, is Paris. “All the metropolises of the world know the same fate. This is where wealth flows and where the alliance between the ‘winners of globalization’ and their ‘servants’, immigrants who have come to serve the new masters of the world, keep their children, bring their pizzas or work in their restaurants”, writes the distinguished social commentator Èric Zemmour in Le Figaro. From now on, he writes, “Paris is a global city, not really a French city”.
The globalized, “bobo-ized [bourgeois Bohemian] upper classes”, according to one of France’s most respected authors. Christophe Guilluy, are filling the “new citadels” — as in Medieval France — and are voting en masse for Macron. They have developed “a single way of talking and thinking… that allows the dominant classes to substitute for the reality of a nation subject to severe stress and strain the fable of a kind and welcoming society”. Guilluy has been criticized by some French media for addressing this reality.
The recent “yellow vests” movement — whose demonstrators have been protesting every Saturday in Paris, for months, against President Macron’s reforms — is a symbol of this division between the working class and the gentrified progressives.
Pictured: “Yellow vests” protestors occupy the steps leading to the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur on March 23, 2019 in Paris, France.
According to Guilluy, it is a “social and cultural shock“. This shock, according to the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, consists of the “ugliness of peripheral France and its effects on concrete lives, the sadness of these working classes who have lost not only a standard of living but also a cultural referent”. In France, there is now a pervasive sense of “dispossession“.
Marine Le Pen’s party won more than twice as many electoral department as Macron. Le Pen won in the depressed and deindustrialized areas of northern, south-central and eastern France that spawned the yellow vests.
“Since moving to France in 2002, I’ve watched the country complete a cultural revolution”, Simon Kuper recently wrote in the Financial Times.
“Catholicism has almost died out (only 6 per cent of French people now habitually attend mass), though not as thoroughly as its longtime rival ‘church’, communism. The non-white population has kept growing”.
Macron, Kuper explains, is the symbol of “a new individualised, globalised, irreligious society”.
France’s flight from Catholicism is so evident that a new book, L’archipel français: Naissance d’une nation multiple et divisée, by the pollster Jerôme Fourquet, has described the cultural failing of the French society as a “post-Christian era“: French society’s displacement from its Catholic matrix has become almost total. The country, Fourquet states, is now implementing its own de-Christianization. And there is only one strong substitute at the horizon. There are today already, according to a new academic study, as many Muslims as Catholics among 18-29 year-olds in France; and Muslims represent 13% of the population of France’s large cities, more than double the national average.
Sometimes Muslim feelings of community solidarity appear to have been taking advantage of this fragmentation by creating their own “ghettos of sharia“. A report from Institut Montaigne, “The Islamist Factory“, has detailed the radicalization of the French Muslim society. Instead of integration, assimilation and Europeanization, Muslim extremists in France are pursuing multiculturalism, separation and partition. The enclaves of immigrants at the edges of French cities, posits Gilles Kepel in his book, La Fracture, foment “a rupture in values with French society, and a will to subvert it”. “People do not want to live together”, said France’s former Interior Minister, Gérard Collomb, in comments reported by Valeurs Actuelles.
This “fracture” was noted again in the same publication: “Four out of ten boys in Seine-Saint-Denis have Arab-Muslim first names”. Pollster Jérôme Fourquet revealed in a new study that “18 percent of newborn babies in France have an Arab-Muslim name”.
France’s “Great Switch” is underway. As the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut recently wrote, “The Notre-Dame fire is neither an attack nor an accident, but a suicide attempt.”
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- Escobar: One Quadrillion Reasons Why Washington Fears Iran's "Maximum Counter-Pressure"
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Sooner or later the US “maximum pressure” on Iran would inevitably be met by “maximum counter-pressure”. Sparks are ominously bound to fly…
For the past few days, intelligence circles across Eurasia had been prodding Tehran to consider a quite straightforward scenario. There would be no need to shut down the Strait of Hormuz if Quds Force commander, General Qasem Soleimani, the ultimate Pentagon bête noire, explained in detail, on global media, that Washington simply does not have the military capacity to keep the Strait open.
