• America's Global Financial War Strategy Is Escalating

  Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

  Cyber Wars And All That…

  Behind the Huawei story, we must not forget there is a wider financial war being waged by America against China and Russia. Stories about China’s banks being short of dollars are incorrect: the shortage is of inward capital flows to support the US Government’s budget deficit. By attracting those global portfolio flows instead, China’s Belt and Road Initiative threatens US Government finances, so the financial war and associated disinformation can be expected to escalate. Hong Kong is likely to be in the firing line, due to its role in providing China with access to international finance.

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  Introduction

  Huawei is hitting the headlines. From ordering the arrest of its Chief Financial Officer in Vancouver last December to the latest efforts to dissuade its allies from adopting Huawei’s 5G mobile technology, it has been a classic deep state operation by the Americans. Admittedly, the Chinese have left themselves open to attack by introducing a loosely-drafted cybersecurity law in 2016/17 which according to Western defence circles appears to require all Chinese technology companies to cooperate with Chinese intelligence services.

  Consequently, no one now knows whether to trust Huawei, who have some of the leading technology for 5G. The problem for network operators is who to believe. Intelligence services are in the business of dissembling, which they do through political puppets, all of which are professionals at being economical with the truth. Who can forget Weapons of Mass Destruction? More recently there was the Skripal poisoning mystery: the Russians would have been bang-to-rights, if it wasn’t for Skripal’s links through Pablo Miller to Christopher Steele, who put together the dodgy dossier on Trump’s alleged behaviour in a Russian hotel.

  The safest course is to never believe anything emanating from a government security agency, which does not help hapless network operators. They, and the rest of us, should look at motives. The attack on Huawei is motivated by a desire to impede China’s technological progress, which is already eclipsing that of America, and America is using her leadership of the 5-eyes intelligence group of nations to impose her geostrategic will on her allies. The row in Britain this week escalated from a cabinet-level security breech on this subject, to American threats of withholding intelligence from the UK if UK companies are permitted to order Huawei 5G equipment, to the sacking of the Minister of Defence.

  A threat to withhold intelligence sharing, if carried out, only serves to isolate the Americans. But you can see how desperate the Americans are to eliminate Huawei. Furthermore, the Huawei controversy is part of a wider conflict, with America determined to stop the Chinese changing the world’s power structure, moving it from under America’s control. When China was just a cheap manufacturing centre for low-tech goods, that was one thing. But when China started developing advanced technologies and began to dominate global trade, that was another. China must be put back in its box.

  So far, all attempts to do so appear to have failed. Control of Afghanistan, seen as an important source of minerals ready to be exploited by China, has been a costly failure for the West. Attempts to wrest control of Syria from Russia’s sphere of influence also failed. Russia is China’s economic and military ally. America failed to bring Russia to her knees, so now the focus is directly on destroying, or at least containing China. China has already outspent America in Africa, Central and South America, buying influence away from America in her traditional spheres of influence. Attempts to neutralise North Korea are coming unstuck.

  In truth, there is an undeclared war between China and Russia on one side, and America and her often reluctant allies on the other. It will now escalate, mainly because America increasingly needs global portfolio flows to cover her deficits.

  America’s financial war strategy

  Behind the cyber war, there is a financial war. In the financial war, America has the advantage of its currency hegemony, which it exercises to the full. It has allowed Americans to have lived beyond their means by importing more goods than they export, and the government spends more than it receives in taxes. In order to achieve these benefits, inward capital flows are necessary to finance them. To date, these have totalled in current value-terms some $25 trillion, being total foreign ownership of dollar assets and deposits.

  America’s policy of living beyond its means now requires more than just recycled trade flows: inward portfolio flows are required as well. Global portfolios, comprised of commercial cash balances as well as investment money, periodically increase their exposure to other regions, potentially leaving America short. The problem is resolved by destabilising the region that has most recently benefited from capital investment, to encourage money to return to dollars and thus America’s domestic markets. Now that she is due to escalate infrastructure spending both in China and along the new silk roads, it is China’s turn.

  This will be the opinion of Qiao Liang, who was a Major-General in the PLA and one of its chief strategists. It was his explanation for the South-East Asian crisis of 1997, when a run started on the Thai baht and spread to all neighbouring countries. In the decade prior to the crisis, the region saw substantial inward capital flows, so much so that countries such as Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia ran significant deficits on their balance of payments. This conflicted with the US’s trade balance, which was beginning to deteriorate. The solution was the collapse of the South-east Asia investment story, which stimulated the re-allocation of investment resources in favour of the dollar and America.

  Qiao Liang cites a number of other examples from the Latin-American crisis in the early-1980s to Ukraine, whose yellow revolution reversed investment flows into Central Europe. This did not go to plan, with over a trillion dollars-worth of investment coming out of Europe, most being redirected to the Chinese economy, which was the most attractive destination at that time. Through the new Shanghai-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect, in April 2014 China facilitated inward investment and the ability for foreign investors to realise profits without going through exchange controls.

  Being the gateway for foreign investors, our story now moves to Hong Kong. According to Chinese and Russian intelligence sources, America tried to destabilise it with covert support for the Occupy Hong Kong movement between September and December 2014. The Fed ended its QE that October, and international capital was needed back in the US. The Americans had also escalated the row over the Spratly Islands and Scarborough Shoal at the beginning of that year, which effectively halted free trade negotiations between China, Japan, South Korea, Macau, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The Chinese hoped this potential free trade area could be expanded to include the ASEAN FTA, which would then have been the largest in the world by GDP and an area in which they could develop the renminbi as the reserve currency.

  These plans were effectively scuppered, but China was not provoked into a public response by these actions. Instead, they started reducing their US Treasury holdings in their dollar reserves from $1.27 trillion to $1.06 trillion in 2016 – not a great fall, but demonstrating they were not recycling their trade surpluses into dollars.

  All that happened at a time when both the American and global economies were expanding – admittedly at muted rates. Trump’s trade protectionism has changed that, and early indications are that the US economy is now stalling. Tax revenues are falling short, while government expenditures are rising. America now urgently needs more inward capital flows to finance the growing budget deficit.

  If Qiao Liang were to comment, doubtless his conclusion would be that America will increase its attack on China to precipitate disinvestment and reallocation to the dollar. And so, the attacks have begun; first by trying to break Huawei. Now, the mainstream media, perhaps with off-the-record briefings, are claiming China and Hong Kong are facing difficulties.

  Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article claiming China’s banks are running out of dollars. Clearly, this is untrue. China’s banks can acquire dollars any time they want, either by selling other foreign currencies in the market, or by selling renminbi to the People’s bank. They have their dollar position because they choose to have it, and furthermore all commercial banks use derivatives, which are effectively off-balance sheet exposure. Furthermore, with the US running a substantial trade deficit with China, dollars are flooding in all the time.

  Following the WSJ article, various other commentators have come up with similar stories. How convenient, it seems, for the US Government to see these bearish stories about China, just when they need to ramp up inward portfolio flows to finance the budget deficit.

  There is, anyway, a general antipathy among American investors to the China story, so we should not be surprised to see the China bears restating their case. One leading China bear, at least by reputation for his investment shrewdness, is Kyle Bass of Hayman Capital Management. According to Zero Hedge, he has written his first investment letter in three years, saying of Hong Kong, “Today, newly emergent economic and political risks threaten Hong Kong’s decades of stability. These risks are so large they merit immediate attention on both fronts.”

  If only it were so simple. It is time to put the alternative case. Hong Kong is important, because China uses Hong Kong and London to avoid being dependent on the US banking system for international finances. And that’s why the US’s deep state want to nail Hong Kong.

  Lop-sided analysis

  Bass is correct in pointing out the Hong Kong property market appears highly geared, and that property prices for office, residential and retail sectors have rocketed since the 2003 trough. To a large extent it has been the inevitable consequence of the currency board link to the US dollar, which broadly transfers the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy to Hong Kong’s more dynamic economy. Bass’s description of the relationship between the banks, the way they finance themselves and property collateral is reminiscent of the factors that led to the secondary banking crisis in the UK in late-1973. Empirical evidence appears to be firmly on Bass’s side.

  Except, that is, for a significant difference between events such as the UK’s secondary banking crisis, and virtually every other property crisis. Hong Kong is a truly international centre, and the banks’ role in property transactions is as currency facilitator rather than lender. In 2017, Hong Kong was the third largest recipient of foreign direct investment (substantially property) after the US and China. FDI inflows rose by £104bn to total nearly $2 trillion. Largest investors were China, followed by corporate money channelled through offshore centres.

  So, yes, Hong Kong banks will be hurt by a property crisis, but not as much as Bass implies. It is foreign and Chinese banks that have much of the property as collateral. It is not the Hong Kong banks that have fuelled the property boom with domestic credit, but foreign money.

  Bass fails to mention that a collapse in property prices and the banking system is unlikely to be confined to Hong Kong. Central banks have made significant progress in ensuring all banking systems are tied into the same credit cycle. Unwittingly, they have simply guarenteed that the next credit crisis will hit everyone at the same time. It won’t be just Hong Kong, but the EU, Japan, Britain and America. Everyone will be in difficulty to a greater or lesser extent.

  Interestingly, the Lehman crisis, which occurred after Hong Kong property prices had already doubled from 2003, caused strong inflows to develop, driving the Hong Kong dollar to the top of its peg. The situation appears to be similar today, with US outward investment at low levels, but near-record levels of foreign ownership of dollar assets. Despite Hong Kong’s foreign direct investment standing at $2 trillion, the prospect of capital repatriation to Hong Kong should not be ignored.

  Probably the most important claim in Bass’s letter is over the future of the currency peg operated by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA). He claims that the “aggregate balance”, which is a line-item in the HKMA’s balance sheet, is the equivalent of the US Fed’s excess reserves, and that “Once depleted, the pressure on the currency board will become untenable and the peg will break.”

  The aggregate balance on the HKMA’s balance sheet has declined significantly over the last year, from HK$180bn to HK$54.4bn currently. The decision about changes in aggregate balances comes from the banks themselves, and for this reason they are commonly taken to reflect capital flows into and out of the Hong Kong dollar. This is different from aggregate balances reflecting actual pressures on the peg, as suggested by Bass.

  The HKMA maintains a US dollar coverage of 105%-112.5% of base money (currently about 110%) and has further unallocated dollar reserves if necessary. The peg is maintained by the HKMA varying its base money, not just by managing a base lending rate giving a spread over the Fed’s fund rate, not just by influencing the commercial banks’ aggregate balances, but by addressing the three other components that make up the monetary base. These are Certificates of Indebtedness, Government notes and coins in circulation and Exchange Fund Bills and Notes (EFBNs). In practice, it is the EFBNs in conjunction with the aggregate balances that are used to adjust the monetary base and keep the currency secured in the Convertibility Zone of 7.75 and 7.85 to the US dollar.

  In maintaining the peg, the HKMA prioritises maintaining it over managing the money supply. There is little doubt this goes against the grain of mainstream Western economists who believe inflation good, deflation bad. Over the last year base money in Hong Kong contracted from HK$1,695bn to HK1,635bn. Does this worry the HKMA? Not at all.

  How the Chinese will act in the circumstances of a new global credit crisis is yet to be seen, but we should bear in mind that they are probably less Keynesian in their approach to economics and finance than Westerners. Admittedly, they have freely used credit expansion to finance economic development, but theirs is a mercantilist approach, which differs significantly from ours. We simply impoverish our factors of production through wealth transfer by monetary inflation. We think this can be offset by fuelling financial speculation and asset inflation. China enhances her production and innovation by generating personal savings. Wealth is created by and linked more directly to production.

  The objectives and effects of monetary and credit inflation between China’s application of it and the way we do things in the West are dissimilar, and it is a common mistake to ignore these differences. The threat to China’s ability to manage its affairs in a credit crisis is significantly less than the threat to Western welfare-dependent nations whose governments are highly indebted, while China’s is not.

  China is sure to see the financial and monetary stability of Hong Kong as being vital to the Mainland’s interests. Apart from the Bank of China’s Hong Kong subsidiary being the second largest issuer of bank notes, the Peoples’ Bank itself maintains reserve balances in Hong Kong dollars, which in the circumstances Kyle Bass believes likely, they can increase to support the HKMA’s management of the currency peg.

  Conclusions

  It is a mistake to think the Hong Kong property market is as much of a systemic danger as it first appears. Expectations of a devaluation of the peg appear to be wishful thinking by the bears.

  Far more important are the consequences of the cyber and financial war being pursued against China and Russia, its close ally, by the American deep state. Under President Trump it was accelerated by his trade tariff policies, which are fundamentally an attack on China’s economy. China will be a hard nut to crack, and the effect of America’s trade protectionism has been to trigger a diminution in international trade, which is now becoming apparent. The negative effects on the American economy appear to be being underestimated.

  The attempt to destroy Huawei’s 5G global ambitions is both the current and most visible part of an undeclared cyber and financial war. Trade protectionism was only a step along the way. The financial war is now escalating with the global economy facing at least a significant recession, almost certain to trigger an overdue credit crisis. The Chinese have long been on a financial war footing, as shown by Qiao Liang’s analysis of how America needs global portfolio flows and what they are prepared to do to attract them. Western thinking that the Chinese and their Russian allies are vulnerable to American hegemony has been disproved time and again. Financial analysts consistently fail to understand the Chinese are not muppets.

  China will not be provoked, and by standing firm, they are sure to protect Hong Kong and get on with diverting investment flows from a failing US economy into its Belt and Road Initiative. This will force a financial crisis on the Americans of their own making. At least, that’s how China has always seen it and they see no need for their passive financial war strategy to change.

  

• CDC: Idiots Riding E-Scooters Suffering Easily Preventable Injuries

  As the popularity of e-scooters rises across major US cities, there has been a surge in emergency room visits for easily preventable injuries, according to the CDC. 

  The cheap, motorized scooters from the likes of Uber, Lyft, Lime and Bird, whisk people around at around 20 mph – which has caused a spate of fractures, dislocations and head trauma according to CNBC. 

  The CDC has found that head injuries topped the list of accident-related incidents involving e-scooters at 45%. The study determined that many e-scooter injuries could have been prevented if riders wore helmets and were more careful around cars, according to summary of the study released on Wednesday. –CNBC

  “A high proportion of e-scooter related injuries involved potentially preventable risk factors, such as lack of helmet use, or motor vehicle interaction,” reads a preliminary summary of the study. 

  The CDC launched a national e-scooter accident study in March after a request by the Texas health and transportation departments. 

  The dockless electric scooters and bikes have become a common sight in numerous cities and college towns, according to the report, as venture capital-flush companies such as Bird and Lime aim to solve so-called “last-mile” transportation with rentals. 

  While Uber and Lyft are effective in taking people longer distances outside of city centers, the ride-hailing services don’t work well in the downtown parts of densely populated cities, where traffic often slows to a crawl.

  But along with the new motorized vehicles has come a host of safety problems and complaints about the lack of regulatory oversight, particularly in places without clear rules about where people can ride and park the devices. Injuries are the bigger problem, with some medical professionals warning of a public health crisis. –CNBC

  A March CNBC story revealed that trauma centers across the country are experiencing a spike in e-scooter related injuries. The CDC, meanwhile, found that after head injuries – upper extremity fractures came in as the second most common at 27%, followed by lower extremity fractures at 12%. The three-month study found that the e-scooter injury rate is around 14.3 per 100,000 trips, with the median age for those injured at 29. 

  The majority of injuries occured on the street (duh), with 29% of those experienced by first-time riders. 18% of injuries involved motor vehicles. 

  “Interventions aimed at these risks and education to first-time riders could potentially reduce injury incidence and severity,” reads the report. 

  Half of those interviewed blamed a “pothole or crack in the street” for their crash, while over 1/3 of those surveyed said they would use a dockless electric scooter again. 

  The results of the study will be presented by the CDC at the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) annual conference happening right now. 

  “We hope to build upon the results of this study as more agencies nationwide may use it as a base to expand their research and knowledge about this new mode of transportation,” said a spokesperson with the Austin Public Health Department. 

  

• Why Does Time Seem Like It's Speeding Up?

  Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

  Does constant exposure to digital technology change the way we perceive time? 

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  When human attention is hyperfocused on a single point, all other environmental stimuli tends to be cut off.  When we completely cut our experience off from our surroundings, this often makes us feel as though we are suffering from what is sometimes called “time loss”.  Add to this the never-ending quest for a new hit of dopamine that digital culture provides and you have a recipe for the mass warping of human brains.

  Video produced by Truthstream Media

  To add to the evidence supporting the video’s conclusion, I remember reading a story a few years back about a restaurant in New York which was losing business. 

  The restaurant found that customer complaints had skyrocketed that year, and that the vast majority of complaints were about food preparation times.  In other words, the customers complained that the food was taking far too long to get to them.  In order to identify the exact problem the restaurant owners hired a company to study their surveillance camera tapes on random days for multiple years, and compare how fast it took for food to get from kitchen to table in the past compared to today.  What the company found was shocking.  Regardless of the year, the food preparation time and delivery was the SAME.  They had not slowed down at all.  If anything, they had sped up their efforts. 

  So, what the hell was going on? 

  The company also discovered something else; the amount of time people were spending on their cell phones while in the restaurant had spiked. 

  It was concluded that the only thing that had changed in the restaurant was the attention span of the customers…which is rather frightening when you think about it…

   

  

• Pentagon Warns Of Chinese Nuclear Subs Expanding Into Arctic Via "Polar Silk Road"

  A new Pentagon report released late this week has voiced deep concern over increased Chinese military presence in the Arctic region, including nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, which Beijing plans to produce at least five more of by 2020. 

  The Pentagon assessment explores and analyzes China’s potential to erect a “Polar Silk Road” as an extension of President Xi Jinping’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. This would include likely deployment of security assets, such as submarines acting as nuclear deterrents and military bases in far-flung locations, found the report. 

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  Beijing itself hasn’t been secretive about this scenario, given it published an Arctic policy white paper last June, which outlined long term strategic expansion into the globe’s northernmost climes, despite China’s geography as a non-Arctic state. 

  Some of the highlights of the Pentagon report are as follows…

  * * *

  Military expansion under the guise of civilian research

  “Civilian research could support a strengthened Chinese military presence in the Arctic Ocean, which could include deploying submarines to the region as a deterrent against nuclear attacks,” according to the report.

  “China’s leaders are leveraging China’s growing economic, diplomatic, and military clout to establish regional preeminence and expand the country’s international influence.” 

  Rapid submarine production related to Arctic expansion

  “The speed of growth of the submarine force has slowed and (it) will likely grow to between 65 and 70 submarines by 2020,” the report predicted.

  BRI and military bases around the world

  “China’s advancement of projects such as the ‘One Belt, One Road’ Initiative (OBOR) will probably drive military overseas basing through a perceived need to provide security for OBOR projects,” the Pentagon said.

  “China will seek to establish additional military bases in countries with which it has a longstanding friendly relationship and similar strategic interests, such as Pakistan, and in which there is a precedent for hosting foreign militaries.” 

  The Pentagon addressed the Taiwan issue

  “China could use missile attacks and precision air strikes against air defense systems, including air bases, radar sites, missiles, space assets, and communications facilities to degrade Taiwan’s defenses, neutralize Taiwan’s leadership, or break the Taiwan people’s resolve,” the report said.

  The Pentagon report outlined a number of potential scenarios that China might take if Beijing decides to use military force on Taiwan, including a comprehensive campaign “designed to force Taiwan to capitulate to unification, or unification dialogue,” according to Reuters.

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  Next Monday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will be in attendance at a meeting of the eight-nation Arctic Council in Rovaniemi, Finland, where Arctic related economic and military cooperation will be discussed. 

  Notably, Scandinavian countries like Denmark have recently complained about China’s reach into Greenland, based in commercial interests on the energy rich island-continent.

  

• The Origins Of The Deep State In North America, Part 1

  Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Duran,

  Part One: The Rise of the Round Table Movement and the Sad Case of Canada (1864-1945).

  “Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

  -Henry C. Carey (Lincoln’s advisor), Harmony of Interests, 1856

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  The British Hand Behind the Deep State Today

  With the election of Donald Trump in November 2016, it has become apparent that America isn’t what many thought it was.

  Suddenly, for the first time since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, there was no longer one America but rather two opposing forces within America itself, and the question was raised “which is the real America and what is it that Trump was re-activating?”

  Here was a political leader who wasn’t from the technocratic establishment, and who campaigned to work with Russia and China, end regime change wars, reverse the nation-killing effects of NAFTA, reviving the JFK-era space mission and even discussed restoring Glass Steagall.

  A clue to what he chose to represent can be witnessed in his defense of the “American System” when he said “this is the system our Founders wanted. Our greatest American leaders — including George Washington, Hamilton, Jackson, Lincoln — they all agreed that for America to be a strong nation it must also be a great manufacturing nation.”

  Soon, it became apparent that this Deep State structure mobilized to stop the re-emergence of the American System was not even American as many had supposed, but rather of a purely British Imperial pedigree and was even caught working against British nationalists such as Jeremy Corbyn. It finally came to light that the British Empire had never gone away after WWII, but had evoked a powerful sleight of hand after FDR’s untimely death in 1945.

  How did this happen? By what means and motives did this Deep State arise? Was it always there or were there key moments in history that give us clarity into its origins and how it took over both America and other nations alike?

  By approaching history shaped by a battle between British and American systems of social order (which represents much more than merely British or American nations per se), a “master key” to unlock the secrets of Britain’s takeover of America (and Europe) can be  found by exploring the strange case of Canada.

  What is this “strange partly British/partly American monarchy of the Americas”? At the best of times it was uplifted by the best constitutional traditions of America cited by Donald Trump above, and at the worst of times it was a platform to spread British intrigues upon the world exemplified by the Montreal-based assassinations of American System leaders Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and John F. Kennedy in 1963. Today those intrigues are led by such Rhodes Scholars as Chrystia Freeland and the modern Round Table movement of Ben Rowswell who have together played leading roles in the overthrow of Venezuela, the protection of fascists in Ukraine and advance of NATO against Russia and China.

  The time has come to drag some skeletons out of the closet.

  Lincoln’s American System Goes Global

  Canada’s struggle for existence as a sovereign nation has been caught between two opposing views of mankind represented by the British and American System of social organization. As the great economist Henry C. Carey laid out while he was advancing the policy of Abraham Lincoln, the American System was designed to become a global system operating amongst sovereign nations for the progress and mutual benefit of each and all. By the end of the 19th century, American System thinking was resonating with statesmen and patriots in all corners of the globe who were fed up with the ancient imperial system of British Free Trade that had always strived to maintain a world divided and monopolized. This view for a post-colonial world was exemplified by Lincoln-ally and first Governor of Colorado William Gilpinwho described a world united by railways across all continents centered around the Bering Strait rail connection. This was outlined in his widely read 1890 “The Cosmopolitan Railway”.

  Although British propagandists had made every attempt to keep the illusion of the sacredness of the British System alive in the minds of its subjects, the undeniable increase of quality of life, and creative thought expressed by the American System everywhere it was applied become too strong to ignore… especially within colonies such as Canada that had long suffered a fragmented, and underdeveloped identity as the price paid for loyalty to the British Empire.

  In Germany, the American System-inspired Zollverein (customs union) had not only unified a divided nation, but elevated it to a level of productive power and sovereignty which had outpaced the monopoly power of the British East India Company. In Japan, American engineers helped assemble trains funded by a national banking system, and protective tariff during the Meiji Restoration.

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  In Russia, American System follower Sergei Witte, Transport Minister and close advisor to Czar Alexander II, revolutionized the Russian economy with the American made trains that rolled across the Trans-Siberian Railway. Under the influence of Witte and other American System allies Czar Nicholas II endorsed the Bering Strait rail connection in 1905, though a tragic turn of fate sabotaged it from unfolding.

  Not even the Ottoman Empire remained untouched by the inspiration for progress, as the Berlin to Baghdad Railway was begun with the intention of unleashing a bold program of modernization of southwest Asia.

  The American System Touches the Canadian Mind

  In Canada, admirers of Lincoln and Henry C. Carey found their spokesman in the great American System statesman Isaac Buchanan (1). Buchanan rose to his highest position of political office in the Dominion of Canada when in April 1864, the new MacDonald-Taché Ministry appointed him the President of the Executive Council. This put him in firm opposition to the Imperial agenda of George Brown, and the later Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, of whom he and all patriotic co-thinkers counted as bitter enemies to Canada’s independence and progress. The policy which Buchanan advocated as he rose to higher prominence was outlined in his December 1863 speech:

  “The adoption by England for herself of this transcendental principle [Free Trade] has all but lost the Colonies, and her madly attempting to make it the principle of the British Empire would entirely alienate the Colonies. Though pretending to unusual intelligence, the Manchester Schools are, as a class, as void of knowledge of the world as of patriotic principle… As a necessary consequence of the legislation of England, Canada will require England to assent to the establishment of two things: 1st, an American Zollverein [aka: Customs Union]. 2nd: Canada to be made neutral territory in time of any war between England and the United States”. (2)

  While the customs union modelled on the Zollverein program of American System economist Friedrich List in Germany laid out by Buchanan, was temporarily defeated during the operation known as the Articles of Confederation in 1867, the potential for its re-emergence returned in 1896 with the election of Wilfrid Laurier, Canada’s next Prime Minister. By 1911, the customs union policy advanced by Laurier, who was a devout admirer of Abraham Lincoln, finally came to fruition. Laurier long recognized that Canada’s interests did not reside in the anti-American program of MacDonald which simply tied Canada into greater dependence towards the mother country, but rather with the interests of its southern neighbour. His Reciprocity program proposed to lower protective tariffs with the USA primarily on agriculture, but with the intention to electrify and industrialize Canada, a nation which Laurier saw as supporting 60 million people within two decades. With the collaboration of his close advisors, Adam Shortt, Oscar Skelton and later William Lyon Mackenzie King, Laurier navigated the mine field of his British enemies active throughout the Canadian landscape in the form of the Masonic “Orange Order” of Ontario, and later, the insidious Round Table movement.

  While Laurier’s attempts to actualize a true Reciprocity Treaty of 1911 that involved free trade among North American economies united under a protective tariff against British dumping of cheap goods, it would not last, as every resource available to the British run Orange Order and Round Table were activated to ensure the Reciprocity’s final defeat and the downfall of Laurier’s Liberal government and its replacement by the Conservative government of Sir Robert Borden in its stead.(3) Laurier described the situation in Canada after this event:

  “Canada is now governed by a junta sitting at London, known as “The Round Table”, with ramifications in Toronto, in Winnipeg, in Victoria, with Tories and Grits receiving their ideas from London and insidiously forcing them on their respective parties.” (4)

  Two years before Laurier uttered this warning, the founder of the Round Table movement, Lord Milner wrote to one of his co-conspirators laying out the strategic danger faced by Buchanan and Laurier’s program with America:

  “As between the three possibilities of the future: 1. Closer Imperial Union, 2. Union with the U.S. and 3. Independence, I believe definitely that No. 2 is the real danger. I do not think the Canadians themselves are aware of it… they are wonderfully immature in political reflection on the big issues, and hardly realize how powerful the influences are…” (5)

  Without understanding either the existential struggle between the two opposing systems related above, or the creation of the Round Table movement by a new breed of British Imperialist as a response to Lincoln’s international victory in the face of the total bankruptcy of the British Empire at the turn of the last century, then no Canadian could honestly ever make sense of what has shaped his or her cultural and political landscape. It is the purpose of this present report to shed a clear light upon some of the principal actors on this stage of universal history with the hope that the reader’s powers of insight may be strengthened such that those necessary powers of judgement required to lead both Canada and the world out of our current plunge into a new dark age may yet occur.

  The Round Table Movement: New Racist Breed, Same Racist Species

  The Round Table movement served as the intellectual center of the international operations to regain control of the British Empire and took on several incarnations over the 20th century. It worked in tandem with the Coefficients Club, the Fabian Society, and the Rhodes Trust, all of whom witnessed members moving in and out of each other’s ranks. The historian Carrol Quigley, of Georgetown University wrote of this cabal in his posthumously published “Anglo-American Establishment” (6):

  “This organization has been able to conceal its existence quite successfully, and many of its most influential members, satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power, are unknown even to close students of British history. This is the more surprising when we learn that one of the chief methods by which this Group works has been through propaganda.

  It plotted the Jameson Raid of 1895; it caused the Boer War of 1899-1902; it set up and controls the Rhodes Trust; it created the Union of South Africa in 1906-1910; it established the South African periodical The State in 1908; it founded the British Empire periodical The Round Table in 1910, and this remains the mouthpiece of the Group; it has been the most powerful single influence in All Souls, Balliol, and New Colleges at Oxford for more than a generation; it has controlled The Times for more than fifty years, with the exception of the three years 1919-1922, it publicized the idea of and the name “British Commonwealth of Nations” in the period 1908-1918, it was the chief influence in Lloyd George’s war administration in 1917-1919 and dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it; it was one of the chief influences on British policy toward Ireland, Palestine, and India in the period 1917-1945; it was a very important influence on the policy of appeasement of Germany during the years 1920-1940; and it controlled and still controls, to a very considerable extent, the sources and the writing of the history of British Imperial and foreign policy since the Boer War.”  (7)

  To understand the pedigree of the Round Table movement as it was “officially” unveiled in 1910 as the ideological shaper of the policies and paradigm of the new “managerial class” of international imperialists dedicated to the salvation of the British Empire under an “Imperial Federation”, it would be necessary to go back a few decades prior, to 1873-74. It was in this year that a young Canadian named George Parkin lectured at Oxford on the subject imperial union as the sacred duty of all Anglo Saxons to advance. Parkin is popularly heralded by Oxford historians as “the man who shifted the mind of England”.

  1873-1902 Empire on the Verge of Collapse: Re-organize or Perish

  During this same period, a grouping of Imperial intellectuals known as the “X Club” (f. 1865) centering on Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer and Joseph Hooker were assigned the responsibility to overhaul the British Empire’s controlling ideological structures that had proven themselves worn out. Each would specialize on various branches of the sciences and would all promote gradualist interpretations of change to counteract explanations which required creative leaps. This program was applied with the intention of: 1) saving the collapsing empire and 2) establishing the foundation of a new scientific religion based upon Charles Darwin’s highly materialistic model of Natural Selection as the explanation for the evolution and differentiation of new species.

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  As X Club co-founder Herbert Spencer went on to elaborate the system of “social Darwinism” as the logical outgrowth of Darwin’s system into human affairs, the intention behind the propagation of the Darwinian program was never “the enlightenment liberalism in battle against the ignorant dogmas of religion”, as it is so often recounted by popular historians of science. Rather, the “revolution in science” initiated by the X Club was merely the re-packaging of an idea as old as Babylon: The control of the masses by a system of oligarchical rule, simply under a new type of “scientific dictatorship”. But how, when the demonstration of creative reason’s power to elevate humanity’s conditions of life by encouraging new discoveries and applied technologies, as promoted by the American System of Political Economy, would the world now accept the conditions of mental and political enslavement demanded by the imperialist in a fixed system struggle for diminishing returns?

  This was the challenge upon which young Oxford men would set their creative energies using the “scientific” reasoning established by Thomas Huxley’s X Club and for the service of the ruling oligarchical families of Europe. George Parkin like all young Oxford men at this time, was highly influenced by this network’s ideas, and used them to justify the “natural scientific inevitability” of the hegemony of the strong over the weak. In this case, the Anglo Saxon master race dominating the inferior peoples of the earth. This message could be seen in his 1892 work Imperial Federation: “Nations take long to grow, but there are periods when, as in the long delayed flowering of certain plants, or in the crystallization of chemical solutions, new forms are taken with extreme rapidity. There are the strongest reasons for believing that the British nation has such a period immediately before it. The necessity for the creation of a body of sound public opinion upon the relations to each other of the various parts of the Empire is therefore urgent.” (8)

  In elaborating upon the danger of the British System’s collapse in light of nationalist movements following the American System model, Parkin went on to ask: 

  “Has our capacity for political organization reached its utmost limit? For the British people this is the question of questions. In the whole range of possible political variations in the future there is no issue of such far reaching significance, not merely for our own people but for the world at large, as the question whether the British Empire shall remain a political unit… or yielding to disintegrating forces, shall allow the stream of the national life to be parted into many separate channels.” (9)

  One of Parkin’s Oxford contemporaries was Alfred Milner, a character who plays a vicious role in our drama as the catalyzer behind the formation of the Round Table Movement. Milner credited Parkin with giving his life direction from that point on (10). It was during 1876 that another contemporary of Milner and Parkin, named Cecil Rhodes left Oxford in order to make a fortune on a cotton plantation in South Africa. All three characters were also highly influenced by John Ruskin, the leader of the “artistic” branch of British Intelligence led by the “Pre-Raphaelite Society”.

  The proceeds of Rhodes’ cotton fortune were multiplied many times by ventures into the diamond industry of South Africa, allowing him to rise to gargantuan heights of political power and wealth, peaking with his appointment as Prime Minister of Cape Town and Founder of Rhodesia. The current London-centered mineral cartels Rio Tinto, De Beers, and Lonrho now pillaging Africa, as well as the legacy of Apartheid which has stained so much of South Africa’s history are among two aspects of the scarring legacy Rhodes has passed down to present times.

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  Between 1876 and his becoming High Commissioner to South Africa in 1897, Milner’s path slightly diverged from Rhodes. Milner was recruited by the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette William T. Stead and became associate editor soon thereafter. The Gazette’s function was set out in the Pall Mall Gospel, a short mission statement which Stead demanded all of his employees abide to: “The Federation of the British Empire is the condition of its survival… as an Empire we must federate or perish.” The gospel also propagandized for the “inevitable destiny” that the USA and Britain “coalesce” (11). The role which the Pall Mall played in coordinating a cohesive vision of empire was the model followed by Milner and his minions later as they ran the Round Table periodicals. Stead was officially recruited to the grand design in 1889 which was instigated by Rhodes and his sponsor Lord Rothschild. It was when Stead had been recently released for prison due to his Gazette’s promotion of “organized vice” only to find his paper in serious financial trouble, when he was first called upon by Cecil Rhodes, a long time follower of his journal in South Africa. After their first meeting, Stead ecstatically wrote to his wife:

  “Mr. Rhodes is my man! I have just had three hours talk with him. He is full of a far more gorgeous idea in connection with the paper than even I have had. I cannot tell you his scheme because it is too secret. But it involves millions. He had no idea that it would cost £250,000 to start a paper. But he offered me down as a free gift £20,000 to buy a share in the P.M. Gazette as a beginning… His ideas are federation, expansion, and consolidation of the Empire…. He took to me. Told me some things he has told no other man—save Lord Rothschild— and pressed me to take the £20,000, not to have any return, to give no receipt, to simply take it and use it to give me a freer hand on the P.M.G. It seems all like a fairy dream….” (12)

  Quigley demonstrates that both Milner and Stead had become active members of the agenda laid out by Cecil Rhodes. But what was this agenda? In a series of seven wills written between 1879 and 1901,” Rhodes, the unapologetic racist, laid out his designs for the re-conquering of the world and indoctrinating young elites into his design:

  “Let us form the same kind of society, a Church for the extension of the British Empire. A society which should have its members in every part of the British Empire working with one object and one idea we should have its members placed at our universities and our schools and should watch the English youth passing through their hands just one perhaps in every thousand would have the mind and feelings for such an object, he should be tried in every way, he should be tested whether he is endurant, possessed of eloquence, disregardful of the petty details of life, and if found to be such, then elected and bound by oath to serve for the rest of his life in his Country. He should then be supported if without means by the Society and sent to that part of the Empire where it was felt he was needed.’

  In another will, Rhodes described in more detail his intention:

   To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world. The colonization by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, these aboard of China and Japan, [and]  the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire.” (13)

  It was under this specific design to create an indoctrination system of talented young disciples that Rhodes’ dream of stealing the world and reconquering America that the Rhodes Trust was established upon his death in 1902. Some historians have maintained that since Rhodes doesn’t literally bring up his call for a secret society in his last two wills, he must have “matured” and left those notions behind him. Yet Professor Quigley points out, that the belief pushed by such “authoritative” historians is a farce, evidenced by George Parkin’s revealing observation taken from his book The Rhodes Scholarship, published in 1912:  “It is essential to remember that this final will is consistent with those which had preceded it, that it was no late atonement for errors, as some have supposed, but was the realization of life-long dreams persistently pursued.” (14)

  Upon Rhodes’ death, George Parkin became the first head of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust in 1902 leaving his post as Principal of Upper Canada College (1895-1902) to fulfill his duty. It was under this post that Parkin recruited fellow Upper Canada College professor Edward Peacock, who joined him as a Rhodes trustee and promoter of what became the Canadian branches of the Round Table movement. While organizing for the ouster of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier and the defeat of the 1911 Reciprocity Treaty, this group recruited young talented disciples from their college connections along the way. The model of the Round Table involved a central coordinating body in London, with branches strategically placed throughout the Commonwealth in order to provide one vision and voice to the young and talented “upper managerial class” of the reformed British Empire. Parkin and Peacock were joined by Lord Alfred Milner, Sir Arthur Glazebrook, W.T. Stead, Arthur Balfour and Lord Nathan Rothschild as co-trustees.

  Working in tandem with the eugenicists of the Fabian Society of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Balfour had founded the first International Eugenics Conference in 1912 alongside enthusiastic recruits such as young Roundtable member Winston Churchill. Charles Darwin’s cousin and founder of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton died mere weeks before being able to keynote the conference. The Fabian Society and its sister organization “The Co-efficients Club” featured such other prominent eugenicists as Bertrand Russell, Halford Mackinder, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, and later Harold Laski and John Maynard Keynes [see accompanying article on the Eugenics bent of the Fabian Society]. Membership rosters of either organization frequently overlapped (15)

  Much of the dirty work conducted by the original Roundtable movement was run primarily by the group of young Oxford men who got their start managing imperial affairs under Milner during the Boer War suppression of the Transvaal (South African) uprising of 1899 to 1902.  Of this Kindergarden, Philip Kerr and Lionel Curtis were tasked with coordinating the Canadian branches from London (with Parkin and Peacock leading from Canada). While Oxford had long been the indoctrination center of young elites for centuries prior, now with the Rhodes Scholarship program in place, a new level of standardization had been initiated.  The new program provided scholarships to young talent primarily throughout the Anglo Saxon family of nations which Rhodes yearned to see re-absorbed under one Aryan umbrella. The Fabian Society had founded the London School of Economics (LSE) for similar purposes. Both the LSE and Oxford have worked hand in hand at crafting agents of imperial change throughout the entire 20th century (16).

  Each student, upon selection, would be provided a scholarship to Oxford University, a generous stipend, and red carpet treatment into the upper echelons of the ruling oligarchical social networks, if the student so willed. Each student was returned to their home country enflamed with a burning desire to fulfill the objectives of the British Empire and advance “the scientific management of society”. Their talents were expressed either in elected office, working in the civil service, media, law, the private sector or in academia. In most cases, these scholars acted upon the Fabian method of ‘permeation theory’… slowly permeating all levels of society’s controlling structures in order to shape perception and shift the invisible structures controlling mass behaviour away from a current of progress and love of truth and towards a materialistic struggle for survival. Each year, one scholarship was granted to each of the Canadian provinces  (with the exception of P.E.I) and 32 were granted to the United States. To the present date, approximately 7000 scholarships have been awarded with increasing openness to the non-Aryan countries to service the imperial agenda.

  The Milnerite Vincent Massey and the Rebirth of Canadian Oligarchism

  While the Canadian experiment has long been trapped by its loyalist (anti-republican) tendencies fueled by such oligarchical systems as the Family Compact (17), Canada has never had a self-contained ruling class as witnessed in the case of Britain. To this present day, the London centered oligarchy loyal to Babylonian traditions, is expressed by the imperial crown as the “fount of all honours” from which all legal and actual authority across the Commonwealth emanates. This has been the model upon which different generations of the Canadian oligarchy have been shaped. Similarly, the American oligarchy has tended to follow a similar model of organization with families recruited by the Crown’s agents such as the Rockefellers, Morgans, Harrimans and Duponts who have merely shaped their values and customs of behaviour around the system led by the British Crown, and represent nothing at all intrinsically “American”. All attempts to evaluate history from the bias of “an international bankers conspiracy” or even “American imperialism” without this higher understanding of the British Empire is thus doomed to failure.

  One of the central figures in the Rhodes network in forming the character and structure of the Canadian oligarchy, as well as the general mass culture of Canada is a man named Vincent Massey. Massey is the son-in-law of George Parkin, who, following the Darwinian edict of “breeding with the best” married his four daughters to leading Round Table and Oxford men. Massey, born into the wealthy Hart-Massey family dynasty became an early recruit to the Round Table, working alongside Canadian Round Table co-founder Arthur Glazebrook in setting up a branch in Ontario in 1911. Glazebrook admired Parkin so much that he even named his son George Parkin de Twenebroker Glazebrook, himself a Rhodes Scholar of Balliol who went on to help run this group alongside Massey by the late 1930s and would head the Canadian secret service during World War II. Arthur Glazebrook wrote a shining letter of recommendation to Milner upon Massey’s departure for studies at Oxford’s Balliol College on Aug. 11, 1911:

  “I have given a letter of introduction to you to a young man called Vincent Massey. He is about 23 or 24 years of age, very well off, and full of enthusiasm for the most invaluable assistance in the Roundtable and in connection with the junior groups… He is going home to Balliol, for a two year course in history, having already taken his degree at the Toronto University. At the end of his two years he expects to return to Canada and take up some kind of serious work, either as a professor at the university or at some other non-money making pursuit. I have become really very attached to him and I hope you will give him an occasional talk. I think it so important to get hold of these first rate young Canadians, and I know what a power you have over young men. I should like to feel that he could become definitely by knowledge a Milnerite” (18)

  Upon his return to Canada, Massey quickly rose in the ranks of the Roundtable, becoming Crown Privy Councilor in 1925, then leading a delegation in 1926 at the Imperial Conference at which point his fellow Roundtabler Lord Balfour passed the Balfour Declaration as a means of appeasing the nationalist sentiment hot in many colonies striving for independence from the mother country. Massey then became Canada’s first Minister (aka: ambassador) to the United States (1926-1930), where he coordinated policy with controlling institutions around the intelligence institutions centered around the Council on Foreign Relations. During his time in Washington, Massey’s official biographer (and University of Toronto President from 1958-1971) Claude Bissel points out that he was a frequent guest in “The House of Truth”, a stronghold of Round Table ideas in the United States housing such luminaries as Walter Lipmann, Felix Frankfurter, Loring Christie, Eustace Percy, and featuring such frequent guests as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and McGeorge Bundy. Most of these characters were hardcore eugenicists affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations (the American branch of the Royal Institute for International Affairs) advancing the program of a British-led “Anglo-American Empire”. Oxford men Loring Christie, and Hume Wrong were both recruited to Massey’s staff during this period and played important roles in the postwar takeover of Canadian foreign policy. Hume’s father George Wrong was also an influential executive member of the Canadian Round Table and Massey ally.

  Massey’s Washington deployment was followed by a stint as President of the Liberal Federation of Canada (1932-1935), and then Canadian High Commissioner to London (1935-1946). It was soon after this experience that Massey was assigned to unleash the second of a series of Royal Commissions (1949-1951) dedicated to destroy any lingering sentiments of the American System within the hearts, minds, political-artistic-scientific structures or economic behaviour of Canada, and reconstruct the Canadian identity based on his own twisted image. This operation had the dual effect of relieving responsibility from the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations financial responsibility for crafting the Canadian identity (19). As a token for a job well done, Massey then became the first Canadian-born Governor General (1952-1959). During his career, Massey served as Governor for Upper Canada College, and the University of Toronto, as well as founder of a university modeled on All Souls, Oxford called Massey College (f.1962). Like All Souls, Massey College serves as a central coordinating node for various operations run through the major universities in Canada.

  Through his various political positions, Massey pulled every string possible to recruit as many agents of the Roundtable Movement and Rhodes Trust networks into prominent positions within the Canadian civil service, cultural control, and academia. During this same period in the United States, Rhodes scholars had swarmed into various influential positions of authority, with a special focus on the State Department, in order to prepare to commandeer Roosevelt’s New Deal program and convert it into a Keynesian nightmare at the first available opportunity. These operations resulted in a third attempt by the British Empire to achieve an agenda that had largely failed in its first two attempts between 1902 and 1933 (20). It is proper to briefly go through the first two before continuing with our report.

  The First Attempt Fails: Imperial Union 1911-1923

  The First incarnation of the World Government agenda to supersede the principle of sovereignty as the basis for world affairs had been the Imperial Union thesis around which the Roundtable had first been created. This involved the creation of a Federation of nations united under one empire, in which representatives of various colonies could hold representatives within an Imperial Parliament, much like the European Union structure chaining nations under the Troika today. The obvious mission under this structure was the participation of the United States ruled by the “economic royalists” of whom Roosevelt said should have left the nation back in 1776. Under Parliamentary structures, little more than an illusion of democracy exists while its bureaucratic nature permits for optimal control by a ruling oligarchy.

  By the end of World War I, forces within the Round Table were dreading the failure of this program, and had resolved to dedicate themselves instead to the League of Nations doctrine in its stead whereby essentially the same outcome could be achieved, but through different means. Under this changing of gears, it was arranged that the Round Table be phased out in place of something new. Two aging controllers of Milner’s Kindergarten writing to each other in 1931 laid this problem squarely on the table and even proposed a solution:

  “As a brotherhood we have lost interest in the Empire and are no longer competent to deal with it. I think, therefore, that if The Round Table is to go on, it should quite definitely change its character, remove its subtitle, and become, what it is much more fitted to become at the present time, a publication connected with the Royal Institute of International Affairs… all the heart and soul of The Round Table movement is petering out and I really don’t know that we stand for anything in particular nowadays.” (21)

  It was with this failure of its original blueprint in mind that the Roundtable Movement began a conversion into its new costume with the creation of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA) in 1919, followed immediately thereafter with branches in the United States under the heading of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and International Pacific Institute. Carrol Quigley demonstrates that the CFR and IPI featured crossovers of members from the RIIA, CIIA, while funding was provided through the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Foundation and RIIA. While possessing nominally American names, these organizations and their members were fully British.

  The Failure of the Second Attempt: The Round Table Transformed 1923-1930

  Both the RIIA, CFR and IPI were financed through large grants by the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations which themselves were set up merely as financial instruments to further the British Imperial agenda at the same time the Round Table Movement was unveiled in 1910. These were two of the core foundations which had been used to finance eugenics laws and the statistics-based “scientific” premises justifying their political implementation. Quigley documents in his works the extensive array of financial support which these “philanthropic” organizations bestowed upon their London controllers.

  Due to the regaining of power of the Liberal Party, now under the leadership of Mackenzie King, the Canadian infiltration was not happening at the pace which some RIIA operatives would have liked. In fact, due to the influence of key Laurier Liberals such as Oscar Skelton and King’s Justice Minister Ernest Lapointe in the famous Imperial Conference of 1923, the last attempt to impose the Round Table thesis for Imperial Union was defeated in that form. By 1925, Roundtable controller Philip Kerr (aka: Lord Lothian) wrote of the anti-British situation in Canada guided by Lapointe and Skelton in the following terms:

  “I am afraid that things in Canada are not at present as satisfactory as they are in the United States… I even found in places a certain feeling that it was a mistake for returned scholars to avow themselves as Rhodes scholars and that the best would be that they should merge themselves in the population and forget their unhappy past!” (22)

  In 1925, O.D. Skelton, Laurier’s friend and biographer, as well as longtime friend and trusted collaborator of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, was made Undersecretary of External Affairs. It was also at this time that resistance to Rhodes Scholar penetration into guiding positions of national policy was obstinately begun.

  Canadian cooperation with British foreign policy largely came undone beginning with the Canadian rejection of Britain’s demands that Canada commit its forces to Britain’s near-war with Turkey during the Chanak Crisis of 1922. In subsequent Imperial Conferences throughout the 1920s, the Laurier Liberals led by Skelton and Lapointe went on to flank and reject various attempts at binding foreign policy between Imperial Federation or the League of Nations. Collaboration with leaders of the Free Irish State against Imperial policy was key in the success of the Canadian patriots’ fending off the Round Table.