As I previously reported, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz would destroy the American economy by detonating the $1.2 quadrillion derivatives market; and that would collapse the world banking system, crushing the world’s $80 trillion GDP and causing an unprecedented depression.
Soleimani should also state bluntly that Iran may in fact shut down the Strait of Hormuz if the nation is prevented from exporting essential two million barrels of oil a day, mostly to Asia. Exports, which before illegal US sanctions and de facto blockade would normally reach 2.5 million barrels a day, now may be down to only 400,000.
Soleimani’s intervention would align with consistent signs already coming from the IRGC. The Persian Gulf is being described as an imminent “shooting gallery.” Brigadier General Hossein Salami stressed that Iran’s ballistic missiles are capable of hitting “carriers in the sea” with pinpoint precision. The whole northern border of the Persian Gulf, on Iranian territory, is lined up with anti-ship missiles – as I confirmed with IRGC-related sources.
We’ll let you know when it’s closed
Then, it happened.
Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Major General Mohammad Baqeri, went straight to the point; “If the Islamic Republic of Iran were determined to prevent export of oil from the Persian Gulf, that determination would be realized in full and announced in public, in view of the power of the country and its Armed Forces.”
The facts are stark. Tehran simply won’t accept all-out economic war lying down – prevented to export the oil that protects its economic survival. The Strait of Hormuz question has been officially addressed. Now it’s time for the derivatives.
Presenting detailed derivatives analysis plus military analysis to global media would force the media pack, mostly Western, to go to Warren Buffett to see if it is true. And it is true. Soleimani, according to this scenario, should say as much and recommend that the media go talk to Warren Buffett.
The extent of a possible derivatives crisis is an uber-taboo theme for the Washington consensus institutions. According to one of my American banking sources, the most accurate figure – $1.2 quadrillion – comes from a Swiss banker, off the record. He should know; the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) – the central bank of central banks – is in Basle.
The key point is it doesn’t matter how the Strait of Hormuz is blocked.
It could be a false flag. Or it could be because the Iranian government feels it’s going to be attacked and then sinks a cargo ship or two. What matters is the final result; any blocking of the energy flow will lead the price of oil to reach $200 a barrel, $500 or even, according to some Goldman Sachs projections, $1,000.
Another US banking source explains:
“The key in the analysis is what is called notional. They are so far out of the money that they are said to mean nothing. But in a crisis the notional can become real. For example, if I buy a call for a million barrels of oil at $300 a barrel, my cost will not be very great as it is thought to be inconceivable that the price will go that high. That is notional. But if the Strait is closed, that can become a stupendous figure.”
BIS will only commit, officially, to indicate the total notional amount outstanding for contracts in derivatives markers is an estimated $542.4 trillion. But this is just an estimate.
The banking source adds, “Even here it is the notional that has meaning. Huge amounts are interest rate derivatives. Most are notional but if oil goes to a thousand dollars a barrel, then this will affect interest rates if 45% of the world’s GDP is oil. This is what is called in business a contingent liability.”
Goldman Sachs has projected a feasible, possible $1,000 a barrel a few weeks after the Strait of Hormuz being shut down. This figure, times 100 million barrels of oil produced per day, leads us to 45% of the $80 trillion global GDP. It’s self-evident the world economy would collapse based on just that alone.
War dogs barking mad
As much as 30% of the world’s oil supply transits the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Wily Persian Gulf traders – who know better – are virtually unanimous; if Tehran was really responsible for the Gulf of Oman tanker incident, oil prices would be going through the roof by now. They aren’t.
Iran’s territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz amount to 12 nautical miles (22 km). Since 1959, Iran recognizes only non-military naval transit.
Since 1972, Oman’s territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz also amount to 12 nautical miles. At its narrowest, the width of the Strait is 21 nautical miles (39 km). That means, crucially, that half of the Strait of Hormuz is in Iranian territorial waters, and the other half in Oman’s. There are no “international waters”.
And that adds to Tehran now openly saying that Iran may decide to close the Strait of Hormuz publicly – and not by stealth.
Iran’s indirect, asymmetric warfare response to any US adventure will be very painful. Prof. Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran once again reconfirmed, “even a limited strike will be met by a major and disproportionate response.” And that means gloves off, big time; anything from really blowing up tankers to, in Marandi’s words, “Saudi and UAE oil facilities in flames”.