  Mackenzie King’s Failed Personality

  Massey’s biographers have commonly referenced his own frustration with Skelton whom he saw as a barrier between himself and the Prime Minister, a man who he could generally manipulate as long as no one with geostrategic insight was near him (23). King’s increasing lack of cooperation with British Foreign policy resulted in the following quote by Massey brother-in-law, and Round Table member William Grant in 1925:

  “It is very difficult to make a permanent impression on him [King] for two reasons. 1) He is as selfish a man as I have ever known, the selfishness disguised by a thick smear of sentimentalism. He will, therefore, sacrifice anyone or anything to his ambition, and then sob about it. 2) He has a mind as lacking in edge as a jellyfish. Fortunately for you he has a real fund of dignified, though rather windy eloquence, and will do little harm if given plenty of speeches to make” (24)

  The Grant quote is instructive as it provides the reader an insight into the singular character flaw of King which would taint him his entire life. That is, the pitiful fact of his “other-directedness”, such that his tendency to frustrate evil influences who wished to use him for their own nefarious ends was frequently balanced by the frustration of good influences who tried to influence him the other way. For good or for ill, King was never his own man but was, in the end, a mother-dominated mystic who could never sever his ideological affiliations with the Monarchy. He may have been a man of deep personal conviction in a higher cause… but like the poor Venetian Prince in Schiller’s “The Ghost Seer”, his convictions were never his own. After the death of Skelton in 1940, King’s neurotic insecurity would express itself in his relief to be liberated by Skelton’s domineering influence: “I have frequently been thrown off following my own judgement and wisdom in these matters by pressure from Skelton and the staff that I made up my mind I would not henceforth yield to anything of the kind” (25). In another diary entry a year later, King wrote: “One of the effects of Skelton’s passing will be to make me express my own views much more strongly”. (26)

  King’s pro-monarchist inclinations permanently schismed his modus operandi from those influences who he otherwise respected, evidenced in the following diary recordings of Skelton and King during two Imperial Conferences: “I defend ultimate independence, which he [King] opposes”, while after another conference, King later wrote: “[Skelton] is at heart against the British Empire, which I am not. I believe in the larger whole, with complete independence of the parts united by cooperation in all common ends”. (27)

  Chatham House Comes to Canada

  The Canadian branch of the RIIA (aka:’ Chatham House’) was created only in 1928, (at the same time as its Australian counterpart) largely as a response to the anti-Round Table tendencies of the Laurier Liberals upon King. The CIIA’s first President was none other than former Canadian Prime Minister and Masonic Orangeman Sir Robert Borden. Its second president was Newton Rowell, who later became president of the Canadian Bar Association, and chaired the failed Rowell-Sirois Royal Commission of 1935-1937 (28). Sir Joseph Flavelle and Vincent Massey were Vice Presidents and George Parkin de T. Glazebrook was honorary secretary. Other founding members were financier and later Conservative Party Cabinet official J.M. Macdonnell, Carnegie Foundation Trustee N.A.M. Mackenzie, UCC President William Grant, Rhodes Scholar George Raleigh Parkin, financier Edgar Tarr, journalist J.W. Dafoe, and Henry Angus. Raleigh Parkin, Grant and Macdonnell also had the distinction of being brothers-in-law with Vincent Massey, and sons-in-law of George Parkin. In 1933, through a donation from the Massey Foundation (which served as a mini clone of the Rockefeller Foundation), the CIIA hired its first Permanent Secretary named Escott Reid. Reid was a Rhodes Scholar fanatically governed by a commitment to world government through the League of Nations, expressed by his following remarks:

  “It would be easier and more self-respecting for Canada to give up to an international body on which it was represented, the decision on which it should go to war than to transfer the right to make that decision from the government in Ottawa to the government in Washington.. It would thus appear probable that effective military cooperation between Canada and the United States is possible only within the framework of an effective world order of which both Canada and the United States are loyal members.” (29)

  The five years after the CIIA was established, an affiliate organization was founded called the Canadian Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA) by similar networks associated with the CIIA, in order to shape national internal policy while the CIIA focused upon Canada’s foreign policy. Original featured speakers were the CIIA’s Norman Mackenzie, and the eugenicist leader of the newly created CCF Party J.S. Woodsworth. It would be another 20 years before both organizations began to jointly host conferences together. Today, CIPA exists in the form of the Couchiching Conferences and their regular brainwashing seminars have been broadcast across the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for over 70 years.

  The CIPA was affiliated with the YMCA, itself a major British-run indoctrination asset as it focused spreading its ideology on conferences, and workshops the world over. It was through this network that a young Maurice Strong was recruited and rose to the highest echelons of the management of the oligarchy’s affairs in later years.

  1932-1935: America’s New Deal Crushes the League of Nations

  Before FDR came to power in 1932, the United States was brought to its knees after four years of Great Depression itself induced by the blowout of a housing bubble built up artificially by British-Wall Street agents such as U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. It was during this time of fear and want that the American population was at its most gullible, largely accepting the propaganda that immigration and bad genes were the cause of the rampant criminality in these painful years. The vast majority of the sterilization laws passed and fascist sympathy cultivated occurred during this time of fear.

  As Franklin Roosevelt rallied the population behind the battle cry “there is nothing to fear but fear itself, and kicked the money lenders out of the temple through the implementation of Glass-Steagall and the activation of public credit issued through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The RIIA running their networks in Canada and especially in the United States had to re-adjust their programs. The renewed faith in the powers of sovereign government in effecting progressive change by the activation of the American System principles were evaporating the belief that world government was the only option for peace to be ensured. However, change for an empire is not always easy, and after decades of investing energy into their reconquest of the United States, the British made a violent attempt to crush FDR.

  A startling revelation swept through the press in 1933 with General Smedley Butler’s public unveiling of the Wall Street-backed attempt to run a coup d’état against Roosevelt using 500 000 legionnaires (30). General Butler’s unveiling of the plan to install himself as puppet dictator was recounted in Butler’s famous book “War is a Racket” (31). This attempted coup had occurred mere months after the thwarted Masonic-run assassination plot to kill FDR which resulted in the killing of Mayor Cermak of Chicago.

  As Pierre Beaudry reported in his study on the Synarchy:

   “It was not a mere coincidence that, at the same time the British promoted the Nazis in Europe, in 1934, the synarchist Lazard Freres and J.P. Morgan financial interests in the United States were staging a similar fascist dictatorial coup against Franklin D. Roosevelt, using the same disgruntled Veterans of Foreign Wars groupings with operatives from the French Croix de Feu deployed to the United States. They ultimately failed to capture the leadership of General Smedley Butler, who ended the U.S. plot by publicly denouncing the conspiracy as the fascist coup that it was.”  (32)

  After having failed miserably in applying aggressive fascism in America, as was being done in Europe as the “solution” to the economic woes of the depression orchestrated by agents of the British Empire on Wall Street, the Rhodes networks decided that the only chance to defeat FDR was through the old Fabian method of infiltration and co-option. Every attempt was made to infiltrate New Deal institutions at all costs such that their full co-opting could occur relatively seamlessly upon the first opportunity of Roosevelt’s fall from power. For this, leading Fabian Society eugenicist John Maynard Keynes’ theories were used to first mimic the outward form of Roosevelt’s program without any of the substance.

  1932: The Rhodes Trust Hive in Canada Shifts Gears

  Just as Roosevelt was coming to power in America in 1932, the Rhodes Trust networks of Canada centering on Escott Reid, Frank Underhill, Eugene Forsey, F.R. Scott, and David Lewis founded a self-described “Fabian modeled think tank” customized for Canada known as the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR). Reid, Forsey, Scott and Lewis were all Rhodes Scholars while Underhill was an Oxford trained Fabian who was tutored by Harold Laski and G.B. Shaw at Balliol College. The avowed intention of the group was to institute a system of “scientific management of society” under Fabian precepts and expressed itself in the group’s selecting of J.S. Woodsworth, another Oxford-trained Fabian, to head the new Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) as an outgrowth of the LSR. The CCF called for the complete destruction of capitalism in its Regina Manifesto of 1933. Woodsworth, an avowed eugenicist, vigorously endorsed the passage of Alberta’s 1927 sterilization laws to eliminate the unfit (32). Following the gospel of his Fabian mentors H.G. Wells and G.B. Shaw, Woodsworth even advocated the abolishment of personal property. At its heart the CCF was not your typical “socialism”, but merely fascism with a “scientific” socialist face.

  Knowing that a fearful mob tends to fall into extremes, the CIIA’s creation of a new polarized left and right did not produce the result as it should have. Under the logic of empire, the abysmal failure of the “right” wing conservative party of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett (1930-1935), should have created the conditions for a radical left turn by the time the CCF had been formed. Unemployment was over 25%, money tightening policies were choking what little production still existed and Bennett’s typically anti-American Tory stance was blocking any potential for increasing trade with the United States.

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  But something wasn’t working for the Empire’s agenda. While the political seeds for a “scientific socialist” world government were being planted on pace in Canada, the cultural fear and despair necessary for such programs to take root willingly by the choice of the masses were no longer in place. Indeed, the Canadian population was so inspired by the weekly Roosevelt Fireside Chats broadcast across the border, scattered with newspaper reports of inspiring.

  New Deal projects, that hope for a better future and a national solution to the chaos of the Great Depression was close enough at hand such that no great polarization could occur. As such, the blind acceptance of a Woodsworth-CCF scientific dictatorship run by agents of Rhodes’s nightmare was avoided.

  FDR’s power in the minds of the Canadian population forced even the radical anti-American blue-Tory Government of R.B. Bennett to eventually adapt to the language of the New Deal by trying to copy the U.S. program in a last ditch effort to save the 1935 election. This Delphic program was known as Bennett’s “New Deal for Canada” platform. The platform was a failure, as the program laid out by Bennett had two grave errors:

  1) Promoting a vast array of social welfare proposals (ie: minimum wage, health insurance, unemployment insurance, expanded pension plan, minimum hours for the work week) but lacking any large scale nation building measures which defined the American success and gave meaning to the welfare measures, the Bennett knock-off simply copied the form without any of the substance of the true New Deal. The closest approximation to infrastructure programs involved slave labour driven “work camps” paying 25 cents per day which used and abused young desperate men so that piecemeal roads and patchwork building could occur devoid of any national mission (33).

  2) The national credit system employed by Roosevelt through his understanding of American System thinkers as Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln was entirely absent from the mind of Bennett and his civil servants. While the creation of the Bank of Canada modeled on the privatized system of England’s Central Bank, was established in 1935 after an extensive Royal Commission run by Lord Macmillan (begun in 1933), its constitutional and structural mandate was designed to merely centralize control for the management of already existent wealth under the control of monetarist/accounting principles… not the creation of new wealth. This institution was designed as inherently monetarist/Keynesian, NOT Rooseveltian.  Without a proper American styled credit system in place which tied credit to the increase of the productive powers of labour, then any large investments, even the superficial ones proposed by Bennett’s New Deal were doomed to failure. After the Conservative Party’s 1935 decimation at the hands of the Liberals, Bennett soon retired permanently to Britain, accepting a title of nobility as Viscount.

  With a revival of the American System under Roosevelt, we can see why the Canadian culture was not induced to fall into the spider web set by London. However we have yet to explain how the CIIA/Rhodes Trust networks were prevented from fully taking over control of Canada’s foreign policy during the remainder of the 1930s.

  The Laurier Liberals Rise again 1935-1940

  On October 1935, the Liberals still under the leadership of Mackenzie King returned to power in Canadian politics attempting to gain a foothold amidst the two British controlled extremes of the left-wing CCF and right-wing Conservatives. At this point, Vincent Massey left his three year post as President of the Liberal Party to occupy his new position as the High Commissioner to Britain bringing into his staff such Oxford protégés as Lester B. Pearson as his personal secretary, as well as Rhodes Scholars George Ignatieff and Escott Reid. While most modern historians (often affiliated with the CIIA such as John English and Jack Granatstein (34) have held that the influx of Oxford men into the Department of External Affairs (DEA) was catalyzed by O.D. Skelton, the evidence demonstrates that none other than Vincent Massey himself and the CIIA networks were the true leaders  in this process against the better intention of O.D. Skelton. The popular thesis cooked up by Granastein and his ilk, has merely been a mythology maintained in order to hide Canada’s true nation building heritage from present generations, as the following evidence will demonstrate.

  While the CIIA had built up a large array of high level intellectuals which had successfully installed themselves at controlling nodes of all major universities across Canada, unlike its counterparts in the United States or Britain, the CIIA had been unsuccessful at permeating the Department of External Affairs (DEA). This was caused in large measure by the return of Oscar Skelton as Undersecretary of the DEA working alongside the Minister of External Affairs Mackenzie King. King was the only Prime Minister to occupy both posts simultaneously in Canadian history. Historian Adam Chapnick describes the suspicions of King and Skelton to CIIA infiltration in the following terms:

  “He shared his prime minister’s suspicions of Britain’s political leadership and had never forgotten that following the British blindly into battle in 1914 had nearly destroyed his country… Skelton became the leader of “the isolationist intelligentsia” in the East Block”(35). This distrust was demonstrated in the words of the Prime Minister, who spoke to the Canadian population after the Imperial Conference of 1937 saying: “Those who looked to the conference to devise and formulate a joint imperial policy on foreign affairs defense or trade will find nothing to fulfill their expectations” (36).

  As chaos began to spread and the echos of war could be heard, cracks began to appear in Skelton’s policy of keeping the CIIA nest from taking over Canadian foreign policy. In a diary entry of May 20, 1938, Skelton wrote the following ominous words:

  “The British are doing their best to have the Czechs sacrifice themselves on the altar of European peace… apparently the French are softening in resistance. The Prime Minister said in council there seemed almost unanimous recognition of (the) impossibility of our staying out if Britain goes in: my 14 years effort here wasted” (37).

  Chapnick describes the irony of the RIIA’s success in coordinating post war planning through the British Foreign Office as early as 1939, yet was unable to make any headway for similar planning in their Canadian branch:

  “While Mackenzie King was bracing his country for the possibility of war, the RIIA’s world-order preparatory group held its first meeting at Chatham House on 17 July 1939. The discussion emphasized the importance of maintaining the rule of law in international relations. Unlike the CIIA, which struggled to be heard in Ottawa through much of 1941, the RIIA had already established close links to the government in London. Its impact was evident in October 1939 when Lord Lothian [aka: Philip Kerr], the British ambassador in Washington, alluded publicly to a future global federation. His comments foresaw an international order in which regional organizations would police the world under the umbrella of a unifying executive body.“ (38)

  Historian Denis Stairs relates Philip Kerr`s frustration with Skelton`s influence on Mackenzie King when he wrote that “Kerr once pointedly observed to Vincent Massey that it “would be better if Skelton did not regard co-operation with anyone as a confession of inferiority”. Massey reported later in his memoirs that he agreed with the assessment.” (39) Massey, an enemy of Skelton since the 1923 Imperial Conference referred to Skelton in his diaries as “Herr Doktor Skelton”.

  Upon the mysterious deaths of O.D. Skelton and Ernest Lapointe in 1941 (40), the gates holding back the CIIA’s hordes began to be lifted as Massey’s young recruit Norman Robertson (a Rhodes Scholar), was quickly installed as Skelton’s replacement as Undersecretary of External Affairs. With this veritable coup, things quickly changed for the CIIA’s role in shaping Canada’s foreign policy. Chapnick describes the situation in the following terms:

  “Ironically, just as the CIIA abandoned its faith in the Canadian government, Norman Robertson finally began to mobilize the Department of External Affairs. Since wartime restrictions prevented him from hiring the additional staff necessary to pursue an internationalist agenda in the traditional way, he sought temporary help from his former academic colleagues. Himself a University of British Columbia graduate, Robertson first asked the professor of political science and economics Henry Angus to move to Ottawa and assume the position of departmental “special assistant.” Angus was a member of the CIIA and had studied the Versailles settlement in depth.

  He was expected to contribute constructively to postwar discussions. George Glazebrook, known to Pearson from the History Department of the University of Toronto, soon joined him. Glazebrook had sat on the CIIA research committee that had been tasked with looking into the shape of the postwar world. In all, approximately twenty university professors eventually worked for External Affairs during the war, nearly all of whom had direct or at least indirect ties to the CIIA. The recruitment of these academics created a planning infrastructure within the Canadian civil service that was similar to those already established in Great Britain and the United States. Two years after the Anglo-American process of planning the postwar order had started, Canada was finally taking its first small step forward.” (41)

  With the takeover of Canada’s foreign policy-making apparatus in the Department of External Affairs by the CIIA, Canada’s new program of the “Third Way” was set in place by the likes of Escott Reid, Lester Pearson, and later Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Under this program, Canada’s role in the post War world served as a counterweight to the bipolar Cold War dynamic of Mutually Assured Annihilation. Wherever possible Canada would disrupt America by befriending Communist Countries, while Britain’s Delphic foreign policy became one of closely mimicking the USA. The Third Way was described later by Pierre Trudeau when asked of his foreign policy approach as “the creation of counter-weights”. All this was done not for interests of Canada, a nation whose birth had become tragically aborted but in the service of the British Empire.

  To be continued next week…

  

• Buffett Reveals The "Outrageous" Investments Behind A Small Iowa College's Giant Endowment

  A small college in Iowa owes a lot of its endowment’s gains to Warren Buffett… and to some pretty “outrageous” investment strategies he helped deploy on the endowment’s behalf. Buffett’s strategies for the little known Grinnell College included highly risky strats like buyouts and arbitrage plays – and they worked: they helped turn the college’s endowment into a $2 billion financial powerhouse, according to Bloomberg.

  Buffett reveals in a new book that his partnership with fellow Grinnell trustee and friend Joe Rosenfield helped him find joy in investing on behalf of the endowment. The results of the the Buffett/Rosenfield partnership still have a profound effect on the 1700 students that attend the Iowa college today. 

  Rosenfield was a Grinnell graduate in 1925, and an attorney whose family owned department stores across Iowa and the Midwest. Rosenfield saw growing the endowment as the college’s best path to survival and enlisted Buffett to help after a casual introduction by a cousin of his. The two spoke during late night phone calls about ideas, Buffett recalls.

  “I can’t recall any committee assignments in my lifetime in which I experienced such pleasure. When Joe would call me at night to discuss some action that would swell Grinnell’s coffers, his enthusiasm was that of a kid in a candy shop. I couldn’t help but share it” the Omaha Octogenarian wrote.

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  “The more outrageous the act might seem for a college endowment, the better Joe and I liked it,’’ Buffett said in the forward to the recently released book “Mentor: Life and Legacy of Joe Rosenfield”. 

  He continued: “Every investment move was always entertaining for us and always (well, almost always) profitable. In fact, we truly had more fun making money for the college than we did in making investments for ourselves. We conspired to have the college buy convertible debentures in a startup (Intel); shorted securities in a ‘can’t-lose’ arbitrage (AT&T); made a leveraged buyout of a network television station (WDTN in Dayton); and the list goes on.”

  Grinnell even purchased a TV station back in 1975. When Buffett called Rosenfield to tell him that stations in Cincinnati and
  Dayton were up for sale, but that he couldn’t purchase them due to regulatory restraints, he told Rosenfield it would be good for Grinnell. The board invested $11 million in a Dayton TV station after “an extensive presentation from Joe and Warren Buffett, who had colluded before the meeting.’’

  Eventually, the station’s value more than quadrupled and was sold in the mid 1980’s. That’s when value investing still worked as markets hadn’t been taken over by central banks, high freaks, and the relentless inflows of “communist” ETF money.

  Rosenfield, who was a college trustee for 59 years, passed away at the age of 96 in the year 2000. 

  “He was an extraordinary friend and one of the people I admired most in the world,” Buffett told Bloomberg in an email. 

  

• Sharyl Attkisson: How Media Narratives Became More Important Than Facts

  Authored by Sharyl Attkisson via The Epoch Times,

  The day that I told CBS News I wished to leave my job as investigative correspondent ahead of my contract, I didn’t give a reason. I didn’t see the point because the problem wasn’t fixable.

  Nor was it isolated to CBS News.

  My own take is that – as our industry has changed in ways that have become undeniable to most – I was a bit of the canary in the coal mine. By that, I mean I believe I was among the first to really pay attention to the increasingly effective operations to shape and censor news—the movements to establish narratives rather than follow facts—and to see the growing influence of smear operations, political interests, and corporate interests on the news.

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  It’s not that I’m smarter than my peers, and I’m surely far less smart than many, but my particular brand of off-narrative reporting happened to draw the intense attention of the smear operators and propagandists, so I began to study it.

  A case in point: the smear that was promulgated when I left CBS. It was often incorrectly reported that I told CBS management I was quitting due to liberal media bias. That false story turned out to be convenient for both political sides, and largely survives today. It simply wasn’t rooted in fact. And I don’t recall reporters even asking me whether it was true. Once a few articles reported that it was, others simply copied the claim and adopted it as if established fact, eventually without attribution. Now there would be no point in trying to clarify it. After all, Wikipedia says it’s true. No going back from that.

  Powerful smear groups and certain interests—including some within CBS at the time—started the narrative that I was “conservative,” not because they necessarily believed it, but as a tool to “controversialize” the reporting I was doing that was contrary to powerful interests.

  The idea is that if I can be portrayed as a partisan, then my reporting can be more easily dismissed.

  The Narrative Requires

  In fact, prior to the operation to push the narrative that I was “conservative,” my reporting had been lauded by a diverse group of observers, including the likes of Rachel Maddow, who once delivered an entire monologue on an investigative expose I did on the “charity” of then-Rep. Stephen Buyer (R- Ind.). My most recent Emmy award was for an undercover investigation into Republican fundraising.

  But the narrative requests—nay, requires—that we forget all that. We must focus on the supposed miraculous metamorphosis. Depending on who’s spinning, they may insist I was a rational journalist who went crazy one day and flew to the dark side of conservatism. Or they may say I used to be a devoted liberal, but decided the big money was in pandering to Republicans, so I sold out. The details aren’t important. You are simply to come away with the notion that my reporting is now politically conflicted.

  Another example of this narrative: Many news reports comment that I work for the “conservative” Sinclair Broadcast Group. Fair enough—Sinclair is run by a family that’s made no secret of their conservative political leanings. But the reporters who note this political connection apparently fail to recognize the inherent conflict in the fact that they eagerly label the conservative group; yet I don’t think they reported that I worked for the “liberal” CNN, the “liberal” PBS, or the “liberal” CBS.

  Some reporters lack the self-awareness and objectivity to understand they are revealing themselves when they selectively apply labels in a one-sided fashion. They are servicing a narrative, even if unintentionally.

  When I worked at CNN, it was owned by a billionaire Democrat donor (Ted Turner)—a good boss, by the way. When I worked for CBS, the management (Sumner Redstone, Les Moonves) were rich Democrat donors—also, a great company to work for during most of my 20 years there.

  Sinclair has likewise been a terrific employer to date. They haven’t forced editorial biases in the reporting on my program. The program is mostly apolitical, addressing topics such as the underreported dangers of MRI dye or how American farmers are suffering under the current trade war with China. When we address politics, you are as likely to see an interview with Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat, as you are to see Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican.

  Improvements

  But there’s the narrative…

  When a national print media reporter wrote about my program a couple of years ago, he incorrectly referred to it as “conservative.” Later, when asked if he’d ever actually seen the program, he admitted he hadn’t. It’s not that it would be difficult to—well—actually do a little bit of reporting rather than repeat a narrative: My weekly program is on at least a half-dozen times each week in the city where this reporter is based, and it’s posted online.

  As easy as it was for him to do some first-hand reporting, he chose to repeat the narrative.

  Lara Logan, who recently left CBS News, has also been speaking out about her observations regarding the decline of fair and objective journalism. She’s likewise been attacking the narratives. As such, she has been subjected to them. That’s how it works. Obviously (says the narrative), she is a disgruntled conservative who is not to be believed. Or (says the narrative), she’s perhaps a little unbalanced. (You know, all that war reporting and stress. Poor Lara.)

  The truth is, Lara is extremely clear-eyed on these issues. And she and I are far from alone in our views on the state of the media. We agree there is terrific journalism being committed on a daily basis at organizations from The New York Times to local news stations. However, we agree that national media has also largely become co-opted by powerful interests who understand how to direct the news landscape in a way that services certain narratives and agendas.

  I have heard support from hundreds of journalists, college professors, and media observers during the last several years. I have been reached out to by reporters in print and on TV, by national and local news, by students and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

  The effort to expose flaws and conflicts in media reporting is growing stronger, not weaker, despite the narratives. The desire to affect improvements is building. Make no mistake: Not all of us are free to speak publicly, but there are a lot of us. And we aren’t going away.

  

• Mississippi River Breaks 1993 Flood Record

  As severe rain and thunderstorms continue to hammer the Midwest, flooding along the Mississippi River has broken quarter-century record. Water levels at Rock Island, Illinois, reached a new record peak, and other spots along the river could also reach new record highs if the rain doesn’t stop.

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  The water level at Rock Island rose 7.7 feet (2.3 meters) above flood stage as of 8 am local time on Friday, according to the National Weather Service. Rock Island is about 175 miles west of Chicago, and the previous record was set in June 1993, when the upper Mississippi and Missouri Rivers flooded the surrounding area, according to Bloomberg.

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  Though the area has experienced substantial precipitation in the past few months, in 1993 “we had rain after rain after rain throughout the spring and summer,” said Justin Palmer, a hydrologist with the U.S. North Central River Forecast Center in Chanhassen, Minn.

  “It is kind of a one-off right now,” Palmer said. “But the potential is there as we get more rain for the river to stay high. We are definitely vulnerable to a rain event.”

  But according to forecasts, the flooding could get worse. About 1.5 to 2 inches of rain is forecast to fall across Iowa and Illinois through May 10, the US Weather Prediction Center said. Between January and March, much of the Midwest will have had one of the 10 worst rain and snow seasons.

  Between Jan. 1 and Thursday, 15.1 inches of rain fell in Davenport, Iowa, across the river from Rock Island.

  High waters levels, which have persisted for months, have slowed the shipments of agriculture commodities like corn and grain, even forcing the CME Group to declare force majeure as some shipping stations became impossible to reach.

  

• Green Revolution: Washington State To Allow Composting Of Human Beings

  Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

  Each Friday we highlight a number of important, and often bizarre stories from around the world that my team and I are closely following:

  1. Washington State will allow human body composting

  It doesn’t get much greener than this.

  Staking his presidential run on climate change, the Governor of Washington is set to sign a bill legalizing composting of deceased humans.

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  An especially high percentage of the deceased in Washington are cremated, so this alternative will cut down on carbon emissions.

  Instead, family members can pay around $5,500 to turn their loved ones into compost, and use the composted-remains to plant a tree.

  Hell, why not throw it right into the vegetable garden. Then your loved ones become a part of you.

  Friendly reminder though, soylent green is people.

  Click here to read the full story.

  2. Satanic Temple gets tax-exempt status

  Surely a sign that the end times are nigh, the Satanic Temple has successfully gained tax exempt status like any other religion.

  The thing is, they aren’t really all about worshipping Satan.

  The church was founded as a bit of a joke. The group is meant to protest the meddling of government and religion.

  For instance, if government functions start with a prayer, they want to open with a prayer to Satan. And if a courthouse lawn has a ten commandments statue, they want Lucifer spreading his wings right there beside it.

  And now they have forced the government to recognize them as a religion, with all the tax exemptions that come with it.

  Click here to read the full story.

  3. Laying the groundwork for conscientious objection to taxes

  Speaking of interesting tactics to avoid taxes…

  Last year a man who refused to pay taxes since 1997 had his case dismissed by a federal court.

  He refused to pay because some tax dollars fund abortions which he morally objects to.

  But the reason his case got dismissed had nothing to do with that.

  The government couldn’t prove he evaded taxes, because he never tried to hide it.

  He was very open about why he wouldn’t pay taxes. That’s not evasion, that’s just refusal.

  And when the IRS started garnishing his wages, the man simply cashed his work checks, and kept a low balance in his bank account. The court said not everything that makes collection harder is evasion, including simply cashing checks.

  The man does still face misdemeanor charges for willful refusal to file tax returns.

  I still prefer the legal ways of reducing my taxes, that won’t have be hauled in front of a judge.

  Click here to read the full story.

  4. Elizabeth Warren proposes canceling student loan debt, making college free

  We said it was coming…

  Desperate for attention in her 2020 bid for President, Senator Elizabeth Warren continues to roll out the most “progressive” policy proposals among the candidates.

  She’s already proposed a wealth tax, jailing CEOs for civil crimes, and breaking up any large corporation she can get her hands on.

  Now she wants to forgive almost all of the $1.5 TRILLION worth of student loan debt.

  However you won’t be receiving any relief if you live in a household with income over $250,000 per year.

  Since the United States government owns 90% of student loan debt, this just means that the taxpayers will be on the hook for all those wonderful underwater-basket-weaving and gender studies degrees.

  Warren also proposed making college free. Because the government has done such a great job educating the youth in public schools…

  Click here to read the full story.

  5. Colorado becomes 15th state to approve gun confiscation

  Beyond a reasonable doubt is the standard for criminal convictions. Only then can you be deprived of life, liberty, and property.

  But all it takes under Colorado’s new red flag-laws to take your guns away is a preponderance of evidence.

  And that weak standard of evidence doesn’t even have to apply to a crime.

  The evidence just has to suggest that a person “poses a significant risk of causing personal risk to self or others in the near future.”

  For a statute that can strip you of your rights, that’s pretty vague and arbitrary.

  If a family member or former roommate testifies that you are a risk to yourself or others, the courts can confiscate your guns with an Extreme Risk Protective Order (ERPO).

  After two weeks, the “suspect” (if you can even call them that, since they aren’t suspected of a crime) has a chance to prove his innocence in court. In other words, you are presumed guilty until you spend your own money to prove your innocence. Otherwise the ERPO can be extended for a full year.

  And the same standard of proof can be used by the accuser to extend the ERPO year after year.

  So forget due process. The whims of the cops and judges can strip you of your right to protect yourself.

  Click here to read the full story.

  

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• Amphibious Warfare: Robot Tank Protects Royal Marines During War Games

   

  Royal Marines conducted a “ground-breaking” exercise simulating an amphibious assault of a beach supported by unmanned vehicles for the first time, reported the Royal Navy newspaper.

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  Alpha Company of 40 special forces carried out ‘Exercise Commando Warrior’ alongside 1 Assault Group Royal Marines (1AGRM) at Tregantle Beach, in Cornwall, a county on England’s rugged southwestern tip.

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  The amphibious assault began late last month with marines in special forces vessels transported to the beach while being supported by unmanned boats with machine guns searching for enemy forces on land and at sea, using advanced cameras and sensors.

  In the sky, small to medium-sized unmanned aerial vehicles patrolled the skies, and two unmanned ground vehicles provided direct and indirect fire support to landing troops.

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  The war exercise successfully achieved connecting all of these unmanned systems to central commanders who will then use data collected from the exercise to influence their future tactical decision-making.

  With autonomous vehicles on three domains (air, land, and sea) protecting marines from enemy forces, the troops successfully stormed the beach, climbed the cliffs, eliminated enemy forces, and retreated to the shore.

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  Royal Marines were the first ever forces to use autonomous vehicles in three domains simultaneously while simulating a beach assault.

  The two unmanned ground vehicles were designed and produced by QinetiQ, a British multinational defense robotics company and a supplier of robots to the Royal Marines.

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  Corporal Scott Shaw was one of the marines participating in the beach assault exercise.

  Shaw said: “This is very early steps in the capacity of the Future Commando Force and reinventing ourselves back to the original definition of what Commandos are.”

  “It is about reinventing the force with new technology that’s available,” he added.

  Corporal Ashley Hill agreed with Shaw — indicating that “Trialling this new kit, and new formations, is about pushing us away from just being an infantry force that gets off the boats and moving us back towards our Commando roots.”

  “There is a space to be filled in defense and we are trying to fill it thanks to this new technology,” Shaw said.

  All video from the unmanned systems were fed through a downlink to a central command and then relayed back to marines that had tablets.

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  Colonel Chris Haw, commanding officer of 1AGRM and Commando Warrior exercise director, said: “This is a really exciting start and although it is only the first step, it is a milestone in Future Commando Force and Littoral Strike development.”

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  The Royal Navy funded all unmanned systems used in the exercise in the 2018/19 financial year.

  Haw said, “In future, we will be able to do things with more precision and less risk.”

  Since the 20th century began, amphibious assaults onto beaches have been one of the most sophisticated military maneuvers. It seems that now, the Royal Marines are integrating autonomous systems on three domains to gain a tremendous edge against enemy forces in future conflicts. 

  

• Why Social Democracy Is Failing Europe

  Authored by Alasdair Macleod via The Mises Institute,

  There is a certain tension in the phrase, “social democracy,” and the description of someone as a social democrat. Social in this context is socialism by the state. A democrat supports the freedom for individual electors to express and defend personal interests in regular plebiscites. The two positions are incompatible.

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  At this point we should note that in economic terms there is little philosophical difference between European socialism and communism. Both seek to relieve capitalists of the means of production in favor of the state, either by ownership or control. Marx himself saw socialism as a temporary phase on the way to full communism. However, we all know from experience that communism fails by impoverishing everyone except a coterie of leaders. The same problem of the state’s inability to calculate prices, other than with reference to labor costs, and to foresee what consumers require on the morrow bedevils both socialism and communism. The principal difference between the two is the speed at which economic disintegration takes place, tied to the rate at which the socializing state removes personal freedoms and destroys wealth.

  Social democrats assume that moderate socialism does not lead to those outcomes, which is a mistake. They are deceived.

  With social democracy we observe committed socialists and communists using democracy as the pathway towards increasing socialism and eventual communism. But there’s a problem, which in time becomes increasingly obvious to the electorate. Electors become poorer over time, and the more progressive among them seek to escape in order to participate in more capitalistic economies. Lenin and Mao Zedong dealt with this tendency by suppressing all freedom of expression and they redefined democracy to permit only the election of communist officials. Intellectuals, always the first to express discontent, were liquidated or sent to the Soviet gulags and China’s penal labor camps. 

  In Western Europe a different, more patient approach was needed for the communist revolution. And this is where the concept of the social democrat springs from.

  The tactic was (and still is) to stand firm on socialism and force compromises always to be made by the democrats. For decades it was the basis of Soviet foreign policy, which employed “useful idiots” to spread communism in both universities and political circles. Their influence was what defeated Enoch Powell and still drives Ken Clarke and his fellow appeasers towards greater socialism. It is clear that social democratic politicians need not be communists, only appeasers. 

  Social democratic political parties express a belief in social justice. But social justice is a meaningless term used by the far left to attract support for more extreme forms of socialism. In Europe, social democrats advocating social justice have held sway since the Second World War. But they are becoming victims of their success at taking down capitalism, because they are losing electoral support. 

  The era of social democracy appears to be coming to an end.

  Germany’s SPD recently suffered its worst electoral result since the Second World War, and France’s Socialist Party came fifth in the presidential election won by Emmanuel Macron, a political outsider. Other social democratic parties to have lost ground include the Netherlands’ Labour Party, Italy’s Democratic Party and Austria’s Social Democrats. In the United States there was a rejection of the Democrats in favor of President Trump, who like Macron in France started as a political outsider. 

  Brexit was the rejection by the British voter of the socializing controls imposed by a remote super-state. The British parliament initially paid lip-service to the electorate’s wishes, before rallying round its socialist credentials and is now conspiring to stop Brexit. So strong is Parliament’s collective socialist instinct that May’s appeasing government is prepared to destroy its electoral base rather than stand against the socialist tide. It comes at a time when the Labour Party has been captured by a Marxist clique which appears increasingly likely to form the next government. 

  Commentators attribute the decline in social democracy to events such as the great financial crisis. This and other reasons are why traditional working-class and blue-collar workers have drifted away. The philosophical conflict between socialism and democracy is at the heart of the rebellion, if only the voters themselves knew it. Instead of rejecting socialism, they are embracing extremes, and the extremes are always socialist extremes. Notably, almost none of the disillusioned social democrats support free markets.

  The point missed by most analysts is that social democracy is failing because of the contradiction between personal freedom and state control.

  As a form of mild socialism, it fails for the same reason as did communism. It all plays into the hands of the communists, for whom the failure of social democracy is an opportunity. They encourage the rank and file to blame capitalism. The collapse of capitalism is inevitable, as Marx wrote. And its collapse hastens full-blooded communism. Communism is a broken philosophy, as has been clearly demonstrated. But ruthless leaders still see it as the means of obtaining power over their fellow humans.

  

• Kim's "Game of Thrones": Report Details Leadership Shake-Up Over Nuclear Negotiations

  A new Bloomberg report details “Kim Jong Un’s Game of Thrones” as he appears to be rapidly changing high level posts connected with nuclear negotiations with the United States, suggesting a change in negotiating strategy following President Trump’s walking away from the Hanoi talks in February. 

  The report concludes that the “swirl of mysterious personnel changes” in Pyongyang signals a dramatic makeover as Kim purges ranks, including the North Korean dictator’s own sister who’s quickly faded to the background in a possible demotion along with his chief nuclear negotiator. 

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  The shake-up further follows Kim’s first historic meeting with President Putin in Russia last month, and is fueling speculation that Pyongyang could be ready to approach US talks with a firmer line, given observers have seen no evidence North Korea is ready to given up any aspect of its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. 

  It comes after last month The New York Times reported that ongoing leadership changes in the ruling Workers’ Party signaled preparations for “protracted negotiations” based on replacing “aging senior officials with younger, more aggressive ones and vowed repeatedly to overcome the sanctions.”

  Weeks ago Kim told a government assembly that he remains “open” to another meeting with Trump, but with conditions.

  He indicated in a public speech: “I am willing to accept if the United States proposes a third North Korea-United States summit on the condition that it has a right attitude and seeks a solution that we can share,” according to the Times.

  “What is clear is that if the United States sticks to its current political calculations, it will darken the prospects for solving the problem and will in fact be very dangerous,” Kim said during the April 10 remarks. 

  Below are some of the highlights of Kim Jong Un’s Game of Thrones style shake-up from the Bloomberg report.

  * * *

  Kim Yo Jong, Sister

  Long considered the most powerful woman in North Korea, she’s recently faded from view.

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  Bloomberg summarizes:

  Part royal representative, part personal assistant, Kim Yo Jong has emerged as one of her older brother’s closest aides in recent months. While she became the first member of the ruling family to visit Seoul and accompanied Kim Jong Un in his summits with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, she’s also performed mundane tasks, such as helping the leader extinguish a cigarette during a train stop in China.

  That proximity to power has made Kim Yo Jong’s disappearance in recent weeks all the more intriguing. Besides being left off a list of newly elected Political Bureau alternate members last month, she was absent from the Putin meetings. In fact, she hasn’t appeared in any state media since the early April reshuffle, after participating in nine public events earlier in the year, according to a tally by the North Korea news site NKPro.

  Kim Hyok Chol, Chief Negotiator

  The nuclear deterrence expert who was initially relatively unknown became point man for negotiations in Hanoi, but has since completely dropped from view. 

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  Says Bloomberg: 

  A career diplomat known for his expertise in nuclear deterrence against the U.S., Kim Hyok Chol’s appointment as counterpart to the Trump administration’s chief envoy Stephen Biegun earlier this year surprised North Korea watchers. One South Korean TV outlet drew a circle around him in a video from a White House meeting between Trump and North Korean officials, asking who he was.

  In the aftermath of the Hanoi talks, Kim Hyok Chol has plunged back into obscurity, receiving no mention in state media reports. That could reflect his relatively low rank in Pyongyong’s power structure — or suggest a purge. Lee Hye-hoon, the South Korean lawmaker, said intelligence officials wouldn’t confirm whether Kim Hyok Chol had been punished.

  * * *

  Kim Yong Chol, State Affairs Commission

  Powerful former spy chief, he was the main emissary between Trump and Kim Jong Un, helping arrange both Trump-Kim summits, but he’s just been replaced as head of a key ruling party department.

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  Per the Bloomberg report:

  Last month, Kim Yong Chol was unexpectedly replaced as head of the ruling party’s United Front Department by a lesser-known official and was absent from Kim Jong Un’s side during meetings with Putin last week in Russia. Experts disagree over whether the change was a demotion. He was re-appointed to the 14-member State Affairs Commission led by Kim Jong Un and is believed to have retained his various ruling party positions.

  * * *

  Ri Yong Ho, Foreign Minister

  Appears to be more central in decision making, perhaps displacing Chol in terms of influence. 

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  According to Bloomberg:

  The veteran diplomat who once denounced Trump at the United Nations as a “mentally deranged person, full of megalomania” has maintained a central foreign policy role since Hanoi. In addition to being re-appointed to the State Affairs Commission last month, he’s also appeared repeatedly by Kim Jong Un side in recent diplomatic events, including the meetings with Putin in Vladivostok.

  * * *

  Choe Son Hui, First Vice Foreign Minister

  From diplomat and translator, her rapid rise to first vice foreign minister – but more importantly her apparent closeness to Kim – has stunned observers.

  Per Bloomberg:

  Among the most surprising developments has been the ascent of Choe Son Hui. The blunt-spoken diplomat was once best known to foreign negotiators as a translator who took liberties with her boss’s words during six-party talks, according to Chun Yung-woo, a former South Korean nuclear envoy.

  Since participating the Hanoi talks, Choe has been promoted to the State Affairs Commission alongside Ri and received the title of first vice foreign minister. She has enjoyed other nods of trust from Kim Jong Un, sharing his table with Putin at their Vladivostok banquet and briefing the foreign media, where she conveyed what she said were the supreme leader’s personal views.

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• China And Russia: Whoopin' Uncle Sam At His Own Game

  Authored by Mike Whitney via The Unz Review,

  Your Geopolitical Quiz for the Day:

  Two countries are embroiled in a ferocious rivalry. One country’s meteoric growth has put it on a path to become the world’s biggest economic superpower while the other country appears to be slipping into irreversible decline. Which country will lead the world into the future?

  Country A builds factories and plants, it employees zillions of people who manufacture things, it launches massive infrastructure programs, paves millions of miles of highways and roads, opens new sea lanes, vastly expands its high-speed rail network, and pumps profits back into productive operations that turbo-charge its economy and bolster its stature among the nations of the world.

  Country B has the finest military in the world, it has more than 800 bases scattered across the planet, and spends more on weapons systems and war-making than all the other nations combined. Country B has gutted its industrial core, hollowed out its factory base, allowed its vital infrastructure to crumble, outsourced millions of jobs, off-shored thousands of businesses, plunged the center of the country into permanent recession, delivered control of its economy to the Central Bank, and recycled 96 percent of its corporate and financial profits into a stock buyback scam that sucks critical capital out of the economy and into the pockets of corrupt Wall Street plutocrats whose voracious greed is pushing the world towards another catastrophic meltdown.

  Which of these two countries is going to lead the world into the future? Which of these two countries offers a path to security and prosperity that doesn’t involve black sites, extraordinary rendition, extrajudicial assassinations, color-coded revolutions, waterboarding, strategic disinformation, false-flag provocations, regime change and perennial war?

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  China’s Belt and Road Initiative: A Tectonic Shift in the Geopolitical Balance of Power

  Over the weekend, more than 5,000 delegates from across the world met in Beijing for The Second Belt and Road Forum For International Cooperation. The conference provided an opportunity for public and private investors to learn more about Xi Jinping’s “signature infrastructure project” that is reshaping trade relations across Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. According to journalist Pepe Escobar, “The BRI is now supported by no less than 126 states and territories, plus a host of international organizations” and will involve “six major connectivity corridors spanning Eurasia.” The massive development project is “one of the largest infrastructure and investment projects in history, ….including 65% of the world’s population and 40% of the global gross domestic product as of 2017.” (Wikipedia) The improvements to road, rail and sea routes will vastly increase connectivity, lower shipping costs, boost productivity, and enhance widespread prosperity. The BRI is China’s attempt to replace the crumbling post-WW2 “liberal” order with a system that respects the rights of sovereign nations, rejects unilateralism, and relies on market-based principles to effect a more equitable distribution of wealth. The Belt and Road Initiative is China’s blueprint for a New World Order. It is the face of 21st century capitalism.

  The prestigious event in Beijing was barely covered by the western media which sees the project as a looming threat to US plans to pivot to Asia and become the dominant player in the most prosperous and populous region in the world. Growing international support for the Chinese roadmap suggests that Washington’s hegemonic ambitions are likely to be short-circuited by an aggressive development agenda that eclipses anything the US is currently doing or plans to do in the foreseeable future.

  The Chinese plan will funnel trillions of dollars into state of the art transportation projects that draw the continents closer together in a webbing of high-speed rail and energy pipelines (Russia). Far-flung locations in Central Asia will be modernized while standards of living will steadily rise. By creating an integrated economic space, in which low tariffs and the free flow of capital help to promote investment, the BRI initiative will produce the world’s biggest free trade zone, a common market in which business is transacted in Chinese or EU currency. There will be no need to trade in USD’s despite the dollar’s historic role as the world’s reserve currency. The shift in currencies will inevitably increase the flow of dollars back to the United States increasing the already-ginormous $22 trillion dollar National Debt while precipitating an excruciating period of adjustment.

  Chinese and Russian leaders are taking steps to “harmonize” their two economic initiatives, the Belt and Road and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). This will be a challenging task as the expansion of infrastructure implies compatibility between leaders, mutual security guarantees, new rules and regulations for the common economic space, and supranational political structures to oversee trade, tariffs, foreign investment and immigration. Despite the hurtles, both Putin and Xi appear to be fully committed to their vision of economic integration which they see as based on the “unconditional adherence to the primacy of national sovereignty and the central role of the United Nations.”

  It comes at no surprise that US powerbrokers see Putin’s plan as a significant threat to their regional ambitions, in fact, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted as much in 2012 when she said, “It’s going to be called a customs union, it will be called the Eurasian Union and all of that, but let’s make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.” Washington opposes any free trade project in which it is excluded or cannot control. Both the EEU and the BRI fall into that category.

  The United States continues to demonize countries that simply want to use the market to improve the lives of their people and increase their prospects for prosperity. Washington’s hostile approach is both misguided and counterproductive. Competition should be seen as a way to improve productivity and lower costs, not as a threat to over-bloated, inefficient industries that have outlived their usefulness. Here’s an excerpt from an article that Putin wrote in 2011. It helps to show that Putin is not the scheming tyrant he is made out to be in the western media, but a free market capitalist who enthusiastically supports globalization:

  “For the first time in the history of humanity, the world is becoming truly global, in both politics and economics. A central part of this globalization is the growing importance of the Asia-Pacific region as compared to the EuroAtlantic world in the global economy. Asia’s rise is lifting with it the economies of countries outside Asia that have managed to latch onto the “Asian economic engine”….The US has also effectively hitched itself to this “engine”, creating an economic and financial network with China and other countries in the region…

  The “supercontinent” of Eurasia is home to two-thirds of the world’s population and produces over 60 percent of its economic output. Because of the dramatic opening of China and the former Soviet Union to the world, almost all the countries in Eurasia are becoming more economically, politically, and culturally interdependent. …

  There is huge potential for development in infrastructure, in spite of some formidable bottlenecks. …A unified and homogeneous common power market stretching from Lisbon to Hanoi via Vladivostok is not necessary, because electric power markets do not function in that way. But the creation of infrastructure that could support a number of regional and sub-regional common markets would do much for the economic development of Greater Eurasia.” (Russian newspaper, Izvestia, 2011)

  Keep in mind, the article was written back in 2011 long before Xi had even conjured up his grand pan-Asia infrastructure scheme. Putin was already a committed capitalist looking for ways to put the Soviet era behind him and skillfully use the markets to build his nation’s power and prosperity. Regrettably, he has been blocked at every turn. Washington does not want others to effectively use the markets. Washington wants to threaten, bully, sanction and harass its competitors so that outcomes can be controlled and more of the world’s wealth can be skimmed off the top by the noncompetitive, monopolistic corporate behemoths that diktat foreign policy to their political underlings (in congress and the White House) and who see rivals as blood enemies that must be ground into dust.

  Is it any wonder why Russia and China have emerged as Washington’s biggest enemies? It has nothing to do with the fictitious claims of election meddling or so-called “hostile behavior” in the South China Sea. That’s nonsense. Washington is terrified that the Russo-Chinese economic integration plan will replace the US-dominated “liberal” world order, that cutting edge infrastructure will create an Asia-Europe super-continent that no longer trades in dollars or recirculates profits into US debt instruments. They are afraid that an expansive free trade zone that extends from Lisbon to Vladivostok will inevitably lead to new institutions for lending, oversight and governance. They are afraid that a revamped 21st century capitalism will result in more ferocious competition for their clunker corporations, less opportunity for unilateralism and meddling, and a rules-based system where the playing field is painstakingly kept level. That’s what scares Washington.

  The Belt and Road Initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union represent the changing of the guard. The US-backed ‘neoliberal’ model of globalisation is being rejected everywhere, from the streets of Paris, to Brexit, to the rise of right wings groups across Europe, to the unexpected election of Donald Trump in 2016. The Russo-Chinese model is built on a more solid, and less extractive, foundation. This new vision anticipates an interconnected multipolar world where the rules governing commerce are decided by the participants, where the rights of every state are respected equally, and where the new guarantors for regional security scrupulously keep the peace.

  It is this vision of ‘revitalized capitalism’ that Washington sees as its mortal enemy.

  

• US Military Reports Massive Spike In Sexual Assaults

  The US military has reported a massive spike in sexual assaults, with 20,500 instances of unwanted sexual contact in 2018 – up from 14,900 in 2016 when a survey was last conducted, according to ABC News. 

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  Most of the victims were female recruits aged 17 to 24, while alcohol was involved in approximately 1/3 of the incidents reported. Shockingly, just one out of three cases were reported to the authorities. 

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  In response to the findings, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan told Congress he plans to “criminalize” sexual harassment in the military. 

  The report released on Thursday surveyed the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, and found 20,500 cases in 2018.

  Incidents of unwanted sexual contact – which ranges from groping to rape – rose by around 38% between 2016 and 2018.

  Only one out of three cases were reported to authorities, the report found.

  In over 85% of the cases, the victims knew their alleged attacker – and a disturbing number of incidents involved young women whose attacker was often their superior officer. 

  “We’ve got a higher prevalence for women 17 to 24. We’re going to be focusing very, very tightly on that,” said Nate Galbreath, Deputy Director of the Department’ of Defense’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. 

  “This is what tells us that there’s something going on that we need to hone in on,” he told ABC News. 