Hezbollah will launch tens of thousands of missiles against Israel. As Hezbollah’s secretary-general Hasan Nasrallah has been stressing in his speeches, “war on Iran will not remain within that country’s borders, rather it will mean that the entire [Middle East] region will be set ablaze. All of the American forces and interests in the region will be wiped out, and with them the conspirators, first among them Israel and the Saudi ruling family.”
It’s quite enlightening to pay close attention to what this Israel intel op is saying. The dogs of war though are barking mad.
Earlier this week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo jetted to CENTCOM in Tampa to discuss “regional security concerns and ongoing operations” with – skeptical – generals, a euphemism for “maxim pressure” eventually leading to war on Iran.
Iranian diplomacy, discreetly, has already informed the EU – and the Swiss – about their ability to crash the entire world economy. But still that was not enough to remove US sanctions.
War zone in effect
As it stands in Trumpland, former CIA Mike “We lied, We cheated, We stole” Pompeo – America’s “top diplomat” – is virtually running the Pentagon. “Acting” secretary Shanahan performed self-immolation. Pompeo continues to actively sell the notion the “intelligence community is convinced” Iran is responsible for the Gulf of Oman tanker incident. Washington is ablaze with rumors of an ominous double bill in the near future; Pompeo as head of the Pentagon and Psycho John Bolton as Secretary of State. That would spell out War.
Yet even before sparks start to fly, Iran could declare that the Persian Gulf is in a state of war; declare that the Strait of Hormuz is a war zone; and then ban all “hostile” military and civilian traffic in its half of the Strait. Without firing a single shot, no shipping company on the planet would have oil tankers transiting the Persian Gulf.
- Oregon Militias Threaten Violence Over GOP Carbon Credit Standoff; Capitol Closed For Safety
Oregon militias have reportedly threatened violence over an ongoing standoff between GOP and Democratic state legislators over climate change legislation, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“The State Police Superintendent just informed the Senate president of a credible threat from militia groups coming to the Capitol tomorrow,” reads a text message sent out to senators on Friday. “The Superintendent strongly recommends that no one come to the Capitol.”
It is unclear what the threats were, as the state’s Democratic leadership did not provide evidence of their claim.
On Saturday, Oregon State Police said that they were monitoring threats and that they were closing the building.
“The safety of legislators, staff and citizen visitors could be compromised if certain threatened behaviors were realized,” said state police captain Tim Fox.
On Thursday, the Three Percenters, a group that joined the armed takeover in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016, said it would do whatever was necessary to keep the Republican senators safe. The Republicans said they wouldn’t accept the group’s help. –Wall Street Journal
What began as a disagreement over a cap-and-trade bill that exacerbated a growing divide between city-dwelling Oregon liberals and their conservative rural counterparts erupted into a full-fledged standoff after eleven GOP senators banded together and are refusing to show up for the vote.
Despite holding an 18 to 12 supermajority in the House and Senate, Democrats cannot approve the bill without at least two Republicans present. After several days of heated debate between the two sides, eleven GOP members mutually agreed to boycott the vote.
The bill, HB 2020, would make Oregon the second state in the country to set up a cap-and-trade system for all sectors of the economy. California was the first, after passing a similar bill in 2016.
Democrats had scheduled a vote on the bill Thursday, but all 11 Republican senators fled the state. At least 20 senators must be present for a quorum, so Democrats need at least two Republicans present to hold a vote. –Wall Street Journal
After Governor Brown (D) authorized state police to hunt down and wrangle the absentee GOP lawmakers, Sen. Brian Boquist (R) said he was prepared for a bloody standoff if state troopers show up – warning “Send bachelors, and come heavily armed; I’m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon, it’s just that simple.”
Oregon state senator @BrianBoquistGOP said if R’s walk out to stop a vote on Cap and Trade and @OregonGovBrown sends state police to bring him back, they should be single and well armed. Your take? pic.twitter.com/Fcu8NXXl8h
— Pat Dooris (@PatDooris) June 19, 2019
The eleven senators are also being hit with a $500 daily fine for each day they refuse to show up for the vote. They say they won’t come back until Democrats agree to major changes in the bill, which they have argued would cripple manufacturing and other industries in the state.