  “It’s extremely disheartening,” said Dr. Elizabeth Van Winkle, the executive director of the Office of Force Resiliency for the Defense Department. “These are our youngest service members and it is extremely frustrating because we’ve been working at this for a really long time.”

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  New efforts will focus on lower-level leaders, starting with non-commissioned officers, and how they need to hold service members in their units accountable. 

  “Our command climate surveys for a long time measured toxic leadership,” said Van Winkle. “What we’re moving towards is that you’re not only accountable for your own behavior but you’re accountable for true command climate. You are accountable for what’s happening within the peers underneath you.”

  “What we now have to do is we really have to focus down and work with the E5’s (sergeants) and those first line folks that are right there on the front lines,” said Galbreath. “To be able to say here are the tools that you can use to be able to set good order and discipline.”

  

• Whales, Crickets, And Other Fearsome Russian Doomsday Weapons

  Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

  Headlines were blaring the word “Russian” again the other day because the mass media narrative managers found yet another reason for westerners to feel terrified of the icy potato patch that we’d barely ever thought about prior to 2016.

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  I’d like to talk about the Kremlin’s latest horrifying horrific addition to its fearsome doomsday artillery, and recap a few of the other incredibly frightening and terrifying tactics that those strange Cyrillic-scribbling demons of the East are employing to undermine truth, justice, and the American way. Just to make sure we’re all good and scared like we’re supposed to be.

  Gather the kids, clutch your pearls and sign off on hundreds of billions of dollars of extra military spending, my patriotic brethren! Here are five super scary ways the Red Menace is trying to destroy you and everything you hold dear:

  1. Whales

  Is this beluga whale actually a Russian spy? https://t.co/GC8hYIuH7J

  — USA TODAY (@USATODAY) April 29, 2019

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Headlines and TV news segments from virtually all mainstream outlets were falling all over themselves the other day to report the fact that some Norwegians found a tame beluga whale with a harness on it, and “experts” attest that the animal may have been part of a covert espionage program for the Russian navy.

  While there is no indication that this spying cetacean has been trained in the arts of sonar election meddling or shooting novichok from its blowhole, theGuardian helpfully informs us that the harness was labeled “Equipment of St. Petersburg”, and was equipped to hold “a camera or weapon”.

  “Marine experts in Norway believe they have stumbled upon a white whale that was trained by the Russian navy as part of a programme to use underwater mammals as a special ops force,” the Guardian reports.

  The Norwegian tabloid Verdens Gang, which picked up on the discovery well before the breathless English headlines began gracing us with their presence, is a teensy bit less Ian Flemingesque in its reporting on the matter: the harness is equipped for a GoPro camera. The words “Equipment of St. Petersburg” are written in English.

  Why is the Russian military writing “Equipment of St. Petersburg” in English on the garments of its aquatic special ops forces, you may ask? If there were indeed a secret beluga espionage squad assembled by Russian intelligence services, would they not perhaps avoid writing the home address of the whales on their harnesses altogether, and maybe, you know, not let them run free in the wild?

  And to that I would say, stop asking so many questions. That’s just what Putin wants.

  2. Crickets

  NBC and MSNBC Blamed Russia for Using “Sophisticated Microwaves” to Cause “Brain Injuries” in U.S. “Diplomats” in Cuba. The Culprits Were Likely Crickets. https://t.co/7G8p0PyCKI

  — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 7, 2019

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  A report seeded throughout the mainstream media by anonymous intelligence officials last September claimed that US government workers in Cuba had suffered concussion-like brain damage after hearing strange noises in homes and hotels with the most likely culprit being “sophisticated microwaves or another type of electromagnetic weapon” from Russia. A recording of one such highly sophisticated attack was analyzed by scientists and turned out to be the mating call of the male indies short-tailed cricket. Neurologists and other brain specialists have challenged the claim that any US government workers suffered any neurological damage of any kind, saying test results on the alleged victims were misinterpreted.

  The actual story, when stripped of hyperventilating Russia panic, is that some government workers once heard some horny crickets in Cuba.

  *cough*

  3. Puppies

  Robert Parry explores the strange mystery of the Russia-gate puppies, https://t.co/XL9pxJW4E8

  — Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) October 4, 2017

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  Ye gads, is is nothing sacred? Is there any weapon these monsters won’t use to transform the west into a giant, globe-spanning Mordor?

  That’s right, in 2017 puppies became one of the many, many things we’ve been instructed to fear in the hands of our vodka-swilling enemy to the east, with mass media outlets reporting that a Facebook group for animal lovers was one of the sinister, diabolical tactics employed by St. Petersburg’s notorious Internet Research Agency. As the Moon of Alabama blog has explained, the only evidence we’ve seen so far actually indicates that the Internet Research Agency’s operations in America served no purpose other than to attract eyeballs for money. As journalist Aaron Maté wrote of the highly publicized Russian Facebook meddling, “Far from being a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the 2016 election.”

  The late, great Robert Parry, one of the earliest and most outspoken critics of the Russiagate narrative, covered this one for Consortium News in an article he authored a few months before his untimely passing:

  As Mike Isaac and Scott Shane of The New York Times reported in Tuesday’s editions, “The Russians who posed as Americans on Facebook last year tried on quite an array of disguises. … There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads.”

  Now, there are a lot of controversial issues in America, but I don’t think any of us would put puppies near the top of the list. Isaac and Shane reported that there were also supposedly Russia-linked groups advocating gay rights, gun rights and black civil rights, although precisely how these divergent groups were “linked” to Russia or the Kremlin was never fully explained. (Facebook declined to offer details.)

  At this point, a professional journalist might begin to pose some very hard questions to the sources, who presumably include many partisan Democrats and their political allies hyping the evil-Russia narrative. It would be time for some lectures to the sources about the consequences for taking reporters on a wild ride in conspiracy land.

  Yet, instead of starting to question the overall premise of this “scandal,” journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, etc. keep making excuses for the nuttiness. The explanation for the puppy ads was that the nefarious Russians might be probing to discover Americans who might later be susceptible to propaganda.

  “The goal of the dog lovers’ page was more obscure,” Isaac and Shane acknowledged. “But some analysts suggested a possible motive: to build a large following before gradually introducing political content. Without viewing the entire feed from the page, now closed by Facebook, it is impossible to say whether the Russian operators tried such tactics.”

  4. Pokémon

  Yes, Pokémon.

  This Russia hysteria has been a long, wild ride, and sometimes it’s honestly felt like they’re just experimenting on us. Like they’ve been testing the limits of how ridiculous they can make this thing and still get mainstream Americans to swallow it. Like the establishment propagandists are all sitting around in a room smoking blunts and making bets with each other all,
   “I’m telling you, we can sell a Pokémon Go Kremlin conspiracy.”
   “Do it!”
   “No way. There’s no way they’ll go for it.”
   “Yeah well you said that about the puppy dogs!”

  And then they release their latest experiment in social manipulation and place bets on how many disgruntled Hillary voters they can get retweeting it saying “God dammit, I knew that jigglypuff looked suspicious!”

  The October 2017 CNN report which sparked off a full day of shrieking “OMG THEY’RE EVEN USING PIKACHU TO ATTACK OUR DEMOCRACY” headlines was titled “Exclusive: Even Pokémon Go used by extensive Russian-linked meddling effort”, and it reported that Russia had extended its “tentacles” into the popular video game for the purpose of election meddling. Apparently the Internet Research Agency attempted to hold a contest using the game to highlight police brutality against unarmed Black men, which of course is something that only an evil autocracy would ever do.

  Not until the fifteenth paragraph of the article did we see the information which undercut all the frantic arm flailing about Russians destroying democracy and warping our children’s fragile little minds:

  “CNN has not found any evidence that any Pokémon Go users attempted to enter the contest, or whether any of the Amazon Gift Cards that were promised were ever awarded — or, indeed, whether the people who designed the contest ever had any intention of awarding the prizes.”

  Mmm hmm.

  5. Laughter

  Turns out jokes are a Russian disinformation conspiracy.
  Is nothing safe? What will those barbarian Others think of next? Weaponizing our tears? https://t.co/0CFcTL65q0

  — Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) December 15, 2018

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  Late last year the BBC published an article titled “How Putin’s Russia turned humour into a weapon” about yet another addition to the Kremlin’s horrifying deadly hybrid warfare arsenal: comedy. The article’s author, ironically titled“Senior Journalist (Disinformation)” by the BBC, argues that Russia has suddenly discovered laughter as a way to “deliberately lower the level of discussion”.

  “Russia’s move towards using humour to influence its campaigns is a relatively recent phenomenon,” the article explained, without speculating as to why Russians might have suddenly begun laughing at their western accusers.

  Is it perhaps possible that Russian media have begun mocking the west a lot more because westerners have made themselves much easier to make fun of? Could it perhaps be the fact that western mass media have been doing absolutely insane things like constantly selling us the idea that the Kremlin could be lurking behind anything in our world, even really innocuous-looking things like puppy dogs, Pokémon and whales? Could we perhaps be finding ourselves at the butt end of jokes now because in 2016 our society went bat shit, pants-on-head, screaming-at-passing-motor-vehicles insane?

  Nahhh. Couldn’t be. It’s the Russians who’ve gone mad.

  *  *  *

  Everyone has my unconditional permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.

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• Mapped: The Salary Needed To Buy A Home In 50 U.S. Metro Areas

  Over the last year, home prices have risen in 49 of the biggest 50 metro areas in the United States.

  At the same time, mortgage rates have hit seven-year highs, making things more expensive for any prospective home buyer.

  With this context in mind, today’s map comes from HowMuch.net, and it shows the salary needed to buy a home in the 50 largest U.S. metro areas.

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  The Least and Most Expensive Metro Areas

  As a reference point, Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins points out that the median home in the United States costs about $257,600, according to the National Association of Realtors.

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  With a 20% down payment and a 4.90% mortgage rate, and taking into account what’s needed to pay principal, interest, taxes, and insurance (PITI) on the home, it would mean a prospective buyer would need to have $61,453.51 in salary to afford such a purchase.

  However, based on your frame of reference, this national estimate may seem extremely low or quite high. That’s because the salary required to buy in different major cities in the U.S. can fall anywhere between $37,659 to $254,835.

  The 10 Cheapest Metro Areas

  Here are the cheapest metro areas in the U.S., based on data and calculations from HSH.com:

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  After the dust settles, Pittsburgh ranks as the cheapest metro area in the U.S. to buy a home. According to these calculations, buying a median home in Pittsburgh – which includes the surrounding metro area – requires an annual income of less than $40,000 to buy.

  Just missing the list was Detroit, where a salary of $48,002.89 is needed.

  The 10 Most Expensive Metro Areas

  Now, here are the priciest markets in the country, also based on data from HSH.com:

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  Topping the list of the most expensive metro areas are San Jose and San Francisco, which are both cities fueled by the economic boom in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, two other major metro areas in California, Los Angeles and San Diego, are not far behind.

  New York City only ranks in sixth here, though it is worth noting that the NYC metro area extends well beyond the five boroughs. It includes Newark, Jersey City, and many nearby counties as well.

  As a final point, it’s worth mentioning that all cities here (with the exception of Denver) are in coastal states.

  Notes on Calculations

  Data on median home prices comes from the National Association of Realtors and is based on 2018 Q4 information, while national mortgage rate data is derived from weekly surveys by Freddie Mac and the Mortgage Bankers Association of America for 30-year fixed rate mortgages.

  Calculations include tax and homeowners insurance costs to determine the annual salary it takes to afford the base cost of owning a home (principal, interest, property tax and homeowner’s insurance, or PITI) in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas.

  Standard 28% “front-end” debt ratios and a 20% down payments subtracted from the median-home-price data are used to arrive at these figures.

  

• Unconstitutional Searches Of Electronic Devices At US Airports Have Quadrupled

  Authored by Dagny Taggart via The Organic Prepper blog,

  “Go to any airport in this country and you’ll see how well our government is dealing with the terrible danger you’re in. TSA staffers are wanding 90-year-old ladies in wheelchairs, and burrowing through their suitcases. Toddlers are on the no-fly list. Lipsticks are confiscated. And it’s all done with the highest seriousness.

  It’s a show of protection and it stirs the fear pot, giving us over and over an image of being in grave personal peril, needing Big Brother to make sure we’re safe.” – Ann Medlock, Home of the Brave

  The federal government wants us to believe that its growing disregard for our First and Fourth Amendment rights is in the interest of national security.

  Thankfully, there are organizations that are attempting to bring attention to the ever-expanding police state – and are even willing to fight them in court.

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  America is turning into a Constitution-free zone.

  Since 2015, U.S. government searches of travelers’ cellphones and laptops at airports and border crossings have nearly quadrupled.

  You might be tempted to believe that these searches are done for good reasons.

  You’d be mistaken.

  Those searches are “being done for reasons beyond customs and immigration enforcement, according to papers filed Tuesday in a federal lawsuit that claims scouring the electronic devices without a warrant is unconstitutional,” according to the Associated Press:

  The government has vigorously defended the searches, which rose to 33,295 in fiscal 2018, as a critical tool to protect America. But the newly filed documents claim the scope of the warrantless searches has expanded to assist in enforcement of tax, bankruptcy, environmental and consumer protection laws, gather intelligence and advance criminal investigations.

  Agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement consider requests from other government agencies in determining whether to search travelers’ electronic devices, the court papers said. They added that agents are searching the electronic devices of not only targeted individuals but their associates, friends, and relatives. (source)

  Border officers are conducting searches without a warrant.

  CBP and ICE policies allow border officers to manually search anyone’s smartphone with no suspicion at all, and to conduct a forensic search with reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. CBP also allows suspicionless device searches for a “national security concern.”

  The previously undisclosed information about the searches was included in a motion the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts. The groups asked a federal court to rule without trial (called a summary judgment) that the Department of Homeland Security violates the First and Fourth Amendments by searching travelers’ smartphones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of entry without a warrant.

  Last year, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston rejected the government’s request to dismiss the lawsuit, allowing the case to move forward. The ACLU and EFF began gathering documents and deposition testimony. Based on the new information, they filed a motion asking the judge to rule in their favor without a trial. “Travelers’ devices contain an extraordinary amount of highly personal information that the government can easily search, retain, and share,” the motion argues.

  This information was obtained as part of a lawsuit, Alasaad v. McAleenan, EFF, ACLU, and ACLU of Massachusetts filed in September 2017 on behalf of 11 travelers – 10 U.S. citizens and one lawful permanent resident – whose smartphones and laptops were searched without warrants at U.S. ports of entry.

  The plaintiffs are asking the court to rule that the government must have a warrant based on probable cause before conducting searches of electronic devices, which contain highly detailed personal information about people’s lives.

  Among the plaintiffs are a limousine driver, a military veteran, journalists, students, an artist, a NASA engineer, and a business owner. They are also requesting the court to hold that the government must have probable cause to confiscate a traveler’s device.

  The government can keep your data and share it with other entities.

  In addition, the plaintiffs are demanding the government expunge from investigatory databases information obtained in past searches. ICE and CBP both allow officers to retain information from travelers’ electronic devices and share it with other government entities, including state, local and foreign law enforcement agencies, the court papers claim.

  Travelers who have had their electronic devices searched at the border run increased odds of being subject to future device searches as they can be flagged in government databases for additional scrutiny on that basis, the plaintiffs say.

  Adam Schwartz, senior staff attorney for the EFF, elaborated in a press release:

  “The evidence we have presented the court shows that the scope of ICE and CBP border searches is unconstitutionally broad.

  ICE and CBP policies and practices allow unfettered, warrantless searches of travelers’ digital devices and empower officers to dodge the Fourth Amendment when rifling through highly personal information contained on laptops and phones.” (source)

  Esha Bhandari, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, added:

  “This new evidence reveals that government agencies are using the pretext of the border to make an end run around the First and Fourth Amendments. The border is not a lawless place, ICE and CBP are not exempt from the Constitution, and the information on our electronic devices is not devoid of Fourth Amendment protections. We’re asking the court to stop these unlawful searches and require the government to get a warrant.” (source)

  Government is abusing its power under the guise of security.

  It might be tempting to believe that allowing the government to violate our rights is the price we pay for a safer country…that the ends justify the means.

  If you are inclined to think that way, please consider the following questions from John W. Whitehead, Constitutional attorney and founder of The Rutherford Institute:

  How far would you really go to secure the nation’s borders against illegal aliens?

  Would you give the government limitless amounts of money to fight yet another endless war? Surround the entire country with concrete walls and barbed wire? Empower border police to do whatever it takes to crack down on illegal immigrants, even if it means violating their human rights? Hold your nose and tolerate all manner of abuses in name of national security?

  Would you allow government agents to trample on the rights of anyone who gets in their way, including legal citizens? Relinquish some of your freedoms in exchange for the elusive promise of non-porous borders? Submit to a national ID card that allows the government to target individuals and groups as it chooses in order to identify those who do not “belong”? Turn a blind eye to private prisons and detainment camps that profit off the forced labor of its detainees?

  Would you turn your backs on every constitutional principle for which our founders fought and died in exchange for empty campaign promises of elusive safety by fast-talking politicians?

  This is the devil’s bargain that the U.S. government demands of its people. (source)

  Immigrants are not the only ones being subjected to warrantless searches.

  Border control cops aren’t just targeting immigrants who are attempting to enter the U.S., as Whitehead explains:

  As part of the government’s so-called crackdown on illegal immigration, drugs and trafficking, its border patrol cops are expanding their reach, roaming further afield and subjecting greater numbers of Americans to warrantless searches, ID checkpoints, transportation checks, and even surveillance on private property far beyond the boundaries of the borderlands.

  That so-called border, once a thin borderline, is now an ever-thickening band spreading deeper and deeper inside the country.

  Consequently, nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within a 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

  As journalist Todd Miller explains, that expanding border region now extends “100 miles inland around the United States—along the 2,000-mile southern border, the 4,000-mile northern border and both coasts… This ‘border’ region now covers places where two-thirds of the US population (197.4 million people) live… The ‘border’ has by now devoured the full states of Maine and Florida and much of Michigan.” (source)

  It is time to ask ourselves how much liberty we are willing to sacrifice in exchange for a bit of security (security the government isn’t even good at providing).

  

• US Military Stops Releasing Information On Afghanistan War

  As the United States continues its ‘longest war’ in Afghanistan, the US military has elected to stop releasing information often used to measure progress, citing “uncertainty” in the way the data is produced which have resulted in “subjective” underlying assessments. 

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  “The command said they no longer saw decision-making value in these data,” reads a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). 

  In remarks to reporters last week, John Sopko, the special inspector general, criticized what he called a trend toward less openness by the military authorities who are advising, training and assisting Afghan security forces. –AP

  “I don’t think it makes sense,” said Sopko. “The Afghan people know which districts are controlled by the Taliban. The Taliban obviously know which districts they control. Our military knows it. Everybody in Afghanistan knows it. The only people who don’t know what’s going on are the people who are paying for all of this, and that’s the American taxpayer.“

  The move comes amid a stalemate within the Trump administration, as the Pentagon has proposed sending nearly 4,000 more US troops into the conflict, which many in the White House oppose. Some in the White House have even propsed withdrawing completely(i.e. the non-interventionism platform Trump campaigned on) or handing over the American effort to private security contractors. 

  And as AP notes, the decision to restrict battlefield information is but the most recent step in a trend of less transparency about the war in recent years – often at the insistence of the Afghan government, which has in previous instances stopped the US military from disclosing how many Afghans had been killed in battle, and the overall attrition within the Afghan army. 

  The latest clampdown also aligns with President Donald Trump’s complaint that the U.S. gives away too much war information, although there is no evidence that this had any influence on the latest decision.

  A government watchdog agency that monitors the U.S. war effort, now in its 18th year, said in a report to Congress on Wednesday that the U.S. military command in Kabul is no longer producing “district control data,” which shows the number of Afghan districts — and the percentage of their population — controlled by the government compared to the Taliban. –AP

  In January, President Trump criticized the disclosure of battlefield information – telling reporters “Some IG goes over there, who are mostly appointed by President Obama — but we’ll have ours, too — and he goes over there, and they do a report on every single thing that’s happening, and they release it to the public,” adding “What kind of stuff is this? We’re fighting wars, and they’re doing reports and releasing it to the public? Now, the public means the enemy. The enemy reads those reports; they study every line of it.”

  Trump then told acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan: “I don’t want it to happen anymore, Mr. Secretary.”

  When the US military last released battlefield data in January, it revealed that “Afghan government control was stagnant or slipping,” according to the report, which adds that the share of the population under Afghan government control or influence – “a figure that was largely unchanged from May 2017 to July 2018 at about 65 percent” – had dropped in October 2018 to 63.5 percent. The Afghan government’s control or influence of districts overall fell almost 2% to 53.8 percent. 

  Less than two years ago, a top American commander in Afghanistan called population control “most telling.” Gen. John Nicholson told reporters in November 2017 that he wanted to see the figure, then about two-thirds, increase to at least 80 percent, with the Taliban holding only about 10 percent and the rest contested.

  “And this, we believe, is the critical mass necessary to drive the enemy to irrelevance,” Nicholson said then.

  Nicholson’s successor, Gen. Scott Miller, believes there already are enough such assessments available to the public, including one produced by intelligence agencies. –AP

  “We are focused on setting the conditions for a political settlement to safeguard our national interests,” said Col. David M. Butler, a spokesman for Gen. Miller in a Tuesday email exchange with AP. “The district stability assessment that was previously provided by DOD was redundant and did little to serve our mission of protecting our citizens and allies.”

  The Trump administration, meanwhile, has been making a hard push to encourage the Taliban and Afghan government to engage in peace talks after the Taliban launched a recent spring military offensive. The group has refused to speak directly with representatives from Kabul, which they view as a US puppet. 

  The war in Afghanistan is largely forgotten in much of America, as is the enormous, continuing financial cost. This year the Pentagon budget includes $4.9 billion to provide the Afghan army and police with everything from equipment and supplies to salaries and food. That is one piece of a wider array of “reconstruction” assistance the U.S. government has provided since the war began in 2001, totaling $132 billion. –AP

  The United States has spent $737 billion on the war and lost over 2,400 lives, according to the Pentagon. 

  

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• UK Donors Abandon Conservatives In Favor Of Brexit Party, 'Right To Vote'

  As rank-and-file Tory members conspire to finally oust Theresa May from No. 10, the party is facing a donor rebellion that will restrict its ability to campaign during the upcoming EU Parliamentary vote, and also leave it in a difficult position if the opposition succeeds in its push for a general election.

  Donors from the business community, who in the past have been a significant source of financing for the Tories, are abandoning the party and instead donating to either campaigns for a second Brexit referendum, or Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party (which is leading the Tories in the EU Parliament elections polls) or Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign, according to Business Insider.

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  The shortage of funds has reportedly left the Tories with just £1.5 million ($2 million) in the bank.

  The situation has grown so dire that the CEO of the party, Mick Davis, has reportedly been forced to dip into his own pockets to cover some of the costs of the upcoming EU Parliamentary vote. He has reportedly told MPs that supporters have refused to donate because of the infighting over Brexit, which has threatened to tear the party apart.

  “There’s a lot of money sloshing around, but most of it isn’t going to the Conservatives,” said one source who spoke with BI. “The conservative party is struggling because people don’t think they’re delivering on their promises,” another said.

  The support for another referendum comes as Labour has reportedly re-committed to supporting a second referendum if they can’t secure a general election.

  “Donors have identified other vehicles for their particular cause. If you’re a hedge fund manager who’s a keen Brexiteer, you will donate to Boris’s campaign. If you’re a business which backs a second referendum, you will donate to Right to Vote.”

  The new Tory-backed referendum campaign, “Right to Vote”, has poured money into polling showing overwhelming support for another referendum. It has also been running ads in local media. It had reportedly spent £40,000 ($45,000) during its first month.

  Right to Vote CEO Mark Holdsworth said the public is tired of being told “half-truths” by politicians who have so far failed to deliver on the promise of the Brexit referendum.

  “Right to Vote was formed in January this year by a group of centre, centre-right parliamentarians looking to set out a clear way forward for the country.”

  “Then as now, the public is sick and tired of politicians on all sides telling them half-truths – and in some cases, blatant untruths – about Brexit, and we have campaigned for the last three months to seek a final say in the Brexit process.”

  “This has involved an on-going campaign across TV, radio, newspapers, online and social media, together with regional campaigning on the ground.”

  “Since we formed, our group is now cross-party, after Heidi Allen, Sarah Wollaston and Anna Soubry famously quit the Conservative party to join Change UK – but what unites them all is their, and our, desire to offer the public a final say on Brexit.”

  One donor who recently defected from the conservatives said that while he’s ‘still a conservative;’ he doesn’t want to donate now because the party’s pro-hard-Brexit stance is ‘anti-business’, he said.

  One donor to the campaign, City Pub Group chairman Clive Watson, which operates 44 sites across England and Wales, told Business Insider that he has donated £35,000 in a personal capacity, having previously donated £25,000 to the Conservative party through his business.

  “I am still a Conservative party member, but I wouldn’t donate at the moment because I think their European stance is anti-business,” he told Business Insider.

  “Brexit is the unknown. It could seriously dislocate supplies to the hospitality industry. Why would I donate to a party that is facilitating that situation?”

   

  

• Large Protests And Political Crisis In Albania

  Authored by Dr. Ana Scheer via Off-Guardian.org,

  The Balkan Peninsula is known as the “gunpowder barrel” of the European continent. In Albania, this “gunpowder barrel” seems to explode quite often due to frequent political conflicts. For any foreign observer the continuous political crisis in this country seem absurd but for the Albanian people it is a harsh reality that effects them socially, economically as well as jeopardizes the European integration of the country in EU.

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  What is happening in Albania? Why the gunpowder barrel has exploded again? And why, Albanians are frightened that this political conflict might escalate into a civil conflict?

  During the parliamentary elections of 2017, the three leading parties achieved these results:

  • Socialist Party of Albania – 764,791 votes – 48.34% – 74 seats

  • Democratic Party of Albania – 456,481 votes – 28.85% – 43 seats

  • Socialist Movement for Integration – 225,975 votes – 14.28% – 19 seats

  The Socialist Party secured enough seats to rule as majority in government. But the election process was recently disputed by the Democratic Party and the Socialist Movement for Integration due to the exposure of investigating files 339 and 184 in which ministers, mayors and other key important figures of the Socialist Party were involved into collaborating with organized crime in order to intimidate the voters and manipulate the results.

  As the local elections of June 30, 2019 were approaching, the opposition parties withdrew their mandates from parliament, i.e.: 60 out of 140 seats letting the majority (SP) to seat and rule alone in parliament. The two opposition parties, representing 43% of the voters are already out of parliament asking for the resignation of Albanian premier Edi Rama, whose prompt political maneuver did not involve resignation, nor talks, but replacement of the parliamentary seats with freelance candidates who rushed to cease such an opportunity, thus creating the new opposition designed by the premier himself.

  Despite the addition of the new MP-s the Albanian Parliament is still not in its full capacity because there are many unoccupied seats, a fact that legally raises many constitutional questions.

  In addition, in order to avoid the failure of the forthcoming local elections, Rama is encouraging and supporting, and even raising small parties, to register in the Electoral College. With such a maneuver, without the opposition, the SP will ensure the wining of every single municipality in the country. With the central and local government under total control, and a parliament under his rule, premier Rama might as well enjoy the attributes of an ancient monarchy.

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  Therefore, during the recent weeks thousands have rallied in the streets of Tirana, especially in front of the prime-ministry and parliament asking for the resignation of Edi Rama as the only solution of free and fair elections.

  During the first mandate of the Edi Rama premiership Albania has received frequent negative reports from the State Department and several foreign institutions regarding the high level of corruption, organized crime, cultivation of cannabis and smuggling of heavy drugs. The world media has raised many alerts about the nation spread cultivation of cannabis. The state police has been allegedly involved in such activities and up to the present several district heads of police have fled the country, wanted by the authorities, and are still at large.

  In 2016 an Italian and German report indicated that there were 363 cannabis areas spread throughout the country. This report was kept secret by the government and when exposed by the few independent media it was denied, however, the former Minister of Interior, Saimir Tahiri went under investigation accused of drugs trafficking and collaboration with organized crime. The financial income from the cannabis activity was estimated in 5 billion euros, half the country’s GDP. The opposition parties claimed that this money was used in ensuring victory in parliamentary elections as well as money laundry. It was this past bitter experience that forced the opposition parties undertaking the radical decision of boycotting the parliament and sabotaging the forthcoming local elections.

  Albania seems to be heading toward a civil conflict. In June the European Commission is expected to refuse once again the opening of the negotiations for the Albanian membership in EU. This will be an added fuel to the present situation. The international institutions are observing patiently, awaiting the Albanian political storm to cease. A storm that seems to end only by the decision to step down of one man: the Albanian premier, Edi Rama.

  

• Thursday's Extradition Hearing "Life & Death" For Assange And Journalism Itself

  Following Julian Assange’s UK court sentencing early Wednesday where he was hit with 50 weeks in prison for skipping bail, which we noted earlier is close to the maximum sentence, WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson slammed the “vindictive” punishment as having caused “shock and outrage” in statements to reporters. 

  However, Hrafnsson said after the court that the “real battle” begins Thursday, which marks the start of US extradition hearings for Assange, set to begin at 10AM (UK) at the Westminster Magistrate Court. He called it a matter of “life and death” for Assange, and ultimately for the journalistic profession itself. 

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  Hrafnsson noted that the outcome of the US extradition hearing could prove a watershed moment for the future of journalism: “Tomorrow is the first step in a long battle, so the fight will certainly continue. This is the fight for press freedom, primarily, as we’ve always stated.”

  Hrafnsson stressed further: “That is a real battle, it’s not just for Julian Assange – even though for him it’s a question of life and death – it is most certainly a question of perseverance [over] a major journalistic principle,” in statements made after Assange’s sentencing stemming from the 2012 bail related charges. 

  Concerning Wednesday’s stiff sentence for skipping bail – close to one year in prison – WikiLeaks later issued the following statement:

  Julian Assange’s sentence, for seeking and receiving asylum, is twice as much as the sentencing guidelines. The so-called speedboat killer, convicted of manslaughter, was only sentenced to six months for failing to appear in court.

  — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 1, 2019

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Reuters summarizes the specific charges the US will seek to extradite him on as follows: 

  The U.S. Justice Department said Assange was charged with conspiring with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to gain access to a government computer as part of a 2010 leak by WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of U.S. military reports about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and American diplomatic communications.

  Last week WikiLeaks and a German online magazine published the contents of a letter sent by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to a former WikiLeaks staff member which suggests US officials are attempting to put together a case against Julian Assange based on the Espionage Act. 

  The DOJ letter addressed to former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg for the intent of requesting an interview outlined “possible violations of United States federal criminal law regarding the unauthorized receipt and dissemination of classified information,” according to a translation from the German, later published to WikiLeaks’ official social media.

  Crucially, conviction under the 1917 law geared toward protecting the nation’s military secrets and most sensitive security matters could result in life in prison or even the death penalty for Assange.

  But all of this is of course conditioned on whether or not the UK ultimately grants the Untied States’ extradition request, the first step in the process of which comes Thursday morning. 

  

• Coming To America: The Complete De-Platforming Of All Non-Establishment Voices

  Authored by JD Heyes via NaturalNews.com,

  The Democrat Party has joined the globalist Left in their quest to wipe out all remaining bastions of freedom and liberty throughout the West which, if they are successful, will plunge the world into chaos, war, and destruction.

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  In Europe, freedom fighters like Tommy Robinson and Carl Benjamin are fighting Leftists in Britain and throughout the European Union as they attempt to build political opposition to what is very obviously an anti-libertarian and anti-democratic campaign of suppression and censorship.

  Robinson, demonized by the European Left as a “far-right extremist” who has been attempting to speak the truth about the virtual invasion of anti-Western Muslim “refugees” from war-torn segments of the Middle East, was jailed in 2018 for essentially expressing his views.

  Since his release, he continues to be targeted for censorship and silencing by EU and British government authoritarians as well as the social media giants — so much so that he now feels his only recourse is to become a Minister of the European Parliament (MEP) in order to retain a platform. 

  Jake Lloyd of Infowars notes:

  “He and others are doing this in an attempt to take over the EU from the inside…”

  “Now, you might not know that,” Lloyd continued, “because, within hours of setting up an account to represent his campaign on Twitter, it was removed. Why it was removed, nobody knows. No explanation has been given.”

  In other words, Robinson was treated just like American conservatives, pro-constitutionalists, and supporters of our “America First” president, Donald Trump.

  “This is following the trend that’s been happening on social media for quite a long time,” Lloyd said, noting that his own employer, Infowars, was systematically removed from Twitter, YouTube, PayPal, and other big tech platforms last year ahead of the 2018 elections.

  For Robinson, it’s his warnings about Muslim destruction of Western culture that landed him in hot water throughout Europe, not just in Britain. In the U.S., Trump supporting Americans who oppose Democrats and their obsessions — abortion, gun control, high taxes, and demand for conformity — who are under assault.

  THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRATIC LEFT HAS BECOME UN-DEMOCRATIC

  But also, a man who describes himself as a classic liberal — Sargon of Akkad, or Carl Benjamin — has also been targeted by the Left because he’s not Left-wing enough.

  “He doesn’t toe the line for globalist organizations like the EU or the United Nations,” Lloyd noted, adding that Benjamin has also launched a campaign to become an MEP.

  “They’ve attacked him in a lot of ways much like they have Tommy Robinson,” said Lloyd. “They’ve also removed his campaign account – he’s running as a member of UKIP, the United Kingdom’s Independence Party – for no real reason.”

  The silencing of political opponents, Lloyd noted, is nothing new, as it’s been happening throughout world history. But typically, suppression of speech, political points of view, and expression have been associated with authoritarian governments and tyrannical leaders like kings and dictators — not havens of democracy like Britain and the U.S.

  Lloyd said that in Benjamin’s case, “he has made some controversial comments in the past,” though in reality, they’re really not that controversial that he should be banned from the public square.

  Indeed, America’s founding fathers were so offended by such tactics that, in the very first amendment to the Constitution, they recognized an inalienable right for humans to speak, think, and express themselves freely — without having to be ‘approved’ for certain speech while other speech is banned because it’s been deemed ‘offensive’ or ‘wrong-headed.’

  Despite complaints by consumers and platform users throughout the Western world, however, the social media behemoths aren’t budging: Like Democrats and the global Left, they are demanding groupthink, conformity of speech and thought, and the quashing of dissenting voices. 

  They are anti-Democrats, in other words, and they won’t stop until they shut down all opposition.

  “Free speech is a myth. Technically we’re allowed to say what we want and won’t get arrested for it, but we constantly have to self-censor our speech, including our political opinions, for many reasons. You’re allowed to express some opinions, so long as they’re the right opinions. But if you lose your ability to pay your bills as a result of your honest and open speech, then you’re not really free.”

  –I Am Turtle Boy, book description

  

• Warren Buffett Bets Big On Dubai Real Estate As Market Dumps

  Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway announced Sunday it would expand its brokerage operations into Middle Eastern markets by opening Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Gulf Properties, reported Reuters.

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  The new unit will be led by Chairman Ihsan Husein Al Marzouqi and Chief Executive Officer Phil Sheridan. The team will consist of 30 advisers and support staff, according to a company statement. “Gulf Properties aspires to grow quickly by tripling its advisor count and opening a second office in Abu Dhabi within a year,” it said.

  “We are excited to enter the UAE and Dubai with such experienced and respected leaders as Dr. Ihsan Husein Al Marzouqi and Phil Sheridan,” said Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Chairman Gino Blefari. “Dubai has been a top priority for our network’s global expansion as it represents innovation among world leaders and is a top global center for trade, logistics, tourism and finance. Gulf Properties will connect our growing brokerage network between East and West and will provide unrivaled access to one of the world’s most exciting real estate destinations.”

  Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices partnered with London-based Kay & Co. last year, its second overseas franchise in Europe, after Rubina Real Estate in Berlin. The company expects to add Milan, Vienna, and Dubai to its international book. Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance recently began operations in Dubai.

  Buffet is entering the Dubai property markets as prices have fallen 25% since the 2015 peak.

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  Lower oil prices, weaker currencies in nearby countries (UAE’s currency is pegged to the USD), a global synchronized slowdown, and political turmoil in the Middle East have all contributed to the downward pressures on price.

  Property development is a vital part of Dubai’s economy, so the fall in prices has slowed the city’s economy.

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  The city is also suffering from a glut, having overexpanded in the last decade. It was a strategy that powered the city after the 2008 financial crisis, brought developers from around the world to build tens of thousands of homes.

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  The glut is expected to depress prices for several more years. Dubai is one of the world’s biggest ongoing construction sites, with nearly 1,200 cranes active across the city, constructing an estimated 31,000 homes this year, far exceeding demand.

  “We are excited for the future and honored that our franchise agreement makes Dubai the first Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices location outside the U.S. and Europe,” said Al Marzouqi. “The presence of such an iconic global brand is further testament that Dubai is indeed a global destination when it comes to commerce and real estate investments.”

  Chris Stuart, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, said their Duabi unit has “experienced leadership, talented agents and an ambitious growth plan for Dubai and the UAE.”

  S&P Global Ratings warned in February that Dubai home prices could drop by at least 10% this year due to a continued imbalance in the market, before bottoming out in the early 2020s. Seems like Buffet’s next big move into the Gulf region is to capitalize on an extremely dangerous bet that Dubai’s housing could bottom soon. 

  

• ISIS Feeds Off The Chaos Of War

  Authored by Patrick Cockburn via Counterpunch.org,

  Western governments have been swift to pledge action to strike at Isis, as it becomes clear that the organisation was behind the suicide bombings that killed 253 people in Sri Lanka.

  A video released by Isis after the attacks shows Zahran Hashim, an Islamic preacher and alleged leader of the bombers, pledging allegiance together with six other men – also thought to be bombers – to the self-declared caliph and leader of Isis, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

  Western leaders, as is usual, are proposing easy or unattainable action that will do little to damage Isis capabilities – such as trying to limit its access to social media – while steering clear of potentially more effective but difficult to implement policies to eradicate Isis that might be contrary to their national interests.

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  The best way to weaken Isis to the point where it can no longer orchestrate or carry out mass slaughter, like that in Sri Lanka last Sunday, is to bring an end to the wars in the Middle East and North Africa which over the last forty years have produced al-Qaeda and its clones, of which Isis is the most famous and most dangerous.

  Governments deny that they are in any way responsible for Isis staying in business and point to the western-backed offensives against it which led to the last piece of the Islamic State being over-run on 23 March.

  As a territorial entity Isis has been eliminated, but that does not mean that it cannot carry out guerrilla and terrorist attacks, as has happened in the last few months in Iraq and Syria. These are little reported because they take place in the vast deserts on the Iraq-Syrian border or they target regimes we do not like, such as the Syrian government in Damascus.

  Isis was born out of war. In 2001, at the time of 9/11, al-Qaeda – out of which Isis was to emerge – consisted of a network of fanatics and a few hundred fighters in camps in Afghanistan. They were so few that they had to hire local Afghan tribesmen to fill out their numbers in propaganda videos.

  It was the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 that turned the al-Qaeda franchise in Iraq under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi into a powerful military movement. When forced out of its strongholds by a reinforced US presence and weakened by opposition from within the Sunni Arab community in 2007, al-Qaeda in Iraq retreated to its hideouts, waiting for better times.

  These were not long in coming with the advent of the Syrian civil war in 2011 which the movement had the resources in men and weapons, to turn to their advantage. I remember Iraqi leaders in Baghdad telling me in 2012/13 that unless the war in Syria was quickly brought to an end, it would reignite the insurgency in Iraq.

  They were soon proved right. Isis, as it was now called, astonished the world by emerging from its fastnesses to capture Mosul in 2014 and sweep through western Iraq and eastern Syria.

  Western powers certainly wanted to defeat Isis but also did not want to do anything that would enable rivals and opponents – Russia, Iran and Bashar al-Assad – to win a clear victory in the Syrian war. They demanded that Assad go long after it was obvious that he was going to win after receiving Russian military support in 2015.

  Stirring the pot in Syria in order to thwart Russia, Iran and Assad was much in the interests of Isis which could exploit the fact that opposition to it was fragmented.

  Opportunities exist for Isis wherever government authority is weak or non-existent and it can put down roots. When defeat looms in eastern Syria this year, Isis moved thousands of surviving fighters next door into western Iraq. In Mosul and Raqqa, once the de facto Isis capitals in Iraq and Syria, assassinations and suicide bombings have started again. Kurdish-led forces are regularly ambushed. In Syrian government held territory near Palmyra, a series of Isis attacks in April killed 36 and captured ten pro-Assad soldiers.

  In Iraq, Isis cells are reactivating in Sunni areas that surround Baghdad which, in the not-so-distant past, were the staging posts for the prolonged and devastating suicide bombing campaign that killed thousands.

  It is probably only a matter of time until Isis succeeds in staging a Sri Lanka type multiple bombing once again in the Iraqi capital. The last big bomb in Baghdad was on 3 July 2016, when a refrigerator truck packed with explosives blew up killing 340 civilians and injuring hundreds more. This should be a moment when the US could do all it can to resist the coming onslaught. Instead Washington is giving priority to pressuring the Iraqi government to impose US sanctions on Iran – something that is bound to divide Iraqis and aid Isis.

  There is a similar pattern across the wider Middle East and North Africa where no less than seven wars, large and small, are being fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and north east Nigeria. These flare up or die down on occasion but they never come to an end.

  The reason for these wars – the true breeding ground for Isis and its kin – is that foreign powers have plugged into local civil wars and want to see their proxy either to come out on top or, at worst, avoid defeat. Libya is a good example of this: would be leader of Libya General Khalifa Haftar, backed by Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, France and Russia are fighting a government in Tripoli supported by Qatar, Turkey, Italy, Tunisia and Algeria.

  Such divisions and rivalries are repeated in conflict after conflict and mean that Isis will always be able to lodge itself somewhere in the chaos.

  At the same time, one needs to keep a sense of proportion about Isis’s capabilities: the atrocities it carries out in Colombo, Baghdad, Paris, Manchester, Westminster and elsewhere are geared to dominate the news agenda, provoke fear and project strength. But none of these things win wars and the defeat of the caliphate earlier this year was real and irreversible.

  This does not mean that Isis will not try to resurrect itself as a guerrilla movement relying heavily on terrorist attacks on soft targets. It is, at bottom, a military machine led by experienced military men who adapt their strategy and tactics according to circumstances. Talk in the west about cutting Isis off from the social media as if that would be a mortal blow misses the point.

  Social media may be a powerful tool for Isis but it would survive without it. Savage cult-like movements similar to Isis such as the Nazis in Germany and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia existed long before the internet and were able to spread their toxic message without use of it..

  The only effective way to bring an end to Isis is to end the wars that produced it. A large part of the Middle East and North Africa have become a zone of conflict where international and regional rivalries are fought out through local proxies. So long as that goes on Isis will continue to exist.

  

• Real-Life 'Hamburglar' Steals $1000s Of Food Through McDonald's Mobile App

  It looks like McDonald’s new-and-improved “hot” Hamburglar might have some competition.

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  The CBC reported on Tuesday that a mysterious ‘hamburglar’ has been victimizing users of a new digital payments app rolled out in Canada by McDonald’s called ‘My McDs’. Hackers have apparently found a way to infiltrate the app and wrack up large bills on unsuspecting users’ credit cards.

  The story was again brought to the media’s attention after a tech writer got hit with a $2,000 bill for food he didn’t order that was charged via the app. When he contacted McDonald’s to complain about the fraudulent charges, the company told him to resolve the issue with his credit card company and refused to issue a refund – an experience that was apparently shared by dozens of others.

  The fraudster pulled off the fast-food scam by infiltrating O’Rourke’s McDonald’s mobile app account, which was linked to his debit card.

  The scammer then used the app to order more than 100 meals for pick-up between April 12 and 18. The smorgasbord included McFlurries, Big Macs, Chicken McNuggets and poutine.

  “It could be one guy who was able to hack my account and he shared it with a bunch of his friends across Montreal, and they all just went on a food spree,” said O’Rourke, who’s baffled by the crime.

  Since McDonald’s wouldn’t issue immediate refunds, forcing impacted customers to wait weeks for their banks to resolve the issue, some complained that the charges, which typically amounted to hundreds of dollars, put them into a difficult financial position.

  Lauren Taylor says she has no idea how someone in Montreal spent $483.65 using her McDonald’s app.

  The Halifax woman said she received dozens of order confirmations in her email inbox with the last four digits of her Visa debit card between Jan. 25-29.

  “It’s amazing to see how quick someone can just breach your privacy…rent is three days away and now I have to find the money,” Taylor said. “It’s a good thing that I live with family. Otherwise I’d be out.”

  As customers congregated online to complain about the security breach, which they blamed on the flaws with the app, McDonald’s issued a statement apparently blaming the app’s users for their own misfortune.

  McDonald’s Canada told CBC News that it’s only aware of “some isolated incidents” involving compromised app accounts. The company said it keeps personal information secure and that it’s confident in the security of its app.

  McDonald’s didn’t say how fraudsters have infiltrated customer accounts, but it recommended that customers practice due diligence by beefing up their passwords and keeping them secure.

  “If guests notice any unauthorized purchases, we recommend they contact their bank and change their password immediately,” said spokesperson Adam Grachnik in an email.

  So far, the dollar-value of food stolen has climbed into the thousands of dollars.

  That’s a lot of McDoubles.

  

• Dilbert Creator Exposes Liberal Media's Lies & The "Fine People" Hoax-Funnel

  Via Scott Adams’ blog,

  I’ve been publicly debunking the “fine people” hoax since 2017. The press created the hoax by consistently and intentionally omitting the second half of President Trump’s comments about Charlottesville.

  If you only see or hear the first half of what the president said, it looks exactly like the president is calling neo-Nazis “fine people.”

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  But in the second part of Trump’s comments, he clarified,

  “You had people in that group who were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of the park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

  In other words, the president believed there were non-racists in attendance who support keeping historical monuments. To remove all doubt, the President continued with

  “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?”

  Keep in mind that it doesn’t matter if the President’s assumption about the attendees was accurate or not. He clearly stated his assumption that some people were there for the monument protest, which he contrasted to the racists who were there to march and chant racist stuff. The New York Times interviewed a member of the non-marchers who said they did not stand with the racists. They cared about guns and free speech. See for yourself, here and more background on that group here.

  Last week I chatted at length with one of the Charlottesville protest attendees. He hates racism, loves free speech, and wasn’t “marching with” anyone. He reports that there was chaos from the start, with lots of people all over the venue doing lots of different things. And there was no way to know what all of the people in normal street clothes were thinking by attending. He was there because he figured it would be a diverse group, from Antifa to neo-Nazis, with plenty of normal non-racists in between. Bolstering his argument is his Jewish heritage. He didn’t think he was attending a neo-Nazi event. He learned that from the press.

  How dumb is that guy, you might reasonably ask?

  I asked him to explain how he could look at the flyer for the event and NOT know it was organized by racists. I pointed to the little Nazi-looking winged image on the flyer to make my point. He said it looked like an American eagle to him. And when I started to push back on that point, he sent me other images of American eagles that are evil and warlike. At that point, I remembered a central truth about the human experience: If a hundred people look at exactly the same thing at the same time, they will arrive at wildly different opinions of what they are seeing. If you show that racist flyer to a hundred Americans, most would not recognize the names of the speakers, and many would not realize the graphic design was suggestive of a racist association. The fact that you and I would definitely recognize it for what it was does not suggest others would do the same. As evidence that people interpret the same information differently, consider every political disagreement ever. Most of it involves people looking at the same information and drawing mind-bogglingly different conclusions about what it all means. I wrote about that phenomenon in my book Win Bigly.

  I remind you again that it doesn’t matter whether or not President Trump was accurate in his assumption that some non-racists attended. He stated his assumption and then spoke to the assumption. Worst case, the New York Times got the “fine people” story wrong, and Trump also got a detail wrong about the composition of the crowd. There was no reporting on the exact composition of the crowd, then or later. No one did a survey of opinions. We only know of the groups that had the highest profiles.

  In America, if there is a large political protest of any kind, the most reasonable assumption one could make is that it will attract a diverse crowd including nearly every kind of opinion on just about everything. If the President is wrong about the existence at that event of some non-racists who were pro-statue, this would be one of the few times in history that there were only two opinions at an event attended by hundreds.

  My point is that Trump could have been right or wrong about who attended, but it doesn’t change the fact that his words clearly and unambiguously condemned the marching racists while excluding them from his “fine people” category.

  But there is something far more interesting going on here than just a story of fake news and quotes taken out of context. This topic is like a laboratory for testing cognitive dissonance. Rarely do you see a strongly held belief, such as the “fine people” hoax, which can be so easily and unambiguously debunked. You only need to show the transcript and/or the video of Trump’s comments in their entirety. The case is made. Easy, right?

  After a few years of trying to deprogram people from this hoax, I have discovered a fascinating similarity in how people’s brains respond to having their worldview annihilated in real time. I call it the “fine people” hoax funnel.

  When you present the debunking context to a believer in the hoax, they will NEVER say this:

  “Gee, I hadn’t seen the full quote. Now that I see it in its complete form, it is obvious to me that my long-held belief is 100% wrong and the media has been duping me.”