“This bill needs to be referred to the voters” due to its profound impact on Oregon’s economy, said Republican senate leader Sen. Herman Baertschiger Jr., speaking by phone from outside the state.
Sen. Michael Dembrow, one of the Democratic architects of the bill, said manufacturers had already been given major exemptions under the bill and that Republicans were only stalling to kill the bill. Voters could still gather signatures for a ballot measure to repeal the bill, he said, but unlike with a referendum, work on it could proceed in the meantime.
He said the Democrats’ resolve had been strengthened by the Republicans’ flight from the state. “The last thing we can do is make this kind of behavior the norm, because then it’ll happen every session,” Mr. Dembrow said. –Wall Street Journal
Democratic legislators say they will return to the Senate floor Sunday whether or not Republicans had returned.
- Dead On Arrival: A Brief Post-Mortem On The US' Regime-Change Operation In Venezuela
Authored by Joaquin Flores via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
They say hindsight is 20/20, and nothing exemplifies that more than the kind of post-mortem that can be done on the failed attempt by the US to overthrow the government of Venezuela. Working through the lack of options that the US has in terms of regime-change in Venezuela, should lead towards a higher degree of investor confidence in the Bolivarian Republic.
We understand that there are ultimately only three ways to attack a target state until it collapses:
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Supporting an internal coup/revolution or terrorism;
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Economic embargo perhaps leading to or justified by 1, and;
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Military invasion justified by the government’s reaction to 1
Then we can see that US has failed in the first two. While the US does appear on the rhetorical level to be willing to embargo the rest of planet earth, they would have to effectively do so in order to embargo Venezuela. By promoting globalization as a virtue, at the institutional level, and not simply recognizing it with problems and all as an inherent component of market economies, the US has withered its own ability to control other civilizations and states in the world’s growing multipolar system.
While the US can place sanctions on Venezuela, and get some countries to even go along with these sanctions, it only improves or strengthens the role and power of those middle-man countries like China which act as ‘value transactors’ of Venezuelan commodities into the global economy. Because it is impossible to ‘cut’ China out of the global economy, it is impossible to cut Venezuela out as well. Given how much China is invested into Venezuela’s economy, as the Wall Street Journal notes, there’s little chance that will change either.
Despite an effort to unseat the democratically elected PSUV government, we were offered some keen insights into the US’s own self-realization regarding their failed process, and publicly so by Pompeo himself.
The level of honesty coming from the Trump administration in the US is refreshing even as it is only half the truth. When we read that Pompeo has explained that the Venezuelan opposition is ‘divided’, this is of course nothing other than good news for those concerned with regional stability, economic development, and a de-escalation of tensions that can lead towards war and instability.
It is also tremendously true, even if Pompeo doesn’t really explain why it’s the case, at least not entirely. But the facticity of the claim in itself reveals that there can be no US sponsored ‘internal regime change’ in Venezuela. Both the governments of Brazil and Colombia – close US allies under their present administrations – have ruled out any sort of military intervention into Venezuela.
Pompeo’s Confession
In comments published by the Washington Post, from an audio recording, it was reported then that Pompeo admitted that:
“We were trying to support various religious institutions so that the opposition would unite,” Pompeo remarked, going on to explain that “they [the opposition] remain divided on how to confront the Maduro regime.”
This admission came on the heels of the recorded statement to the WP, where he previously explained:
“Our dilemma, which is to keep the (Venezuelan) opposition together, has turned out to be tremendously difficult,”
He continued, saying that:
“At the moment when (Nicolás) Maduro leaves, everyone will raise their hands and say: ‘Choose me, I’m the next president of Venezuela.’”
Subsequent to that comment, he would explain that an excess of 40 different Venezuelan opposition politicians have come forward expressing their view that as Guaido is but a transitional figure, that they ought to be ‘selected’ by the US to win an actual (i.e. staged) election. This would be, ideally for them, an election that comes on the heels of an absolute restructuring of the security apparatus of Venezuela. The idea would be to ensure the marginalization of the PSUV forces from the electoral process, a ‘counter-revolution’ of sorts. The staged elections involving various opposition parties and leaders would be an afterthought in all reality. And still, there is no consensus among this opposition on who should lead.
Pompeo expressed tremendous exasperation with this state of affairs, commenting that his realization of the problem isn’t one that came about recently, but is one in fact he was aware of since he began his work in the Trump administration with the CIA. To that point he stressed that these are problems which not only manifested themselves in “public during these last months, but since the day I became director of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), this was something that He was at the center of what President Trump was trying to do. ”
That’s to say, Pompeo understood this problem all along. The whole project was dead on arrival.
There is no military option
Given that Venezuela can’t really be effectively more embargoed than it presently is, the US is left with one option remaining. Yes, that leaves military options, nominally on the table in terms of US pressure tactics and techniques. But the reality is that these are something much less tangible than the US has historically relied upon. A lot of this has to do with the general decline of the US military in comparative terms. While the US maintains something approximating its military capacity in absolute terms, compared to a decade or two ago, it has not managed to maintain that in relative or comparative terms. The ‘gap’ between the U.S and other rising powers, military speaking – and this reflects economic changes as well – has become smaller. Even the Washington Post, as well as other mainstream US billionaire blogs, has admitted as much.
The fact of Venezuela’s anti-air capabilities in the form of the S-300 system are enough to bring unacceptable levels of material and human loss to the US air forces (Navy/Marine, Army, etc.). These could potentially bring the number of downed US fighters to many dozens in the first hours, of the first sortie. The loss of prestige alongside the scores of Cindy Sheehans this would produce, makes the venture a non-starter from go.
So this leaves the US in something of a conundrum. It has indeed brought Venezuela to the near point of collapse over the course of recent years, creating an economic catastrophe through a combination of sanctions and the manipulation of oil prices. But it failed to push it over the edge, and its thanks to a growing and new international consensus that this was the case.
Venezuelan leadership for its part has admitted also that there are a number of measures and policies that ought to have been in place, long term economic measure in terms of diversifying the economy that would have helped to off-set the worst of the damage done by the manipulated attack on Venezuela’s economy. We’ll recall that Russia experienced similar, based in the same manipulation of oil prices, leading to a temporary ‘shock’ to the Ruble, which plummeted in value relative to the Dollar overnight, stoking a major crisis between June and December of 2014. Russia was in a better position to manage this, and though without hiccups, has managed to avoid the sorts of repercussions that Venezuela has faced.
Strong reasons for optimism and the coming bullish trend
The inability of the US to move further against Venezuela’s economy has only given Caracas time, and organization, to work around them. These work-around measures by Venezuela can improve, but the distance between the economic attacks from the US, and the operationalizing of Guiado in a coup gambit, was too great for the US to use them in combination in an effective way.
It’s worth noting also that the general ‘game plan’ of the US has been effectively written about, expounded publicly, and absorbed by private intelligence agencies and government networks alike. The science and art of regime change has given rise to the science and art of the counter-coup.
When we understand that there is no really viable military option, Caracas knows that it is bracing for further acts of terrorism and sabotage on its critical infrastructure. International help in combatting such state-sponsored terrorism, as reported by Venezuelan state news agency TeleSur has already been had, however, and so we can expect that we will see how effective this has been through the lack of much materializing in this direction.
Taken all together, the essentials for a rebounded Venezuelan economy are in place. Investor confidence and the assurances to Spanish, and therefore by extension German, banking interests operating without the US as a middle-man in Latin America, are well-founded and lead towards a bullish trend.
As a post-mortem on the US’s failed regime change operation in Venezuela, it is an excellent case study in how the international community can properly deal with and respond to the often irrational and potentially destabilizing actions of former global hegemons when in a state of decline. As far as Venezuela is concerned, it’s an excellent case study in sovereignty in the 21st century, despite a west-centric socio-economic focus on globalization.
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- Black, Latino Enrolment In US Colleges Is Almost Double What It Would Be On "Merit" Alone
Researchers wondered what the nation’s most selective colleges and universities would look like if they admitted students solely on the basis of SAT scores.