  That doesn’t happen.

  Instead, people usually react by falling down what I call the Hoax Funnel. I use the funnel imagery because the big hoax (that the President called neo-Nazis fine people) is instantly replaced with a lesser hoax, and so on, until the final claim is laughably vaporous, consisting of a question without a claim. Here is the hoax funnel in all its parts. You can test this at home by debunking the hoax with friends and family. Watch how they all go down the same hoax funnel until they end with nothing but questions of the “How do you explain X, then?” type.

  We start at the top of the funnel.

  Trump called neo-Nazis and white nationalists in Charlottesville “fine people”

  This is debunked by showing the full transcript or the full video in which he clearly, and without prompting, says the exact opposite, that the neo-Nazis and white nationalists should be condemned totally. See for yourself.

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  The believer in the “fine people” hoax will question the authenticity of the transcript first, which you can debunk by showing the actual video clip here. Once the legitimacy of the transcript is established, expect the believer to retreat down the hoax funnel to the following hallucination.

  No “fine people” march with neo-Nazis!

  Here you can expect the hoaxed person to hallucinate (literally) a fact that is not claimed and is not in evidence. There is no claim that “fine people” were “marching with” the neo-Nazis, or supporting them in any way. There is a claim that such people were in the same zip code. The “marching with” hallucination is easily debunked by a New York Times article in which they interview one of the non-racists in attendance who love guns and free speech and do not stand with racists, much less march with them. Excerpt here:

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  But it doesn’t matter if the New York Times got that story right. What matters is that the President explained his assumption about who attended. Keep in mind that the media has not reported who attended. No survey of opinions was taken, and there were plenty of people in attendance who were not physically marching or chanting with the neo-Nazis.

  Once you debunk the “marching with” point, expect the believer to retreat down the hoax funnel to this next point.

  Trump wasn’t talking about statue protests! He was talking about protesters versus neo-Nazis!

  Again, showing the transcript debunks this claim. Trump specifically mentioned that people were protesting the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue. That clearly frames the “both sides” as being pro and anti-statue, not neo-Nazis versus anti-racism protestors, which of course was the biggest story theme from the event.

  Once you have shown that Trump was explicitly talking about both sides of the statue debate, believers can be expected to retreat down the hoax funnel to this next level.

  It was obviously a neo-Nazi event, so no one would attend who was not a racist!

  That point would make sense if you had never spent a minute as an adult in the actual world. In the real world, a hundred people can look at a flyer and have a lot of different opinions on what it means. You might look at the flyer and conclude that only racists were attending. Someone else might look at it and not know some of the named speakers had racist views, or might assume the racists were a small part of a larger event about statues. The only way a believer can defend their “should have known” opinion is by assuming that the attendees were smarter than the average American seems to be in every other walk of life. You can’t get a hundred Americans to have the same interpretation of ANYTHING, no matter how confident you are that they should.

  Once you have debunked this claim by showing how opposite the “should have known” argument is to all human experience, observation, and common sense, the believer will still hold it to be a rational argument. But you can finish it off by reminding the believer that the facts of exactly who attended do not matter to the hoax question because the President clearly stated he believed some non-racists were attending to protest the statue question. (No marching!)

  At this point, your believer will retreat further down the hoax funnel to an even weaker position that looks like this.

  Why didn’t the non-racists who attended turn and leave as soon as they arrived? Huh? Huh? Explain that, you apologist!

  Notice we are entering the question phase instead of the opinion stage. When hoax believers are so far down the hoax funnel that the best point they can make is in the form of a question, you have already debunked the main point: The President was NOT calling the neo-Nazis and white nationalists “fine people.”

  But watch how your believer will abandon the main point without admitting it, as if the lesser points that follow are somehow all the original point, but different. This is when things get really freaky.

  Expect this question next.

  Why doesn’t the president speak out against racism and neo-Nazis?

  This can be debunked by referring to links showing the President repeatedly condemning racism and bigotry at different times and places. See here and hereand here for examples. And of course here talking about Charlottesville.

  After you have shown clips of Trump condemning racists repeatedly, and naming the groups, you generally see the hoax believer retreat down the hoax funnel to this.

  Why is Trump “revising history” now, instead of when it happened in 2016?

  Chris Cuomo of CNN asked this question recently when discussing the topic. And he asked the question immediately after reporting that Sleepy Joe Biden had raised the issue in his campaign announcement speech. Biden is the answer to the first part of the question as to why it is in the headlines. But why is Trump pushing back on the hoax now when he didn’t push back so hard in 2016?

  Unfortunately, I have some insight into that question, and I don’t like it. According to my sources, the White House staff (many of whom were not as pro-Trump as you would expect, especially in 2016) and even some percentage of the management of FoxNews believed the hoax. That isn’t so surprising when you consider that half the country believed it and still do. Under those conditions, the President was trapped. If he couldn’t get his own staff and FoxNews on his side, maybe it was better to let the story atrophy from lack of attention. I can’t read the President’s mind, but without his staff and FoxNews on the same side, it would have been risky to take on the hoax without backup.

  So what changed?

  It turns out I’m part of the answer to that question. As I said, I’ve been publicly persuading on this topic for a few years, and slowly picking up support. But I wasn’t getting much traction until Sleepy Joe raised the issue, and that encouraged me to hammer at the topic with the help of my 312,000 Twitter followers. Brave writers such as Joel Pollack and Steve Cortes took it up a level with articles debunking the hoax here and here. Best of all, meme-maker phenomenon Carpe Donktum mocked the hoax in a way that is fun and visual, which increased its attention. And special thanks to the Twitter patriots who wrestled with other Wikipedia editors to correct the record on that site, including @Unstumpable2016, @natasjlp, @milkchaser, @daveJay and @SolidPhase.

  Collectively, including all the folks on social media who joined the debunking, we made enough noise to force the major news outlets to respond to the criticisms, with several of them naming me as a debunker. Wikipedia was the first non-right-leaning publication to debunk the hoax by including for the first time the entirety of the President’s statements. In the past week, I’ve seen other major publications debunk it as well, while pretending they are not. By that I mean they show the second part of the quote that debunks the hoax. They don’t frame it as a debunking, choosing instead (every time) to descend down the hoax funnel to find something – anything – that is tangentially related to the topic that they can claim is what they meant all along, or is true enough, or at least changes the subject. I include among the debunkers this past week the Washington Post, Vox, CNN, FoxNews, TheDailyBeast, RealClearPolitics, Breitbart, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and even Politifact.com. Any publication that printed the second part of Trump’s statement is debunking the hoax.

  You might think all that debunking would be enough to end the hoax. But the hoax funnel goes deep. Chris Cuomo of CNN retreated all the way to this question.

  Why does Trump speak out against Islamic terror more than white supremacy when the death count lately is higher from white supremacists?

  I can’t read the President’s mind, but I observe he downplays everything he wants to see less of and exaggerates everything he wants more of. For example, he downplayed ISIS when the press was warning they were still a bigger threat. I interpreted that as a way to keep ISIS recruiting down. Who wants to join a losing team? Likewise, downplaying the rise of white nationalists/supremacists is how you get less of it. That last thing that would be helpful to the nation is hearing our President say the racists are doing great lately at getting their kill stats up. That would attract people to it.

  We also know the press tries hard to frame the president as the cause of any rise in racist violence in this country. If someone is blaming you for causing a problem, would you respond by saying there’s a lot of that problem? You might think the smart answer involves minimizing it, given that you know you are going to take the blame for it.

  It also doesn’t make much sense to say domestic racist terror is “worse” than Islamic terror based solely on the fact that the recent body counts are higher in one group. For starters, only a few dozen people are killed by domestic terror per year, compared to 280,000 people killed by handguns over the past decade. If all you do is count dead bodies, domestic terrorism and even Islamic terrorism in this country both round to zero. If you are being honest, you don’t compare those two groups on the basis of victim counts alone.

  Islamic terrorists would love to use a weapon of mass destruction in the United States. They are an international organization bent on world domination, with standing armies, at least in the case of ISIS. And they are driven by an ideology that is hard to stop once it gets a toehold. By contrast, white racist terrorist attacks usually involve mental illness and lone wolves. I don’t see those risks as similar, and I don’t know how smart it would be to tell the public the racists are doing a great job of getting their stats up.

  Now let’s say you have talked a believer in the “fine people” hoax all the way down the hoax funnel to here. Do they acknowledge how badly they have been misinformed and hoaxed by their trusted news sources for years?

  Never.

  Instead, expect them to pivot to one of the other debunked hoaxes that they are not aware have been debunked because their news sources are unreliable. That last gasp looks like this.

  Well, Trump said other things that prove he is a racist monster, so…

  That’s when the hoax-believer will present a laundry list of other hoaxes they still believe, including these gems.

  Trump called Mexicans “animals”! (He didn’t. He called MS-13 gang members animals)

  Trump called countries in which brown people live “shitholes.” (He didn’t. It was a reference to poor economic situations in some countries.)

  Trump questioned Obama’s birth certificate. (Questioning an opponent’s legitimacy for office is politics 101. Trump did the same for Ted Cruz, questioning his Canadian birth. Politics of the most common kind is not racism.)

  Trump said all Mexicans are rapists! (He didn’t say all Mexicans are rapists. He was using his normal hyperbole to say too many criminals were crossing the border.)

  Trump said Judge Curiel couldn’t be fair because he is Mexican! (No, he indicated that Judge Curiel’s Mexican heritage might bias him against Trump because the media had painted Trump as an enemy of all Hispanics. In the legal process, calling out potential bias is normal and useful.)

  Trump mocked a reporter who has an arm disability! (No, Trump uses similar mocking gestures for anyone he thinks acts stupid, including Ted Cruz. See for yourself here.

  For a tour of some of the other hoaxes about Trump, see my blog post titled Why Democrats Hear a Secret Racist Dog Whistle and Republicans Don’t.

  As I mentioned, this topic is interesting on the political dimension, but far more fascinating on the psychological dimension. As a test that you can try at home, see if you can push a believer in the “fine people” hoax down the hoax funnel. And just for fun, see if you can talk a believer into reading aloud the part of Trump’s transcript in which he “condemned totally” the neo-Nazis and white nationalists. I predict it will be hard to get anyone to read it. The cognitive dissonance should, in theory, freeze their brains and render them speechless. The believer will become “cognitively blind” to the transcript and probably get angry in the process. And you will give yourself a lesson in what cognitive dissonance looks like. Watch carefully the eyes of the hoax believer as their worldview dissolves. They will often get bug-eyed (literally widening their eyes) and start to sputter out laundry lists of other hoaxes.

  You won’t change any minds. In my experience, the hoax believers go all the way down the hoax funnel and then forget the journey, returning to the top as if it had not been debunked one minute earlier. But you might enjoy breaking the brains of your critics. And you might learn something in the process.

  Have fun!

  

• US And China Drive Global Arms Spending To New Post-Cold War High

  Perhaps signaling a dangerous return to a ‘new Cold War’ — as some Russia scholars have recently called it — a just published study has revealed last year’s global military expenditure reached its highest level since the end of the Cold War, according to Reuters, and shows ratcheting competition for arms buying between the United States and China.

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  The finding is based on the latest arms spending figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which announced in its annual report that total global military spending reach $1.82 trillion in 2018, up 2.6 percent on the previous year.

  The think tank identified the hugely significant increase, the highest global spending has been since 1988 — in the last few years of the Soviet Union’s existence — as driven fundamentally by increased spending in the United States and China.

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  Specifically US military spending was up 4.6% last year at $649 billion, and China, led by President Xi’s desire to rapidly modernize the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), spent 5% more on arms compared to the prior year, as Reuters notes, an increase for the 24th consecutive year. Per data from the SIPRI report:

  U.S. military spending rose 4.6 percent last year to reach $649 billion, leaving it still by far the world’s biggest spender. It accounted for 36 percent of total global military expenditure, nearly equal to the following eight biggest-spending countries combined, SIPRI said.

  China, the second biggest spender, saw military expenditure rise 5.0 percent to $250 billion last year, the 24th consecutive annual increase.

  One analyst involved in the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure program which produced the report put the numbers in perspective as follows: “In 2018 the USA and China accounted for half of the world’s military spending.” 

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  This also as President Trump has made strong national defense a high priority, with his 2018 defense spending request put before Congress breaking every past budget record. 

  Other top spenders that came in below the US and China were identified in declining order as: 

  • Saudi Arabia 
  • India 
  • France 
  • Russia 
  • Britain 
  • Germany 
  • Japan  

  On a per capita basis, Saudi Arabia is actually outspending the United States amidst its war in Yemen, raging since 2015, and as fears of growing Iranian influence in the region fuels Riyadh’s weapons shopping spree. 

  Saudi Arabia by far outspent all other regional countries, including Iran and Turkey in 2018.

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  Also of note is Russia’s actual decline in defense spending:

  Russia, which flexed its military muscles with its 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and intervention in the Syrian conflict, dropped out of the list of the top five spenders in 2018 following an annual decline of 3.5 percent.

  Despite a sustained drive to upgrade and modernize Russia’s armed forces, President Vladimir Putin has had to tighten purse strings following a sharp decline in global oil prices and the need to prioritize some domestic spending programs.

   Meanwhile, total NATO spending amounted to just over half of global spending, the report concluded.

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  And yet SIPRI found that “military expenditure by all 29 NATO members amounted to just over half of global spending” — which suggests a predictable NATO posture of threat inflation regarding Moscow.

  But clearly, the report ought to put to bed the favorite Washington notion of the return of an expansionist menace in the form of a resurgent Russia; instead, US defense planners should be more worried about a “red menace” further to the East. 

  

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• Where Childhood Obesity Is Most Prevalent In Europe

  World Health Organization analysis shows the countries in Europe where childhood obesity is most prevalent, revealing, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong points out, that the problem to be most pronounced in Mediterranean nations.

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  Regardless of gender, Cyprus is home to the largest share of obese 6 to 9 year olds.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  For boys, Cyprus is joined by Italy on the top spot with 21 percent. In third place is Greece with 20 percent.

  For Europe’s girls, Spain has the second highest rate at 17 percent, followed by Malta with 15 percent.

  

• Swedish Anti-Extremism Tsar Allows Returning ISIS Fighters Re-Entry As "Caring Citizens"

  Authored by Jon Hall via FMShooter.com,

  According to officials in Stockholm, Swedish residents have nothing to fear fromIslamic State fighters returning from the Middle East to live peaceful, crime-free lives in Sweden.

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  Christina Kiernan, Stockholm’s anti-violent extremism coordinator, claimed that jihadists who returned from Syria and Iraq were living “orderly lives” following public outcry regarding the government’s decision not to strip people who fought in radical Islamic terror organizations of their Swedish passports.

  Kiernan said on a television interview this week:

  The IS returnees we have talked to so far have no known current crime, they have a job and an orderly life to the extent that we do not have knowledge of activities that can in any way scare anyone…

  The television interviewer fired back:

  So they are returning from this type of business and becoming caring, well-behaved citizens?

  Kiernan admitted that “so far [the number of returnees they’ve spoken to] is only a few”. About half of the 300 ISIS fighters that left Sweden to fight in the Middle East are believed to have already returned to the country. Shockingly, a survey conducted last year reveals that local authorities have lost track of most of the returnees.

  Magnus Ranstorp, terrorism expert, noted the “deep culture of silence” enacted in heavily migrant-populated areas of Sweden, with many citizens totally unwilling to speak to authorities over issues regarding Islamism or returning jihadists.

  Ranstorp urged officials to keep a closer eye on returnees, warning that a “totally different threshold of violence” compared to the native population was a serious threat and that the government should do more to prosecute “extremely dangerous” individuals across Sweden.

  Upon further investigation, it’s been exposed that one in three ISIS returnee fighters have committed serious crimes upon returning to Sweden.

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  Giving a new definition to the term “Stockholm Syndrome”, Swedish officials are openly contradicting themselves – claiming they’ve interviewed and talked with returning ISIS fighters to ensure they are living a peaceful, modernized life when it’s been reported they’ve lost track of the majority of them.

  In their bid to reach total and complete political correctness, yet another European country is putting native citizens in real and actual danger to accommodate migrants with backwards beliefs that only want to terrorize Westernized societies and maim the infidels they’ve declared holy jihad on.

  

• Joint Russia-China Naval Drills Kick Off After 2 US Warships Enter Taiwan Strait

  Early this week Chinese media confirmed that Russian warships arrived in Qingdao, a port city in East China’s Shandong Province, at the start this week’s join China-Russia naval exercises. 

  The Russian fleet included the Varyag guided missile cruiser, a submarine, two anti-submarine ships, a corvette, a landing ship, a tanker and a rescue vessel, according to China’s Global Times.

  Russian submarine makes a visit to Qingdao Port in China. pic.twitter.com/FgMoWC0Bh9

  — Andrew McAlister (@Drumboy44DWS) April 29, 2019

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  The planned drills, called Naval Cooperation 2019 exercises, set to run April 29 to May 4 come amidst a general thawing and improvement of relations between Moscow and Beijing as both experienced heightened economic and military tensions with the United States of late. 

  For its part, the PLA Navy (People’s Liberation Army) will deploy a submarine, two guided missile destroyers, three guided missile frigates and a submarine rescue ship to participate in the exercises, according to an official PLA statement. 

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  Official descriptions of the drills detail plans for joint training in maneuvering and communication, missile launches, artillery fire at sea, and naval aviation coordination, among other things. 

  Russia’s TASS news agency identified the ships in its fleet that are involved in the joint drills as follows: 

  A group of Pacific Fleet ships consisting of the flagship Guards Order of Nakhimov missile cruiser Varyag, the large anti-tank ships Admiral Vinogradov and Admiral Tributs, the corvette Sovershenny, the large landing ship Oslyabya, the rescue vessel Igor Belousov and the sea tanker Irkut arrived at the port of Qingdao on a business call several hours ago, and the official opening ceremony for the bilateral Russian-Chinese naval drills ‘Maritime Cooperation 2019’ was carried out.

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  Interestingly, the joint drills kicked off a mere day after the United States sailed two warships through the Taiwan Strait. The USS Stethem and USS William P. Lawrence passed through the contested strait on Sunday, in what US Navy officials called “routine” transit.

  “The ships’ transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Cdr. Clay Doss, a spokesman for the Navy’s Seventh Fleet said in in a statement. “The US Navy will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows,” he added.

  Beijing has consistently denounced such US operations as provocations aimed at weakening China’s historic claims over Taiwan. 

  

• What If A Mega-Tsunami Hit The East Coast Of The United States?

  Authored by Michael Snyder via The End Of The American Dream blog,

  Someday a giant meteor will slam into the Atlantic Ocean, and the colossal tsunami that is produced will wipe out most of the people that are living along the east coast.  In 1998, a big Hollywood movie entitled “Deep Impact” imagined what such an event would look like, and scientists assure us that it is just a matter of time before it takes place.  And since 39 percent of all Americans live in a county that directly borders a shoreline, we are in an extremely vulnerable position.  Let’s just hope that what I am talking about in this article does not happen any time soon.

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  Earlier today I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, and I came across a video entitled “What If A Mega-Tsunami Hit The United States”.

  If you know me well, then you probably know that this is a hot button issue for me, and so it definitely got my attention.

  And it must be a hot button issue for a lot of other people as well, because it has already been viewed more than 3.5 million times.

  I did some digging around, and I found an accompanying article for the video.  According to that article, someday a wall of water 3000 feet high could come racing toward us at 620 miles per hour…

  In six hours, you, your government, and 124 million other people across 14 states will be tested by the greatest disaster to ever hit the U.S. East Coast. A great wave, 1000 meters tall (3280 ft.), moving towards you at 1000 km/h (620 mph), and that’s only the beginning.

  Boston, New York, Philly, D.C., Miami. All underwater. And you?

  Of course the size of the tsunami would all depend upon the size of the event that caused it.

  According to scientists at the University of California at Santa Cruz, if a giant meteor suddenly slammed into the Atlantic Ocean it could potentially create a tsunami with a wall of water as high as 400 feet…

  If an asteroid crashes into the Earth, it is likely to splash down somewhere in the oceans that cover 70 percent of the planet’s surface. Huge tsunami waves, spreading out from the impact site like the ripples from a rock tossed into a pond, would inundate heavily populated coastal areas. A computer simulation of an asteroid impact tsunami developed by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows waves as high as 400 feet sweeping onto the Atlantic Coast of the United States.

  Either way, we are talking about death and destruction on a scale that is hard to imagine.

  Once a meteor hit, there would be a race against time to get away from the massive wall of water rapidly approaching the east coast.  The creators of the Facebook video that I just mentioned envision that everyone would have “6 hours of advance notice”…

  The death toll would be staggering; the economic impact, easily costing billions, if not trillions of dollars. It will take decades to rebuild, and yet, is it wrong to suggest that we might’ve gotten off easy?

  How much worse would it have been without the 6 hours of advance notice? That’s right, you owe a big thank you to these supersmart buoys monitoring the coast, keeping you safe and dry, so that you can rest easy, and keep watching ‘What If.’

  Sadly, the truth is that we would probably get very little warning.  For example, if a giant meteor were to splash down near Puerto Rico, the amount of time before impact would be extremely limited.  You could try to get in your car and outrace the wall of water coming at you at 620 miles per hour, but of course the highways would be jammed with other people trying to get out as well.

  In a worst case scenario, tens of millions of people would die, and all of our east coast cities would essentially be destroyed.

  You may not spend much time thinking about such a thing, but I find it very interesting that NASA is currently simulating a similar scenario…

  NASA is going to be using a simulation of an “asteroid apocalypse” in order to help the space agency prepare for the cataclysmic event. And they are taking it seriously, as disaster planners from FEMA will join NASA for a dress rehearsal of doomsday.

  International partners, including the European Space Agency (ESA), will also be a part of the simulation. The drill is said to be a “tabletop exercise” that will simulate just how a planetary asteroid emergency would play out in real time.

  And NASA has good reason to be concerned, because our planet is apparently “in the midst of an epic asteroid surge”…

  NASA’s been running these simulations for years, and with good reason: Earth, as it happens, is in the midst of an epic asteroid surge compared to the relative peace and quiet the planet experienced many millions of years ago.

  When unexpected space rocks do appear on our scopes, sometimes we only get hours’ notice of their existence before they streak past. While the chances of a catastrophic impact are exceedingly slim, we’re nonetheless unprepared for surprise asteroid strikes, which is why NASA is continually working on plans to help improve our NEO detection and mitigation capabilities.

  We truly do live in very strange times, and they are going to get a whole lot stranger.

  A single moment in time can change everything.  Most people assume that NASA knows about all of the big rocks that could potentially slam into our planet, but that is not true at all.  According to one estimate, approximately 17,000 large near-Earth objects remain undetected.  But since they are “undetected”, the truth is that nobody knows the real number.

  Meteors go whizzing by us all the time, and NASA doesn’t discover a lot of them until they are already past us.

  In reality, we are sitting ducks, and someday our luck will finally run out.

  

• Is The New World Order's Global Annihilation Agenda Ramping Up?

  Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

  New World Order globalists are seeking to eliminate 90% of the human race, in a bid to protect the environment. Those for mass death have convinced themselves that the only way to save the planet is to eliminate “useless eaters.”

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  The NWO and globalization has been happening for some time now, but there always appears to be a moment when the agenda’s rhetoric is ramped up to disturbing levels, complete with apocalyptic death.  Even leftist totalitarian comedians like Bill Maher have joined in the horrific agenda pushing by saying he just wants people to, “Not have kids, DIE, and stay dead.” Maher said humans hurt the environment, so the solution is for them to die. (Did Maher forget he’s a human?) “As he argued that humans hurt the environment, he concluded that it would be better for Earth for more people to ‘not have kids, die and stay dead,’” reports NewsBusters.org.

  Leftists truly believe the planet will be destroyed if humans are allowed to survive much longer. Left-wing nut case Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warns that planet Earth only has 12 more years before it will be destroyed by “climate change” — a completely fabricated junk science narrative invented by power-hungry Leftists who are almost universally illiterate in the realm of real science, reported Natural News.

  There are far too many humans who believe that the slaughtering and killing off of billions of other humans is the answer to “climate change.” Because globalists truly believe humans are a threat to the planet, they have no qualms whatsoever about calling for the mass genocide of human beings around the world. After all, they are trying to “save the planet,” they tell themselves, which translates in their twisted and sociopathic minds, that the ends justify the means. (Did anyone just picture Adolf Hitler?)

  Natural News further wrote that the global annihilation agenda is ramping up, and with it comes increased rhetoric. In fact, laws are now being pushed that will allow governments to efficiently dispose of billions of bodies by “recycling” them back into the food supply. (Soylent Green, anyone?)

  In the state of Washington, for example, a new “human composting” bill has been passed by the state House and Senate. Once signed into law, it would allow human corpses to be liquefied and flushed into the sewer system. From there, “biosludge” is collected by every city in America — including Seattle — where it is dehydrated and trucked out to the rural farms in surrounding areas. There, it’s dumped on farm fields after being dishonestly labeled “free fertilizer” for farmers.

  This is all explained in my jaw-dropping film “Biosludged,” available for free at Biosludged.com. (You can watch the film, or even download the raw video files and share the files on torrents if you wish.)

  Effectively, what this means is that human corpses are going to be “recycled” back into the food supply in Washington. Soon, this will be authorized across America. It’s one of the necessary steps before the globalists unleash their “kill switch” biological weapon that’s designed to kill off at least 90% of the global population. Once that is accomplished, human labor will be replaced by automated robots, while armed Google “suicide drones” seek out and exterminate the human survivors living in the rubble of cities like Seattle.-Natural News

  All governments of the world are on an unsustainable path, and rather than admit failure and give up their power and money they’ve stolen from the masses, genocide becomes their answer. After all, those who are not living don’t need the government handouts.  How else does anyone possible think universal basic income could ever work?

  No one knows when the time will come that governments will decide to finally commit mass murder on a scale never before experienced, but there is evidence and even talk from globalists that it’s the only solution and at some point, could occur.

  

• Washington Warns Beijing: 'Paramilitary' Fishing Boats Will Now Be Treated Like Combatants

  As the US continues its increasingly daring and extremely provocative “freedom of navigation” operations in the Strait of Taiwan and South China Sea, it’s also growing more vocal about challenging China’s increasingly expansionary military presence in the Pacific. Over the weekend, the US has warned Beijing that the US military would aggressively respond to provocative acts by China’s coast guard and fishing boats in the same way it reacts to the Chinese navy.

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  The threatening posture is aimed at curbing Beijing’s increasingly sharp-elbowed approach not just to the South China Sea, which it already effectively dominates, despite the rival claims of several of its neighbors (claims that have been validated by international courts), but in the Pacific more broadly, the FT reports.

  Admiral John Richardson, head of the US Navy, said he told his Chinese counterpart, vice-admiral Shen Jinlong, in January that Washington would not treat Chinese fishing boats that work with the People’s Liberation Army-Navy any differently from actual Navy ships. This warning wasn’t unprovoked: On several occasions, Chinese fishing boats have blocked vessels belonging to the US, Vietnam and the Philippines. They have even rammed and harassed ships, blocked access to lagoons, and participated in the seizure of reefs and shoals.

  “I made it very clear that the US navy will not be coerced and will continue to conduct routine and lawful operations around the world, in order to protect the rights, freedoms and lawful uses of sea and airspace guaranteed to all,” Adm Richardson told the Financial Times.

  China’s informal marine militia has been expanding since 2015, when it established a headquarters on the Paracel Islands.

  The maritime militia has been strengthened since 2015, when it created a headquarters in the China-administered Paracel Islands, a disputed area in the South China Sea that is also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan. It has also received training alongside the Chinese navy and coast guard. In its last annual report on the Chinese military, the Pentagon said the fleet “plays a major role in coercive activities to achieve China’s political goals without fighting.”

  China has increasingly used the maritime militia because fishing boats are less likely to prompt a military response from the US. But the latest warning significantly raises the stakes for China’s non-navy vessels engaging in aggressive acts.

  Defense analysts have long warned about the need for a more effective strategy to counter Beijing’s expansionary aims in the Pacific, and Andrew Erickson, a maritime militia expert at the US Naval War College, recently called for the US to “deal with China’s sea forces holistically” by demanding that both military and paramilitary ships follow international rules. He added that the US must “accept some friction and force Beijing to choose” between de-escalating or inflaming tensions.

  James Stavridis, a retired US admiral and former NATO commander, said Richardson made the right call.

  “It is a warning shot across the bow of China, in effect saying we will not tolerate ‘grey zone’ or ‘hybrid’ operations at sea,” said Mr Stavridis. “A combatant is a combatant is the message, and the CNO (Chief of Naval Operations) is in the right place to warn China early and often.”

  As is now customary whenever the US ratchets up the pressure on the Chinese Navy, don’t be surprised too see a retaliatory show of force in the coming days and weeks.

  

• Chinese Drugmaker Discloses $4.4 Billion Accounting Fraud

  It looks like China’s unstoppable default tsunami is about to claim its latest corporate victim…and thanks to lax oversight that allowed the company to get away with what appears to be a staggering accounting fraud, thousands of unsuspecting investors might be left holding the bag.

  According to Bloomberg, Kangmei Pharmaceutical Co., one of China’s largest listed drugmakers, revealed on Tuesday that it had overstated its cash holdings by $4.4 billion. Unsurprisingly, the revelation, which immediately exposed the company to be teetering on the brink of insolvency, sent its shares and bonds tumbling. Its shares, which are a constituent of MSCI’s global index, plunged by the 10% daily limit. Its 2.4 billion yuan ($356 million) notes due in 2022 dropped by as much as 60 yuan (about $9).

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  It’s just the latest example of why investors must be wary of Chinese companies due to lax regulations, even as its equity and bond markets are becoming increasingly internationalized. The company’s revelation came four months after it revealed that Chinese authorities had launched an investigation into the company.

  One of BBG’s sources said the restatement is ‘unprecedented’ in the history of Chinese security markets.

  The immense size of Kangmei’s restatement, described by one securities lawyer as unprecedented for China, puts a spotlight on disclosure practices in a country where companies are defaulting at a record pace and several instances of questionable accounting have emerged in recent months. The issue has become increasingly important for global investors and securities firms as they gain unprecedented access to China’s gargantuan stock and bond markets.

  “Investors have to be more careful about Chinese firms’ reporting,” said Andrew Lam, a director at BDO, an international accounting firm. “They will have to do real homework, examining closely companies’ financial reporting for any potential irregularities.”

  The China Securities Regulatory Commission, which in recent years has been pushing the nation’s stock exchanges to delist companies that provide inaccurate disclosures, didn’t immediately reply to a faxed request for comment. The Shanghai Composite Index rose 0.5 percent at 1:36 p.m. local time.

  Though the company could face de-listing over the fraud, it said it will try and raise more capital to meet an upcoming bond obligation due Sept. 3. All of this is happening after Beijing’s decision to start allowing companies to fail led to a record number of Chinese corporate defaults.

  Kangmei, based in China’s southern Guangdong province, said it faces forced delisting if the CSRC classifies its behavior as a major legal violation, according to a company notice on risks related to its ongoing CSRC investigation. The drugmaker’s upcoming bond maturities include a 750 million yuan note due Sept. 3. Kangmei plans to sell as much as 20 billion yuan of bonds to replenish working capital and repay debt, the firm said in a filing on Tuesday.

  Other companies that have faced similar scrutiny from regulators include Kangde Xin Composite Material Group Co., which defaulted on a bond in January after reporting cash levels just four months earlier that were enough to pay the debt 15 times over. The CSRC began investigating Kangde Xin in October.

  But as one analyst points out, this isn’t the first time a Chinese company has displayed a high cash balance while selling bonds, then the cash just disappeared.

  “We have seen a number of Chinese companies with high cash balances still seek funding from investors, and later on the cash just disappears,” said Raymond Chia, head of credit research for Asia excluding Japan at Schroder Investment Management Ltd. “We should really question borrowers.”

  While investors will be watching the CSRC, one of China’s most powerful securities regulators, to see how it handles the case, whatever the result, one investor said the Kangmei will likely ‘struggle to win back the confidence of investors’ – which sounds to us like the understatement of the century.

  Investors will watch the CSRC for more details on what went wrong at Kangmei, according to Guo Feng, head of the wealth management department at Northeast Securities Co. Whatever the result, the company may struggle to win back investor confidence, said Shen Chen, a partner at Shanghai Maoliang Investment Management.

  “This scandal could narrow their refinancing channels as investors flee,” Shen said.

  Though BBG reported that this was the largest cash discrepancy on record, a bankruptcy from earlier this year suggests that this might not be true.

  Back in January, the bankruptcy of Jiangsu-based Kangde Xin Composite Material Group, took investors by surprise when it failed to pay a 1 billion yuan ($148 million) local note due Jan. 15 due to a liquidity crunch, according to the company. The shocking punchline? As research analyst Tim Yup pointed out,  as of end-September Kangde Xin reported that it had 15.4 billion yuan in cash and equivalents, more than double the total amount of its short-term debt, and more than 15 times the amount of debt that it just defaulted on.

  Clearly, when it comes to the balance sheets of indebted Chinese companies, no cash balances can be taken as a certainty.

  

• About That Letter That Mueller Wrote To Barr…

  Another deep state “leak” has hit the tape, and as usual it has gone to the WaPo and NYT almost at the exact same time… but this it’s even more laughable than usual.

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  In what the WaPo breathlessly reports late on Tuesday was a rebuke and “complaint” to Attorney General William Barr, special counsel Robert Mueller sent a letter to the AG in late March, just days after Barr sent out his summary to Congress, in which Mueller stated that Barr’s 4-page summary to Congress on the sweeping Russia investigation failed to “fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work and conclusions, citing a copy of the letter it had obtained using its trusted deep intel sources.

  This is what Mueller said to Barr, according to the leaked NSA intercept:

  “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

  And if one reads just that, it certainly does not look good for Attorney General Barr, especially just one day before his first official Congressional hearing on the topic of the Mueller report: so bad that even the absolute lunatic fringe of conspiracygate – which had mercifully shut up for the past month with its daily predictions that this member of the Trump clan is going to jail, or that website will be shut down – has roared back into life with the sage assessment that “this is bad.”

  Pouring more fuel on the fire, the always pithy Axios adds that “this revelation about Mueller’s dissatisfaction with the characterization of his report will likely escalate the growing rift over Barr’s handling of the special counsel’s investigation. House Democrats, who have expressed distrust in the attorney general, are set to vote on Wednesday to allow House Judiciary Committee lawyers to question Barr at Thursday’s hearing.”

  Or maybe not, and perhaps the WaPo/NYT report is not “so bad” if one actually reads it, because once the breathless WaPo finally does come up for air, we get to paragraph 13 – a point by which most readers have turned out – to read the following real punchline in the WaPo report:

  When Barr pressed Mueller on whether he thought Barr’s memo to Congress was inaccurate, Mueller said he did not…

  So, Mueller felt there was confusion… but he did not think the memo was inaccurate. Wait, what’s going on here and how is this even a story? Well, if we read the rest of the above sentence, we find the true object of Mueller’s “complaint”:

  [Mueller] felt that the media coverage of it was misinterpreting the investigation, officials said.

  Which means that, as the WaPo itself reports, what Mueller was really angry with was the coverage of his report by media such as… the WaPo and the NYT?? The irony, it burns.

  But wait, because if one reads even further – and yes, we know most Russiagaters have troubles getting beyond sentence one so they are excused – we find that throughout a subsequent 15 minutes telephone conversation between the special counsel and the attorney general, Mueller’s main worry was “that the public was not getting an accurate understanding of the obstruction investigation.”

  This goes back to what Mueller’s letter requested: “that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and made some initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials,” the WaPo writes.

  What happened then? A few weeks later Barr did just that, and absent occasional redactions – some of which apparently revealed that Russia had taped Bill Clinton having phone sex with Monica Lewinsky – he did just that.

  So if Mueller thought Barr’s memo was not inaccurate, and his ire was instead targeted at the media for “misinterpreting the investigation” – although it remains unclear just how they did this, after all Mueller does not dispute that there was no collusion (yes, Russiagaters, that means you) and did not dispute Barr’s conclusion of no obstruction – then what is the point of these two rather confused pieces? Well, as noted above, tomorrow Barr is scheduled to testify on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the investigation, and the entire article is meant to focus on the headlines of the WaPo (and NYT) article, and certainly not on paragraph 13 which, not only refutes the prevailing tone that Barr did something wrong, but in fact exonerates him. But that won’t have any impact on tomorrow’s hearing which is now assured to be a complete kangaroo court.

  As for tonight’s really big, if unspoken, story – if this is the best leak Mueller has to defy Barr and the president, then Trump has indeed won.

  

• 'Good Will'-Hunting By Iran & North Korea

  Authored by Tom Luongo,

  When all else fails with Donald Trump try flattery. That’s exactly what Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif did on Sunday. Because for Iran and North Korea that is, honestly, all that is left.

  First it was North Korea, saying talks could resume but only if President Trump’s staff were no longer around.

  This weekend Iran took to the airwaves with an interview on Trump’s favorite network, Fox, likely the only thing he’s allowed to watch along with CNN. Good cop/bad cop as it were.

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  Zarif made his way around the Sunday talk show circuit to make his case to the U.S. establishment. These appeals were to Trump himself to come out from behind his staff and broker honestly with both countries.

  “They have all shown an interest in dragging the United States into a conflict. I do not believe that President Trump wants to do that, I believe President Trump ran on a campaign promise of not bringing the United States into another war. But I believe President Trump’s intention to put pressure, the policy of maximum pressure on Iran in order to bring Iran to its knees so that we would succumb to pressure, is doomed to failure.”

  IRANIAN FOREIGN MINISTER JAVAD ZARIF ON FOX NEWS SUNDAY

  At the same time Iran and North Korea both understand that if Trump doesn’t do this they are moving on with their lives regardless of what the U.S. does next.

  Russia is openly preparing for war if need be.

  Since the beginning of the Trump administration there has been almost zero interaction between U.S. and Iranian foreign offices. The lack of diplomacy and professionalism of the Trump administration has been quite evident from the beginning.

  Any attempt to engage in diplomacy was roundly rejected by Trump himself. Why do you think Rex Tillerson was fired? It wasn’t because he called Trump an “Idiot.” Though Rex was right about that.

  He was fired because he actually engaged in diplomacy with both North Korea and in intervening to stop the Saudis from invading Qatar in 2017.

  He was also a supporter of the JCPOA, knowing that that deal was as good as it would get until the U.S. stopped all regime change activities around the world. And that was the breaking point.

  It was time for the neocons, specifically Sheldon Adelson, the Saudis and the UAE, to push for a new foreign policy. They had to stop Trump from making a deal of substance with North Korea because it would undermine the goal of destroying Iran.

  Peace might have broken out in the Middle East and U.S. troops might have come home. The Horror. The Horror.

  Remember North Korea and Iran are linked in the minds of the Israelis, Trump and the Neocons because of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

  Iran just test-fired a Ballistic Missile capable of reaching Israel.They are also working with North Korea.Not much of an agreement we have!

  — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 23, 2017

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  These are the most important 140 characters Donald Trump has written in the past two years. It underscores and puts paid why he is so dead set on pushing the situation with North Korea and Iran to its crisis point.

  Readers of this blog know that myself and Halsey English have been saying for months that Iran and North Korea divided up their nuclear weapons ambitions between them. This way they could adhere to the letter of their international agreements while violating the spirit of them.

  WHY TRUMP’S TWEET SIGNALS NUCLEAR END-GAME, 9/24/2017

  Pompeo and Bolton were installed to rein in Trump and accelerate the antagonism of Iran on behalf of Israel. They were installed to scuttle Korean reunification and make unreasonable demands on every one of Israel’s enemies — Lebanon, Syria and Iran — to ensure non-compliance and justify sanctions.

  This is why the JCPOA was the ‘worst deal ever.’ It didn’t preclude the outsourcing of the two halves of the nuclear weapon — the warhead developed by North Korea and the ballistic missile developed by Iran.

  This is why Benjamin Netanyahu wants to cripple Iran’s ballistic missile program. And why he is so obsessed with ‘proving’ the Iranians are still making a warhead.

  There is no solution to the intractable mess of this situation if the U.S. is dead set on unilateral ultimatums of the kind Bolton and Pompeo only seem capable of.

  This is why it is so significant that first Kim Jong-un and now Javad Zarif are trying to cleave Trump away from his advisors handlers and appeal to him directly to de-escalate the situation.

  Last week Kim sat down with Russian President Vladimir Putin and affirmed a close relationship while elevating Putin to that of equal partner in any future talks between the U.S. and North Korea.

  Putin understands that North Korea would “rather eat dirt” than give up their nukes at this point. They know what happens to countries that negotiate with Americans like John Bolton.

  Kim knows like Putin does that “Presidents change, policy doesn’t.” And the U.S. policy on subjugating its adversaries is not open for discussion.

  So any agreement between Trump and Kim isn’t likely to last a decade. This is the consequence of Trump’s tearing up every treaty he can get his hands on he doesn’t like.

  At some point, like it or not, you honor your agreements or accept that there are no deals possible.

  Kim rightly refuses to be treated like an underling and now will only deal with other heads of state. Zarif knows that Trump watches Fox News and so does Fox’s executives who allowed this interview.

  The fact that both Kim and Zarif have to go through these channels to get their message across is beyond embarrassing. And not for them.

  They both come across here as statesmen while Pompeo continues to look like a buffoon, blundering his way around preparing the world for the Rapture he so clearly thinks is necessary.

  Zarif understands that the moves made in the past couple of weeks by Trump through Bolton have the potential for outcomes Trump himself doesn’t want.

  Trump wants to win the hand and get his Middle East deal of the century across the finish line. If Bolton has sold him on the notion that the only way to stop Iran and save Israel is to invade and destroy them then the die has been cast and we’d better get out the body counters.

  As Scott Ritter points out in the American Conservative the move to nominate the IRGC as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization’ was a de facto declaration of war against Iran which makes thousands of U.S. troops vulnerable in Iraq and Syria where they fight side-by-side against ISIS.

  It is well past time for Trump to decide who runs his administration and what his legacy is going to be. Zarif appealed to candidate Trump, a man no longer in existence, who sold his presidency to the neocons to stay in power back in 2017 when he doubled down in Afghanistan.

  He’ll never have more political capital to break free of Bolton et.al. than he does now with RussiaGate over and the Democrats in disarray.

  Too bad he’s such a coward he can’t see that.

  *  *  *

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• Khashoggi Murder Suspect Found Dead In Turkish Prison

  Just about seven months have passed since Jamal Khashogggi, a former government insider-turned-critic of Saudi Crown Prince MbS, walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and disappeared, sparking an international scandal that prompted several governments (though notably not the US) to suspend arm sales and spoiling MbS’s second ‘Davos in the Desert’ as dozens of CEOs and scheduled speakers pulled out.

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  Considering the intensity of the backlash to Khashoggi’s murder at the hands of a government death squad, something the Saudi kingdom begrudgingly admitted following weeks of denials (though it insisted that the team had only been sent to ‘talk’ to Khashoggi, and that his killing, dismemberment and the destruction of his remains were the work of rogue operatives) it’s a testament to the shoddy attention span of the global public (and their political and business leaders) that the scandal has been so quickly forgotten.

  But as the public has moved on to criticize KSA’s mass executions and the brutal proxy war in Yemen, it appears at least one government involved in the Khashoggi affair might be taking advantage of the fact that the spotlight has moved away to seek some brutal retribution.

  On Monday, WSJ reported that one of two suspected UAE spies under investigation by the Turkish government for playing some unspecified role in the Khashoggi’s killing – and who were helping Saudi and its allies spy on Arab critics living in Turkey – had been found hanged in his cell at a notorious Turkish prison.

  The cause of death was quickly ruled a suicide.

  Turkish prosecutors on Monday said wardens had found the suspect, identified as Zaki Y.M. Hassan, hanged inside his solitary cell in Istanbul’s Silivri prison and had ordered an investigation into his death. Turkish state media said Mr. Hassan had died by suicide.
  U.A.E. officials couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

  Turkish authorities had said they were investigating the two men for a possible connection with the killing of Mr. Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul at the hands of Saudi Arabian operatives in October.

  The alleged U.A.E. spies came to Turkey soon after the Oct. 2 killing, according to state media reports. They were detained on April 15 and have confessed to spying on behalf of the Gulf state, the reports have said.

  Turkish state media has said authorities had tailed the two suspects for several months and had evidence that they were collecting intelligence on Arab nationals residing in Turkey and seeking to recruit other operatives to create a larger surveillance network.

  it’s possible that Hassan’s death may have been a suicide. But the tensions between Turkey and members of the GCC who have kept up a shipping ban against Qatar (as the UAE has) have only intensified in the wake of Khashoggi’s murder. Turkey is a close ally of Qatar.

  Meanwhile, the Saudi government has pressured the children of Khashoggi to grant clemency to 11 men who are potentially facing the death penalty for their alleged role in the killing (they were scapegoated as the kingdom continued to deny MbS’s involvement in the plot, despite a stream of leaks out of the US intelligence community pointing the finger at the Crown Prince). On another front, Erdogan’s government has continued to provoke the US  by arresting yet another consular employee (all have been Turkish nationals).

  If this was an act of retribution, does that mean there could be more to come? And what would that mean for Turkey’s increasingly shaky economy?

  

• Tipping Point: The Gilets Jaunes Are Winning, What's Next?

  Authored by David Studdert via Off-Guardian.org,

  The weekend just gone, Manifestation 23, marked a seismic shift in the five month battle between the Gilets Jaunes and the French state. The Notre Dame fire has brought into the open the strategic shift in public opinion that has occurred over the winter; shifts all to the advantage of the Gilets Jaunes. While the cold winter months with their looming darkness only allowed us to glimpse two equal parties grinding away at each other in the gloom, the advent of spring and its clear light, reveals how the Gilets are gathering reserves of strength all over France, and how, now, they are slowly winning in Paris as well. The sight of French police surrounding Notre Dame and denying access to its ‘own’ population, starkly illustrates what the state seeks to deny. After all, these sort of monuments are the materiality through which states demonstrates their connection to the population, their right to rule and their own power.

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  The Neo-liberal state is crumbling and Macron is going be the sacrificial lamb. At this stage he will be lucky to last two months. His clumsy handling of the Notre Dame blaze has outraged and enraged more sections of the French population. Indeed throughout the five months of protest, and despite the wall to wall media propaganda, opinion polls consistently show continued and unwavering sympathy and support of the Gilets Jaunes.

  In the sharp light of spring it is clear that Macron’s winter strategy: the Great National Debate, has achieved nothing for the government and more tellingly perhaps, has further revealed Macron’s own incapacity to either change himself or shift course. As one anonymous French state official reportedly said: ‘Mitterrand gave them an extra week’s holiday, but Macron can’t manage anything’. He simply seems unable in any form to communicate with either the Gilets or the people of France. His constant speeches, with their casual insults and lack of empathy, remain one of the best recruitment tools the Gilets possess.

  His recent pronouncements continue this trend. His promise to rebuild the cathedral in five years was met with scorn – ‘this is not a railway line’, said one commentator, while his invitation to the world (a typical empty gesture) angered and aroused traditionalists. Indeed, as has been widely reported, his endorsement of cash donations from billionaires, simply provided the Gilets with yet more free sticks to beat him and the state.

  Even his big showpiece speech was cancelled when the Cathedral burst into flames. And what was his big announcement? A freeze on hospital and school closures, the index-linking of pensions to inflation and the closing of the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the university that produces the country’s political and civil elite, all of which, particularly the last, were seen as too late and totally irrelevant. After all it doesn’t put food on the table or help the people get to the end of the month with any money. As I noted in previous articles, this is typical of Macron, revealing only how his personal authority is slipping away, and strangely enough, how irrelevant he is becoming to the entire debate.

  Above all, Macron is guilty of being one of those stupid/intelligent middle class people; the sort neo-liberalism delights in providing for us in many guises: administrators, legacy media editors, heads of departments, councillors, politicians. He is bright, he is buffed, he has aspiration, he can speak fluently on subjects for hours, yet for all of that, every speech he makes simply inflames the situation. And this, coupled with his inability to convey a shred of empathy and his apparent lack of understanding concerning both politics and national history, reveal him to be nothing so much as a messenger boy for the rich and the powerful. Once again none of this escapes the French population.

  Clearly Macron much prefers international summits to meeting his own people and in truth his dreams of the future, which is all he has, are as banal as Marinetti’s.

  All of this was starkly obvious in the course of the great National Debate. Billed as a listening exercise, every photo showed Macron not listening, but lecturing, while his rolled shirt sleeves made him look like a boy, inexperienced and out of his depth. The state PR is simply not working and one can’t believe that any worker in France was fooled by this nonsense.

  So Macron is finished and he’ll be gone soon, but the question remains where does this revolt go from here? For the manner in which his removal occurs, how long it takes and who replaces him, will determine the next stage.

  Unfortunately for the French neo-liberal state, Macron’s dismissal will not solve the problem. Firstly because, in an immediate sense, there is no alternative candidate within ruling circles acceptable to the Gilets. Secondly, because it is becoming increasingly apparent that neo-liberalism as a form of governance can only succeed in a climate of profligate personal credit, which, along with rising house prices (not counted as inflation), remains the only method available to Neo-Liberalism for generating wealth among all social classes. They simply are unwilling or unable to give anything to the people.