Their answer: Campuses would be wealthier, whiter, and more male.
Horror of horrors, we know, but there’s no arguing with the data from the Georgetown Universitry study. As The Wall Street Journal reports, rather shockingly to many, more than half the students now enrolled at the top 200 colleges and universities would lose their seats to students who performed better on the SAT.
The result, as the chart below shows, is that black and Latino students, would be worst-affected with enrolments cut nearly in half, to 11% of all students from 19%.
The share of Asian students would slip to 10% from 11%. The principal winners were wealthy white male students, whose ranks would increase. But a large number of white students would lose their seats and be replaced with other white students.
“The SAT does not and should not measure excellence on its own. Data are overwhelming that grades and test scores together better predict college success than either does alone,” a spokesman for The College Board said in a statement.
“Comprehensive research demonstrates that sustained commitment to an activity in high school outside of class further predicts success in college and beyond. Resourcefulness in response to challenges has long been honored in college admissions as a dimension of merit and success in life. A focus on a single score would leave so much talent unseen.”
So black and Latino college enrolment is almost twice what it would be based on “merit” alone, and this is before The College Board introduces its so-called “adversity score” to accompany a student’s SAT results.
All of which has us wondering, how long before well-off, so-called ‘advantaged’ families start moving into poor lower-class neighborhoods for just long enough to benefit from the adversity score… making it even easier to game the system for the wealthy? (Easier than paying off cheats to take SATs or bribing soccer and crew teams for entry).
Jeremy Frost summed this farce up best:
“Education by its nature is supposed to be elitist, the better you preform the greater your opportunities. This is just madness, it undermines the entire point of selective admission to institutions of higher education.”
This unbelievable factor in the college admission process discriminates against hard-work and true academic achievement when America, as a nation, is rapidly sliding down the global scale of intelligence as it is.
As The Council of Foreign Relations detailed, among people ages 55 to 64, Americans rank first in the percentage who’ve earned high school degrees and third in those who’ve earned college and graduate degrees. But Americans ages 25 to 34 only rank 10th in the world in high school diplomas, and they’ve dropped to 13th in attaining post-secondary degrees.
U.S. vs. Global Education Attainment Rankings by Age
It’s not that 25-to-34-year-olds are less educated than boomers: 88 percent of them earned high school diplomas, compared with 90 percent of boomers, and they actually managed a tiny edge – 42 percent to 41 percent – in post-secondary degrees. The real problem is that they’re slipping in relation to their global counterparts.
Paradoxically, younger Americans are entering college at a higher rate – 70 percent – than the boomer generation managed. In 1970, only 48.4 percent of high school graduates went on to higher education, according to a study published in 2010 in the American Journal of Applied Economics. But that edge is negated, because fewer than half of today’s students manage to stay in school and earn degrees, a slightly lower completion rate than boomers.
Finally, one wonders if the graduation rate is going to be monitored between the high and low student’s adversity scores? If not, why not? It would seem that without such information no valid evaluation of the program can be made. And as Mark Soane concludes:
“The SAT was the last bastion of objective measurement in the sea of subjectivity that makes up a college application. It is profoundly disappointing to see that the SAT is now subject to the same identity politics bias that everything else is in college admissions. The SAT and the ACT were the best predictors of college preparedness.
If you debase the results, you will get one or all of the following: higher dropout rates; debased teaching standards, resentment and distrust among students.”
Lawsuits charging unfair admission practices have also been filed against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California system.
How do we look our kids in the eyes, urge them to work their hardest, study endlessly, never stop trying because that’s what counts in America… and then apologize for reducing their chance of making it to their dream school by daring to live in a low-crime, low-poverty, high-cost, two-parent home.
- The Lessons Of Rome: Our Neofeudal Oligarchy
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Our society has a legal structure of self-rule and ownership of capital, but in reality it is a Neofeudal Oligarchy.
The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 is not an easy, breezy read; its length and detail are daunting.
The effort is well worth it, as the book helps us understand how the power structures of societies change over time in ways that may be largely invisible to those living through the changes.
The Inheritance of Rome focuses on the lasting influence of Rome’s centralized social and political structures even as centralized economic power and trade routes dissolved.