  The dismissal of the Paris police chief and the calls by the state for the police to use greater violence and employ more weaponry, simple confirm the gridlock which has entangled the neo-liberal state and its bureaucratic class. A gridlock which not only depresses and represses the rest of us, but also, within the current ruling dogma, is impossible to transcend; violence and exclusion are all the contemporary state has left.

  And what of the Gilets? Well, they are everywhere. Every week Facebook is full of online Gilet house-parties, where films, discussion and reinforcement abound. When they don’t demonstrate they talk.. Nor, despite the toil required, is there any sign the people of France are quitting the movement. My roundabout still has people each week-end, as they have been every week-end through what was a cold and desolate winter, and in this they are simply duplicating events at the other twenty or so occupied roundabouts in Gers and all through France. Recently the group at my roundabout distributed a flyer saying that they were finding it difficult to continue every weekend and could others come and assist them, something which according to locals, met with an influx of new recruits. ‘Nous le faisons pour vous’ is their standard speech as they hand out flyers to passing motorists, almost all of whom appear friendly and sympathetic; something entirely to be expected, given all of them are locals.

  Some liberal commentators still persist in presenting the Gilets as supplicant Oliver Twists, begging for more from their superiors table and these same commentators love to speak of the revolt as being the periphery verses the centre. As I have made clear in my previous articles, this is the opposite of the truth.

  For the Gilets are showing rising levels of political consciousness; with an apparent endless enthusiasm for debates concerning violence, socialism and their demands – debates which are still, even after five months, managed online with toleration and respect for the diversity of people’s opinions.

  Additionally, from a strategic perspective the Gilets have already demonstrated their capacity to bring every major French city to a halt. Toulouse, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Lyon, have all seen large, persistent demonstrations coupled with massive arrests.

  Concurrently, smaller provincial centres like Tarbes in the south west continue to host their own weekly demonstrations, something duplicated in similar centres all over France. And with that is rising, both a hatred of the police, particularly the metropolitan police, and a sense of unity and determination among the Gilets. Naturally most of this escapes the metropolitan elite and the official media, preoccupied as they are with head counts and privates on parade. Yet even in Paris, there is considerable evidence of the movement’s growing support, with people increasingly prepared both to manifest at demonstrations and to express sympathy in media interviews, phone-ins and online.

  This narrows the state’s room for manoeuvre drastically. In short the invisible hand is now visible. Something clear when the government, in a brief and crude attempt, sought to blame the Gilets for the Notre Dame blaze – accusations howled down and swiftly rescinded.

  Slowly, slowly this battle is developing into a life or death struggle for the neo-liberal state and we can, over the next few months, expect them to intensify their violence during demonstrations, inaugurate house arrests, seal of more railways routes and Paris monuments and ultimately intensify various false flag operations aimed at splitting the movement and fermenting inter-communal conflict.

  For the Gilets, this sense they are winning will only increase their determination. If I could make a prediction this will lead ultimately to increased demonstrations, perhaps beyond the self-imposed week-end boundaries, as well as larger, longer blockades of railways and motorways. The French word for demonstration is manifestation and that is a useful word here, because in every sense and every action the Gilets are manifesting their unity, their vision for France and their commitment to that vision.

  The last week has been a good week for those who believe that neo-liberalism is a con trick, incapable of providing most a reasonable life, or indeed frankly of governing an increasingly sophisticated social world and an increasingly savvy citizenry. The simplistic nostrums of neo-liberalism remain incapable of confronting the huge problems facing us as a species – a simple truth which is becoming increasingly obvious.

  Finally, this week, both the Gilets Jaunes and the Extinction Rebellion in London, are revealing that, despite massive surveillance, militarized, violent policing and the state’s propaganda apparatus, contemporary populations are developing new methods and new visions capable of surmounting these obstacles and finally, after this endless decade of stagnation, moving us forward in a positive, inclusive and effective manner.

  

• How AI Systems Could Threaten Democracy

  Authored by Steven Feldstein, via NakedCapitalism.com,

  U.S. technology giant Microsoft has teamed up with a Chinese military university to develop artificial intelligence systems that could potentially enhance government surveillance and censorship capabilities. Two U.S. senators publicly condemned the partnership, but what the National Defense Technology University of China wants from Microsoft isn’t the only concern.

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  As my research shows, the advent of digital repression is profoundly affecting the relationship between citizen and state. New technologies are arming governments with unprecedented capabilities to monitor, track and surveil individual people. Even governments in democracies with strong traditions of rule of law find themselves tempted to abuse these new abilities.

  In states with unaccountable institutions and frequent human rights abuses, AI systems will most likely cause greater damage. China is a prominent example. Its leadership has enthusiastically embraced AI technologies, and has set up the world’s most sophisticated surveillance state in Xinjiang province, tracking citizens’ daily movements and smartphone use.

  Its exploitation of these technologies presents a chilling model for fellow autocrats and poses a direct threat to open democratic societies. Although there’s no evidence that other governments have replicated this level of AI surveillance, Chinese companies are actively exporting the same underlying technologies across the world.

  Increasing Reliance on AI Tools in the US

  Artificial intelligence systems are everywhere in the modern world, helping run smartphones, internet search engines, digital voice assistants and Netflix movie queues. Many people fail to realize how quickly AI is expanding, thanks to ever-increasing amounts of data to be analyzed, improving algorithms and advanced computer chips.

  Any time more information becomes available and analysis gets easier, governments are interested – and not just authoritarian ones. In the U.S., for instance, the 1970s saw revelations that government agencies – such as the FBI, CIA and NSA – had set up expansive domestic surveillance networks to monitor and harass civil rights protesters, political activists and Native American groups. These issues haven’t gone away: Digital technology today has deepened the ability of even more agencies to conduct even more intrusive surveillance.

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  How fairly do algorithms predict where police should be most focused? Arnout de Vries

  For example, U.S. police have eagerly embraced AI technologies. They have begun using software that is meant to predict where crimes will happen to decide where to send officers on patrol. They’re also using facial recognitionand DNA analysis in criminal investigations. But analyses of these systems show the data on which those systems are trainedare often biased, leading to unfair outcomes, such as falsely determining that African Americans are more likely to commit crimes than other groups.

  AI Surveillance Around the World

  In authoritarian countries, AI systems can directly abet domestic control and surveillance, helping internal security forces process massive amounts of information – including social media posts, text messages, emails and phone calls – more quickly and efficiently. The police can identify social trends and specific people who might threaten the regime based on the information uncovered by these systems.

  For instance, the Chinese government has used AI in wide-scale crackdowns in regions that are home to ethnic minorities within China. Surveillance systems in Xinjiang and Tibet have been described as “Orwellian.” These efforts have included mandatory DNA samples, Wi-Fi network monitoring and widespread facial recognition cameras, all connected to integrated data analysis platforms. With the aid of these systems, Chinese authorities have, according to the U.S. State Department, “arbitrarily detained” between 1 and 2 million people.

  My research looks at 90 countries around the world with government types ranging from closed authoritarian to flawed democracies, including Thailand, Turkey, Bangladesh and Kenya. I have found that Chinese companies are exporting AI surveillance technology to at least 54 of these countries. Frequently, this technology is packaged as part of China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative, which is funding an extensive network of roads, railways, energy pipelines and telecommunications networks serving 60% of the world’s population and economies that generate 40% of global GDP.

  For instance, Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE are constructing “smart cities” in Pakistan, the Philippinesand Kenya, featuring extensive built-in surveillance technology. For example, Huawei has outfitted Bonifacio Global City in the Philippines with high-definition internet-connected cameras that provide “24/7 intelligent security surveillance with data analytics to detect crime and help manage traffic.”

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  Bonifacio Global City in the Philippines has a lot of embedded surveillance equipment. alveo land/Wikimedia Commons

  Hikvision, Yitu and SenseTime are supplying state-of-the-art facial recognition cameras for use in places like Singapore – which announced the establishment of a surveillance program with 110,000 cameras mounted on lamp posts around the city-state. Zimbabwe is creating a national image database that can be used for facial recognition.

  However, selling advanced equipment for profit is different than sharing technology with an express geopolitical purpose. These new capabilities may plant the seeds for global surveillance: As governments become increasingly dependent upon Chinese technology to manage their populations and maintain power, they will face greater pressure to align with China’s agenda. But for now it appears that China’s primary motive is to dominate the market for new technologies and make lots of money in the process.

  AI and Disinformation

  In addition to providing surveillance capabilities that are both sweeping and fine-grained, AI can help repressive governments manipulate available information and spread disinformation. These campaigns can be automated or automation-assisted, and deploy hyper-personalized messages directed at – or against – specific people or groups.

  AI also underpins the technology commonly called “deepfake,” in which algorithms create realistic video and audio forgeries. Muddying the waters between truth and fiction may become useful in a tight election, when one candidate could create fake videos showing an opponent doing and saying things that never actually happened.

  An early deepfake video shows some of the dangers of advanced technology.

  In my view, policymakers in democracies should think carefully about the risks of AI systems to their own societies and to people living under authoritarian regimes around the world. A critical question is how many countries will adopt China’s model of digital surveillance. But it’s not just authoritarian countries feeling the pull. And it’s also not just Chinese companies spreading the technology: Many U.S. companies, Microsoft included, but IBM, Cisco and Thermo Fisher too, have provided sophisticated capabilities to nasty governments. The misuse of AI is not limited to autocratic states.

  

• Mansion Crisis: Hamptons Home Sales Tumble To 7 Year Low 

  Zerohedge readers have discovered that luxury real estate markets across the country in the last several years – have fallen into a slump. Our core focus has been Manhattan, Greenwich, and the Hamptons, along with West Coast cities.

  A new report by appraiser Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers & Consultants, confirms that lavish vacation homes in New York’s Hamptons remained under pressure as 1Q19 sales declined to their lowest level in years.

  Demand for the most expensive properties (above $10 million) collapsed to a six-year low between January and March. However, demand picked up for the lower end market. About 59% of all 1Q19 Hamptons sales were from homes under $1 million.

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  Appraisers said the tax overhaul passed in 2017 soften demand by capping deductions for mortgage interest and property levies and made vacation homes more expensive on eastern Long Island’s South Fork.

  “We are in the middle of this transition period post the new tax law, where the high end is struggling,” Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, told Bloomberg in an interview. “What’s actually selling is shifting much lower so there’s more inventory exposed.”

  Across all price levels, sales in the Hamptons have declined five straight quarters. This has led to an overall decline in the median sale price of homes, down 5.5% versus the same period a year ago. About 300 homes changed hands in 1Q19 was the lowest sales transactions for the first quarter in seven years.

  Unparalleled “A” class gated equestrian estate on over 5 manicured acres features superb riding amenities and a gracious, comfortable farmhouse.

  To learn more visit https://t.co/X4EJNF84nM and https://t.co/cU0kx5Mxbz#143TownLane #EquestrianEstate @BHSWorldwide @HamptonClassic pic.twitter.com/MKDnaSxfCR

  — Mark J. Baron (@markjbaronre) July 20, 2018

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  The appraiser said the slump in activity would take nearly seven-and-a-half years to sell all mansions currently listed at the current pace of sales, the longest stretch in appraiser’s records.

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  Ernie Cervi, senior vice president at brokerage Corcoran Group, said home sales should increase in 2Q, now that tax season is complete, mortgage rates have dropped and volatility in financial markets has declined. The added supply is expected to push home prices lower as buyers gain the upper hand.

  “Price adjustment is the trigger,” Cervi said. “That’s what brings people back into the market.”

  The wealth of the Hamptons real-estate market is closely correlated with those of nearby Manhattan, another real estate market that is quickly cooling.

  

• All That's Missing Is A Black Swan…

  Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

  “There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”
  – Ludwig von Mises

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  The chart above only goes back to 1960, but its message is clear, nevertheless. The velocity of money has dropped below that which was necessary to maintain a productive economy in 2009 and has never recovered.

  The velocity of money can be defined as, “the rate at which money circulates or is exchanged in an economy in a given period.” It’s generally measured as a ratio of gross national product (GNP) to a country’s total money supply.

  No money turnover… no economy.

  But, if that’s so – if the chart is correct and the money turnover is by far the lowest since 1970 – why did the economy recover after 2010 and why are we in a bull market? Surely, the quantitative easing programme initiated by the Fed corrected the problem and happy days are here again.

  Well, actually, neither of those commonly-held assumptions is correct. Quantitative easing didn’t pump money back into the failing economy and, more to the point, it wasn’t intended to. Most of the money that was created through quantitative easing never actually hit the streets.

  To back up a bit, in 1999, the Fed, then under Alan Greenspan, convinced the US government, then under President Bill Clinton, to repeal the Glass Steagall Act, an act created in 1933 to assure that banks would never again recklessly create loans to the public that could never be repaid. Mr. Greenspan argued that the Great Depression was long over and there would not be a reoccurrence but that, if the Clinton Administration would repeal Glass Steagall, it would usher in an era of investment of borrowed money that would create the greatest surge in business since World War II.

  And he was correct in his argument. The repeal ushered in a period of reckless loans that accomplished two things – it allowed the Clinton Administration to end on a positive note – one in which the economy appeared to be vibrant. However, it also created a mammoth debt bubble.

  As is always true, the creation of massive debt is like a shot of economic heroin in an economy. The euphoria is very real. Unfortunately, so is the withdrawal. This withdrawal kicked in with the real estate crash of 2007.

  The Fed (which, if you remember, had created the bubble) recommended that, although the bankers had benefitted enormously through the creation of the debt, they were now in trouble. Rather than have them pay for their misdeeds, the Fed Chairman put forward the concept of quantitative easing (QE). Through QE, the government would pump money into the banks to bail them out. Therefore the banks benefitted hugely from the reckless loans, then benefitted hugely again, through the debt-funded QE.

  The pretense was that QE would be used to pay off bad loans, re-energising the economy. And, interestingly, enough money was pumped into the banks through QE1, 2 and 3 to literally write off every mortgage in the country. Had that been done, those cleared of debt would indeed have had the ability to re-invest in the economy.

  But that isn’t what happened. Very little of the money that was created actually hit the street. It was simply gobbled up by the banks.

  A by-product of the crash is that it brought on the Greater Depression. Real income has not increased since 2007, but inflation has. Although the US government claims inflation to be at 1.52%, it’s actually far higher – over 5%.

  Likewise, unemployment is claimed to be at 3.8%, yet the real unemployment rate (as calculated by John Williams’ Shadowstats) is over 21%.

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  By any of these measures, the US is unquestionably in a depression.

  But, hang on, what about the markets? The stock market is booming. Yes, quite so. It has become the norm for companies to buy back their own stocks. Although, this is economically dangerous, it does temporarily inflate the apparent value of the stocks and politicians do point to the stock market boom as proof of their sound fiscal management.

  And, of course, there’s the bond market. It’s at an all-time high.

  But bonds are debt, plain and simple. And a bond is merely a promise to pay the lender back with interest on a future date. The more bonds in the market, the more debt.

  And so, we see a boom in markets that’s a false-reading. It was created entirely through debt and that debt is now in a bubble of historic proportions.

  All of the other indicators (if we use the correct figures, not the ones the government has helpfully ginned up) confirm that the US is decidedly in a depression.

  But, if that’s so, why doesn’t it feel like a depression?

  Well, the answer to that is, once again, the economic heroin. At this point, the regular injections of heroin are massive enough to provide a euphoric high. The only problem is that, when the heroin runs out, the withdrawal will be one for the record books.

  Global debt has reached $100 trillion, up from $13 trillion in 1990. Debt now represents 57% of global financial assets. At $18.4 trillion, the US has the largest treasury debt in the world, close to 40% of the total.

  Oh-oh.

  What goes up must come down. And, if there remains any doubt as to whether, this time around, the Keynesian tooth fairies have some sort of pixie dust that will make the problem go away, we need only have a look at the chart above, which was produced by the Fed itself.

  In the real world of Main Street, the velocity of money has declined dramatically since 2009 and has tanked in 2017, unable to recover.

  Conditions overall could not be worse for a crash more massive than any the US has ever seen in its 243 year history.

  At present, all that’s holding up the house of cards is the mistaken faith that the average citizen has that the false numbers are correct – that his country is bumping along nicely. When he figures out that that was a lie, it’s game over.

  All that’s required to eliminate the notion and to send the economy into a tailspin is a black swan event.

  Will it be the dumping of treasuries back into the US system, as is now on the increase? Will it be the full implementation of CIPS, the Chinese interbank payment system? Will it be the elimination of the dollar as the petrodollar, as is now underway?

  Any one of these and perhaps another dozen other black swans are waiting in the wings. All that’s needed is for one of the swans to walk onto the world stage.

  *  *  *

  Clearly, there are many strange things afoot in the world. Distortions of markets, distortions of culture. It’s wise to wonder what’s going to happen, and to take advantage of growth while also being prepared for crisis. How will you protect yourself in the next crisis? See our PDF guide that will show you exactly how. Click here to download it now.

  

• It's 2019, Guess Who's Back In Iraq? 

  It’s 2019, over 15 years since the US invaded Iraq… so of course the racked with scandal mercenary group Blackwater is back in Iraq. Or rather, Erik Prince’s latest among many incarnations of the infamous private contractor firm is back, now Frontier Services Group (FSG), based in Hong Kong.

  Dubai-based Frontier Logistics Consultancy DMCC, a subsidiary of Prince’s controversial FSG (given its coziness with the Chinese government and gulf monarchies), has been registered as a foreign company with Iraq’s Ministry of Trade, Buzzfeed reported based on new Iraq government documents it obtained. 

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  And where else would the corporate mercenary foot soldiers of empire be based but Basra, located in Iraq’s oil-rich south? Notably it’s also close to the border with Iran, in a Shia heartland which last summer saw mass unrest due to electricity shortages and lack of services, blamed on government corruption and “foreign” presence of oil companies. 

  Blackwater had been previously banned from Iraq after contractors opened fire on and killed unarmed civilians in Baghdad in what became known as the Nisour Square massacre.

  But according to the below document obtained by BuzzFeed, Prince is back, but under a different company name: 

  A Hong Kong-based security and logistics company founded by Erik Prince is working in the south of Iraq, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News https://t.co/eUJ7jB1QJT

  — BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) April 26, 2019

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  The news comes after the controversial Blackwater founder told Al Jazeera a year ago that Iraq was among Middle East locations his company was considering setting up shop.

  Prince has also been in headlines of late after pitching an idea to privatize the wars in Afghanistan and Syria to Trump administration officials, which has reportedly met with little progress. 

  Buzzfeed wrote after uncovering this latest bombshell, sure to result in serious pushback among the Iraqi population:

  Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois and a longtime critic of Prince and Blackwater, said the document was “troubling.”

  “This should sound alarm bells for the Iraqi government, who expelled Blackwater from Iraq for deadly behavior,” she said.

  FSG has not publicly stated it has operations in Iraq. The company’s latest annual report referred to new offices it had opened in the Middle East last year, but did not specify which countries.

  The Nisour Square incident involved Blackwater contractors killing 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians as their humvees sped through a busy Baghdad intersection, which resulted in four of the contractors involved receiving 30 year prison sentences after a series of trials, with one receiving life. 

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  Prince — the brother of billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — has over the past years since selling his mired-in-controversy Blackwater group (now Academi) revived his mercenary empire in China, in a market where Western firms of necessity find themselves working closely with Chinese state authorities.

  He’s reportedly had success in securing security and logistics contracts in Africa and China, and has since at least 2017 lobbied both top US generals and Congressional leaders to consider massive privatization of current Pentagon deployments in the Middle East. 

  

• Ron Paul: Why Is Maria Butina In Prison?

  Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

  Russian gun rights activist and graduate exchange student Maria Butina was sentenced to 18 months in prison last week for “conspiracy to act as a foreign agent without registering.” Her “crime” was to work to make connections among American gun rights activists in hopes of building up her organization, the Right to Bear Arms, when she returned to Russia.

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  She was not employed by the Russian government nor was she a lobbyist on Putin’s behalf. In fact the Putin Administration is hostile to Russian gun rights groups. Nevertheless the US mainstream media and Trump’s Justice Department are treating her as public enemy number one in a case that will no doubt set the dangerous precedent of criminalizing person-to-person diplomacy in the United States.

  The Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) was passed in 1938 under pressure from the FDR Administration partly to silence opposition to the US entry into World War II. While a handful of cases were prosecuted during the war, between 1966 and 2015 the Justice Department only brought seven FARA cases for prosecution.

  Though very few cases have been brought on FARA violations, one of them was against Samir Vincent, who was paid millions of dollars by Saddam Hussein to lobby for sanctions relief without registering. He got off with a fine and “community service.”

  Millions of dollars in unregistered payments from Saddam Hussein gets no jail time, while Butina gets 18 months in prison for privately promoting a cause most Americans support! How is this justice?

  The US Justice Department is not even as tough on illegals who commit capital crimes in the US!

  Unfortunately Maria Butina was in the wrong place at the wrong time. With the rise of the “Russiagate” hysteria, Butina’s case was seen as a useful tool by Democrats to push the idea that President Trump was put into office by the Russians. Plus, many of them are also hostile to our Second Amendment and to the National Rifle Association. So it was a perfect storm for Butina.

  Sadly, conservatives are mostly silent on this miscarriage of justice. They are also caught up in the idea that America can only be great if it goes abroad seeking monsters to destroy.

  Also, a new Cold War is very profitable to the military industrial complex and Butina serves an important propaganda purpose. The media is an all-to-willing participant in this farce.

  Even though Trump has been exonerated by a Mueller investigation that didn’t even view the Butina case as worth investigating, the President has been silent on her persecution. This is similar to his sudden silence on Wikileaks now that Julian Assange may be facing an eternity in a US supermax prison.

  As author James Bamford wrote recently in an excellent New Republic article on the Butina case, the national security agencies are also eager to get another notch in their belts and the Russian gun activist was low-hanging fruit for their ambitions.

  Non-interventionists believe strongly in citizen-to-citizen diplomacy as a way of avoiding war and conflict overseas. Exchange students, international business ventures, tourism, and just communicating with others is such an important way to thwart the plotting of the warmongers who lurk in all governments.

  I am saddened to see that the United States has made such a hostile move toward peaceful foreign citizens seeking friendship with Americans. When citizens are no longer allowed to engage in diplomacy we are left with only the state. And the state loves war.

  

• SEC Bars Hedge Fund Manager Who Lost 88% Of His Clients' Money In Three Days

  The SEC barred a “hedge” fund manager from Connecticut after it discovered that he lost $1.8 million of his client’s assets after participating in “risky investment practices”, which is a polite way of saying losing 88% of their money in about three days.

  Matthew Rossi and Fairfield, Conn.-based SJL Capital defrauded clients by misleading them about the nature and performance of the fund’s investment strategy, according to a cease and desist order from the SEC. Rossi was the founder, managing partner and 80% majority owner of the fund. 

  The SEC’s order said that Rossi told investors his fund would invest in a diversified portfolio of publicly traded equities. He also claimed that the fund had a highly successful proprietary algorithm, called MarketDNA, that had been refined over 20 years and included stop losses to limit downside risk.

  Instead, the SEC alleges that Rossi “engaged in risky, unhedged options trading, which did not comport with the purported MarketDNA strategy and did not include any safety valves or stop loss limits.”

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  The strategy of unhedged options trading seemed to work out fine… at first. In June 2016, Rossi used the fund’s assets to buy a series of put options that wound up returning him 101% that month. The fund had additional gains of 15% in July and reached its peak valuation of more than $1.3 million at the end of the month.

  But the fund’s success ran out in August 2016 when it lost 88% of its value in days due to the same options “strategies”.

  On August 19, Rossi sold short dated Amazon calls that resulted in a loss of over $600,000. Within minutes of closing that position, Rossi bought Amazon call options, in addition to Priceline call options, and lost over $68,000 when he sold the Amazon options on August 22.

  By November 2016, the fund had been completely wiped out.

  Then, instead of making a long, drawn out video explaining the losses like the fine folks at OptionSellers.com did, Rossi hid the extent of the losses from investors by making fake account statements and tax documents that falsely described the fund’s assets and returns generated by the supposedly successful strategy.

  The SEC claims that clients invested nearly $1.8 million with him and when they found out about the losses, Rossi made up a story that they were due to a “rogue trader” who had been making trades on his behalf while he was undergoing knee surgery and couldn’t work. As a result, the SEC has barred Rossi from association with any broker, dealer, investment adviser, municipal securities dealer, municipal advisor, transfer agent, or nationally recognized statistical rating organization.

  

• "Warning Shot Across The Bow:" US Warns China On Aggressive Acts By Maritime Militia

  Earlier this month, we reported that 275 Chinese fishing militia and Coast Guard vessels surrounded the island of Thitu in the South China Sea, which is currently being occupied by the Philippines. The US recently delivered a stern message to Beijing about its aggression in the highly disputed body of water, announcing that Chinese fishing militia and Coast Guard ships would be treated as military vessels.

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  Admiral John Richardson, head of the US Navy, described how he told, vice-admiral Shen Jinlon of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), back in January, that the Trump administration would label the Coast Guard and the maritime militia as military vessels.

  “I made it very clear that the US navy will not be coerced and will continue to conduct routine and lawful operations around the world, in order to protect the rights, freedoms and lawful uses of sea and airspace guaranteed to all,” Admiral Richardson told the Financial Times.

  China’s Coast Guard has more than doubled its feet to over 130 ships in the last decade, making it the largest coast guard in the world. Beijing trains and provides financial subsidies to the maritime militia, an armed reserve force of civilians and fishing boats, has significantly increased in size since 2015.

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  In its last annual report on the PLAN, the Pentagon said the fleet “plays a major role in coercive activities to achieve China’s political goals without fighting.”

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  In 2H17 through 1H18, the maritime militia sailed through the East China Sea with commercial grade laser pointers — striking low-flying American warplanes with damaging beams of light.

  China has more frequently deployed the maritime militia in the East and South China sea because the US Navy is likely not to respond to aggression from small fishing boats. But that seems to be coming to an end, as the latest warning from Admiral Richardson could provoke a hot conflict.

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  James Stavridis, a retired US admiral, said Admiral Richardson’s warning is the latest move in the Pentagon to get tough on China.

  “It is a warning shot across the bow of China, in effect saying we will not tolerate ‘grey zone’ or ‘hybrid’ operations at sea,” said Stavridis. “A combatant is a combatant is the message, and the CNO (Chief of Naval Operations) is in the right place to warn China early and often.”

  Bonnie Glaser, a China specialist at CSIS, a Washington-based think-tank, said: “By injecting greater uncertainty about how the US will respond to China’s grey-zone coercion, the US hopes to deter Chinese destabilizing maritime behavior, including its reliance on coast guard and maritime militia vessels to intimidate its smaller neighbors.”

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  The warning from Admiral Richardson also affects the Chinese Coast Guard, said Dennis Wilder, a former head of China analysis at the CIA, adding that President Xi Jinping took control of the coast guard in 2018.

  “By having both the navy and the coast guard under the Central Military Commission, it improves in wartime the co-ordination and control of maritime forces,” he said. “As China’s coast guard is heavily armed, it is a logical assumption that it would be incorporated into military plans and operations.”

  The US Navy has been conducting Freedom of Navigation Operations through the South China Sea, near China’s militarized islands that are considered highly contested areas. Some have warned that labeling the militia and Coast Guard vessels as military vessels would be particularly challenging.

  “If the US decides to interpret maritime militia vessels as military, that will lead to increased risk,” said William Choong of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “With US destroyers in the South China Sea and the continuing Chinese maritime militia operations there, things could go bad very quickly.”

  Several weeks ago, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said he hopes “non-regional forces don’t stir up troubles in the South China Sea,” after the US Navy amphibious assault ship USS Wasp, carried an unusually large number of Lockheed Martin F-35s, sailed through the South China Sea near the Scarborough Shoal.

  China has overlapping economic claims in the South China Sea with Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Brunei. While territory disputes remain unsolved, the region remains a flashpoint for the next conflict between the US and China.

  

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• Only A Quarter Of Brits Know Who The Irish PM Is

  With the Irish border the main sticking point in Brexit negotiations, Statista’s Niall McCarthy points out that it may come a surprise to hear that only a quarter of British people actually know who the Irish taoiseach or prime minister is.

  YouGov tracks awareness levels of various international politicians among the British public (excluding Northern Ireland) and only 26 percent have heard of Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  That’s still a higher share than India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (23 percent) or Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison (15 percent).

  

• Annihilation Of Christian Life And People: Where Is The Outrage In The West?

  Authored by Giulio Meotti via The Gatestone Institute,

  • Islamic extremists have seen that the West has not mobilized to prevent them from repressing Christians, as if unconsciously there were a strange convergence between our silence and the ethnic cleansing project of the Islamic State, aimed at erasing Christians.

  • “Religious liberty, the core value of western civilisation, is being destroyed across large parts of the world. Yet the West, myopically denying this religious war, is averting its gaze…” — Melanie Phillips, British journalist, The Times, November 17, 2014.

  • The Duke of Cambridge, Prince William, just visited the Muslim survivors of the attack on the mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Why does the same compassion not spur the British royal family to stop in Sri Lanka, their former colony, to meet the Christian survivors, before going back to England?

  • The appeal of Asia Bibi’s daughters to help her mother met a deaf West. The UK refused to offer asylum to this persecuted Pakistani Christian family.

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  Sri Lanka after the jihadist massacre of Christians is not just a terrible succession of crying mothers and little coffins. Unfortunately, it also tells us a lot about the discouraging state of the West. Pictured: The funeral of one of the victims of the April 21 Easter Sunday attack in Sri Lanka. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

  “Where is the solidarity for the Sri Lanka’s Christians?” asked the British scholar Rakib Ehsan, a Muslim.

  “The differences in tone and nature between the condemnations of the Christchurch and Sri Lanka terrorist attacks are striking. After Christchurch, there was no hesitation about stating the religious backgrounds of the victims and directing emotion and affection towards Muslim communities. Politicians took no issue with categorising the events in Christchurch as terrorism.

  “In contrast, the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘Christianity’, along with their associated terms, have so far failed to feature in much of the reaction to the attacks in Sri Lanka.

  “What is evident is not only a clear reluctance to specify the religious background of Christians who were killed in Sri Lanka, but also an absence of heartfelt solidarity with Christian communities across the world, which continue to suffer grave forms of persecution on the grounds of their faith.”

  Rakib Ehsan asked the right question. But it might be rewritten as: Where is the Western solidarity for the Sri Lanka’s murdered Christians?

  This is a drama in three acts. The first act consists of the Christians and other non-Muslim indigenous peoples being violated and murdered. The second act consists of Muslim extremists who create this genocide. And the third act consists of the indifferent West, which looks everywhere else.

  The number of murdered victims in the April 21 Easter Sunday jihadist attacks in Sri Lanka is too terrible even to think about: 253 dead. Among the victims, 45 children were murdered. Their small faces and stories have begun to emerge. The Islamic terrorists knew there were many children in the three churches, and they deliberately targeted them with their bombs. Footage shows one of the bombers patting a young child on the head before he enters the St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, where “everyone has lost someone“.

  The Fernando family had taken a photograph at the baptism of their third child, Seth. In Negombo they were all buried together. Father, mother and three children aged 6, 4, and 11 months. According to the New York Times:

  “Fabiola Fernando, 6, was an elementary school student. In a photo posted to her mother’s Facebook page, she showed off a gold medal, a small smile on her face. Leona Fernando, 4, the middle child in her family, was learning to read and was holding a copy of “Sleeping Beauty” in the picture. Seth Fernando, 11 months, was the newest addition to the Fernando family. He was buried alongside his parents and two sisters.”

  The silence of the Western intellectual world and the media is particularly deafening. The new humanitarian conscience seems to see only two groups: those who have the right to the compassion and protection of the international community, and those, such as Christians, unworthy of help or solidarity.

  The deliberate murder of an 8-month-old baby, Matthew, in a Sri Lankan church apparently did not upset or chill the West, did not go viral on social media, did not to become a hashtag, did not to push the Europeans to crowd into their public squares, did not press the Islamic world to examine its conscience, did not to induce Western politicians and opinion-makers seriously to reflect on who killed that child, or on those who foment and finance the Islamist anti-Christian hatred.

  Sudesh Kolonne was waiting outside St. Sebastian’s Church when he heard the blast. He then ran inside and searched for his wife and daughter. It took him a half hour to find their bodies.

  The attacks also killed three children of a Danish billionaire. Another woman losther daughter, son, husband, sister-in-law and two nieces. A British father had to make a choice over which of his two children to save. Another British family was destroyed. To add horror to horror, the pregnant wife of one of the terrorists, when police raided her home, detonated a suicide vest, killing her own children.

  The Duke of Cambridge, Prince William, just visited the Muslim survivors of the attack on the mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, including children recovering in the hospitals. It was a gesture of humanity and compassion. Why does the same compassion not spur the British royal family to stop in Sri Lanka, their former colony, to meet the Christian survivors, before going back to England? Entire Christian families were decimated in the attack.

  Where is the outrage in the West for the annihilation of Christian life and people? It feels as if there is no indignation, only silence, interrupted by bombs and “Allahu Akbar”. The history books of the future will not condone this Western betrayal. If the West had taken seriously the persecutions of Christians, now the bell would not toll for the death of the Christian presence — not only in historic lands of Christianity, but also for the West. Islamic extremists have seen that the West has not mobilized to prevent them from repressing Christians, as if unconsciously there were a strange convergence between our silence and the ethnic cleansing project of the Islamic State, aimed at erasing Christians.

  The British author Melanie Phillips has called this persecution of Christians “our guilty secret.”

  “Religious liberty, the core value of western civilisation, is being destroyed across large parts of the world. Yet the West, myopically denying this religious war, is averting its gaze from the destruction of its foundational creed in the Middle East and the attempt to eradicate it elsewhere. It is therefore no surprise that, faced with jihadist barbarities abroad and cultural inroads at home, the free world is proving so ineffectual”.

  The jihadist attack in Sri Lanka was not only “the deadliest attack on Christians in South Asia in recent memory.” It was also the largest massacre of Christian children. But no newspaper has launched a campaign to raise awareness of European public opinion, no pro-Christian solidarity movement has arisen, no Western leader appears to have visited a church in solidarity, no Western church leaders had the courage to point out the culprits by calling them by name, no Western mayors hung photographs of the 45 children torn to pieces, no public square was filled in thousands saying “Je suis chrétien”.

  A few years ago, at the height of the migrant crisis in Europe, a photograph conquered public opinion in the West. It was the famous picture of the three-year-old Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, who drowned off the coast of Bodrum, Turkey. That little migrant moved the West. His image went viral. The New York Times called it “Aylan Kurdi’s Europe“.

  “For historical reasons, Angela Merkel feared images of armed German police confronting civilians on our borders,” wrote Robin Alexander, Die Welt’s leading journalist, in his book, Die Getriebenen (“The Driven Ones”). If photographs of migrant children spurred Europe’s leaders to open their borders, the photographs of murdered Christian children — such as the 45 in Sri Lanka — apparently left them indifferent.

  The appeal of Asia Bibi’s daughters to help her mother met a deaf West. The UK refused to offer asylum to this Pakistani Christian family and take persecuted Christians.

  “It is with indifference that we witness a catastrophe of civilization with no precedent”, wrote the French scholar historian Jean-François Colosimo, commenting on the destruction of Eastern Christianity. No religion, no community, is today more persecuted than Christians. Why, then, this silence by the West? Have we become so foreign to ourselves, to our roots and to our history, that we can contemplate this outbreak of jihadi violence without blinking an eye? Or are we so short-sighted that we hoped to buy “peace” with the Muslim extremists at the cost of abandoning those Christians? The same jihadi ideology that murdered Christian children in Sri Lanka, targeted European children in Nice, Manchester and Barcelona.

  Sri Lanka after the massacre is not just a terrible succession of crying mothers and little coffins. Unfortunately, it also tells us a lot about the discouraging state of the West.

  

• Mike Adams: Every Liberal City In America Is Headed Toward Venezuela

  Authored by Mike Adams via NatrualNews.com,

  Liberal cities across America are collapsing into Third World status. It’s not just the fact that San Francisco’s streets are now littered with drug needles and human feces, either. Seattle is also collapsing into rampant homelessness and drug addiction, creating an entire class of impoverished, homeless residents who are breeding grounds for HIV and other infectious diseases.

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  Yet Seattle’s liberal city leaders — like all “progressives” — are unwilling to take any action to resolve the problems in the first place. Instead, they enact new policies that make the problems worse while calling it “progress.”

  Local reporter Eric Johnson recently released a documentary called Seattle is Dying which dared to document the city’s collapse into Third World status. (See video below.) But instead of working to resolve the root of the problem (i.e. brain dead liberal economic policies that always lead to destitution and collapse), the city’s elite have launched a P.R. campaign to brainwash local citizens with engineered happy messages that are dutifully broadcast by local news networks.

  As Seattle’s City Journal reports:

  Earlier this month, leaked documents revealed that a group of prominent nonprofits—the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Campion Advocacy Fund, the Raikes Foundation, and the Ballmer Group—hired a PR firm, Pyramid Communications, to conduct polling, create messaging, and disseminate the resulting content through a network of silent partners in academia, the press, government, and the nonprofit sector. The campaign, #SeattleForAll, is a case study in what writer James Lindsay calls “idea laundering”—creating misinformation and legitimizing it as objective truth through repetition in sympathetic media.

  This propaganda campaign, of course, is exactly what the vaccine industry does on a daily basis all across America. Monsanto and the GMO industry has been pursuing the same dishonest tactics for years. First, they fabricate industry lies and pay off doctors and health experts to sign their names to industry-funded junk science. Then they issue propaganda directives to the corporate-run media which dutifully broadcasts all their propaganda. From there, the tech giants shadowban and de-platform anyone who opposes the “official narrative.”

  So now, Seattle’s wealthy elite are trying to brainwash the population into rejecting the evidence right in front of their own eyes. Seattle is rapidly turning into a s##thole liberal city, because liberals destroy everything they control.

  See the “Seattle is Dying” mini documentary here:

  As Charles Hugh Smith writes in his article, “America’s Forced Financial Flight: Fleeing Unaffordable and Dysfunctional Cities“:

  Although it’s verboten to mention this in the we’re-so-fabulous local media, many of these high-cost urban regions are hopelessly dysfunctional. Taxpayers have ponied up billions of dollars in new taxes, fees and bond measures, and yet none of the problems that make daily life miserable ever get better.

  The forced flight from unaffordable and dysfunctional urban regions is as yet a trickle, but watch what happens when a recession causes widespread layoffs in high-wage sectors and suddenly the hipster bistro that was always jammed is empty, and then shuttered. To replaced the taxes lost to layoffs and closed businesses, the political class will have no choice but to launch a frenzy of higher taxes, fees and surcharges on those left behind.

  Every liberal city headed toward a Venezuela-style collapse

  This story is about much more than just Seattle. What every American needs to understand is that liberals are right now in the process of economically gutting every major U.S. city that’s under their control.

  Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Houston, Miami, Denver, Portland and other liberal cities are all headed toward total economic and humanitarian disaster. Leftist policies always breed homelessness, drug addiction, disease and starvation. In cities like Seattle, the government even pays for needles and drugs to continue supporting the substance abuse habits of local citizens. If liberals regain the White House in the future, they will do the same thing to America that they’re right now doing to Seattle.

  Instead of solving problems, liberals would much rather portray those who suffer from the problems as “victims” of oppression. Yet it’s the liberal / Democrat policies that are creating these nightmare conditions to begin with, driving people out of jobs with mandatory minimum wage hikes, for example, that also cause business owners to flee the cities and states run by liberals.

  Remember: Left-wing societies are characterized by authoritarian, wealthy elitists who rule over the impoverished masses while destroying the middle class. That’s exactly what’s happening across the West Coast liberal cities today.

  Listen to my recent podcast which explains more about where this is all headed:

  And get out of the liberal cities while you still can. Sooner or later, they are going to start confiscating pensions and private property to fund their insane spending sprees in a desperate effort to keep buying votes from the very same people they have trapped in a cycle of poverty and hopelessness.

  There will come a day when you can no longer sell your home in Chicago, for example, because the government’s confiscatory taxes on all real estate sales will make it nearly pointless to engage in real estate transactions at all.

  It’s all going to hit the fan in the coming years, and liberal cities will collapse much like Venezuela. Get out while you can still sell your property for something close to its actual value. Buy a place in the country and practice self-reliance.

  

• Goldman Sparks Erdogan's Fury, Predicts Lira Will Crash To All Time Low In 12 Months

  One month ago, on March 22, when the Turkish lira suddenly cracked, and suffered what was then its biggest one-day drop since last summer’s crisis as public attention turned to the sudden plunge in the nation’s reserves and the bank’s unexpected 150bps equivalent tightening in policy, JPMorgan FX strategists poured gasoline on the fire when – as the lira was sliding – they published a note recommending a 5.90 target on the USDTRY.

  As JPM analysts Anezka Christovova and Saad Siddiqui wrote then, recommending a lira short, Turkish authorities would likely “attach less significance to lira stability and reduce FX reserve support” for the currency following March 31 elections, resulting in further lira weakness, adding that the pace at which Turkey’s burning net foreign reserves is “unsustainable” and therefore “FX reserve support will abate post local elections on March 31, which could lead to USDTRY trading substantially higher.”

  Predictably, it also prompted Erdogan’s anger, with Turkey’s banking and capital markets regulators opening separate investigations into JPMorgan Chase the bank’s recommendation to short the lira.

  Desperate to create a scapegoat for the sudden plunge in the currency, which as it turned out had since last summer been artificially propped up by local banks (while the central bank pretended not to intervene and thus misrepresented the true level of its reserves), Turkey delighted at the opportunity to blame the plunge in the lira, which is only just now restarting, on JPMorgan. As a result, the banking regulator BRSA said the JPMorgan analysts’ note had “misguiding and manipulative” content that resulted in volatility in markets and hurt the reputation of Turkish banks, according to state news agency Anadolu. The Capital Markets Board began its own investigation on similar grounds, according to a statement on its website.

  In the month since then, the lira plunge has only accelerated, and whether the result of JPM’s short reco or the fact that the central bank was misrepresenting its reserves by roughly 100%, the lira has since plunged well below JPM’s 5.90 target, hitting 5.95 against the dollar on Friday; and so the fury at JPMorgan was promptly forgotten.

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  But now, a new bank has decided to take JPMorgan’s spot and provoke Erdogan’s ire, with a fresh lira short recommendation, that sees the Turkish lira crashing to its lowest level on record within 12 months.

  In a note published late on Friday by Goldman Sachs, the bank’s FX strategist Zach Pandl has assured himself immediate detention, or worse, should he ever step foot on Turkish soil, by predicting that the Turkish central bank’s move away from boosting confidence in the lira is likely to send the currency sliding to levels last seen during the mid-2018 crisis, and worse.

  According to Goldman, the unexpected removal last week by the central bank of its pledge for additional tightening if needed “opened the door” to both interest-rate cuts and further currency depreciation.

  “Rates are still not high enough to restore confidence in the lira,” as indicated by continuing “dollarization”, or the increasing share of foreign-exchange deposits in the banking system, Goldman economists Murat Unur and Clemens Grafe wrote in separate note April 25 according to Bloomberg. They also wrote that the central bank will “need to take action to stabilize the lira,” adding that “savers require higher risk premia to be willing to hold a higher share of their deposits in TRY.”

  As a result, Goldman projects TRY to fall to 6.25 in three months, 6.5 in six months, and crash to an all time low of 7 within 12 months, marking a 15% slide in coming year. On Sunday night, Lira was trading at 5.9500.

  The full Goldman note is below:

  TRY: TCMB opens the door to a cut (and more currency depreciation). On Thursday the TCMB kept its policy rate unchanged at 24%, but removed its tightening bias which stated, “if needed, further tightening would be delivered”. By removing this bias, the central bank opened the door to not only a rate cut at its next meeting on June 12 but also further currency depreciation. The sharp hike in policy rates last year was a necessary condition to stabilize the Lira; and while the policy rate is high enough to achieve a balanced current account, a renewed series of cuts will not help with anchoring inflation expectations or stemming the degree of ongoing dollarization in the economy. Our economists have raised their year-end inflation forecasts to +14% yoy by year-end, taking into account the depreciation of the Lira in recent weeks, and we are rolling our forecasts to show even further depreciation (USD/TRY to 6.25, 6.50 and 7.00 in 3, 6 and 12 months).

  We expect Turkey will launch a probe into Goldman’s tentacular ways within 24 hours.

  

• Mexican Or Mexican't? Who Works The Most Hours Every Year?

  While most Americans know May 1st as May Day, a holiday that once was celebrated with mayday poles and flowers, most people across the world know the day as Labor Day.

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  The story of how May 1st became Labor Day actually begins in the U.S. in 1886. As Statista’s Sarah Feldman notes, workers across the U.S. coordinated a multi-day protest starting on May 1st in multiple cities to agitate for an eight-hour workday. On the second day of protests, violence between police and peaceful protestors broke out in Chicago at an event that became known as the Haymarket affair. By 1889, the International Socialist Conference declared May 1st an international holiday for labor now known as International Workers’ Day.

  That held true in the U.S. too, until 1958 when President Eisenhower, reacting to the anti-communist tensions of the early Cold War, signed a resolution naming May 1st “Loyalty Day” to avoid association with the universalist, workers first-language that the day was known for. Loyalty Day is not widely celebrated or commemorated in the United States, while Labor Day in the U.S. occurs during the first weekend of September.

  Much like attitudes towards labor have changed over time and place, the current culture around working hours change based on where in the world a worker is employed.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  According to the OECD in Mexico, the average worker works the most hours a year, putting in over 2,200 hours of labor. South Korea comes in second with slightly over 2,000 hours of work per year. The United States is just 34 hours above the OECD average, while the average German worker enjoys around 1,356 average annual hours of work, 390 hours below the OECD average.

  

• Spanish Election Ends With Hung Parliament, Forming New Government "Could Prove Challenging"

  Spain’s ruling socialist party led by prime minister Pedro Sanchez is set to regain control with his left-leaning allies close to a majority following Sunday’s vote for Spain’s Congress of Deputies, although based on most all of the votes counted, he would need a handful of votes from Catalan separatists, which may prove to be problematic.

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  According to Goldman Sachs, based on a projections of votes counted by 11:45 pm BST (roughly 99.8% of the sections where votes have been collected for Congress and about 89% for the Senate) point to a hung Parliament, in line with indications from opinion and exit polls. In other words, as expected no party has won enough votes to form a government on its own. The Socialist Party (PSOE) is projected to be the party with the highest share of seats in Parliament. And while Goldman expects that it will take time for a new government to be put in place, a center-left coalition led by PSOE is likely to emerge as a government, potentially with the support of a moderate group of Basque separatists.

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  As Bloomberg adds, the ruling Socialists are on track to win 123 seats, up from 85 in 2016. Its left-wing ally Podemos platform has another 42 seats while the Basque Nationalists, another group close to Sanchez, has six. That would give Sanchez 171 seats, just shy of the 176 he would need for a majority. The moderate Catalan separatist group Esquerra Republicana has another 15 seats and has signaled its willing to help. This could give the 47-year-old premier a shot at forming Spain’s first stable government in almost four years and enable him to chart a way forward for the country after years of economic crisis and political turmoil.

  It will mean a government in Madrid that seeks conciliation rather than confrontation with the separatists controlling Catalonia and will make him the standard bearer for social democracy in Europe

  Notably, a second Sanchez government would reverse the trend of a collapse in voter support for Europe’s other center-left parties. He achieved this by boosting the minimum wage and pension payments while remaining committed to spending within the fiscal limits set by the European Union. While Sanchez had already served 10 months as the head of a minority government, he was forced to call a snap election when he failed to pass his budget.

  Also of note: a new nationalist party has emerged “to motivate supporters, who have historically been less reliable than voters on the right” according to Bloomberg. Vox is set to win seats in parliament for the first time, but its 24 seats suggest it’s set to fall short of expectations and the huge buzz around their sudden emergence on the political scene. Vox’s parliamentary presence will mean Spain is no longer exempt from the right-wing populism that’s swept across Europe and the U.S. But unlike Italy and some other European nations, Spain remains a particularly enthusiastic member of the European Union. Not even Vox is suggesting pulling out.

  The traditional conservative group, the People’s Party, lost about half its seats and will have 67 deputies in the new parliament.

  Vote Highlights via Goldman:

  On 28 April, all 350 seats in the Spanish Congress of Deputies were up for election, as well as 208 of the 266 seats in the Spanish Senate. According to projections based on votes counted by 11.45 pm BST, the allocation of seats in Congress is as follows:

  • Socialist Party (PSOE) – centre-left: 123 seats (28.7% of votes)
  • People’s Party (PP) – centre-right: 66 seats (16.7% of votes)
  • Ciudadanos party – liberal: 57 seats (15.8% of votes)
  • Unidos Podemos – left-leaning: 42 seats (14.3% of votes)
  • Vox – right-leaning: 24 seats (10.3% of votes)
  • Small regional parties: 38 seats (14.2% of votes).

  1. The general election has delivered a hung Congress, with no party winning an absolute majority of seats. About 89% of votes have been counted for the Senate, and projections show that PSOE has a majority of seats (122 seats out of 208). A coalition government is likely to emerge but only after lengthy negotiations among political parties, which will likely start only after the regional and European elections on May 26. Forming a government could prove challenging given how fragmented Congress is.

  2. A centre-left coalition of PSOE, Unidos Podemos and regional nationalist parties from the Basque Country, Valencia, the Canary Islands and Catalonia (including the separatist Catalan Republican Left, ERC and Catalan European Democratic Party, PdeCAT), would have the strongest majority in Congress, controlling 199 seats, of which 123 seats would be held by PSOE, 42 by Unidos Podemos and 34 by regional parties (of which 10 are from regional non-separatist parties, and 24 from separatist parties). But, it could prove challenging to form such a government, since regional nationalist parties, which did not vote in favour of the government budget in March causing the government’s collapse, would play a critical role in the coalition.

  3. Two other possible coalitions would not have the majority of seats in Congress (176) needed to form a majority government. A centre-left coalition of PSOE and Unidos Podemos would have 165 seats and a centre-right coalition government formed by PP, Ciudadanos and Vox would have 147 seats. Finally, the centre-left coalition of PSOE and Ciudadanos would have an absolute majority of seats in Congress (180 seats), but, so far, Ciudadanos has denied the potential for such a coalition because of differences with PSOE over how to confront the separatist movement in Catalonia.

  4. Given the fragmentation in Congress, the possibility of a minority government can not be excluded, or that a government cannot be formed as happened in 2015. Also, it could be possible that any coalition government that may eventually emerge will not remain in power for the entire term and that new elections will be necessary at some point in the future, before the end of the legislature.

  5. Political and policy uncertainty will be of little consequence for the 2019 economic outlook, but the type of government that emerges from the general election could matter for Spain’s medium-term outlook.

  

• Tit For Tat? Why Did Mueller Let Trump Off the Hook?

  Authored by Mike Whitney via The Unz Review,

  Why did Robert Mueller end the Russia investigation when he did? He could have let it drag it out for another year or so and severely hurt Trump’s chances for reelection. But he didn’t do that. Why?

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  Of course, we’re assuming that the investigation was never intended to uncover the truth. If it was, then Mueller would have interviewed Julian Assange, Craig Murray and retired members of the Intelligence Community (Ray McGovern, Bill Binney) who have shown that the Podesta emails were leaked by an insider (on a thumbdrive) not hacked by foreign agents. Mueller would have also seized the servers at DNC headquarters and done the necessary forensic investigation, which he never did. He also would have indicted senior-level agents at the FBI and DOJ who improperly obtained FISA warrants by withholding critical information from the FISA court. He didn’t do that either. Mueller did none of these things which simply proves that his final report was what many people had expected from the very beginning; a purely political document that twists the truth to achieve Mueller’s particular objectives. But to understand what those objectives are, we need to determine what the real goals of the investigation were. So, here they are:

  1. To help sabotage Trump’s political agenda

  2. To create a cloud of illegitimacy over Trump’s election

  3. And to prevent Trump from implementing his plan to normalize relations with Russia.

  These were the real objectives of the investigation, to create a forth branch of government (Special Counsel) that had the power to keep Trump permanently on the defensive while the media made him out to be either an unwitting accomplice in Russian espionage or, even worse, a traitor. The aim was to reign him in and keep the pressure on until a case could be made for his impeachment. Mueller played a key role in this travesty. His assignment was undermine Trump’s moral authority by brandishing the cudgel of criminal indictment over his head. This is how a D.O.J. appointee, who had never held public office in his life, became the most powerful man in Washington.

  My question is simply this: Why did Mueller give up all that power when he did?

  I think I can answer that, but first, we need a little more background. Check out this quote from candidate Trump in 2016:

  “We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past…We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments…. Our goal is stability not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country [the United States]… We will partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism …In our dealings with other countries, we will seek shared interests wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding, and good will.”

  Imagine how terrified the foreign policy establishment must have been when they heard Trump utter these words. No more regime change wars? Are you kidding me? That’s what we do: Regime-Change-Is-Us., and now this upstart, New York real estate tycoon is promising to do a complete 180 and move in another direction altogether. No more destabilizing coups, no more bloody military interventions, instead, we’re going to work collaboratively with countries like Russia and China to see if we can settle regional disputes and fight terrorism together? Really?

  At the same time Trump was promising this new era of “peace, understanding, and good will,” Hillary Clinton was issuing her war whoop at every opportunity. Here’s candidate Hillary trying to drum up support for taking on the Russians in Syria:

  “The situation in Syria is catastrophic. And every day that goes by, we see the results of the Assad regime in partnership with the Iranians on the ground, and the Russians in the air…When I was Secretary of State, I advocated and I advocate today a no-fly zone and safe zones.”

  Interesting, isn’t it? Here’s Hillary, the “liberal” Democrat, pushing for a no-fly zone in Syria even though the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, stated clearly that “Right now… for us to control all of the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war against Syria and Russia.” In other words, if Hillary had been elected, she was all ready to flip the switch and start WW3 ASAP. Is it any wonder why the establishment loved her?

  “We have to work more closely with our partners and allies on the ground,” boomed Hillary, meaning that she fully supported the continued use of jihadist proxies in the fight against Assad. “I do think the use of special forces, the use of enablers and trainers in Iraq, which has had some positive effects, are very much in our interests, and so I do support what is happening.”

  War, war and more war, that’s the Hillary Doctrine in a nutshell.

  It was Hillary’s relentless hawkishness that pushed leftists into the Trump camp, not that they ever believed that Trump was anything more than what he appeared to be, an unprincipled narcissist with an insatiable lust for power. But they did hope that his dovish comments would steer the country away from nuclear annihilation. That was the hope at least, but then everything changed. And after it changed, Mueller released his report saying: “Trump is not guilty after all!”

  So, what changed?

  Trump changed.

  Think about it: In mid December 2018, Trump announced the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Syria within 30 days. But instead of withdrawal, the US has been sending hundreds of trucks with weapons to the front lines. The US has also increased its troop levels on the ground, the YPG (Kurdish militia, US proxies) are digging in on the Syria-Turkish border, and the US hasn’t lifted a finger to implement its agreements with NATO-ally Turkey under the Manbij Roadmap. The US is not withdrawing from Syria. Washington is beefing up its defenses and settling in for the long-haul. But, why? Why did Trump change his mind and do a complete about-face?

  The same thing happened in Korea. For a while it looked like Trump was serious about cutting a deal with Kim Jong un. But then, sometime after the first summit, he began to backpeddle. He never honored any of his commitments under the Panmunjom Declaration and he never reciprocated for Kim’s cessation of all nuclear weapons and ballistic missile testing. Trump has made no effort to “build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula” or to strengthen trust between the two leaders. Then, at the Hanoi Summit, Trump blindsided Kim by making demands that had never even been previously discussed. Kim was told that the North must destroy all of its chemical and biological weapons as well as its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs before the US will take reciprocal steps. In other words, Trump demanded that Kim completely and irreversibly disarm with the feint hope that the US would eventually lift sanctions.

  Trump made these outrageous demands knowing that they would never be accepted. Which was the point, because the foreign policy establishment doesn’t want a deal. They want regime change, they’ve made that perfectly clear. But wasn’t Trump supposed to change all that? Wasn’t Trump going to pursue “a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past”?

  Yes, that was Trump’s campaign promise. So, what happened?

  There are other signs of capitulation too; like providing lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military, or nixing the short-range nuclear missile ban, or joining the Saudi’s genocidal war on Yemen, or threatening to topple the government of Venezuela, or stirring up trouble in the South China Sea. At every turn, Trump has backtracked on his promise to break with tradition and “stop toppling regimes and overthrowing governments.” …’ At every turn, Trump has joined the ranks of the warhawks he once criticized.

  Trump is now marching in lockstep with the foreign policy establishment. In Libya, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Iran, in Lebanon, he is faithfully implementing the neocon agenda. Trump “the peacemaker” is no where to be found, while Trump the ‘madman with a knife’ is on the loose.

  Is that why Mueller let Trump off the hook? Was there a quid pro quo: “You follow our foreign policy directives and we’ll make Mueller disappear?

  It sure looks like it.

  

• Kids' Extracurricular Activities Are Burying Parents Under A Mountain Of Debt

  The extracurricular activities that used to just be “good old-fashioned fun” are now mandatory pieces to a college resume for kids. And the cost of these activities is pushing parents deep into debt and compromising them financially, according to MarketWatch. 8 in 10 parents in a new survey said that they’re hoping that signing kids up for extracurricular activities could help them bring in extra income someday. 66% of these parents have gone into debt to pay for things like soccer, ballet, dancing, and piano lessons.

  CompareCards.com surveyed more than 700 parents with young children who participate in extracurricular activities. The more the parents spent, the more they believed that these activities would literally “pay off” in the long run. 90% of parents who dropped at least $4,000 a year believed their kid would earn money from that activity in the future, compared to 75% of parents who spent less than $1,000 who said the same.

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  Matt Schulz, chief industry analyst at CompareCards, said:

   “And what the survey showed is, it’s not just sports parents who have these big dreams and big hopes for their sons and daughters; it’s music parents, it’s cheerleading parents, it’s debate team parents.” 

  The most popular activities included sports, reported by 30% of parents, music (16%), dance (15%), gymnastics (12%), cheerleading (9%), martial arts (8%), beauty pageants (3%) and debate teams (3%). 46% of parents said they spent more than $1000 annually and 27% said they’re spending more than $2000 quarterly.

  This survey supports a University of Michigan poll that found 55% of parents said that school sponsored sports teams and extracurricular activities helped boost their child’s college application. Three times as many low income parents as high income said that the benefits of these activities are not worth the cost, indicating that the survey was skewed towards affluent parents.

  62% of parents revealed they’ve actually gone into debt for their children’s activities and 33% of them are still paying off related debt. Almost 1 in 10 parents of those in debt owe more than $5000 and 27% owe more than $3000 in debt.

  “They do hope that perhaps those efforts in terms of time and money may be rewarded with maybe a scholarship, or maybe a professional career,” Schulz continued. Families can wind up spending more than $200,000 in total on private school tuition, SAT tutors, living in a certain school district and these extracurricular activities to help groom their kids for getting into a good college.

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  Athletics alone can sometimes cost $100-$499 a month and sports play a big role because recruited athletes have been shown to receive the largest admissions advantages – as the recent college admission scandal just showed us. Music lessons are expensive at $40-$60 per hour, language lessons cost $30-$45 per hour and art lessons cost $30-$60 per hour.

  Vered DeLeeuw says that she and her husband have spent about $20,000 on extracurricular activities for their daughters. They included dance, gymnastics, swimming and Hebrew lessons.

  DeLeeuw  said: “We live in an extremely competitive world, and it’s also a world where many parents feel that their kids are their most important investment and their proudest achievement. I will do a lot to increase their chances of success. And extracurricular activities are part of that — of enriching them, giving them more tools, helping them develop into the best people they can possibly be. Developing skills and talents outside of school is important. And in the case of the Hebrew School, for example, it’s also a way to preserve tradition, language and cultural identity.”

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  They recognize that spending over $20,000 was “money that did not end up in our nest egg”, however.

  Gone are the days when kids could just sit around, watch a little TV and then go outside to play with their friends. Veronica Hanson enrolled her daughters, ages 5 and 7, into activities when they were just a few months old.  Their resume since then has included swimming, music classes, Japanese lessons, Girl Scouts, acting, soccer, rock climbing, art, hiking, yoga, cooking, ballet and gymnastics.

  Hanson said: “I have two daughters who are part of our world’s future. My husband and I invest everything we can into making sure our kids are global citizens who can contribute to progress. I think it’s important to let them explore a bunch of different things when they’re young.”

  “It is a huge investment,” she continued. She says she spends about $7,000 per summer on activities alone. 

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  Shelly Schneider drops $3,000 a year on her three children for theater group, vocal coaches, Girl Scouts, tee ball, soccer, football, and piano lessons.

  She concluded: “Through all of these things, [the kids] are proving themselves and building confidence, building relationships and growing their little brains, and that’s very important. I believe the arts are a very important part of learning and opening up the brain to help you with other subjects. Learning music is proven to help with math and science. And if they learn to love science and math, that can really expand their careers.”

  “It’s noble to support your kid in the pursuit of their dreams, but it’s also important for a parent not to do that in a way that can wreck their own dreams of being financially stable and retiring someday,” Schulz concluded.

  

• Did The Russians Really Interfere In US Elections?

  Authored by Boyd Cathey via The Unz Review,

  The Mueller Report is now public, and our Mainstream Media have filled the airways with all sorts of commentaries and interpretations. We know that – despite the very best efforts of the dedicated Leftist attorneys on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s staff – there was absolutely no coordination between members of the Trump campaign, or any of his staffers, with Russians. No additional charges have come as a result, other than accusations made earlier of “process crimes” (e.g. failure to report earnings on tax forms, failure to report lobbying work, or not telling investigators what they demanded to hear—“crimes” that practically every politician in Washington has been guilty of at one time or another and would normally not cause much of a stir). None of these involved Russia.

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  Of course, that finding has not satisfied many Democrats or the unhinged Leftist crazies in the media, who continue to have visions of “collusion”—a kind of communications Alzheimers that has poisoned our media now for years. Thus, Representative Eric Swalwell (who is one of nearly two dozen Democrats running for president) continues to assert that there was “collusion,” as does the irrepressible (and irresponsible) Adam Schiff: “it’s there in plain sight,” they insist, “if you just look hard enough, and maybe squint just a bit—or maybe have those specialized 3-D Russia glasses!”

  Such political leaders—along with those further out in the Leftist loonysphere like Representatives Maxine Waters and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes—continue down their Primrose path of post-Marxist madness.

  But beyond the collusion/coordination issue, the past couple of weeks have been filled with a swirling controversy concerning what is called “obstruction of justice.” And once again, the fundamental issues have been incredibly politicized. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had an obligation, if he and his minions discovered “obstruction of justice,” that is, concerted and illegal attempts to obstruct the investigations by the president or his staff, to present charges to the Department of Justice. Yet, all he was able to do was assemble a farrago of “he said/she said” instances, none of which rose to the level of criminal activity. Apparently President Trump told a subaltern “I wish would you fire Mueller,” or he wished in a speech in his joking style that “if the Russians had Hillary’s emails, they would release them,” or he had a private conversation with Vladimir Putin when they met (as all national leaders do!), or his son met with a Russian attorney who supposedly had some “dirt” on the Hillary Clinton campaign (which did not turn out to be the reason for the Trump Tower meeting at all).

  None of the ten or eleven cited instances came anywhere close to being actionable or criminal under settled law. In each instance cited, the president’s actions (or desires) fell within his purview and authority under Article II of the Constitution. And regarding Trump’s desire to fire Mueller, he was on solid legal ground; the Supreme Court in its 1997 decision, Edmonds vs. the United States, declared that “inferior” officials, including an independent counsel, could be removed by presidential action as part of his delegated powers. And, in any case, Mueller was not dismissed.

  Mueller had an obligation after examining these situations to make a finding; he did not. By so doing, by avoiding decisions and stringing out such instances in an obviously political sense, he abdicated his responsibility and did his best to impugn Donald Trump and his administration…and thus offer grist for continued Democrat attacks on the president…all the way through the 2020 election.

  Mueller left it up to the Attorney General William Barr…and Congress…to decide how to proceed. And that is where we are today.

  The one issue that both Democrats and most Republicans seem to agree on, the issue which both say is “proven conclusively” by Mueller is that the Russians “attempted to interfere and did interfere” in our 2016 election.

  Interesting, is it not, that the Republicans who zealously defend the president and attack the obviously political nature of the Mueller Report would accept, as if on faith and without question, the accusations of Russian interference, also contained in the report?

  Turn on Fox and watch, say, Martha MacCallum (e.g., “The Story,” April 24, 2019) declare “we all know now without doubt that the Russians tried to interfere” in our elections, or listen to most any GOP congressman repeat that same narrative with unquestioning certitude.

  But that assertion – is it truly backed up factually? Where is the evidence, other than largely questionable information sourced from our largely discredited intelligence agencies which, as we know, had a determined goal of overthrowing the president by any means possible?

  Almost three years have passed from the first fake news that appeared in the media on the subject of “Russian collusion,” a concerted effort launched to discredit at first the Donald Trump candidacy and then sabotage his presidency, including his efforts to stabilize Russian-American relations.

  As proof of Russian actions, the Mueller Report cites the indictments against twenty-five Russian citizens who were indicted for attempted “interference” (those Russians are, let us add, quite conveniently out of the country and thus not prosecutable). When those indictments were issued, Russia pointed out the flimsy, unsupported and transparently made-up nature of the charges, and demanded that American authorities provide conclusive proof. Such requests were rebuffed.

  In order to evaluate the evidence, the Russian government proposed reestablishing the bilateral expert group on information security that the Obama Administration had terminated, which could have served as a platform for conversation on these matters. The American side was also invited to send Justice Department officials to Russia to attend the proposed public questioning of the Russian citizens named by Mueller. Additionally, Russia offered to publicize the exchanges between the two countries following the publication of the accusations of cyberattacks, exchanges which were conducted through existing channels between October 2016 and January 2017.

  Our government refused every offer.

  A careful analysis, in fact, fails to show any substantial evidence of Russian cyberattacks and attempts to “subvert democracy.” By some estimates, possibly $160,000—a paltry sum—was spent by the Russians during 2016 on social media activities in the United States. Does anyone wish to discover and compare the amount the Chinese Communists or the Saudis would have expended during the same period, for their continued influence and power in Washington and inside-the-Beltway?

  It is helpful to examine the charges that have been made, some included in the Mueller Report and accepted blindly by most pundits and politicians, both on the Left and by establishment conservatives.

  The Russian government, via their embassy in Washington, has published a 120 page “white paper,” The Russiagate Hysteria: A Case of Severe Russiaphobia, responding to the accusations made against them since 2016. Obviously, the Russian document has a particular viewpoint and very specific goal, but that should not deter us from examining it and evaluating its arguments. (I have written on Russia and its relations with the United States on a number of occasions since 2015 and had pieces published by The Unz Review, Communities Digital News, and elsewhere. On my blog, “MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey,” I have authored a dozen columns addressing this question).

  Here following I list twenty-one claims made regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election and in American domestic affairs. I follow each claim with the Russian response and how others, as noted, have also responded. In most cases I retain the original text, at times with my editing, but, in every case, with all the referenced sources.

  These twenty-one claims should be examined more closely and more calmly, and the “Russophobic” hysteria we have experienced during the past several years needs to be put aside for the sake of rational investigative inquiry—and discovering how the Managerial State and global elites have attempted a “silent coup” against what’s left of our republic.

  These claims and the responses deserve respectful consideration and detailed responses:

  1. CLAIM: Russia “meddled” in the U.S. elections by conducting influence operations, including through social media.

  FACT

  All of the claims of Russian trolls that surfaced over the last few years (such as Russians using the Pokémon Go mobile game and sex toy ads to meddle in the elections – ) are so preposterous and contradictory that they virtually disprove themselves.

  Not to mention the absurdity of the whole notion of 13 persons and 3 organizations (whichever country they might represent) charged on February 16, 2018, by Robert Mueller with criminally interfering with the elections, affecting in any way electoral processes in a country of more than 300 million people.

  It is telling that when pressed about the scope of the alleged influence campaign, representatives of American social media companies give numbers, that even if they were valid (and there’s no evidence of a connection to the Russian government), are so minuscule as to be basically non-existent. For example, Facebook has identified 3,000 Russia-linked ads costing a total of about $100,000. That’s a miniscule number of ads and a fraction of Facebook’s revenues, which totaled $28 billion. Facebook estimates that 126 million people might – the emphasis is on the word “might” – have seen this content. But this number represents just 0.004% of the content those people saw on the Facebook platform.

  Significantly, Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing on December 11th, 2018 that “ad accounts linked to Russia” spent about $4,700 in advertising” to politically influence Americans during the 2016 presidential election season.

  To further cast doubt on the allegations, an American watchdog group “Campaign for Accountability” (“CFA”) admitted on September 4th, 2018, that it deliberately posted propaganda materials on Google disguised as “Russian hackers from the Internet Research Agency” to check how they would be filtered for “foreign interference”. Google officials then accused the CFA as having ties to a rival tech company “Oracle”. In other words, corporate intrigues disguised as “Russian interference“.

  As American media has admitted, out of several dozen pre-election rallies supposedly organized by Russians, Special Counsel Mueller mentions in his indictment that only a couple actually appear to have successfully attracted anyone, and those that did were sparsely attended and, almost without exception, in deep-red enclaves that would have voted for Trump anyway.

  Amidst all the hysteria about the alleged Russian meddling it is worth reading various research studies which show, quoting “The Washington Post”, that it is Americans, in particular our intelligence service, that peddle disinformation and hate speech.

  According to Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, the scale and scope of domestic disinformation is much larger than any foreign influence operation. And academics from the Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy document in their study that there had been major spikes in outright fabrication and misleading information proliferating online before the 2018 U.S. election. A “significant portion” of the disinformation appeared to come from Americans, not foreigners, the Harvard researchers said.

  2. CLAIM: Russian hackers accessed computer servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and leaked materials through Wikileaks and other intermediaries

  FACT

  As President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin noted in his interview with NBC on June 5, 2017, when flatly denying any allegations of Russia interfering in internal affairs of the U.S., that today’s technology is such that the final internet address can be masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one will be able to understand the origin of that address. It is possible to set up any entity that may indicate one source when, in fact, the source is completely different.

  No evidence has been presented linking Russia to leaked emails. In fact, there are credible studies arguing that DNC servers are much more likely to have been breached by someone with immediate and physical access. In 2017 a group of former officers of the U.S. intelligence community, members of the “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity” (VIPS), met with then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo to present their findings.

  Those findings demonstrated using forensic analysis that the DNC data was copied at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack ( , , ), thus suggesting that it was more likely a removable storage device used.

  Another counterargument to the “Russian hackers” claim is that the DNC files published by Wikileaks were initially stored under the FAT (File Allocation System) method which is not related to internet transfers and can only be forwarded to an external device such as a thumb drive.

  It is also suspicious that the DNC prohibited the FBI from examining the servers. Instead, a third-party tech firm was hired, “Crowd Strike”, which is known for peddling the “Russian interference” claims. And soon enough it, indeed, announced that “Russian malware” has been found, but again no solid evidence was produced.

  According to the respected former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, the indictment by the Mueller team on July 13, 2018 of the 12 supposed Russian operatives was a politically motivated fraud. As Ritter explains, Mueller seems to have borrowed his list from an organizational chart of a supposed Russian military intelligence unit, contained in a classified document from the NSA titled “Spear-Phishing Campaign TTPs Used Against U.S. And Foreign Government Political Entities”, which was published by The Intercept online. As stated in that document, this is just a subjective judgement, not a known fact. Ritter concludes, that this is a far cry from the kind of incontrovertible proof that Mueller’s team suggests as existing to support its indictment.

  Moreover, it is telling that the indictment was released just before the meeting between President Putin and Trump in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, seemingly as if the aim was to intentionally derail the bilateral summit.

  3. CLAIM: Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.

  FACT

  As concluded in the summary of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, the investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia

  If the Mueller team, having all the resources of the U.S. government, after 22 months of work, many millions of dollars spent, more than 2800 subpoenas issued, nearly 500 search warrants and 500 witness interviews, didn’t find any evidence of “collusion”, it is simply because there was never any. The whole claim of collusion was launched and peddled by the same group of Democrats, liberal-leaning media and the so-called “Never Trump Republicans”, as it became clear that Donald Trump had real chances of winning the election. And later it morphed into a campaign to derail the newly-elected President agenda, including his efforts to mitigate the damage done to U.S.-Russian relations.

  4. CLAIM: Hacking of American political institutions was personally ordered by the Russian President Vladimir Putin.

  FACT

  This claim is based on nothing else but the infamous fraudulent “Steele Dossier”, paid for by political opponents [i.e., the Hilary Clinton campaign] of Donald Trump, and wild conjectures that “nothing in Russia happens without Putin’s approval” .

  Needless to say, zero proof is presented. By the same logic, nothing in the U.S. happens without the President’s approval. For example, is he also responsible for Edward Snowden? After all, Mr. Snowden was doing work for the U.S. intelligence services. Or the deaths of all the civilians killed abroad by U.S. drone strikes? Every minute detail approved by the President?

  5. CLAIM: Russia did not cooperate with the U.S. in tracing the source of the alleged hacking.

  FACT

  Russia has repeatedly offered to set up a professional and de-politicized dialogue on international information security only to be rebuffed by the U.S. State Department. For instance, following the discussion between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Hamburg on July 7, 2017, Russia forwarded to the U.S. a proposal to reestablish a bilateral working group on cyber threats which would have been a perfect medium to discuss American concerns. Moreover, during his meeting with Donald Trump in Helsinki on July 17, 2018, Vladimir Putin offered to allow U.S. representatives to be present at an interrogation of the Russian citizens who were previously accused by the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller of being guilty of electoral interference. Furthermore, in February 2019 the Russian government suggested publishing bilateral correspondence on the subject of unsanctioned access to U.S. electronic networks, which was conducted between Washington and Moscow through the Nuclear Threat Reduction Centers in the period from October 2016 to the end of January 2017.

  Needless to say, all Russian offers were rejected. A conclusion is naturally reached that American State Department officials have little interest in hearing anything that contradicts their own narrative or the discredited version of the CIA.

  6. CLAIM: Russia is interfering in elections all over the world

  FACT

  No credible evidence has been produced not only of Russia’s supposed meddling in the U.S. political processes, but to support similar allegations made by the U.S. in respect to other countries. For example, former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster insinuated that Russia was interfering in the Mexican presidential elections of 2018. However, Mexican officials, including the president of the Mexican Senate Ernesto Cordero Arroyo, and Ambassador to Russia Norma Pensado during a press conference in Moscow in February, 2018, debunked this baseless claim.

  Another example of fake news were reports saying that U.S. was increasingly convinced that Russia hacked French election on May 9, 2017. However, on June 1, 2017, the head of the French government’s cyber security agency said no trace was found of the claimed Russian hacking group behind the attack. On the other hand, the history of U.S. interfering in other countries’ elections is well documented by American sources (see: ).

  For example, a Carnegie Mellon scholar, Dov H. Levin, has scoured the historical record and found 81 examples of U.S. election influence operations from 1946- to 2000. Often cited examples include Chile in 1964, Guyana in 1968, Nicaragua in 1990, Yugoslavia in 2000, Afghanistan in 2009, Ukraine in 2014, not to mention Russia in 1996! And how else could the current situation in Ukraine and Venezuela be described, with U.S. representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker openly pressuring Ukrainian voters to support the incumbent, and Washington possibly plotting a coup in Caracas?

  7. CLAIM: The lawsuit of the Democratic National Committee against the Russian Federation related to “interference in the election” has a legal standing.

  FACT

  The DNC filed a civil lawsuit on April 20, 2018 against the Russian Federation and other entities and individuals. Named as defendants in the lawsuit are the Russian Federation; the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU); the GRU operative using the pseudonym “Guccifer 2.0”; Aras Iskenerovich Agalarov; Emin Araz Agalarov; Joseph Mifsud; WikiLeaks; Julian Assange; the Trump campaign (formally “Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.”); Donald Trump, Jr.; Paul Manafort; Roger Stone; Jared Kushner; George Papadopoulos; Richard W. Gates; and unnamed defendants sued as John Does 1–10. The DNC’s complaint accuses the Trump campaign of engaging in a racketeering enterprise in conjunction with Russia and WikiLeaks.

  Even irrespective of the fact that there was no “interference” in the first place, the case has no legal standing. Exercise of U.S. jurisdiction over the pending case with respect to the Russian Federation is a violation of the international law, specifically, violation of jurisdictional immunities of the Russian Federation arising from the principle of the sovereign equality of states.

  8. CLAIM: Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak was a spy.

  FACT

  In March of 2017 U.S. media began libeling Sergey Kislyak a “top spy and spy-recruiter” This preposterous claim was based on nothing but his contacts with Trump confidant Senator Jeff Sessions – carrying out work any ambassador would do. Per the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, among core diplomatic functions is ascertaining by all lawful means conditions and developments in the receiving state, and that certainly includes openly meeting leaders of Congress on Capitol Hill. Even former CIA Director John McLaughlin noted that Mr. Kislyak is an experienced diplomat, not a spy.

  9. CLAIM: Russian Embassy retreat in Maryland was an intelligence base

  FACT.

  Among the unlawful acts that U.S. administrations undertook was the expropriation of a legal Russian property in Maryland, a summer retreat near the Chesapeake Bay under the pretext it was used for intelligence gathering. But where is the supposed-treasure trove of alleged spy equipment that U.S. authorities reportedly found there? Why not show them publicly to back up the claim? After the expropriation and the claims, not a word – silence.

  The retreat, “dacha” as Russians would call it, was bought by the former Soviet Union in 1972. Since then, it was used for recreation, including hosting a children’s summer camp and regularly entertaining American visitors. One of the more popular events was the stop-over during the annual Chesapeake Regatta, completed with an expansive tour of the property. Presumably U.S. intelligence services could have used this for years to inspect the property. Why was nothing ever mentioned before the Obama Administration action?

  10. CLAIM: The meeting in Trump Tower in New York on June 9, 2016 between Trump campaign officials and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was to discuss compromising materials that Russian had on Hillary Clinton.

  FACT

  According to testimony provided to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Ms. Veselnitskaya focused on explaining the illicit activities of U.S.-British investor Bill Browder, wanted in Russia for crimes, and brought attention to the adverse effects of the so-called “Magnitskiy Act”, adopted by U.S. Congress in 2012 and lobbied for by Browder.

  11. CLAIM: Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, met with Russians in Prague to “collude”.

  FACT

  It was reported in American media that the Justice Department special counsel had evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, secretly made a trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign to meet with Russian representatives, a fact also mentioned in the discredited “Steele Dossier”. This was given as further evidence of “collusion”. But Cohen vehemently denied this – under oath. Passport records indicate that he never was in Prague. He was actually on vacation with his son at the supposed time. Given that he publicly turned on his former boss and still denied the fact of ever going to Prague disproves this claim further.

  12. CLAIM: Former member of the Trump campaign team Carter Page was a Russian intelligence asset.

  FACT

  According to members of Congress and journalistic investigations, the redacted declassified documents of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC, also called the FISA Court) show that the main source used by U.S. counterintelligence to justify spying on Mr. Page was the fraudulent so-called “Steele Dossier”.

  Thus, Mr. Page for obvious reasons was not accused by the team of Robert Mueller of being involved in a “Russian conspiracy”.

  13. CLAIM: On August 22, 2018, The Democratic National Committee filed a claim with the FBI, accusing the “Russian hackers” of infiltrating its electoral database.

  FACT

  Several days later members of the Democratic Party admitted that it was a “false alarm”, as it was simply a security check-up performed at the initiative of the Democratic Party’s affiliate in Michigan.

  14. CLAIM: On August 8, 2018 U.S. Senator Bill Nelson accused Russia of breaching the infrastructure of the voter registration systems in several local election offices of Florida.

  FACT

  Florida’s Department of State spokesperson, Sarah Revell, stated on August 9, 2018, that Florida’s government had not received any evidence from competent authorities that Florida’s voting systems or election records had been compromised. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI also could not confirm in any manner the accusations.

  15. CLAIM: In September, 2017 the U.S. media, referring to the Department of Homeland Security, accused Russia of “cyberattacks” on electoral infrastructure in 21 states during the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.

  FACT

  On September 27, 2017, Wisconsin and California authorities stated that their electoral systems were not targeted by cyberattacks. On November 12, 2017, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin said in a CBS interview that the “hackers’ activity” had no significant consequences and did not influence the outcome of the elections. And, indeed, the source of those attacks was not clear.

  16. CLAIM: Russia meddled in the Alabama 2017 Senate elections to help the Republican candidate.

  FACT

  Despite the initial claims, it turned out that a group of Democratic tech experts decided to imitate so-called “Russian tactics” in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate racе. Even more jarring is the fact that one participant in the “Alabama project”, Jonathon Morgan, is chief executive of “New Knowledge”, a cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released in 2018 by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Once again, we have one of the main private sector players in hyping the Russian threat caught red-handed.

  17. CLAIM: Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign chairman, was a secret link to Russian intelligence.

  FACT

  Trump’s former campaign chairman was hit with two indictments from Mueller’s office. However, even as American media notes, both cases have nothing to do with Russia and stemmed from his years as a political consultant for the Ukrainian government and his failure to pay taxes on the millions he earned, his failure to report the foreign bank accounts he used to stash that money, and his failure to report his work to the US government. In his second case in Virginia, he was also chargedwith committing bank fraud to boost his assets when the Ukraine work dried up.

  In fact, serious concerns have been raised in the U.S. that it was Ukrainian officials who tried to influence the 2016 elections by leaking compromising materials on Mr. Manafort.

  The Ukrainian connection is also prevalent in the case of money transferred to accounts of American politicians. For instance, according to a “New York Times” article, Ukrainian billionaire Viktor Pinchuk donated over 10 million dollars to the “Clinton Foundation while just 150 thousand dollars to the “Trump Foundation”.

  18. CLAIM: Russia compromised the Vermont power grid.

  FACT

  On December 31, 2016, “The Washington Post”, accused “Russian hackers” of compromising the Vermont power grid. The local company, “Burlington Electric”, allegedly traced a malware code in a laptop of one of its employees. It was stated that the same “code” was used to hack the Democratic Party servers in 2016. However, the “Wordfence” cybersecurity firm checked “Burlington Electric” for hacking, and said that the malware code was openly available, for instance, on a web-site of Ukrainian hackers. The attackers were using IP-addresses from across the world. “The Washington Post” later admitted that conclusions on Russia’s involvement were false.

  19. CLAIM: Russian Alfa Bank was used as a secret communication link with the Trump campaign.

  FACT

  In October 2016 a new “accusation” appeared, alleging that a message exchange between the Alfa Bank server and Trump organizations indicated a «secret» Trump – Russia communication channel.

  However, the FBI concluded the supposed messaging was marketing newsletters and/or spam.

  20. CLAIM: Russia cracked voter registration systems during the 2016 U.S. elections.

  FACT

  In July 2016 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security accused Russia of gaining unauthorized access to electronic voter registration systems in Arizona. But on April 8, 2018, “Reuters”, referring to a high-ranking U.S. administration official, wrote there was no proof Russia had anything to do with the mentioned cyberattack.

  21. CLAIM: Russian Embassy bank transactions were linked to “election interference”.

  FACT

  American publication “Buzzfeed” repeatedly claimed that U.S. authorities flagged Russian Embassy financial transfers as suspicious, many of them dated around the 2016 election. In reality, the media outlet, by twisting the facts and placing them out of context, made routine banking transactions – salary transfers, payments to contractors – look nefarious. It is not uncommon for embassy personnel to receive larger payouts, transfer or withdraw larger sums of money at the end of their work. Furthermore, leaking of confidential banking information of persons and organizations protected by diplomatic immunity raised concerns about the likely involvement of security services.

  The arrest in October 2018 of a U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network official, charged with leaking information both about the Russian Embassy accounts and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, provides further proof to the theory of political skullduggery.

  *  *  *

  Most of these responses have not been fully examined or addressed by major media, nor, for that matter, by Fox News, dominated as it is by an almost instinctive Neoconservative Russophobia (the one possible exception being Tucker Carlson).

  For the American Left, since the collapse of Communism and the growth of a traditionalist nationalism (under Vladimir Putin), Russia has become a convenient target. When the Soviets were in power prior to 1991, the USSR was seen as a “progressive” presence in the world, even if by the requirements of American politics the Left was forced to make ritualistic condemnations of the more extreme elements of Soviet statecraft. Now that post-Communist Russia bans same sex marriage, glorifies the traditional family, and the conservative Russian Orthodox Church occupies a special position of esteem and prominence, that admiration has turned to fear and loathing. And that Russia and its president have been viewed as favorable to the hated Donald Trump doubly confirms that hostility and targeting.

  For the dominant Neoconservatives and many Republicans, contemporary Russia is seen as “anti-democratic,” “reactionary,” and a threat to American world hegemony (and the refusal to bow to that hegemony, whether economically, politically, or culturally). Indeed, as a major intellectual force, Neoconservatism owes much of its origins to Eastern European and Russia Jews, many of whose ancestors were at direct odds with the old pre-1917 Tsarist state. That animus, those nightmares of pogroms and oppression, have never completely subsided. A modern traditionalist, Orthodox Russia is viewed as antithetical to their more liberal, even Leftwing ideas (e.g., increasing “conservative” acceptance of same sex marriage, “moderate” feminism, and a whole panoply of “forward looking” views on civil rights issues—all of which are present on Fox News.)

  Memory of “the bad old days” has never disappeared.

  None of this history should prevent a close examination of the current accusations against Russia, nor our search for the truth. Much—perhaps the future of Western civilization itself—depends on it.

  

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• Washington Has Destroyed Western Liberty: The Era of Tyranny Has Begun

  Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

  A fish rots from the head. In the Western world rot is accelerating. The rot in Washington is swiftly spreading to state and local governments and abroad to the Empire’s vassal governments.

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  Washington’s attack on journalism represented by the illegal arrest of Julian Assange has now spread to France. The US government’s policy of sanctions against sovereign countries that do not follow Washington’s orders has spread to the state of New York, where the governor has threatened sanctions against financial institutions that do business with the National Rifle Association.

  In France the vassal president Macron has ordered three journalists — who revealed that Macron’s government knowingly and intentionally sold arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE to be used for the slaughter of women and children in Yemen — to report for police questioning. The report proves that Macron’s government deliberately lied when it said it was unaware that French weapons were to be used for attack rather than defense use in violation of the Arms Trade Treaty of 2014. The journalists are under investigation by the French gestapo for “compromising national defense secrets.”

  In other words, when the French government lies, it is a violation of national defense secrets to report it.

  The entire Western world is adopting Washington’s approach to Assange and criminalizing the practice of journalism, thus protecting governments’ criminality. If you reveal a government crime, as Wikileaks did, you will be prosecuted by the criminal government for doing so. It is like permitting a criminal to prosecute the police and prosecutor who want him arrested.

  With the First Amendment already under attack and targeted for elimination by Identity Politics for permitting “hate speech,” with the 10th Amendment destroyed by the war criminal Abe Lincoln, and with habeas corpus and due process destroyed by the George W. Bush and Obama regimes, only the Second Amendment still stands, and it is under attack from New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

  Cuomo revealed that his threat of sanctions against financial organizations has the purpose of putting “the NRA out of business. We’re forcing NRA into financial jeopardy. We won’t stop until we shut them down.” The tyrant Cuomo knows that the NRA cannot operate without a bank account and insurance coverage.

  To be clear, Washington’s success in weaponizing government against the people has spread throughout the empire and down into the state governments of the United States.

  When we add to this the mass spying on citizens made possible by the digital revolution, we have as the result the death of liberty.

  To any longer speak of the “Western democracies” is to mouth a falsehood. There are exactly zero Western governments that can be held accountable by the people. There can be no accountable government without a free press. There is no economic freedom or freedom of association when businesses are punished for having business relationships with organizations that are targets of government oppression.

  The “war on terror” was a disguise for an attack on the US Constitution, an attack that has succeeded. The worst act of treason in history is the US government’s destruction of the US Constitution.

  The era of tyranny has begun. Elections cannot stop it.

  

• "We Need To Take Action Now:" LA Homeless Deaths Jump 76%

  Kaiser Health News reports that a record number of homeless people died across Los Angeles County last year, on bus benches, parks, hillsides, railroad track, and sidewalks.

  Deaths skyrocketed 76% in the last five years, far outpacing the growth in the city’s homeless population.

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  As of 2018, the city’s total homeless population was about 53,000, an increase of 39% since 2014. The study said a majority of the people weren’t living in government shelters but rather on city streets.

  Government officials and so-called experts have limited understanding of what the primary cause for the rise in deaths, but they said the opioid crisis could be a significant reason.

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  An increase in deaths outlines that Los Angeles County, a region of more than 10 million inhabitants, is in the midst of a homelessness crisis. 

  Based on that criteria, the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner reported 3,612 deaths of homeless people from 2014 to 2018.

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  A closer examination of the deaths revealed where the homeless were dying.

  About 33% died in hospitals and more than two-thirds died outside, in places like alleyways, sidewalks, parking lots, tent cities, parks, railroad tracks, and on freeway on-ramps.

  Male deaths were much higher than female deaths, the study noted. Even though African Americans make up fewer than 10% of the county’s population, they accounted for 25% of the homeless deaths.

  Substance abuse played a primary role in at least 25% of the deaths over the last five years, according to the coroner’s data.

  The coroner’s exact cause of death “doesnt necessarily tell the whole story,” said Brian Elias, the county’s chief of coroner investigations, who was alarmed by the surge in homeless deaths.

  Dr. Paul Gregerson, chief medical officer for JWCH Institute clinics in the Los Angeles area, provides medical assistance to the homeless, says that many of the disadvantage people died from heart disease, cancer, lung disease, diabetes, and infections.

  There has also been a sharp increase in deaths of millennials who were homeless. For instance, the deaths associated with adults under 40 – more than doubled.

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  “We need to take action now,” said Rev. Andy Bales, CEO of the Union Rescue Mission shelter on the city’s infamous Skid Row. “Otherwise next year, it’s going to be more than 1,000.”

  The report paints a grim picture of a public health crisis expanding like wildfire across Los Angeles.

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  As to why the report didn’t mention the root cause of homelessness on the West Coast is beyond our comprehension. One of the main drivers has been income inequality, derived from the financialization of the economy and excessive monetary policy over the last decade or more, has collapsed the middle class, leaving them on borderline poverty levels.

  

• US-Led Bombing Campaign in Syria Left Raqqa "Most Destroyed City in Modern Times": Study

  Authored by Julia Conley via Common Dreams

  An “unprecedented” new study released on Thursday revealed that the U.S.-led bombing campaign on Raqqa, Syria in 2017 — which one military commander at the time claimed was the “most precise air campaign in history” — killed an estimated 1,600 innocent civilians while leveling the city on a scale unparalleled in recent decades.

  The research collated almost two years of investigations into the assault on Raqqa, the groups said in a statement, and “gives a brutally vivid account” of the enormous number of civilian lives lost as “a direct result” of thousands of coalition air strikes and tens of thousands of US artillery strikes in Raqqa from June to October 2017.

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  The report—”Rhetoric vs. Reality: How the ‘Most Precise Air Campaign in History’ Left Raqqa the Most Destroyed City in Modern Times“—is detailed on the interactive website created by investigative news organization Airwars and the human rights group Amnesty International-USA which carried out what they call the “most comprehensive investigation into civilian deaths in a modern conflict.”

  The findings confirm that the U.S.-led coalition has admitted to just a fraction of the civilian carnage it has caused in Syria, even as it has boasted of the care it’s taken in avoiding such casualties and the precision of the Raqqa offensive.

  According to the report:

  US, UK and French forces also launched thousands of air strikes into civilian neighborhoods, scores of which resulted in mass civilian casualties.

  In one tragic incident, a Coalition air strike destroyed an entire five-story residential building near Maari school in the central Harat al-Badu neighborhood in the early evening of 25 September 2017. Four families were sheltering in the basement at the time. Almost all of them – at least 32 civilians, including 20 children – were killed. A week later, a further 27 civilians – including many relatives of those killed in the earlier strike – were also killed when an air strike destroyed a nearby building.

  “I saw my son die, burnt in the rubble in front of me,” Ayet Mohammed Jasem, one of the few survivors of the later attack, told the investigators. “I’ve lost everyone who was dear to me. My four children, my husband, my mother, my sister, my whole family. Wasn’t the goal to free the civilians? They were supposed to save us, to save our children.”

  At the time of 2017 assault on Raqqa it was U.S. Lieutenant General Stephen J. Townswend, commander of the coalition, who said, “I challenge anyone to find a more precise air campaign in the history of warfare…The Coalition’s goal is always for zero human casualties.”

  But the researchers argue the evidence belies those claims and, as part of the report, both groups demanded accountability for what was done to the city and its people.

  Eyewitness statements and 1,000 named victims; massive open source analysis, and crowdsourced satellite imagery review of the destruction, all led @Amnesty and @airwars to conclude that at least 10 times more civilians died at Raqqa than @CJTFOIR concedes. https://t.co/uF6k3rLWmv

  — Airwars (@airwars) April 25, 2019

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  “The coalition needs to fully investigate what went wrong at Raqqa and learn from those lessons, to prevent inflicting such tremendous suffering on civilians caught in future military operations,” said Chris Woods, director of Airwars, in a statement.

  Donatella Rovera, a crisis investigator for Amnesty, shared some of what she found in Raqqa in a video the group released along with the report.

  “When I first came to Raqqa after the war, I knew that relentless American, British, and French bombardment killed civilians and destroyed much of the city,” Rovera said.

  “What I came to discover was that little or no protection was afforded to the thousands of civilians who were trapped in the city,” she added. “Raqqa is the most destroyed city in modern times in terms of percentage. There is no part of Raqqa which has been left untouched.”

  During their investigation, the groups also listened to the stories of survivors like nine year old Fatima Hussein Ahmad who lost her mother, Aziza, and three siblings in artillery strikes on their neighborhood, as well sustaining injuries that required the amputation of her right leg. “I was thrown over there by the explosion,” she told Amnesty during an interview from a burnt out home near where the attack took place. Almost two years later, she still cannot walk and uses a wheelchair donated by an NGO to get around. She told the researchers her only wish is to go back to school.

  The interactive website contains a whole section of stories from the ground, including one of 32 people, 20 children among them, who were killed in an air strike near a school and another where civilians were targeted as they crossed a river with no way to escape.

  The U.S. has claimed to have unleashed 30,000 rounds of artillery on the city during the offensive, while the U.K. and France helped to carry out thousands of air strikes. The U.S. strikes represent the equivalent of one strike every six minutes for four months.

  “Many of the air bombardments were inaccurate and tens of thousands of artillery strikes were indiscriminate, so it is no surprise they killed and injured many hundreds of civilians,” said Rovera.

  “Coalition forces razed Raqqa, but they cannot erase the truth,” she added. “Amnesty International and Airwars call upon the Coalition forces to end their denial about the shocking scale of civilian deaths and destruction caused by their offensive.” 

  Civilians — who for four years had been essentially held captive in Raqqa by ISIS as the armed group set up checkpoints restricting movement, planted land mines in exit routes, and used residents as human shields — suffered fresh brutality from the U.S. and its allies as they claimed to be “liberating” the city.

  The two groups interviewed about 400 survivors and surveyed 200 attack sites throughout the city, examining the ruins of residential buildings and neighborhoods.

  Analyzing social media posts, satellite images, and other material, Amnesty and Airwars have identified the shellings that destroyed about 11,000 buildings and the names of more than 1,000 victims.

  But even with access to the groups’ meticulous research, which they have shared with the coalition, military leaders have admitted to only 159 civilian deaths during the Raqqa campaign — 10 percent of the number determined by Airwars and Amnesty —despite the fact that the coalition does not carry out its own investigations.

  The report comes ahead of an expected report from the Trump administration regarding civilian casualties that resulted from the coalition’s strikes.

  “We hope to finally see an honest assessment of the devastating impact that U.S. lethal strikes have had on the civilians in Raqqa,” said Daphne Eviatar, director of Amnesty’s Security with Human Rights program. “The public deserves to know how many civilian casualties our government is responsible for, and the survivors deserve acknowledgement, reparations, where appropriate, and meaningful assistance to rebuild their lives.”

  

• Orwell Goes Retail: Stores Now Track Where You Shop… And Sleep

  In news that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, retailers are now tracking not only where are you shop, but also where you sleep, according to a new Bloomberg article.

  For instance, Hill Country Galleria in Bee Cave, Texas used information and location data from customers’ phones to determine that a lot of shoppers own pets. Using this data, it went on to install water fountains, babysitting stations and photo op stations for customers and their pets. As a result, the time customers spent in the mall grew by 40%.

  One shopping Center in Chicago found it was drawing customers from Asian neighborhoods, so it filled one of its vacancies with a high-end Asian specialty grocery. And even Dunkin’ Donuts is getting in on the trend. It employed phone data to make sure that the 278 new stores it was opening wouldn’t steal customers from existing locations.

  These few clues that retail owners are getting from customers’ phones are one of the last chances brick-and-mortar shops have at trying to salvage their industry. They’re buying this mobile phone data hand over fist in order to help determine where people shop, eat and see movies. They’re also looking to see where customers go before and after going to the mall. It helps them look at personal details and paint a picture of the demographic that shops with them. It also helps them advertise.

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  But aside from transforming the industry, this is raising privacy concerns. The idea of being tracked – surprise – makes some people uneasy (how that is not “all” is beyond comprehension). All the companies interviewed for the article said that they don’t use any information that can identify individuals, but due to lax regulation, they’re really on the honor system to keep their word. So, we’re absolutely positive they’re doing the right thing…

  This new type of analysis is called location analytics and the worldwide industry is expected to grow to $15 billion by 2023 from $8.35 billion in 2017. More than half of the retailers surveyed last year said that they use these firms to collect the data.

  lan McKeon, chief executive officer of Alexander Babbage, which packages and sells location data said: “Historically, we’ve only been able to look at theoretical behaviors of people. Now we can look at where we’re actually drawing from, and we discovered that the trade areas look nothing like we used to think they did.”