This legacy of centralized power and loyalty to a central authority manifested 324 years after the end of the Western Roman Empire circa 476 A.D. in Charlemagne, who united much of western Europe as the head of the Holy Roman Empire. (Recall that the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire endured another 1,000 years until 1453 A.D.)
But thereafter, the social and political strands tying far-flung villages and fiefdoms to a central authority frayed and were replaced by a decentralized feudalism in which peasants were largely stripped of the right to own land and became the chattel of independent nobles.
In this disintegrative phase, the central authority invested in the monarchy of kings and queens was weak to non-existent.
In the long sweep of history, it took several hundred years beyond 1000 A.D. for central authority to re-assert itself in the form of monarchy, and several hundred additional years for the rights of commoners to be established.
Indeed, it can be argued that it was not until the 1600s and 1700s–and only in the northern European strongholds of commoners’ rights, The Netherlands and England–that the rights of ownership and political influence enjoyed by commoners in the Roman Empire were matched.
It can even be argued that the rights of Roman citizenship granted to every resident of the late Empire were only matched in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The rights of commoners were slowly chipped away by civil authorities and transferred to the feudal nobility. As the book explains, these rights included limited self-rule within village councils and ownership of land. These rights were extinguished by feudalism.
The connections between these civil society/legal freedoms (of self-rule and ownership of land/capital), the Protestant Reformation and the birth of modern Capitalism are explained by historian Fernand Braudel’s masterful 3-volume history Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, a series I have long recommended:
The Structures of Everyday Life (Volume 1) The Wheels of Commerce (Volume 2) The Perspective of the World (Volume 3)
The self-reinforcing dynamics of religious, civil and economic freedoms are key to understanding the transition from feudalism/monarchy to the world systems of today, in which some form of self-rule or political influence and economic freedom are expected of every civil authority.
Let’s fast-forward to today and ask what relevance these histories have in the present era.
There are two points worth discussing. One is the acceleration of change; what took 300 years now takes 30, or perhaps less.
The second is the slow erosion of commoners’ self-rule and ownership of meaningful, productive capital.
This gradual, almost imperceptible erosion is what I call neofeudalism, a process of transferring political and economic power from commoners to a new Financial Aristocracy/Nobility.
If we examine the “wealth” of the middle class/working class (however you define them, the defining characteristic of both is the reliance on labor for income, as opposed to living off the income earned by capital), we find the primary capital asset is the family home, which as I have explained many times, is unproductive–in essence, a form of consumption rather than a source of income.
Ultimately, all pensions, public and private, are controlled by central authorities, even though “ownership” is nominally held by commoners. (Ask middle class Venezuelans what their pensions are worth once central authorities debauch the nation’s currency.)
In a globalized, financialized economy, the only capital worth owning is mobile capital, capital that can be shifted by a keystroke to avoid devaluation or earn a a higher return.
Housing and pensions are “stranded capital,” forms of capital that are not mobile unless they are liquidated before crises or expropriations occur.
I am also struck by the ever-rising barriers to starting or even operating small businesses, a core form of capital, as enterprises generate income and (potentially) capital gains.
The capital and managerial expertise required to launch and grow a legal enterprise is extraordinarily high, which is at least partly why a nation of self-employed farmers, shopkeepers, artisans and traders is now a nation of employees of government and large corporations.
What sort of capital can be acquired by the average commoner now? Enough to match the wealth and political power of financial Nobility? This is the source of our fascination with tech millionaires and billionaires: a few commoners have leveraged technology to join the Nobility.
As for political influence: a recent study found that voters had very little power in the U.S., which is effectively an oligarchy: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.
Summary: “The U.S. government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country’s citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern universities has concluded.”
Neofeudalism is not a re-run of feudalism. It’s a new and improved, state-corporate version of indentured servitude. The process of devolving from central political power to feudalism required the erosion of peasants’ rights to own productive assets, which in an agrarian economy meant ownership of land.
Ownership of land was replaced with various obligations to the local feudal lord or monastery– free labor for time periods ranging from a few days to months; a share of one’s grain harvest, and so on.