  Smartphone apps gather data throughout the day, dropping pins on locations and collecting timestamps and device IDs. Aggregators buy this data and sell it to analytics companies that clean it up for retail to use. Packages for retailers run as low as $15,000. Aggregator UberMedia says it looks at 800 million active devices per month and has 14 trillion total location observations deriving from four and a half years of historical data. To help get details including the age, income and education of people, firms connect the phone’s location at night – i.e. when you’re home and in bed – with US census data.

  “We don’t have any information about who owns the device, so the way that we contextualize the information is we look at where the phone sleeps at night,” McKeon continued.

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  And it isn’t just your location that is being tracked. Psychographic data, including a person‘s behavior and spending habits – as well as their social media chatter – is also being tracked.

  Spatial.ai is a startup that studies online conversations and collects location data for 72 categories, helping businesses determine whether specific personality types correlate with sales. For instance, for “hipsters” these products often include antiques, vinyl records and coffee.

  Shopping landlord Brixmor Property Group Inc. worked with the start up to identify a lot of talk about “girls night out” in the neighborhood of one of its shopping centers in Newtown, Pennsylvania. As a result, Brixmor opened a “female friendly organic concept” restaurant in the area. Brixmor CEO Jim Taylor said: “You get a much better sense of the commuting patterns of the community that utilizes your center, and it’s oftentimes quite revelatory.”

  But privacy concerns remain. As the market is more competitive, providers have started to cut corners. Laura Schewel, CEO of StreetLight Data Inc. said her friend lost a potential client to a competitor because it refused to sell individual raw data, versus aggregated data, on groups of people.

  Taylor concluded: “We don’t want to use technology in a way that erodes trust. As a shopping-center owner, you want to bring in vibrant uses that generate lots of sales, lots of traffic and allow you to grow rents over time.”

  And yet one wonders just how much “trust” shoppers would have if the stores were honest and forthcoming, and disclosed all the different ways they strip their clients of their last shred of privacy.

  

• The Great Financial Crisis Ten Years On: China's Past Role & Current Risks

  In this week’s episode of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with China expert Anne Stevenson-Yang about the imminent dangers facing global financial markets in the event of a break in the renminbi-dollar peg.

  In the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis, it was generally understood that the Chinese were artificially depressing the value of the RMB vis-à-vis the USD, in order maintain an abnormally large current account surplus that would be recycled into western financial markets in the form of government securities, equities, real estate, etc. By recycling so much of the proceeds from trade back into foreign markets, the CCP managed to maintain a lower exchange rate than it otherwise would be, were it to convert those dollars back into renminbi.

  In other words, China was suppressing the value of its currency. Bob Wittbrot calls this recycling process the “Boomerang Greenback.” This dynamic worked extraordinary well until the world went into recession around the time of the great financial crisis, which marked a peak in China’s current account. The CCP also met the crisis by expanding bank lending, easing credit, and fueling investment even further. In addition, by maintaining interest rates and the cost of capital well-below the rate of inflation during China’s multi-decade boom, the CCP has managed to keep households’ share of the economy at low enough levels to induce an overall high-savings rate for the country (by having less disposable income than would otherwise be expected for an economy this size, the average Chinese citizen spends less on consumption than he or she otherwise would, absent financial repression). This has been an additional shot in the arm for investment.

  At some point post-2008 (judging from their foreign exchange reserves, this appears to have started somewhere around the start of 2014) China went from artificially suppressing the value of its currency to artificially supporting it. Unlike a country like Thailand, however, whose currency peg famously broke under the speculative attacks of foreign investors during the 1997-98’ Asian Financial Crisis, the Chinese have managed to avoid such a scenario on account of maintaining a closed capital account (exercising tight capital controls). Coupling that with a current account surplus, the CCP has been able to obtain the hard currency it has needed in the last 5 years or so in order to buy the various inputs required to run their economy and keep the cycle going.

  The problem is that China generated a tremendous amount of money and credit since the GFC, in particular, and therefore risks a major devaluation in the value of the RMB should the country no longer be able to get the foreign exchange reserves it needs through a sustainable current account surplus. They are, at the moment, running a negative current account, a negative fiscal balance (of roughly 9% of GDP), their foreign exchange reserves are declining for the first time ever, while the country’s external debt has doubled in the last five years, increasing by an average of $70 billion per quarter since the beginning of 2017. More than half of this debt is short-term, which means it needs to be constantly rolled over. Up until the Fed paused it’s tightening cycle, the rising interest rates coupled with new tariffs on Chinese goods were creating a pincer-like effect on China’s economy and on its ability to maintain its peg, forcing it to fund more of its dollar needs through borrowing at ever higher interest rates.

  China cannot maintain a credible peg between the RMB and the USD when its money supply is growing, by some calculations at more than 10x that of the United States over the last 10 years. This is a fundamental problem of accounting. If China were completely self-sufficient – if it had access to sufficient energy, food, base metals, etc. within its own borders – then its inability to obtain dollars would not be an issue. The problem is that it is desperately short these commodities as inputs for its manufacturing and domestic consumption. The recent drop in the price of oil helped them out a bit, but it has been rising again, just as China’s oil imports are surging. The country recently surpassed the United States as the world’s largest crude importer. For a nation with dwindling foreign exchange reserves, this is not a good trend. And, it isn’t even clear what the real FOREX numbers are in China. Official foreign exchange reserve put that number at $3.2 Trillion, but US treasury tick data shows that China owns a little bit less than $1.2 trillion in US Treasuries, which according to some people, suggests that their overall FOREX position is closer to $2 Trillion.

  Meanwhile, the U.S. trade deficit fell to $49.4 billion in February, the lowest level since June 2018, and well below what economists had expected. A 20.2% drop in imports from China was the main driver behind the nearly 3.4% improvement in the trade deficit in February, data from the Commerce Department showed. The trade deficit has narrowed for two straight months now.

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  There seems to be a growing sense of awareness among many in China that all is not well with the country’s capital account. We have seen numbers suggesting that illicit capital has been flowing out of China (whether we are talking about precious stones, Bitcoins, or other means available to the wealthier citizens of China) in noticeably higher amounts since the mini-devaluation in August 2015. This is consistent with what we often see in countries ahead of a devaluation, default, or some other financial disturbance. Do China’s wealthy know something we don’t?

  Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

  

• Alarms Go Off As Credit Card Charge-Offs Soar To Seven Year High

  An ominous trend, indicating US consumers are in far worse shape than assumed by conventional wisdom, has re-emerged.

  Regular readers may recall that two years ago we wrote that “Credit Card Defaults Surge Most Since Financial Crisis.” And while this deteriorating trend had more or less plateaued for much of 2018, it has taken another big step higher and as Bloomberg reports “red flags are flying in the credit-card industry after a key gauge of bad debt jumped to the highest level in almost seven years.”

  According to advance data from Bloomberg Intelligence, which will soon flow through to the S&P/Experian Bankcard Default Index, after staying largely flat for much of 2017 and 2018, the first three months of 2019 saw a troubling jump in the nationwide credit card charge-off, or default rate to 3.82%, the highest in seven years or since the second quarter of 2012. At the same time, the number of loans 30-days past due, a leading indicator of future write-offs, jumped at all seven of the largest U.S. card issuers.

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  Some examples: Capital One said this week that its first-quarter U.S. card charge-off rate climbed to 5.04% from 4.64% at the end of 2018. At Discover Financial Services, which also reported results on Thursday, the charge-off rate rose to 3.5% from 3.23% in the prior quarter.

  As for what is causing this sharp jump in charge offs, some credit card issuers blamed artificially increased FICO scores. As readers may recall, two weeks ago we asked if “Inflated” FICO Scores Will Be The Catalyst For The Next Meltdown” noting that credit score inflation “is the idea that debtors are actually riskier than their scores indicate, due to metrics not accounting for the “robust” economy, which may negatively affect the perception of borrowers’ ability to pay back bills on time. This means that when a recession finally happens, there could be a larger than expected fallout for both lenders and investors.”

  There are around 15 million more consumers with credit scores above 740 today than there were in 2006, and about 15 million fewer consumers with scores below 660, according to Moody’s.

  The problematic implication is that while FICO scores may represent a far stronger US consumer, the reality is just the opposite, as Capital One implied during its Thursday conference call, when Richard Fairbank, CEO of Capital One which is the country’s third-largest credit card issuer, warned that there’s been a “degradation” in credit quality for certain customers, adding that “some customers with negative credit events during the financial crisis are now seeing those problems disappear from their credit-bureau reports.” And yet, the same customers are just as unlikely to repay their credit card bill whether their FICO score is 750 or 680.

  “We may be looking at data that might not paint the full picture of a consumer’s credit history,” Fairbank said during the Thursday earnings call with analysts. “Part of the context for our caution has been not only how deep we are in the cycle but, also, this is the time period when there is less information than there once was.”

  Did someone say non-GAAP credit scores? Because that’s precisely what the artificially inflated FICO scores have become, and they are presenting an unreliable picture of a customer’s ability, or eagerness, to pay down their credit card debt. Hence the jump in charge offs.

  Others echoing the warning included the CEO of Discover Card, Roger Hochschild, who said that “certainly, this has been one of the longest recoveries, so, in general, we have been contracting credit policy at the margin and tightening.” In an interview with Bloomberg, Hochschild said his company has been closing inactive accounts and slowing down the number and size of credit-line increases for both new and existing customers.

  Almost as if those artificially higher non-GAAP FICO scores no longer represent reality… just like non-GAAP financial results.

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  Meanwhile, as Bloomberg adds, the credit card industry’s latest warnings build on developments in January, when fourth-quarter results showed charge-off rates near the lowest in decades were coming to an end, something we discussed at the time. As a result, competition for the highest-quality customers remains fierce, leading many issuers to spend more on marketing and rewards to gain market share with that group.

  “If you think about lending products, there are always people who want to take your money,” Hochschild said. “You’re going for people who have many choices — they have existing cards, they could get any card they want. So our job is to make sure those are the ones we attract to Discover.”

  But a growing wariness about the potential for a rise in bad debt has led many issuers to tighten underwriting and to make issuance of new credit more problematic, creating a vicious loop where those who need credit the most are also the least likely to get it.

  That said, it’s certainly not a crisis yet: charge-offs remain not far from historic lows as banks benefit from low unemployment rates in the US. On the other hand, with overall interest rates in the US still near historic, record lows, the fact that charge offs are already surging is just another reason why the Fed will find it impossible to hike rates higher, and in fact, if the deteriorating default trend continues, the central bank may have no choice but to cut rates soon. And while that may kick the can for a few quarter, all such a goosing of US consumer will achieve, is make the next recession – and financial crisis – that much worse when it finally hits, because if American’s can make their credit card payment when unemployment is a record low and GDP is – allegedly – growing above 3%, one wonder what will happen when the next recession does finally hit.

  

• One Dead In Passover Synagogue Shooting; Off-Duty Border Patrol Agent Shot Back At 19-Year-Old Suspect

  Update2: San Diego Sheriff Bill Gore confirmed John Earnest as the suspect. 

  Update #7 @SDSheriff Bill Gore confirms the name of the shooting suspect as 19-year-old John Earnest (DOB 6/8/99). We didn’t find any prior law enforcement contact with Earnest. We’re looking into digital evidence and checking the authenticity of an online manifesto.

  — San Diego Sheriff (@SDSheriff) April 28, 2019

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  Update: The shooter has been confirmed as 19-year-old John T. Earnest. 

  Multiple Law Enforcement Sources Familiar w/the Investigation Tell NBC News that the Shooter (Synagogue in Poway, CA) is John T. Earnest (DOB: 6/8/99 – 19 yrs old)

  — Esmeralda Medellin (@esmeraldamedel6) April 27, 2019

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  NBC San Diego reports that “an off-duty U.S. Border Patrol agent who was in the synagogue at the time of the shooting opened fire on the suspect, missing the man but striking his vehicle.”  

  ARMED off duty law enforcement stopped the San Diego synagogue killer and saved many lives.

  This is why every America should have the ability to arm themselves whenever they choose.

  — John Cardillo (@johncardillo) April 27, 2019

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  President Trump – who the synagogue shooter allegedly disavowed as a “Zionist” – called the shooting a hate crime and offered his “deepest sympathies.” 

  President Trump calls the shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California, a “hate crime” and “hard to believe.” He adds, “My deepest sympathies to all of those affected.” https://t.co/XVORtke1Bi pic.twitter.com/sAjHV2o73q

  — CNN (@CNN) April 27, 2019

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  Meanwhile, governor Gavin Newsom said in a tweet “Hate continues to fuel horrific and cowardice acts of violence across our state, country and world. It must be called out. CA stands with Poway.”

  Charleston, Pittsburgh, Quebec, New Zealand — now our own Poway, California.

  No one should ever fear going to their place of worship.

  Hate continues to fuel horrific and cowardly acts of violence across our state, country, and world. It must be called out. CA stands with Poway.

  — Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) April 27, 2019

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  As reported earlier, Earnest appears to have posted an “open letter” manifesto as well as a message on 8chan prior to the attack. See below for details. 

  ***

  One woman is dead and at least 3 other people have been injured after a gunman opened fire on a Poway, California synagogue on Saturday just before 11:30 a.m. on the last day of Passover. 

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  The mayor of the northern San Diego suburb, Steve Vaus, confirmed the death to NBC 7 just after 1:30 p.m.

  The suspect – a 19-year-old man, was detained down the road from the synagogue, according to San Diego County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Aaron Meleen. 

  Update #5 @SDSheriff Bill Gore confirms one person was killed and three others were injured in the #synagogueshooting at Chabad of Poway. Our hearts go out to those affected by this incident.
  19-year-old man was arrested in connection with the shooting by @SanDiegoPD.

  — San Diego Sheriff (@SDSheriff) April 27, 2019

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  The Chabad synagogue serves as a community center for ultra-Orthodox Jews, according to NBC News. 

  Chabad is an Orthodox Jewish Hasidic movement. The shooting coincides with the end of Passover. https://t.co/YYJDcr2G7W

  — Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) April 27, 2019

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  According to local Steve Werby, who spoke with a Deputy Sheriff, has been monitoring the police radio bands, and whose wife was on scene, said that two children were injured, while two others are missing. 

  Shooting inside the Chabad of Poway, California. Just across city of San Diego border. During religious services. At least one person shot. 2 children injured. 2 children missing. My source is deputy sheriff via direct conversation, police band, and relative of person at Chabad. https://t.co/21RRgaJVmo

  — Steve Werby (@stevewerby) April 27, 2019

  Werby also said that police were preparing to enter the home of the suspect, who lives with his parents – and that Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein lost two fingers in the attack. 

  All 4 victims of the Chabad of Poway shooting are now at Palomar Medical Center. Victims of the shooting at the synogogue include Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein who lost 2 fingers, another adult I know, and 2 minors. One minor age 11. #sandiego #poway #chabad #activeshooter #hatecrime https://t.co/FuCnODj8RK

  — Steve Werby (@stevewerby) April 27, 2019

  He also tweeted: “According to an adult inside the synogogue during the shooting at Chabad of Poway synogogue, there were 6 or 7 shots, screams, then 6 or 7 more shots. Source is my wife who is talking to the adult.”

  According to an adult inside the synogogue during the shooting at Chabad of Poway synogogue, there were 6 or 7 shots, screams, then 6 or 7 more shots. Source is my wife who is talking to the adult. #sandiego #poway #chabad #hatecrime https://t.co/6RRUn3dK3C

  — Steve Werby (@stevewerby) April 27, 2019

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  While currently unconfirmed – internet sleuths have tenatively identified the suspect a 19-year-old local John Earnest – who appears to have posted about the attack on the 8chan prior to the incident.

  John Earnest’s manifesto has the writer DESCRIBE themselves as a 19 year old male.
  Police just said the suspect is 19 years old.

  It’s him.

  Police need to speed the hell up pic.twitter.com/VFmDyYbhAs

  — Nick Monroe (@nickmon1112) April 27, 2019

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  There is also an “open letter” manifesto in which Earnest explains that he is a “man of European ancestry,” who says he also “scorched a mosque in Escondido a week after Brenton Tarrant’s sacrifice,” referring to last month’s New Zealand Mosque shooter which the manifesto says was the “catalyst for mer personally.” 

  Of note, there was an early morning arson at a nearby Mosque in Escondido, California on March 24th which remains unsolved. While several people were sleeping inside, one person who was awake spotted the flames and managed to put out the fire. 

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  The potential suspect’s “manifesto” also has a series of Q&As in which he says he is not a Trump supporter.  

  “Are you a Trump supporter?”

  You mean that Zionist, Jew-loving, anti-White, traitorous cocksucker? Don’t make me laugh. –Manifesto

  The time stamp seems to match the manifesto….. https://t.co/yyyaO0Ii1E

  — Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) April 27, 2019

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  Here is the potential suspect’s 8chan post. Again, this is unconfirmed as of this writing. 

  Here’s the 4Chan post he posted about it, similar to the Christchurch shooter that posted his manifesto on 8Chan pic.twitter.com/LSe5cUDTnS

  — Sean Bekkers (@WarDogCS) April 27, 2019

  The “Manifesto” reads: 

  To my brothers in blood. Make sure that my sacrifice was not in vain. Spread this letter, make memes, shitpost, FIGHT BACK, REMEMBER ROBERT BOWERS, REMEMBER BRENTON TARRANT, filter the religious D&C, and filter the schizos who will inevitably call this a ‘false flag.’ Something to note, people grossly overestimate the police’s ability to solve ‘crimes’ such as ‘arson’ and ‘murder.’ Lots of threads about ‘Feds are talking to me guys because I post on 8chan, it’s so spooky’ are ‘organically’ popping up. What a load of shit meant to try to scare the goyim and prevent retaliation.

  The author of the note claims to be a “a 19 year old nursing student from the depths of Commiefornia.” 

  For more live developments, follow journalist Nick Monroe’s thread by clicking on the tweet below: 

  “At least 4 people (including 2 children) shot during a #Passover holiday celebration at Chabad Poway synagogue in San Diego.” pic.twitter.com/NP3b7gteZU

  — Nick Monroe (@nickmon1112) April 27, 2019

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  Act quickly though – it appears Twitter is hard at work censoring Nick’s information: 

  TWITTER DELETED MY TWEET FROM PUBLIC VIEW WITHOUT MY CONSENT

  Left: What you see
  Right: What I see pic.twitter.com/IYnZALQc7Q

  — Nick Monroe (@nickmon1112) April 27, 2019

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• On The Punitive Taxation Of America's Richest

  Authored by Richard Salsman via The American Institute for Economic Research,

  The rich in America don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes, according to critics of capitalism and of inequality who propose a near doubling (to 70 percent) of the current top federal tax rate on personal income. Many such critics also demand a new wealth tax on previously earned income that’s been saved and invested. But what’s a “fair share?” Why is 70 percent the right and proper tax take? Why not 50 percent? Is today’s top rate of 35 percent inherently fair? Why not 10 percent?

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  Ask anyone who’s willing to define or defend “fair share” in this context — whether a tax expert, an editorialist, or a neighbor — and you’ll likely hear not hard facts and solid logic but a host of banal attitudes and platitudes. “Inequality is unjust!” Why? “Because it’s unfair!” Why? “Because so many people are in need today — and most people agree with me.” But why assume the status of needy or less rich people is caused by the rich? It just doesn’t follow. If the rich aren’t blameworthy for the poor lot of others, as a criminal would be for robbing and impoverishing a victim, what, in plain justice, could justify punitive taxation of the rich?

  Part of the problem (and the emotionalism) is that many people today — especially the highly schooled (and highly paid) elites — doubt or deny the principle of desert. They believe no one is truly or fully responsible or deserving of their socioeconomic position or trajectory in life. “They didn’t earn it,” we hear, because so many others — whether parents, teachers, peers, or preachers — played a role. Well, if others played a role, are they deserving? If so, is desert in fact a valid principle? If so, why bother equating unequal possessions with ill-gotten gains? Those who most deny desert deny it most vehemently in the rich; in failing to see how anyone succeeds “on their own,” they fail the more so in seeing how truly great producers succeed.

  Randomness and “luck” also are posited as causal in one’s socioeconomic status; but it’s a contradictory claim, since randomness, by definition, is the causeless (or unidentified). The causeless can’t be causal. Even when self-responsibility is conceded as a factor in people’s socioeconomic status, it’s usually assigned an insignificant role. Yet if no one truly “deserves” their status in life, or their possessions, logical consistency requires that the principle apply alike to the rich, poor, and middle. But it’s not applied that way these days; “social justice” now entails not desert but a denial of desert and the contradictory claim that while no one deserves anything, some people nevertheless “deserve” redistributed income and wealth.

  In truth, in a free society with equal treatment before the law, different human endowments, talents, and productive capacities necessarily yield different socioeconomic outcomes. Since no human is omniscient or omnipotent, it isn’t necessary to assume that everything humans possess has been attained by perfect prescience, a perfect plan, perfect execution, or superhuman powers.

  In the economic realm, if unequal people are left free to invent, create, produce, exchange, and consume wealth in mutual, voluntary exchange, to mutual advantage, what they come to possess is, thereby, presumptively just — legitimately earned — however unequal or dissimilar may be their possessions relative to the possessions of others. If society lacks freedom and wealth is seized, one should fight for more freedom, not punitive taxation.

  Legitimately obtained possessions shouldn’t be condemned or seized by third-party passers-by who lack standing in trade. If it can be demonstrated — not merely assumed, according to the premise of a “zero-sum society” — that someone’s status or possessions have been attained by force, fraud, or political favoritism-cronyism, the proper remedy is to preclude and punish such wrongs, not to preclude or punish unequal possession or socioeconomic status per se. That requires a constitutionally limited government devoted to protecting individual rights, including property rights, not the opposite, more common type observed today, which variously violates rights, extends special favors, and applies the law (or taxes) unequally.

  Guided by the principle of justice as desert, “fair share” in taxation requires that no person, group, or firm be singled out for punishment or favors, for higher tax rates or subsidies, based on differential economic prowess, earnings, or possessions.

  Whether what’s taxed is income, sales, or wealth, the fairness test is satisfied when a single, uniform tax rate is applied equally to all; in contrast, a graduated tax code that imposes ever-higher rates the more one makes, spends, or owns — penalizing the richer because they are richer — fails the fairness test; it is punitive (unjust) taxation; it presumes guilt, not innocence; it assumes that great wealth is stolen, not produced. In fact, vast concentrations of wealth usually reflect vast and sustained success — necessarily by “big business” — in supplying and satisfying millions of customers.

  The current U.S. federal income tax schedule isn’t uniform when it comes to rates. For example, the tax rate is only 12 percent for those making between $9,525 and $38,700 per year but 24 percent for those making between $82,500 and $157,500 and 37 percent for those making more than $500,000. There’s no good reason in ethics, logic, or economics why some people should pay two or three times the rate others pay; the graduated tax-rate schedule violates not only the precepts of fundamental fairness but also the equal-protection clause in the U.S. Constitution.

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  Of course, were all U.S. citizens in all income brackets subject to the same tax rate, the richer would still pay more in total taxes than would the less rich or poor. If the uniform rate was 20 percent, those earning $10,000 a year, $100,000 a year, and $1,000,000 a year would pay, respectively, $2,000, $20,000, and $200,000 per year. Those with 10 times the income of others would pay 10 times the total taxes, no more or less. It would be unjust to pay more or less than what’s proportionate. It’s also perfectly plausible that the richer should pay more in taxes not because of their greater “ability to pay” but because they depend more on legitimate government services (law and order, courts, military defense, private-property protection).

  The unfair graduation in U.S. income tax rates isn’t mitigated in other parts of the tax code. The rich as much as the non-rich also pay sales taxes, estate taxes, property taxes, and taxes for Social Security and Medicare. Considering all federal taxes, the rich in America unfairly pay far more than their fair share, which implies that the real inequity that now requires a remedy is the fact that most non-rich Americans pay far less than their fair share of taxes.

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  The nearby exhibit shows that in 2015 the top 1 percent of income earners in America, representing 16 percent of total income, paid 27 percent of all federal taxes; if they had paid their “fair share,” they’d have paid only 16 percent of all taxes. They were forced to overpay by 11 percentage points. Similarly, those in the 81st to 99th percentiles of income earners, representing 37 percent of total income, paid 43 percent of all federal taxes; if they had paid their fair share, they’d have paid only 37 percent of all taxes, so they too overpaid (by 6 percentage points). Taken together, the top quintile of earners, representing 53 percent of total income, paid 70 percent of all federal taxes, or 17 percentage points above their fair share.

  In contrast, the fourth quintile of earners paid only 17 percent of taxes despite earning 20 percent of all income (an underpayment of three percentage points); worse still, the lower three quintiles (representing 60 percent of all income earners) paid only 13 percent of all federal taxes in 2015, even while comprising 27 percent of all income. It’s patently unfair when more than half of income-earning Americans pay less than half of their fair share of federal taxes. Yet few elected officials care to rectify it. In unlimited democracies unconcerned with rights, a majority can easily freeload on a minority.

  There’s nothing moral or “progressive” about a graduated tax schedule. It stunts economic progress by penalizing those who most contribute to it. It also defies the scientific progress made in economics in recent centuries, demonstrating that wealth is created, not stolen, and mainly by brains, not brawn. It’s no coincidence that the second plank in Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848) demanded “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” The demand was understandable perhaps, to the extent it was based on the false “labor theory of value,” which presumed that only manual labor created surplus value, while skilled, mental, and managerial labor were parasitical and larcenous. The Marxian-socialist scheme of graduated taxation, although common to this day, is no less false than the income theory it rests upon.

  Surely, most economists should know better by now — that skilled, mental, and managerial labor is far more productive than is manual or menial labor. Not even the income obtained by investing is “unearned,” despite unjust tax-code jargon. Creativity, capital, corporations, and concentrations of wealth are indispensable to productivity, profits, and prosperity. But is this acknowledged today? Our “modern,” “progressive” tax code reflects not science or progress but a pre-scientific (zero sum) view of the origins (and inequality) of income and wealth. Yes, the size, scope, power, and spending of government should be reduced, but economists also should identify ways to make government financing, at any level, less punitive and more just.

  

• Chinese Families Paid Massive Sums In College Admissions Scandal

  While the people implicated in the “biggest college admissions scandal in history” have so far have been predominantly American – with photos of actresses like Lori Loughlin and ringleader William Rick Singer being plastered across the news – it turns out that the two families who shelled out the most money in the scandal were, not surprisingly, Chinese according to the Wall Street Journal. 

  One wealthy Chinese family paid an astounding $6.5 million to Singer, the scheme’s mastermind, while a second family was found to have paid $1.2 million. The family involved in the $6.5 million payment has not yet been identified; the $1.2 million payment was in exchange for 21 year old Sherry Guo’s admission to Yale University. Guo moved to Southern California from China to attend high school in the U.S. 

  Most of the other parents in the scandal paid between $250,000 to $400,000, making the huge sums out of China noteworthy to those investigating and following the scam. They are easily the largest sums reported thus far. 

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  Ms. Guo had her eye on Columbia University or Oxford University but Singer insisted that she go to Yale, calling it a “sure thing”. 

  Guo learned English after arriving in California about five years ago and attended JSerra Catholic High School in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., starting high school as an older student.

  Ironically for the Yale “student”, her lawyer is trying to tuck her behind the defense of ignorance. Guo was “so unfamiliar with how people apply to schools in the U.S., Rick Singer’s instructions to her didn’t seem as out of place as they would to a student who grew up in the United States and has more of an expectation of free choice,” her lawyer said. Guo’s family was introduced to Singer by an LA-based financial adviser, who said that Guo’s family told Singer they wanted to make a “donation” to “one of those top schools” for his daughter’s “application.”

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  The next day, Singer contacted disgraced Yale Women’s Soccer coach Rudy Meredith, giving Meredith a resume and personal statements, including links to her art portfolio. Singer indicated he would “revise” the information to include a false history playing soccer and subsequently listed her as a member of a junior national team in China and co-captain of a soccer club in So Cal. Mr. Singer paid $400,000 to Mr. Meredith in exchange for having him designate the girl as a recruited athlete, nearly guaranteeing her a spot at the school.

  Meanwhile, Guo had actually won awards for her artwork previously, with her former high school principal calling her an “unbelievable artist”. She was eventually admitted to Yale after being tagged as a recruited athlete last fall.

  Unfortunately for the potentially gifted youngster, she is no longer at the university. The family has not been charged. 

  “I just don’t think the question of guilt is clear-cut in Sherry’s case, at all,” her lawyer said. 

  Guo is part of a larger trend of Chinese families bringing children to the U.S. for primary schooling in the hopes of helping them gain college admission down the line. She is the last on a long line of names that have been profiled as a result of the admissions scandal.

  In retrospect, the prominent presence of Chinese families in the admissions scandal is hardly a surprise. Several years ago, numerous US banks got into hot water for hiring the offspring of Chinese oligarchs in exchange for “favors.” As one example, recall that back in late 2016, and after more than three years of digging into JPMorgan’s hiring practices in China, federal authorities determined that the bank hired the children of Chinese leaders as part of a quid pro quo to win business in the booming nation, clearing the way for a costly punishment. Well, somewhat “costly”: the punishment in question resulted in a $264 million settlement with the bank and its Hong Kong subsidiary; ultimately JPM was charged with orchestrating a long-running foreign bribery scheme. This issue, which strikes at the heart of whether JPMorgan violated United States law governing foreign bribery, became a focal point of the investigation and the ensuing settlement negotiations.

  Having observed how it can be done at the corporate level, wealthy Chinese decided to reverse the approach, and proceeded with outright bribes targeting America’s most selective universities.

  * * *

  But back to the college admissions scandal, where last week we reported that former USC soccer coach Laura Janke was cooperating with prosecutors after pleading guilty. 

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• The Essence Of Evil: Sex With Children Has Become Big Business In America

  Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

  “Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

  Children, young girls – some as young as 9 years old – are being bought and sold for sex in America. The average age for a young woman being sold for sex is now 13 years old.

  This is America’s dirty little secret.

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  Sex trafficking—especially when it comes to the buying and selling of young girls—has become big business in America, the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.

  As investigative journalist Amy Fine Collins notes, “It’s become more lucrative and much safer to sell malleable teens than drugs or guns. A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be retailed once, but a young girl can be sold 10 to 15 times a day—and a ‘righteous’ pimp confiscates 100 percent of her earnings.”

  Consider this: every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry.

  According to USA Today, adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

  Who buys a child for sex? Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life.

  “They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.

  In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.

  On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period of servitude.

  It is estimated that at least 100,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.

  “Human trafficking—the commercial sexual exploitation of American children and women, via the Internet, strip clubs, escort services, or street prostitution—is on its way to becoming one of the worst crimes in the U.S.,” said prosecutor Krishna Patel.

  This is an industry that revolves around cheap sex on the fly, with young girls and women who are sold to 50 men each day for $25 apiece, while their handlers make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year.

  This is not a problem found only in big cities.

  It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.

  As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”

  Don’t fool yourselves into believing that this is merely a concern for lower income communities or immigrants.

  It’s not.

  It is estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged child sex workers in the U.S. These girls aren’t volunteering to be sex slaves. They’re being lured—forced—trafficked into it. In most cases, they have no choice.

  In order to avoid detection (in some cases aided and abetted by the police) and cater to male buyers’ demand for sex with different women, pimps and the gangs and crime syndicates they work for have turned sex trafficking into a highly mobile enterprise, with trafficked girls, boys and women constantly being moved from city to city, state to state, and country to country.

  For instance, the Baltimore-Washington area, referred to as The Circuit, with its I-95 corridor dotted with rest stops, bus stations and truck stops, is a hub for the sex trade.

  No doubt about it: this is a highly profitable, highly organized and highly sophisticated sex trafficking business that operates in towns large and small, raking in upwards of $9.5 billion a year in the U.S. alone by abducting and selling young girls for sex.

  Every year, the girls being bought and sold gets younger and younger.

  The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out, “Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.“

  “For every 10 women rescued, there are 50 to 100 more women who are brought in by the traffickers. Unfortunately, they’re not 18- or 20-year-olds anymore,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking. “They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked. They’re little girls.”

  Where did this appetite for young girls come from?

  Look around you.

  Young girls have been sexualized for years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of over-sexualized children.

  “All it takes is one look at MySpace photos of teens to see examples—if they aren’t imitating porn they’ve actually seen, they’re imitating the porn-inspired images and poses they’ve absorbed elsewhere,” writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek. “Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school.”

  This is what Bennett refers to as the “pornification of a generation.”

  “In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives,” concludes Bennett. “Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.”

  In other words, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators. And then we wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused?

  Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported, “Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.” Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.

  Rarely do these girls enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.

  Debbie, a straight-A student who belonged to a close-knit Air Force family living in Phoenix, Ariz., is an example of this trading of flesh. Debbie was 15 when she was snatched from her driveway by an acquaintance-friend. Forced into a car, Debbie was bound and taken to an unknown location, held at gunpoint and raped by multiple men. She was then crammed into a small dog kennel and forced to eat dog biscuits. Debbie’s captors advertised her services on Craigslist. Those who responded were often married with children, and the money that Debbie “earned” for sex was given to her kidnappers. The gang raping continued. After searching the apartment where Debbie was held captive, police finally found Debbie stuffed in a drawer under a bed. Her harrowing ordeal lasted for 40 days.

  While Debbie was fortunate enough to be rescued, others are not so lucky. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day).

  With a growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.

  For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.

  Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.

  Peter Landesman paints the full horrors of life for those victims of the sex trade in his New York Times article “The Girls Next Door”:

  Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners–toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens–as well as what she called a “damage group.” “In the damage group, they can hit you or do anything they want to,” she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it’s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.”

  What Andrea described next shows just how depraved some portions of American society have become. “They’d get you hungry then to train you” to have oral sex. “They put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older, I’d teach the younger kids how to float away so things didn’t hurt.”

  Immigration and customs enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., report that when it comes to sex, the appetites of many Americans have now changed. What was once considered abnormal is now the norm. These agents are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. As one agent noted, “We’ve become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit.”

  This trend is reflected by the treatment many of the girls receive at the hands of the drug traffickers and the men who purchase them. Peter Landesman interviewed Rosario, a Mexican woman who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years. She said: “In America, we had ‘special jobs.’ Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.”

  A common thread woven through most survivors’ experiences is being forced to go without sleep or food until they have met their sex quota of at least 40 men. One woman recounts how her trafficker made her lie face down on the floor when she was pregnant and then literally jumped on her back, forcing her to miscarry.

  Holly Austin Smith was abducted when she was 14 years old, raped, and then forced to prostitute herself. Her pimp, when brought to trial, was only made to serve a year in prison.

  Barbara Amaya was repeatedly sold between traffickers, abused, shot, stabbed, raped, kidnapped, trafficked, beaten, and jailed all before she was 18 years old. “I had a quota that I was supposed to fill every night. And if I didn’t have that amount of money, I would get beat, thrown down the stairs. He beat me once with wire coat hangers, the kind you hang up clothes, he straightened it out and my whole back was bleeding.”

  As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune: “In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”

  One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.

  This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.

  Trafficked women and children are advertised on the internet, transported on the interstate, and bought and sold in swanky hotels.

  Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government’s war on sex trafficking—much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime—has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public, while doing little to make our communities safer.

  So what can you do?

  Educate yourselves and your children about this growing menace in our communities.

  Stop feeding the monster: Sex trafficking is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from homelessness, poverty, and self-esteem issues to sexualized television, the glorification of a pimp/ho culture—what is often referred to as the pornification of America—and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of pornography, music, entertainment, etc.

  This epidemic is largely one of our own making, especially in a corporate age where the value placed on human life takes a backseat to profit. It is estimated that the porn industry brings in more money than Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.

  Call on your city councils, elected officials and police departments to make the battle against sex trafficking a top priority, more so even than the so-called war on terror and drugs and the militarization of law enforcement.

  Stop prosecuting adults for victimless “crimes” such as growing lettuce in their front yard and focus on putting away the pimps and buyers who victimize these young women.

  Finally, the police need to do a better job of training, identifying and responding to these issues; communities and social services need to do a better job of protecting runaways, who are the primary targets of traffickers; legislators need to pass legislation aimed at prosecuting traffickers and “johns,” the buyers who drive the demand for sex slaves; and hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with rooms and cover for their dirty deeds.

  That so many women and children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.

  But the truth is that we are all guilty of contributing to this human suffering. The traffickers are guilty. The consumers are guilty. The corrupt law enforcement officials are guilty. The women’s groups who do nothing are guilty. The foreign peacekeepers and aid workers who contribute to the demand for sex slaves are guilty. Most of all, every individual who does not raise a hue and cry over the atrocities being committed against women and children in almost every nation around the globe—including the United States—is guilty.

  

• Midsized Metro Areas Are "In" Again

  The era of the mid-sized metro area is back, according to a new Bloomberg op-ed. In fact, for the first time since 2007, midsize metropolitan areas in the United States grew faster than large ones in the year ended July 1, 2018. The areas, with populations between 250,000 and 999,000, grew 0.8% versus 0.7% for large metropolitan areas. That data could signal that growth may be shifting back to smaller areas.

  As we just wrote about, large metropolitan areas like New York, LA and Chicago have seen their populations dwindle in recent years. However, most of the rest of the country is still seeing growth.

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  The 21 metro areas with more than 2.5 million and less than 9 million people accounted for 48.1% of US population growth from 2017 to 2018. These metro areas make up 20.3% of the country’s population. Overall, 56.2% of Americans lived in the 53 metro areas with 1 million people or more in July 2018. This figure is up from 54.6% in 2010 and 56.1% in 2017. And so even though the country may not necessarily be getting more urban, it is definitely getting more metropolitan.

  And signs of a momentum shift are becoming clear. There’s been an inflection since 2015 away from large metro areas and towards mid-sized and smaller ones.

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  One way to look at this is “as a contest between economics and livability”, according to the op-ed. The bigger areas continue to have an advantage in the former, as incomes rise with their population, and growth in per capita income from 2010 to 2017 has also generally favored the large areas.

  University of California at Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti wrote in 2012: “Large metro areas have been experiencing more income growth because the knowledge economy has an inherent tendency toward geographical agglomeration.”

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  There are still smaller metro areas that outdo bigger ones in things like percentage of the population with college degrees, but larger metro areas have had an advantage in attracting these people, because their size offers them more opportunities. If your first job doesn’t work out, for instance, there’s probably another one right around the corner. But the trade-offs of large metropolitan areas remain longer commutes and higher costs.

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  And large metropolitan areas have had the edge in harder to measure aspects of livability, including entertainment and food quality. Many metro areas with populations between 250,000 and 999,000 offer great restaurants, cultural attractions and appealing neighborhoods.

  The mid-sized metro revival should be welcomed, the piece concludes, arguing that the shift is a remedy to the concentrations of wealth in large metropolitan areas, where proposed solutions like subsidizing moves to higher-income regions and dismantling zoning regulations and other barriers to housing construction in in-demand cities are not getting traction.

  And the belief that the comeback can continue is real. Brookings Institution’s Alan Berube wrote in January:

  Although these regions lack the size and global reach of their much larger metro counterparts, they arguably retain the requisite scale to offer a distinctive economy and quality of life to their businesses and residents. Moreover, their size may also facilitate the sort of pragmatic, cross-sector problem solving that often bedevils larger metro areas; to wit, the average midsized metro area encompasses just 2.8 U.S. counties, versus 8.2 counties in the average large metro area.

  You can read the full op-ed here. 

  

• Will Trump Nominate A Gold Standard Advocate To Fed?

  Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

  Trump has already exerted more influence over one institution than any other president in over 100 years — the Federal Reserve.

  That’s because Trump has had more control over Fed personnel than any president since the Fed was founded in 1913. As I’ve written before, Trump now “owns” the Fed.

  When Trump was sworn in, he inherited two vacant seats on the seven-person board of governors of the Federal Reserve System. Holders of those two seats are also members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the group that sets U.S. interest rates and monetary policies.

  President Obama also had the same vacancies, but he did not nominate anyone to fill the seats because he doubted his chances of getting the nominees past the Republican-controlled Senate and he was sure “President Hillary” would do the right thing and appoint pro-Democratic nominees.

  In the end, Trump beat Clinton and the vacancies fell to Trump. Then Trump got another windfall. Within 14 months of becoming president, three additional Fed governors resigned (Dan Tarullo, Stan Fischer and Janet Yellen), and Trump suddenly had five vacancies to fill, or 70% of the entire Fed board.

  Trump promoted Jay Powell to chair and appointed Richard Clarida as vice chair, Randy Quarles as vice chair for regulation and Michelle Bowman to fill a seat reserved for community bankers.

  All of those appointments were well regarded by Wall Street and the media. But that still left Trump with the two original vacancies.

  Trump indicated he wanted to appoint Herman Cain and Steve Moore to fill those seats. Cain is a former presidential candidate, chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and CEO of the Godfather’s Pizza chain. Moore is a think tank analyst, founder of the Club for Growth and a former member of the editorial board of TheWall Street Journal.

  Cain has now withdrawn his nomination after running into opposition from Senate Republicans based in part on old allegations of sexual misconduct. Moore is also being opposed by those who fault him for not having a Ph.D. in economics.

  Whatever the merits, the real reason they have been opposed by monetary elites is that they are “friends of Trump” and will hold Jay Powell’s feet to the fire to cut interest rates and keep the economic expansion going ahead of the 2020 election.

  But if Moore withdraws next or if his nomination is defeated, no worries. There’s some indication that Trump’s next nominee will be Judy Shelton.

  She does have a Ph.D. and is a well-known advocate of a new gold standard. Just this Sunday she wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal, “The Case for Monetary Regime Change,” that challenged the current system and defended the classical gold standard.

  She has also defended Trump’s trade policies, arguing that those who embrace unfettered free trade dogma “disregard the fact that the ‘rules’ are not working for many American workers and companies.”

  For those who want Moore to step aside next, the best advice may be “Be careful what you wish for.”

  Regardless, the 2020 presidential election is already beginning to take shape.

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  A few weeks ago, I unveiled my first forecast on the outcome of the 2020 presidential race. My estimate was that Trump had a 60% chance of winning.

  I was also careful to explain that my forecasting model includes constant updating and would no doubt change between now and Election Day on Nov. 3, 2020.

  That’s normal. Politics is a highly volatile process and it’s foolish to put a stake in the ground this early. My model has quite a few factors, but the leading factor right now is that Trump’s chances are the inverse of the probability of a recession before the third quarter of 2020.

  If recession odds by 2020 are 40%, then Trump’s chances are the inverse of that, or 60%. With the passage of time, Trump’s odds go up because the odds of a recession go down.

  If a recession does hit, then Trump’s odds go way down. This dynamic can be used to explain and forecast Trump’s economic policies, including calls for interest rate cuts and efforts to place close friends on the Fed Board of Governors.

  It’s all connected.

  As usual, I found myself out on a limb with my forecast; the mainstream media are sure Trump will lose in 2020, if he’s not impeached sooner. So it was nice to get some company who sees things my way…

  A new Goldman Sachs research report also projects that Trump will win in 2020. Goldman shows a narrower margin of victory than my model, but a win is a win.

  Of course, their forecast will be updated (like mine) but we’re starting to see more signs from other professional analysts that Trump is a likely winner after all.

  

• Watch: Chinese University Successfully Launches Hypersonic Rocket 

  According to a Weibo post by Xiamen University, “Jia Geng No. 1” hypersonic rocket, developed by Xiamen University Aerospace Academy and Beijing Lingkong Tianxing Technology Co., Ltd., was successfully tested in Northwestern China.

  The pictures, embedded in the post, show the Jia Geng No. 1 rocket to be 28.5 feet long by 8.2 feet wide and weighing a little over 8,000 pounds.

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  The rocket features a gas turbine that could accelerate the vehicle to more than Mach 3, and has characteristics of a hypersonic ramjet engine.

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  The purpose of Jia Geng No.1 is likely to examine shockwaves at hypersonic speeds.

  The Shanghai Morning Post notes that Xiamen University is the first university in the world to have developed and flown a hypersonic rocket.

  “We call [the design] the double waverider,” said Zhu Chengxiang, an assistant professor at the university’s School of Aerospace Engineering and part of the Jia Geng No. 1 team.

  Unlike American hypersonic rockets such as Boeing’s X-51 Waverider, which rides on a hot layer of gas known as a “shock wave,” the Jiageng-1 No.1 rides on two layers of shock waves, one underneath the rocket and the other in the air intake of its ramjet engine.

  The Jiageng-1 No.1 has several innovative advantages over Western hypersonic rockets: it can transition from supersonic to hypersonic speeds with ease, and the design produces more lift allowing it to travel further with more efficient fuel consumption.

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  Chengxiang said the Pentagon is deeply disturbed by China’s rapid development of hypersonic vehicles and had tried to severe Chinese scientists’ collaboration efforts with Western researchers.

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  Another Weibo post by Xiamen University shows the hypersonic rocket in flight. The rocket flies throughout the Stratosphere with a maximum altitude of about 90,000 feet. During the test, the rocket performed as planned after making some maneuvers to “reproduce real flight conditions and conduct aerodynamic tests,” then glided down and deployed a parachute to land safely on the ground.

  Xiamen University Aerospace Academy with Beijing Lingkong Tianxing Technology Co., Ltd. successfully launched and recovered the reusable winged suborbital JiaGeng-1 technology tester rocket. (max alt 26.2Km)

  ℹ：https://t.co/kxtCxLBAla pic.twitter.com/zJE3sB6QJF

  — LaunchStuff (@LaunchStuff) April 23, 2019

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The Post said details of the flight were classified because the project was partly funded by the government.

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  Chen Yong, an associate professor of physics who was part of the team at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said the test by Xiamen University was historic.

  “Conducting hypersonic study in a university is quite difficult, especially when it comes to the stage to bring the concept from laboratory to the sky.” 

  Xiamen University is striving to develop a hypersonic aircraft capable of two hour flight time to any airport in the world, although the team acknowledged that such a goal was several decades out.

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  US Air Force Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, director of the Missile Defense Agency, said last year that he supports Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin’s push to develop space-based sensors that would defend the nation from hypersonic attacks by America’s adversaries [China and Russia].

  “The hypersonic threat is real, it is not imagination,” Lt. Gen. Greaves explained last summer at the Capitol Hill Club.

  Griffin warned that the US could be falling behind in hypersonic arms race.

  “In the last year, China has tested more hypersonic weapons than we have in a decade. We’ve got to fix that.”

  The latest Chinese hypersonic rocket test – exposes just how far the US is behind the curve.

  

• CA Logic: Raise Gas Taxes, Then Demand An Investigation Into Why Gas Prices Are High

  Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

  California is home to some of the most power-hungry politicians on Earth. These people actually hiked the gasoline tax, and are now demanding an investigation into why gas prices are higher in California than elsewhere in the United States.  It would be sad if it wasn’t so insane.

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  California Governor Gavin Newson is demanding an investigation into why the state’s gas prices are so high. But as Reason points out, it’s not all that difficult to see what that California politicians are the culprit.  In fact, the reason the gas prices are high is that Newsom (and other politicians) raised taxes on gasoline.

  As lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom supported a 2017 bill increasing the state’s gas taxes. When running for governor in 2018, he opposed a ballot initiative that would have repealed that same increase, reported Reason. But like all politicians, Newsom is unwilling to admit that he and his comrades in the California government have caused the problem. So begins the finger-pointing. The governor sent a letter to the California Energy Commission (CEC) on Tuesday demanding that the state agency “investigate” California’s roughly $4.03 per gallon gas prices, which are currently the highest in the country. Those prices are also well above the national average of $2.86 per gallon.

  “Independent analysis suggests that an unaccounted-for price differential exists in California’s gas prices and that this price differential may stem in part from inappropriate industry practices,” wrote Newsom in his letter to the CEC. 

  “These are all important reasons for the Commission to help shed light on what’s going on in our gasoline market.”

  California currently imposes the second-highest gas taxes in the country. A state excise tax currently adds $.417 per gallon (almost 42 cents per gallon), and that rate that will increase to $.473 (47 cents per gallon) come July. But that’s not all. On top of that tax, the state imposes a 2.25 percent gasoline sales tax. There’s more. California has also added a low-carbon fuel standard and a cap-and-trade scheme for carbon emissions which together already increase the state’s gas prices by $.24 per gallon above the national average, according to a 2017 state government report.

  The worst part is that Newsom isn’t the only problem causer asking for blame to shifted to “inappropriate industry practices” as opposed to their gas tax hikes. In January, 19 state legislators (17 of whom had voted in favor of that 2017 gas tax increase, while the other two had only entered office in 2018) sent a letter to State Attorney General Xavier Becerra, in which they demanded that the state’s Department of Justice (DOJ) investigate the “unexplained gasoline surcharge” that was estimated to cost Californian families $1,700 a year.

  Yeah. It’s a real head-scratcher.

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  Even someone who understands just the basics of economics knows that high levels of taxation and regulation and a lack of competition in the state’s fuel sector are not mutually exclusive explanations to the high gas prices.  Government fees and red tape often have the effect of squeezing out marginal producers and retailers (eliminating competition) giving remaining firms greater ability to raise prices.  It’s called supply and demand. The demand remains but much of the supply is gone. Once the competition (supply) is gone by way of taxation and regulation, the companies that remain can jack the prices up as high as they want.

  California’s government is not doing its residents any favors when it comes to their policies.