The other key dynamic of feudalism was the removal of the peasantry from the public sphere. In the pre-feudal era (for example, the reign of Charlemagne), peasants could still attend public councils and make their voices heard, and there was a rough system of justice in which peasants could petition authorities for redress.
From the capitalist perspective, feudalism restricted serfs’ access to cash markets where they could sell their labor or harvests. The key feature of capitalism isn’t just markets– it’s unrestricted ownership of productive assets–land, tools, workshops, and the social capital of skills, networks, trading associations, guilds, etc.
Our system is Neofeudal because the non-elites have no real voice in the public sphere, and ownership of productive capital is indirectly suppressed by the state-corporate duopoly.
Our society has a legal structure of self-rule and ownership of capital, but in reality it is a Neofeudal Oligarchy.
* * *
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- Maher: Democrats Screwed If They Run On 'Reparations And Concentration Camps' In 2020
Establishment comedian Bill Maher warned that if 2020 Democrats run “a campaign based on reparations and concentration camps” it will be “very hard to win the election” against President Trump.
Maher was responding last week’s latest outrage when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called migrant detention facilities to “concentration camps,” a remark she has doubled and tripled-down on despite receiving considerable backlash from Jewish groups and others over the comparison.
While conservative political consultant Liz Mair tried to argue that Democrats can win the argument without invoking Nazi Germany, liberal guests Thom Hartmann and Dan Savage disagreed, with Savage arguing “the use of the term concentration camp has caused people to debate what is actually going on.” Mair replied “that was already happening,” to which a triggered Savage spat back “these are fucking concentration camps.“
Maher pushed back.
“Come on, when we think of concentration camps, I think of mass graves, I think of experimenting on human people.”
“If you want to run a campaign based on reparations and concentration camps, then it’s going to be very hard to win the election, I’m not saying you can’t do it, I’m not saying you can’t do it, but very hard to argue that this is helping,” said Maher.
- New Theory Suggests We Live In A Gigantic Higher Dimensional Black Hole
Authored by Jake Anderson via The Mind Unleashed blog,
New research into black holes has accelerated in recent years, producing some outlandish – though mind boggling – ideas. The newest theoryadvanced by researchers may take the cake in this regard.
A team of astrophysicists at Canada’s University of Waterloo have put forth a theory suggesting that our universe exists inside the event horizon of a massive higher dimensional black hole nested within a larger mother universe.
Perhaps even more strangely, scientists say this radical proposition is consistent with astronomical and cosmological observations and that theoretically, such a reality could inch us closer to the long-awaited theory of “quantum gravity.”
The research team at Waterloo used laws from string theory to imagine a lower-dimensional universe marooned inside the membrane of a higher dimensional one.
Lead researcher Robert Mann said:
”The basic idea was that maybe the singularity of the universe is like the singularity at the centre of a black hole. The idea was in some sense motivated by trying to unify the notion of singularity, or what is incompleteness in general relativity between black holes and cosmology. And so out of that came the idea that the Big Bang would be analogous to the formation of a black hole, but kind of in reverse.”
The research was based on the previous work of professor Niayesh Afshordi, though he is hardly the only scientist who has looked into the possibility of a black hole singularity birthing a universe.
Nikodem Poplawski of the University of New Haven imagines the seed of the universe like the seed of a plant – a core of fundamental information compressed inside of a shell that shields it from the outside world. Poplawski says this is essentially what a black hole is, a protective shell around a black hole singularity ravaged by extreme tidal forces creating a kind of torsion mechanism.
Compressed tightly enough – as scientists imagine is the case at the singularity of a black hole, which may break down the known laws of physics – the torsion could produce a spring-loaded effect comparable to a jack-in-the-box. The subsequent “big bounce” may have been our Big Bang, which took place inside the collapsed remnants of a five-dimensional star.
Poplawski also suggested that black holes could be portals connecting universes. Each black hole, he says, could be a “one-way door” to another universe, or perhaps the multiverse.
Regardless of whether or not this provocative theory is true, scientists increasingly believe that black holes could be the key to understanding many of the most vexing mysteries in the universe, including the Big Bang, inflation, and dark energy. Physicists also believe black holes could help bridge the divide between quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity.
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