  

• 400,000 New Yorkers Face "Subway Hell" As L Train Shutdown Begins

  In what is likely going to prove to be a fascinating, if not all-out frightening experiment, New York City is about to find out what happens when its vital L train shuts down. Starting Friday night, the tunnel that ties Brooklyn and Manhattan together on the line is partially shutting down on nights and weekends for repairs, according to Bloomberg. Riders are anxious about what this will do to the already dilapidated and crowded subway system. And the true test will come during Monday morning’s commute, when the tunnel is supposed to re-open.

  Rebecca Pappa, an art therapist who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn said: “For me, it’s going to be a pain. I still don’t know exactly what’s happening. There’s been a lot of different information out there.”

  In January, Governor Andrew Cuomo called off a full shut down of the tunnel for 15 months and instead offered a new approach that would close one tunnel at a time and limit the closures to just nights and weekends.

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  The new plan is called the “L train slowdown” and was cheered by riders who will keep their line to Manhattan. At the same time, it raises questions over safety and whether or not riders are going to have alternatives on nights and weekends when transit officials have already warned that crowding may make it so bad that stations could close temporarily. 

  This leads to the obvious question: then what’s the point of keeping them open?

  The repairs are going to be a major challenge for the MTA which is constantly under fire for slow work and going over budget. It’s also a test for Governor Cuomo, who essentially took on responsibility for the entire project.

  While planning for the project, officials had concerns that removing concrete would create silica dust, a toxic mineral that can cause lung cancer. The MTA has said – surprise – they’re confident that the dust will not pose a risk.

  But this doesn’t mean that some riders aren’t doubtful. Michael Magner, an L train rider who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said he was concerned about the dust, especially since there was no independent review of the construction approach. He said: “I don’t know enough about exactly how dangerous silica dust is compared to something like asbestos. It seems bad, but not as bad as that.”

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  The authority’s chief development officer, Janno Lieber, responded: “This is not new stuff — we deal with concrete and its demolition every day, and have well established methods in place to handle this work safely. We have adopted a hyper-conservative standard, and have every precaution in place to protect workers and the public.”

  His agency said it will post the silica dust levels online once a week to keep the public informed.

  This didn’t stop transit workers from holding a protest at the Bedford Avenue station in Brooklyn earlier this month. The MTA’s managing director, Veronique Hakim, called the protests “irresponsible”, saying “It’s ludicrous to think that we would do anything to put our employees or our customers at risk.”

  In typical New York fashion, other riders are concerned less about inhaling toxic dust that might kill them and more about getting where they’re going.

  Amy Lucker, a librarian at New York University said: “It’s going to be a pain in the butt anytime I want to leave my neighborhood
  on the weekend. Anybody who thinks it’s not going to spill over to the weekdays is deluding themselves. It’s going to be general annoyance for at least a year and a half.”

  The MTA’s Twitter account said this week that “stations will be way more crowded than usual”.

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  Mitchell L. Moss, the director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University said that car sharing and ride sharing services will be the beneficiary: “The real winners are Uber Pool and Shared Lyft. That’s how
  people are going to come and go to bars and restaurants.”

  But still, ride sharing isn’t a realistic solution for many New Yorkers. Sam Kerins, an actor who lives in Brooklyn, said simply: “I can’t afford to Uber everywhere.”

  Stephanie Rosario, a hearing screener for newborns who lives in Ridgewood, Queens, thinks the plan is too little, too late from Cuomo: “I honestly think they should have shut the whole thing down. If you want to build something and to fix it, then fix it well.”

  

• Game Of Crypto-Thrones

  Authored by Alena Nariniani via HackerNoon.com,

  Specially for Game of Thrones fans I’ve decided to imagine the crypto market in the GoT universe.

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  Here is what came out of it.

  State governments and other regulatory agencies — House Lannister

  Would eagerly take control of absolutely everything, but so far it’s not quite working out. Not the type to back down either. Stubbornly trying to regulate more and more areas, they claim people user security is the key motivation behind their actions, saying that crypto regulation lays far outside of their interests since they have plenty of other matters to be taking care of (the Lannisters also frequently claim they neither need or care for King’s Landing and they are content with Casterly Rock, and all they are doing is for the benefit of the people)…

  The people users believe. Or pretend to be doing so. They gather into small and large groups to air their grievances, but ultimately, having discussed them, disperse. However, since the Lannisters have such valuable assets as Qyburn, a necromancer, and the Mountain, a towering brutal warrior, such gatherings are not a concern to anyone.

  Authorities and regulators are in a constant power struggle between each other, trying to make their way into the very top of their hierarchy, however, when faced with a common enemy (think industry that is not yet regulated to the grown) they quickly rally up. Most of House Lannister members are there illegitimately in some way, but it’s almost impossible to drive them away from the Iron Throne.

  SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) — House Stark

  The SEC representatives would surely prefer to be Daenerys Targaryen, but they are frequently reminded that they are not directly relevant in the crypto industry, so they sigh and take on the role of House Stark.

  They dream of controlling the crypto market the same way they control the US securities market — with an iron fist. Their motto, “Winter is coming”, is said with the intention to hurry the regulation of the market… They almost never scheme, but from time to time they try to speak to Lannisters as equals (bringing suggestions, expressing opinions). This gives the Lannisters a good laugh, while the Starks are walking back to Winterfell gritting their teeth.

  Commonly seen as having great reputation — in the eyes of a layperson, that is, as once you get deeper into their values, rules and laws, it becomes apparent their worldview is incompatible with the digital age…

  Crypto enthusiasts, analysts, experts — House Greyjoy

  In their dreams they also wish to be the Daenerys Targaryen of the crypto world, while also realizing they would be out of their depth in the role, so they stick to the homely castle on the Iron Islands. “We do not sow”, nor do they reap, or do anything at all, for that matter. They are akin to marketing people who are always going on about how everybody will be living large or die in the gutter (underline as appropriate).

  Lie. Incessantly and egregiously, just as the Grey King who, in addition to the islands, ruled the very seas (since he had taken a mermaid as his wife), all crypto enthusiasts claim to either be buddies with Buterin and Nakamoto, or have the insider scoop that is about to yield them millions which they are so conveniently ready to share for a modest donation of $10 to $30.

  Information and advertisement platforms — Brotherhood Without Banners

  These guys, just like anyone else, would be excited to hit it big in the industry just like Daenerys Targaryen, but for the most part (with a few exceptions) are only capable of showing off and quietly sobbing over the great times past when they could charge a few thousand dollars for publishing a shabby advertorial… Since these groups are so disparate, they can only cut it as the Brotherhood Without Banners.

  Social media — House Tully

  Seven bloody hells, who wouldn’t want to be Daenerys? Social media sure would. House Lannister is, perhaps, the only exception, they do just fine as they are. So House Tully is what social media most resembles. Proliferating and multiplying without much issue, they are nonetheless trying to influence the status quo, without much success. They generally play nice (although they do tend to scheme a great deal behind closed doors), but nothing they touch seems to work the way they want it to, despite their best intentions.

  Facebook — Petyr Baelish (Littlefinger)

  In the most direct relation to House Tully (friend since childhood, was raised in Riverrun), but is different from the rest of the family. On a friendly footing with the Lannisters. Flips its stance as it sees fit — initially stood against crypto and even banned crypto-related advertisement, but later, as the true Master of Coin, realized that this venture smells like money and announced its own token! Naturally, the ban on crypto-related ads was never lifted… All for the sake of the people users, as they say. Everyone dealing with Baelish, for the sake of their own safety, must remember one thing: Baelish, above all other things, is concerned with himself alone.

  Vitalik Buterin — Prince Oberyn

  Dorne and its ruler seem quite positive amidst the rest of the leaders — they mind their own business and don’t participate in others’ squabbles. From time to time, however, the Red Viper of Dorne does turn his attention to the affairs around him, shakes his head saying “how did it come to this?”, but doesn’t act and keeps others from compromising their safety. After all, the consequences of getting his hands dirty in others’ affairs are far too apparent to him, thanks to his intellect. With that in mind, Dorne stance seems more than reasonable.

  Satoshi Nakamoto — Daenerys Targaryen

  The Mother of Bitcoin, Queen (King) of Andals and the First Crypto… Enough said: the creator of the first cryptocurrency, champion of all things good… Nobody has ever seen him, but he has their respect! The regular folk — digital currency users — are anxious for his return, hoping the saviour will free them from the tight grip of House Lannister. Whether or not he comes is unknown, so Lannisters are barely concerned about him. They have enough stuff to be taking care of!

  ICO/STO/IEO investors — Khalasar

  Investors are the army of Daenerys, left under the walls of an unconquered Meereen. They still remember how great it was in the beginning, but wondering, where are the promised dragons, nudity and liberated slaves now?

  

• With Assad Victorious, US Oil Sanctions Now Strangle Entire Syrian Population

  The deep irony of the tragic Syria war is that after seven years of massive bloodshed, as the government has emerged victorious, it is only now with relative stability and ensuing calm over most of the country that an “economic siege” has hit the population with full force. 

  Damascus even during some of the worst years of war was always a bustling traffic-packed economic center for its six million inhabitants, but as we noted previously the country has been plunged into a fuel crisis that is the result of new US-led oil sanctions targeting Damascus and Tehran. As one recent WSJ report put it, Iranian oil deliveries to Syria have “fallen off a cliff” since January.

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  “Lifeless” and “decimated economy” are words used to describe the Syrian capital city and home to Assad in a new Bloomberg piece (which appeared just as busy as most any global cosmopolitan center only months ago), as further “traffic is light” and “morale is down,” according to the report.

  “Waiting 19 hours for gas in a lifeless city” — the headlines read. The ongoing weeks-long crisis has now been made especially worse after the Trump administration this week ended embargo exemptions for eight countries allowed to purchase Iranian crude.

  “Lines of cars stretching for miles wait hours to fill their tanks with the 20 liters of gasoline that Syrians in government-controlled areas are allowed every five days,” Bloomberg describes. “The last shipment of oil from Iran, which was sending up to 3 million barrels a month, came in October before sanctions were resumed.”

  It was thought runaway inflation during the height of the war years would reverse course, but as one Damascus resident related:

  “I thought once the war ended, our currency would become stronger and our living standards better,” said Saeed al-Khaldi, who transports vegetables across the sprawling city. Damascus’s population has almost doubled since the war started, to over 6 million, as civilians fled violence in other regions. “Instead, we’re living from one crisis to the other.”

  The WSJ reported last month that Iranian oil had been routinely delivered to Syria throughout most of the war, but now “U.S. sanctions have cut off Iranian oil shipments to Syria, taking an unprecedented toll on a flow of crude that had persisted in the face of long-term international restrictions and helped sustain the Assad regime through years of civil war.”

  So why did Washington previously keep it flowing? Why cut off supplies now through increased sanctions? Simply put, Assad and his Iranian allies won the war.

  And so long as there were US-Saudi supported “rebels” entrenched in Damascus’ suburbs, such as Eastern Ghouta, and other pockets across the country, any targeting of Syrian oil imports at that time would have strangled not only the regime but America’s proxies on the ground as well. 

  How would #Syria ‘s State have been able to avoid the latest sanctions on Petroleum Products?

  By not going for the final “win” in April 2018 in Eastern Ghouta & other opposition held areas near Damascus.

  OFAC prepared its directive & delivered it barely 6 months afterwards pic.twitter.com/XaeHrQodWV

  — EHSANI2 (@EHSANI22) April 18, 2019

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  But now, as last year the final anti-Assad pockets of insurgents were rooted out by the Syrian Army, Washington is content to economically strangle the entire region.

  One little acknowledged fact is that by United Nations figures, the majority of the displaced from the war are actually “internally displaced persons” (7 million IDP’s based on past years’ estimates by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR), which means Washington’s policy of economic strangulation is directly impacting every part of the population, whether pro-government or not. 

  The White House still fundamentally prioritizes weakening Syria as crucial in its ultimate goal of regime change in Tehran. In this sense, the “long war” for Syria could merely be in its middle phase. 

  

• Kashmir: The Constant Conflict

  Authored by Jayant Bhandari via Liberty Unbound blog, annotated by Acting-Man.com,

  Threats of Nuclear War

  On February 26, 2019, the Indian Air Force, for the first time since 1971, conducted a raid inside Pakistan, and allegedly hit a terrorist training camp, killing more than 250 terrorists. Pakistan showed photographs of damage to a tree or two. According to Pakistani officials, no one died and no infrastructure was damaged.

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  Mirage 2000 warplane of the Indian Air Force in medias res. [PT]

  Photo credit: hindustantimes.com

  It is hard to know the truth, for India did not provide any evidence, nor did Pakistan allow journalists access to the site. Both governments blatantly lie to their citizens, retailing falsehoods so hilarious that even a half-sane person could see through them. But drunk in nationalism, Indians and Pakistanis normally don’t.

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  Photo of the damage the Indian strike of February 26 did as shown by Pakistan

  Photo credit: BBC News

  India’s intrusion was in response to a suicide car-bombing on February 14 in Kashmir, a bombing that killed 45 troops. Indians were moving a convoy of 2,500. They were in buses, not in armoured cars, as officially stated. Challenging the army is sacrilegious, so no one asks why their movement was so badly planned, and why they had not been airlifted, which would have been far cheaper and easier.

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  Image from the suicide attack in Kashmir that preceded the Indian air strike [PT]

  PTI Photo / S. Irfan

  In all the ramping up of emotions in the aftermath of the suicide bombing on the troops, it became very clear that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi would lose the next elections (which are due in a couple of months) unless he retaliated. Sending India to war was a small price.

  Soon after India’s intrusion, Pakistan closed its airspace. Tension at the border went up significantly, and continues to be high.

  A day later, Pakistan attempted airstrikes in India. In the ensuing challenge, one of India’s MIG-21 planes, known as flying coffins because they are very old and outdated, was shot down by a Pakistani missile. The Indian pilot parachuted into Pakistani territory. India claimed to have downed a Pakistani F-16. Pakistan denied the claim.

  The Indian pilot captured by Pakistan was beaten up by locals and obviously by the Pakistani army to get him to praise Pakistani “hospitality” and “kindness”

  TV stations in both countries were singing songs about the valor of their troops, which consist of uneducated rural people with no other job opportunities and absolutely no clue about what they are fighting for. These troops act as gladiators for the spectacle of the bored, TV-watching masses, who feel vicariously brave while munching their chips. Of course, the social media warriors know that it is not they who will be at the front-lines in any serious conflict.

  A video from the Hindustan Times – “Pulwama attack triggers national outrage, protests at many places” [PT]

  It is not in the culture of the Third World masses to feel peace and happiness. Either they are slogging away in the field and going to sleep a bit hungry — which helps to keep them focused and sane — or, if they have time on their hands, they become hedonistic and graduate to deriving pleasure from destructive activities. The latter becomes apparent as soon as they have enough to eat. This feedback system in their culture applies entropic force to take them back to Malthusian equilibrium.

  Pakistan’s raison d’etre is to obsess over Kashmir and the human rights violations therein that the Indian army inflicts, oblivious of a much worse tyranny provided by its own army and fanatics, particularly in Baluchistan. Once Pakistan’s social media had put the people into a trance of war, officials had no option but to retaliate.

  Both armies are thoroughly incompetent and disorganized, and extremely corrupt (troops in India actually double up as house-servants of their bosses — something that would be inconceivable to a well-organized and truly nationalistic body of soldiers.) The tribal societies of Pakistan and India merely posture; they have no courage to go into a real war. But alas! Posturing can become reality.

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  Army cartoon from an Indian newspaper [PT]

  On this occasion, threats of nuclear bombing were made. The bombs would probably have failed to explode, but it was obvious that the United States could not be a bystander. Despite the fact that Trump was busy in Vietnam with another nuclear-armed country, North Korea, he had to make a few calls.

  He had to interfere, as an adult does when two kids are fighting. Those of us who complain — quite rightly — about the US military-industrial complex should consider the unseen, unrecognized good that the US does in helping to avoid a nuclear holocaust.

  Kashmir, Bone of Contention

  The cause of such a war – the stated point of contention between India and Pakistan – is Kashmir. They both want to have Kashmir. And, just to complicate things, some Kashmiris want full independence. But it must be said: the approach of everyone involved is grossly stupid.

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  Three countries are laying claim to Kashmir [PT]

  Kashmir (including Jammu, “the gateway to Kashmir”) has a GDP of US $22 billion. It has only 1% of India’s population, but it gets 10% of federal grants. India’s defense budget is US $52 billion, with Kashmir as the primary reason; and because of Kashmir, a lot of additional funds are spent on internal security, including the 500,000 Indian troops positioned there.

  Kashmir is a bottomless pit for India, and the money does no good for Kashmir, either. Kashmir must exist under the tyranny of terrorists and of Indian forces, who under the law do not face accountability in the courts. Kashmir has no resources of value or any economy of substance; its populace is inward-looking and fanatic. There is no reason for India not to kick Kashmir out of the federation.

  Pakistan, with a fraction of India’s economy, spends money comparable to India’s to try to take over Kashmir, occupy the one-third of Kashmir that it has right now, train terrorists, and, as a consequence, destroy itself economically and socially. Were Kashmir to join Pakistan, it would offer only negative value, dragging down Pakistan’s per capita GDP. There is no rational reason for Pakistan to accept Kashmir, let along fight for it.

  Kashmir as an independent country would be landlocked and not much different from Afghanistan. No sane Kashmiri would want to be independent from India. Although India is backward and wallows in poverty and tyranny, in relative terms it is the best hope for Kashmir. Moreover, Ahmadi Muslims who went to Pakistan after the separation of 1947 are deemed non-Muslims by mainstream Pakistanis and by Pakistan’s constitution. The same fate awaits Kashmiris if they join Pakistan.

  In a sane world, there is nothing to negotiate. As you can see above, I could be on any of the three sides of the negotiating table and accept the demands of the other two without asking for anything in return.

  Unfortunately, my compromises would not be seen as such. In keeping with Third World proclivities, they would be seen as signs of weakness, and new demands would soon be made, ceaselessly generated by superstition, ego, expediency, tribalism, and emotion. This, not Kashmir, is the primary problem, and this is the reason why here is no solution, ever.

  Institutionalized Irrationality

  Muslims are not the only culprits — it is merely that talking about them post-9/11 is politically more acceptable. In the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and Africa, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims are all included in the cycle of tyranny and irrationality. If Islam comes across as worse, it is mostly because in these places it has institutionalized irrationality, fed on it, and been self-victimized by it.

  Since the inclusion of the sharia in Pakistan’s constitution in the 1980s, Pakistan, which was until then richer than India on a per capita basis, has taken a rapid slide downwards. Today, freedom of speech is so constrained that any accusation of having said a word against the “holy” book or the army can result in capital punishment — if, that is, one avoids getting lynched before reaching the courts.

  Protests erupt in Pakistan after a conviction for blasphemy against Asia Bibi – a Christian woman – was overturned [PT]

  A Christian woman, Asia Bibi, was sentenced to death in Pakistan in 2010 for the crime of drinking water from a cup reserved for Muslims. After a decade of prison, she was released, not because the Supreme Court saw the case as utterly stupid, which it should have, but because it didn’t see clear proof that she had committed the “crime.”

  Pakistan erupted in civil chaos as millions thronged the streets, asking for her blood. In my totem pole of values and consequences, Pakistan is 25 years ahead of India in self-destruction.

  An Ocean of Corruption

  Corruption these days hits me soon after I land in Delhi. It has now become customary for the toilet-caretaker at the airport to demand a tip. With his dirty hands he offers tissue paper to me and tries to make me feel guilty if I don’t accept it.

  The Indian government has tried to control corruption, through the demonetization of 86% of currency in 2016 and the imposition of a nationwide sales tax a year later. While these haven’t controlled corruption, they have managed to seriously harm the economy by destroying the informal sector, which employs 82% of Indians. And without the informal sector, the formal sector will falter.

  Financial corruption is not even the real problem. Were bribery to stop, India would rapidly become North Korea or Eritrea. I say that because financial corruption is a necessary safety valve in over-regulated societies. When such backward societies do manage to control bribery in isolation, they create extremely suffocating environments.

  North Korea and Eritrea have actually controlled bribery by getting their citizens to snitch on each other and by extraordinary levels of punishments. Backward societies like these are necessarily subdued and stagnant, lack of skills being the real reason for their backwardness; and the lack of the safety valve of bribery constricts whatever potential they have.

  But financial corruption, a symptomatic problem, is seen as the prime problem by politically correct kids who go to study at Ivy League colleges and then to work for IMF, the World Bank, etc., without any real-life experience. They see financial corruption being removed from one place, only to find it reappearing in another; they don’t understand what is happening.

  India is an ocean of corruption, but it’s not just financial. More importantly, it is cultural. The real corruption is cultural irrationality, the irrationality of people who operate not through honesty, pride, compassion, or honor, but through expediency. Trying to control bribery in such societies does not work, because bribes are just a part of the whole package of social corruption and irrationality.

  As the economy has grown, India has been on a path to increased fanaticism and violent nationalism. These days, if you are found to be in possession of beef, you risk getting lynched. Nationalism is on the rise, rather rapidly. You are forced to stand up for the national anthem before the start of movies in cinema halls.

  Complaining about the Prime Minister on social media can land you in prison. Opposing his policies can get you beaten up. India’s constitution stays secular, but the trend is in the same direction that Pakistan has been on.

  Dubious Economic Miracle

  The World Bank, IMF, etc. continue to report that India is among the fastest growing economies in the world, and is perhaps even faster growing than China. While these numbers are completely erroneous, even if they weren’t, institutionally the Indian subcontinent has been rudderless since the time the British left. All economic growth since the time of so-called independence has come because of importation of technology from the West.

  But what about the fact that India has one of the largest numbers of engineers and PhDs in the world?  It is easy to get a degree without studying — and not just in India — and the results are obvious. In the age of the internet, when a competent engineer can work remotely for a Western client, Indian “engineers” work as taxi drivers, deliver Amazon products, or get jobs as janitors. Their degrees are just degrees on paper.

  Moreover, education is a tool; so is technology. They must be employed by reason. Without reason, “education” and technology serve the wrong masters: tribalism and superstitions. No wonder that with increasing prosperity, “educational” achievement, and better technology, India is regressing culturally.

  India is massively lacking in skills. Finding a plumber or an electrician is an uphill task—they create more problems than they solve. Indians are completely unprepared for the modern economy. This is the reason why you hardly see anything in Western markets that is made in India, despite India’s having more than one-sixth of the world’s population. It is virtually impossible to form a company of five people in India and expect it to work with any kind of efficiency.

  People often blame China for copying Western technology. While that is true, one must recognize that copying takes a certain amount of skill that people in some other economies simply don’t have. The situation of India has worsened as the best of Indians now increasingly prefer to leave for greener pastures, including even Papua New Guinea.

  Lacking leadership, post-British India is rapidly becoming tribal, fanatic, and nationalistic. We must remember that India as a union is together only because of inertia from the days of the British. When the inertia is gone, India will disintegrate into tribal units, as will Pakistan and much of the rest of the Third World.

  Conclusion

  A horrible war will one day break out between India and Pakistan. It will not be because of Kashmir, which is just an excuse, but because irrational people always blame others, envy them, and hate them. They fail to negotiate. They have no valor, but constant posturing will eventually trigger something. There is no solution to their problems. Every problem that the British left behind has simmered and gotten worse.

  As soon as India reaches a stage where it can no longer grow economically because of imported technology, its cultural decline will become rapidly visible. Though India is 25 years behind Pakistan, both are walking toward self-destruction, to a tribal, medieval past.

  As for the US, the job of any rational US president is to help ensure that destruction stays within the borders of India and Pakistan.

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  Modi’s electoral chances restored by militarism [PT]

  

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• European Equities May Benefit As $1 Trillion In U.S. Buybacks Vanish Into Thin Air

  European equities may start to finally see some love, as they are now positioned to take advantage of one significant coming tailwind from the U.S., according to Bloomberg. Over the next 12 months, US stocks are going to lose a significant amount of support that they have received from buybacks, as the nearly $1 trillion buyback bonanza that has fueled stock purchases in the United States starts to come to an end, according to Sanford C. Bernstein strategists.

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  This could be an area where European stocks, due to their low dependence on buybacks, could see help as a result.

  Bernstein strategists led by Inigo Fraser-Jenkins said:

   “This would remove one advantage of U.S. equities over Europe. As the buyback support is reduced it will make a stronger relative case for Europe.”

  And the decision of the U.S. central bank to hold off on rate increases may have temporarily reduced concerns about debt hurting equities, but the topic is still on the table and credit spreads are expected to keep widening over the next year.

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  Furthermore, the significance of share repurchases to the US rally has been pronounced, with $1 trillion in buybacks in just 2018 alone, far overshadowing the $100 billion in net inflows from active and passive funds. And even though European equities have rallied to the tune of more than $1.5 trillion since December’s lows, shorting these stocks remains a popular trade globally, according to Bank of America Corp.’s latest fund manager survey. And many traders are still on the sidelines, as Europe’s ugly politics and mixed economic data continues to weigh on sentiment.

  Stock funds in Europe have been hemorrhaging for nearly a year with outflows since the Brexit referendum reaching $139 billion. Redemptions have been so large that they have “erased the inflows fueled by Mario Draghi’s 2012 pledge to do whatever it takes to preserve the Euro.” 

  And although Bernstein strategists aren’t ready to make a buy call for European equities, low investor positioning, discounted valuations and anticipated support from reduced US buybacks are worth acknowledging, they note.

  The analysts concluded: “Europe is uniquely hated. We like to be contrarian and so large outflows incline us to like a region. However, we are not quite ready to issue a ‘buy Europe’ call.”

  

• Poroshenko Out, Zelensky In. Will Things Change In Ukraine?

  Authored by Tom Luongo,

  The incalculable damage that’s been done to the region for cynical geopolitical goals can never be undone but it can stop.

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  With art imitating life presidential elections in Ukraine ended with Volodymyr Zelenski garnering a massive majority over incumbent Petro Poroshenko. So, let’s get right to the point.

  Will this change anything?

  The West poured a lot of money and time into Poroshenko. It was obvious months ago he was not going to win a second term no matter what he did. With him mostly gone from the scene it is now up to Zelensky to put together a plan which goes far beyond the protest vote against Poroshenko’s obvious corruption.

  The problem is we have no idea if he’s 1) capable of doing this or 2) strong enough to implement anything he comes up with.

  With his party polling below 30% it’s clear this wasn’t a mandate for him but one against Poroshenko. The probability is high that he will be unable to form a stable, majority government later this year if his election isn’t a country-wide revolution but rather a short-lived temper tantrum.

  Let’s hope it’s the former. Given just how deep the US ties into Poroshenko and Yulia Tymoshenko are I would bet on the latter, unfortunately.

  So, his next steps are important. And the issues facing him are severe.

  From the Donbass, which he supported reconciling with versus Poroshenko’s unbridled belligerence, to Crimea. Zelensky will have to face down enormous political pressure to solve them in ways that reflect reality.

  That means mending some of the bridges burned under Poroshenko with Russia, which he says he wants. But the question is whether he realizes that much of the anti-Poroshenko vote is tied into this. And just how tenuous his position as president truly is.

  It means he will need to look Southeast to Pakistan where outsider and supposed political neophyte Imran Khan is walking a similar tightrope as a geopolitical hot potato. Khan is trying to do unite the civilian and military arms of Pakistan’s leadership under one roof.

  It’s no small task.

  And, so far, Khan has acquitted himself well. He’s cut deals with both Saudi Arabia on energy and Iran on border security/terrorism. He’s survived major conflagrations with India and Iran; false flag operations timed to create maximal chaos and paralyze his government and any reforms.

  In short, Zelensky will have to lead. It will mean talking with Putin. It will mean giving up something to put the Western vultures, both in the US and Europe, at bay. And he needs to do so in a way that is orthogonal to Poroshenko.

  If Zelensky is going to survive and bring Ukraine out of the mess that it’s in, he’s going to have to realize that rapprochement with Russia is the way forward.

  It means having the courage to not make unruly demands on Putin. Poroshenko spent the last year of his presidency leaving poison pills behind for whoever succeeded him.

  Breaking the Treaty of Friendship and attacking the Kerch Strait Bridge being the two big ones. He has to agree to back off on military use of the Sea of Azov and accept blame for the incident in return for getting the sailors Russia holds freed.

  Ending the bombing of the Donbass is also needed, disengaging back to the Minsk contact lines and stop lying about the situation. This would go a long way to establish a baseline of trust.

  And it’s low-hanging fruit. Ukrainians outside of the insane American diaspora, want this done. But, it’s also on a short-timer because 2019 is slipping away and a lot of energy issues have to be solved.

  Putin upped the ante barring coal and oil exports to Ukraine last week placing Ukraine in a very vulnerable position come this winter. And remember, no gas transport deal at the end of this year as well.

  He is not without leverage as the EU has dragged its feet on the final approvals of the Nordstream 2 pipeline. This is a pivotal moment. Gazprom and Russia are pot-committed to the project, with it nearly complete and the EU is now trying to leave it unfinished to inflict maximum pain.

  The Ukrainian economy is collapsing. Coal production is down 8% year-over-year. Putin knows this and has Zelensky in a stranglehold.

  Angela Merkel has made no bones about how important securing gas transit through Ukraine is to getting the EU to change its policies towards Russia. And Vladimir Putin will not budge on his negotiating any new deals until Ukraine changes.

  So, all of these competing agendas are coming to a climax in the next couple of months. And off in the corner is the European Parliamentary elections in a month. And they could easily change the entire political will of the European Union.

  Euroskeptics like Matteo Salvini could finally push for ending sanctions against Russia if Putin and Zelensky bury the hatchet on some of the latest issues left behind by Poroshenko. Returning the sailors would undercut the need for the latest sanctions. Withdrawing the Ukrainian Army from the contact line in accordance with the now only symbolic Minsk II agreement would melt EU resistance to lifting sanctions.

  But, lastly, these things would allow for a nominal gas transit contract between Gazprom and Naftogaz which would end-run around the opposition to Nordstream 2 as Merkel tells her people and Denmark to stand down on the final permits.

  Lots of ifs, I know. But that’s the path in front of Zelensky if he’s serious about making substantive changes to the dynamic in Eastern Europe. The incalculable damage that’s been done to the region for cynical geopolitical goals can never be undone but it can stop.

  

• Ebola Doctors In Congo Are Threatening A Strike At The Worst Possible Time

  The doctors crucial to helping stop Ebola outbreaks in the Congo are threatening to go on strike indefinitely if health workers are attacked again, according to AP.

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  The threat comes after a Cameroon national that was working for the World Health Organization was killed last week. Dr. Richard Valery Mouzoko Kiboung of Cameroon was killed on Friday during an attack on an Ebola response command center in the eastern Congo.

  Dr. Kalima Nzanzu urged authorities to provide greater security for the Ebola response and said that he wanted residents to understand that doctors and other medical staff are there to help fight the outbreak.

  Politically, eastern Congo is a volatile area where many armed groups operate. Lack of trust in government has subverted efforts to contain Ebola since the outbreak began late last summer. Some residents falsely accuse foreigners of bringing Ebola to the area.

  Just days ago, we reported that the Ebola outbreak in the Congo was close to “becoming a global emergency”. Two weeks ago, the World Health Organization issued a statement on the ongoing Ebola outbreak in North Kivu and Ituri provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

  The recent spike of cases increases the threat that the deadly virus will spread to other countries and efforts must be redoubled to stop it, the WHO said last Friday after a meeting of its expert committee.

  On April 12, the WHO claimed that while the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Congo is of “deep concern” the situation does not yet warrant being declared a global emergency.

  Here are a few concerning excerpts from the statement:

  However, the Committee wished to express their deep concern about the recent increase in transmission in specific areas, and therefore the potential risk of spread to neighbouring countries.

  Special emphasis should be placed on addressing the rise in case numbers in the remaining epicentres, notably Butembo, Katwa, Vuhovi, and Mandima.

  Because there is a very high risk of regional spread, neighbouring countries should continue to accelerate current preparedness and surveillance efforts, including vaccination of health care workers and front-line workers in surrounding countries.

  Cross-border collaboration should continue to be strengthened, including timely sharing of data and alerts, cross-border community engagement and awareness raising. In addition, work should be done to better map population movements and understand social networks bridging national boundaries.

  The Committee maintains its previous advice that it is particularly important that no international travel or trade restrictions should be applied. Exit screening, including at airports, ports, and land crossings, is of great importance; however, entry screening, particularly in distant airports, is not considered to be of any public health or cost-benefit value. (source)

  The outbreak has become the second-deadliest in history, behind the West African one from 2014-16 that killed more than 11,300 people. As of April 15, the outbreak has claimed 821 lives. The total case number is 1273. Unfortunately, both numbers are soaring, and experts say it is not even close to ending.

  

• 'The Satanic Temple' Has Evolved Into An Anti-Trump Movement, And Leftists Are Flocking To It

  Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

  The Satanic Temple is the perfect religion for progressives.  You can believe anything you want, as long as you hate what Donald Trump, Christians and conservatives believe.  Unlike the Church of Satan, the Satanic Temple doesn’t even believe in a supernatural entity called Satan.  Instead, they celebrate Satan as “the ultimate rebel”, and they relish in using the symbol of Satan to greatly upset Christians.  The Satanic Temple was founded in 2013, and from the very beginning it was clear that they were primarily a political movement.  In fact, they openly tell prospective members that the only real requirement for joining is to believe “in the political and secular actions” of the group…

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  “If there’s a local chapter where you are, to join you do have to be accepted, but there’s no initiation or anything. You don’t even have to be a Satanist, you can just be a strong ally who believes in the political and secular actionswithout being super stoked about all the aesthetic aspects.”

  Previously, Satanism in America had always been a shadowy underground movement, but the Satanic Temple has changed all that.

  Instead of avoiding the public eye, they believe that their rebellion against conservatives and Christians “requires a level of political participation”…

  ‘Traditionally, Satanists practice very privately, closed doors, black candles, black metal music, but with the Satanic philosophy being where Satanism represents rebellion against arbitrary authority, we believe it requires a level of political participation. I think that we need to go into the public sphere and announce ourselves without shame.’

  The organization grew rapidly after it was founded, but if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election that probably would have put a damper on their political activism.

  But once Donald Trump won the election, interest in the group absolutely exploded…

  “The Satanic Temple attracted ‘thousands’ of new members in just the first 36 hours after the election of Donald Trump,” the group reported. “The 4-year-old temple, which had a pre-Trump membership of around 50,000, has never before seen a spike in registration nearly this big.”

  “We’re definitely a resistance movement,”spokesperson and co-founder Lucien Greaves said after a speech outside the University of Colorado Boulder. “We stand in stark opposition to this idea that we must unify under a single religious banner.”

  Thanks to a favorable new documentary about the group, it is getting a lot of attention right now.

  And even many leftists that have absolutely no intention of joining the Satanic Temple are saying very positive things about the organization.  For example, the following comes from a Huffington Post article entitled “Satan Is Having A Moment”…

  Satanists, it turns out, are everything you think they’re not: patriotic, charitable, ethical, equality-minded, dedicated to picking up litter with pitchforks on an Arizona highway.

  That much is clear in the fantastic new documentary “Hail Satan?” — which chronicles the rise of the Satanic Temple, a movement that has little to do with its titular demon. Founded in 2013, the organization is equal parts modern-day religion, political activist coalition and meta cultural revolution. By reclaiming the pop iconography that has long frightened evangelical America ― devil worship, ritualistic sacrifice, horns, pentagrams, the so-called Black Mass ― the Satanic Temple aims to catch people’s attention and then surprise them with messages of free speech, compassion, liberty and justice for all.

  Positive articles like that make members of the Satanic Temple sound like civic-minded do-gooders that just want to make a positive impact on society, but the truth is that they absolutely loathe everything that conservatives and Christians stand for.

  They really hate President Trump, and they really, really hate Vice-President Pence.  Just consider what one of the co-founders of the Satanic Temple recently said about Pence…

  “[President Trump] is too stupid to predict; the guy has no concept of his own limitations. The thing that makes me most comfortable with Trump is the fact that he has no vision. Mike Pence really scares me,” Lucien Greaves told The Daily Beast in an interview published on Wednesday. “Pence has a clear, theocratic vision for the United States.”

  And despite the fact that they claim that they “don’t worship Satan”, the group does celebrate the black mass, it does conduct Pentagram rituals, and it does seek to put statues of Baphomet up in prominent public locations.

  As the group continues to grow, their national influence undoubtedly will as well.

  Perhaps it is appropriate that the Satanic Temple has gained such prominence.  In our society today, we are literally locked in a battle of good vs. evil for the future of our nation, and it seems quite fitting that Satan has become a key symbol for the other side.

  To me, the Satanic Temple is more than just a little bit hypocritical.  They claim to not believe in any supernatural entities, and yet they were just granted tax-exempt status “as a church” by the Internal Revenue Service…

  The Satanic Temple has been officially recognized as a church by the Internal Revenue Service, three months after taking Sundance by storm as the subject of the documentary “Hail Satan?” According to an announcement from “Hail Satan?” distributor Magnolia Pictures, the temple is now eligible for the tax-exempt status given to other religious institutions.

  Either they are a “faith” or they are not.

  Unfortunately, I have a feeling that there is a lot more to the Satanic Temple than meets the eye.

  Just like their hero, the leaders of the Satanic Temple appear to be experts in deception, and they are leading thousands upon thousands of people down a very dark path.

  

• Preferred Pronouns Or Prison

  “He.” “She.” “They.”

  Have you ever given a moment’s thought to your everyday use of these pronouns?

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  It has probably never occurred to you that those words could be misused. Or that doing so could cost you your business or your job – or even your freedom…

  Source: The Strategic Culture Foundation

  

• Next Stop On The War Train – Iran, Venezuela, Or North Korea?

  Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

  If you learn one rule about how governments function today, it should be that political leaders are usually puppets and the real decision makers are almost never out in the open. The question is, how does one know for certain that this is the case with a specific leader? His rhetoric might be compelling, he probably knows every buzzword to spark your interest, and he might even throw you some legislative scraps from the political table every once in a while to make you think that he’s going to follow through on his campaign promises, but does he actually believe in the principles he originally championed?

  The litmus test for any US president is to examine the type of people he invites into his house. Who does he surround himself with? The cabinet is the president’s constant companion and decision making team. The cabinet is looking over his shoulder and influencing everything he does. If you want to find who is pulling the strings of a president, this is a good place to start.

  Once you identify the major players in the cabinet, it’s important to discern what they want. What goals are they trying to squeeze out of a first or second term in the White House? What is the geopolitical or social trend they are creating through their influence? This should not be hard to read…

  The problem with our current president, Donald Trump, is not that he is very different from previous presidents, but that he is very similar to them in many ways. While conservatives that voted for Trump did so most of all in the hopes that he would follow through on his promise to “drain the swamp”, he has instead been actively filling the swamp with ever more slimy and parasitic creatures. Whenever one leaves the cabinet, they are replaced with another equally ghoulish character from a roster of banking elites, think tank sociopaths and globalists.

  The Mueller Report has been a highly effective distraction for both leftists and conservatives when it comes to the true loyalties of Trump. So many Americans have been obsessed with the notion of whether or not the president is controlled by a foreign power they forgot to look for the real influencers right under the roof of the White House.

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  The notion that Trump could still function as some kind of freedom fighter while playing 10-dimensional chess with the elitists sitting comfortably within his own decision making team is an incredibly absurd fantasy, but some people in the liberty movement still cling to this idea. Cognitive dissonance strikes when reality conflicts with what we want to see in the world, and we choose our ideal version of events over that reality.

  One great danger is that a large number of conservatives will support Trump in actions that they would have once considered contrary to their principles because they want to believe he is something he is not. This includes the potential perpetuation of long running wars based on disinformation as well as the creation of new wars built on similar lies and with ulterior motives.

  The veil on the Trump Administration is being slowly pulled away, perhaps not coincidentally at the same time that the Mueller Report circus has hit a crescendo. Only two days before the report was released Trump vetoed the “War Powers Act” passed by Congress, which removes US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, a war that has gone utterly under-reported in the mainstream media even though death toll figures have recently been revised five times higher than originally indicated.

  Only one week after the Mueller Report, Trump has backed Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar, who is now engaged in another under-reported and bloody siege in Tripoli in and attempt to assert dominance over the country.  This is yet another event which is clearly being maneuvered by the elites in Trump’s cabinet, while at the same time the media is insinuating that Trump is acting “unilaterally” against their input.

  Constitutionally, no president is supposed to have the power to unilaterally declare war on another country, or to involve the US in such wars covertly. Congress has quietly been ceding that authority over the past several decades. One would think that if Trump was a constitutionalist, one of his first actions would be to voluntarily return constitutional powers to the form they were original intended before they were manipulated by elitist controlled politicians. But Trump rarely even mentions the word “constitution” in public, so expecting him to defend it might be a stretch.

  The underlying suspicion in Trump’s veto decision is that this is not just about Yemen, but about a war (or multiple wars) yet to be initiated. There are at least three major options on the table right now…

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  Iran

  Everyone knows a war with Iran is coming eventually. The CIA led coup to overthrown democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh (a nationalist) and install the Shah (Mohammed Reza Pahlevi) directly resulted in the Iranian revolution in 1979. Every US president and elitist cabinet since this event has tested the waters of public sentiment on a renewed conflict with Iran. So far they have not been able to find a rationale that the citizenry is willing to buy; either that, or they have simply been too busy perpetuating wars in other regions to get to Iran yet.

  However, under Donald Trump the elites have an opportunity, for now they have the option to launch wars without risking public blowback to their agenda. Confusing? Consider this – Trump has been painted as a conservative stalwart, a nationalist and populist extraordinaire that is vehemently anti-globalist (even though his cabinet is packed with elites and globalists). As a puppet president, Trump is a perfect weapon. The establishment can now launch wars without being forced to construct ANY elaborate rationale, and then they can simply blame the resulting disasters on “populism” and conservatives in general.

  Perhaps this is why tensions with Iran are now skyrocketing as the US reasserts stifling sanctions and declares the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. The US is also set to end all waivers for Iranian oil exports and is threatening economic retaliation against countries that ignore sanctions. This is expected to cause gasoline prices to spike even higher in the near term.

  Iran has responded by declaring the US a state sponsor of terrorism, and is threatening to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which is one of the most important avenues for oil shipping in the world. I would also note that many European nations are not on board with higher oil prices and are seeking ways to circumvent sanctions against Iran.

  The effort to foment war with Iran has been spearheaded primarily by former Director of the CIA and current Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, along with CFR member John Bolton. They have insinuated that if Iran moves to block the Strait of Hormuz, war will result.

  Venezuela

  I have written extensively on the Venezuela situation in the past, including in my recent article ‘Is Venezuela On The Verge Of Becoming Another Syria?’ To summarize, Venezuela was already near collapse due to foolish socialist policies, but the elites have decided to help the South American country along with sanctions as well as the initiation of a coup using Juan Guaido as a frontman. Currently, Guaido has entered Venezuela under the protection of the US, and is openly fomenting revolution against Nicolas Madruro.

  The Venezuela conflict seems to be headed up by Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton. Bolton has indicated numerous times that the military option is on the table for the region if Madruro refuses to step down and relinquish power, or if he dares to arrest Guaido.

  A Venezuela scenario interests me greatly for a number of reason, but primarily because it matches up perfectly with a scenario described in ‘Operation Garden Plot’, a secret continuity of government and martial law program exposed during the Iran/Contra Hearings in the 1980’s. Garden Plot outlines that a crisis in South or Central America followed by mass migrations north to the US border would be a useful crisis and a valid excuse to trigger martial law measures in America, starting first on the border and then spreading from there. Isn’t this the situation we are staring to see today on the border?

  A war in Venezuela, either through a coup or through direct US military action would amplify current unstable conditions to a maximum.

  North Korea

  It should come as no surprise to anyone that the “diplomatic negotiations” with North Korea have ended in shambles.  Trump’s highly publicized walk out during the last summit was even praised by the likes of Joe Biden. NK is now threatening to return to missile and nuclear tests and cut off future summits if the US does not back off of sanctions by the end of this year.

  The current state of devolving affairs with North Korea was highly predictable, though the amount of time it took for the farce to become widely evident was certainly longer than I expected. As I’ve been warning for months, there was never any intention on the part of the Trump Administration and its elitist handlers to secure a legitimate deal with North Korea, and the idea that NK would EVER denuke was ludicrous from the start.

  The kabuki theater was designed as a means to solidify Trump’s base and lure the liberty movement into the neo-con fold.  At the same time, it has staged the Trump Administration for an epic negotiations disaster in the near future.  “So close, and you blew it…”, the media pundits will say.    

  North Korea is still engaging in summit negotiations, not with the US, but with Russia and Vladimir Putin. The result will likely be the exact opposite of what the mainstream media has been suggesting (i.e. renewed efforts to denuke). I suspect that this will only hasten North Korea’s break from peace talks with the West, just as Turkey’s negotiations with Putin have only hasted their departure from NATO.  

  The question is, if NK begins missile and nuclear tests again at the end of this year, as they seem to be threatening to do, will this be used as an excuse for a war in the region? And, is this the next stage in the scripted globalist narrative in which Trump is a “bumbling populist villain” destined to lead the nation to economic and geopolitical ruin…?

  War As A Catalyst For Centralization

  The purpose behind regional and global conflicts should be obvious, but for some reason the motives seem to escape many people, perhaps because they are so easily caught up in false paradigms.

  Almost every war of the past century has been followed by further centralization of government power and the creation of globalist institutions which continually argue for the end of national sovereignty as THE SOLUTION to end all war.  Considering the fact that all modern wars are banker engineered wars, I would suggest that forcibly and permanently removing organized sociopathic elites from positions of power and influence is the only long term solution for ending war.

  War is not just “a racket” as Smedley Butler decried; war is also a useful tool for molding mass psychology.  However, I want to remind everyone that not all globalist schemes succeed; many of them fail spectacularly.  The covert destabilization of Syria and the attempt to lure the American public into supporting a military invasion to remove president Bashar al-Assad from power was initiated over 7 years ago and has ended with dismal results for the establishment cabal.  Not only did they fail to convince Americans that CIA trained Syrian insurgents were “heroic freedom fighters” (the same insurgents that eventually formed ISIS), they also failed to convince the public and US military members that going to war in the region to unseat Assad was a rational option.  The only success in Syria, I suppose, is that no one in intelligence agencies or politics has yet been punished for their covert training, arming and funding of terrorist groups.

  The globalists are not omnipotent.  They often misjudge and underestimate the public.  Their extreme narcissism is one of their greatest weaknesses, and it is a weakness they can do nothing about; they are stuck with it and they are oblivious to it at the same time.  The key to stopping new wars today rests in the hands of conservatives, for it will be in our name that the next wars will be launched.  We must not allow this, let alone support it.  Regardless of what part of the world the next regional conflagration emerges, regardless if it is led by the Trump Administration, it is up to us to say no, expose the agenda and shut the farce down, just as we monkey-wrenched elitist plans in Syria.  It can be done.

  *  *  *

  If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

  

• Who Is Running For President In 2020 (So Far)?

  The number of candidates for the U.S. Democratic presidential primaries in 2020 rose to 19 this week, with former vice president Joe Biden making his long-expected announcement.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Among the field of candidates are nine sitting members of Congress, six women and also six minority candidates. Other bids came from former and current mayors, former Congressmen, a governor, an entrepreneur and a self-help author who has been called Oprah’s spiritual adviser.

  Some candidates had decided to form what is called an exploratory committee ahead of a proper campaign announcement, but all of them have since announced a full-fledged run for president.

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  There are two candidates for the Republican primaries so far: the current president of the United States, Donald Trump and former governor of Massachusetts, William Weld. Trump filed for a 2020 run on Jan 20, 2017, the day of his inauguration, according to the Federal Election Commission. Weld had previously been associated with the Libertarian party, but changed his affiliation back to Republican ahead of his campaign announcement and filing with the FEC on April 1.

  

• Johnson: Special Counsel Mueller – Disingenuous And Dishonest

  Authored by Larry Johnson via Sic Temper Tyrannis blog,

  While President Trump is correct to celebrate the Mueller Report’s conclusion that no one on Trump’s side of the ledger attempted to or succeeded in collaborating or colluding with the Russian Government or Russian spies, there remains a dark cloud behind the silver lining. And I am not referring to the claims of alleged obstruction of justice.  A careful reading of the report reveals that Mueller has issued findings that are both disingenuous and dishonest. The report is a failed hatchet job. Part of the failure can be attributed to the amount of material that Attorney General Barr allowed to be released. It appears that Bill Barr’s light editing may have been intended to expose the bias and sloppiness of Mueller and his team.

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  Let us start with the case of trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. If you were to believe that the Steele Dossier accurately reported Vladimir Putin’s attitude towards Trump, then a Trump real estate deal in Moscow was a slam dunk. According to one of Steele’s breathless reports:

  The Kremlin’s cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in  relation  to  the  ongoing  2018 World Cup soccer tournament. How ever, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these.

  Then there is reality. The impetus, the encouragement for the Moscow project came from one man–Felix Sater. 

  In the late summer of2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov.J07 Sater had known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov’s purchase of a building in New York City.30S Sater later contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).

  To reiterate–if the Steele Dossier was based on truthful intelligence then the Trump organization only had to sit back, stretch out their hands and seize the moment. Instead, little Felix Sater keeps coming back to the well. In January 2016, according to the Mueller report.

  Sater then sent a draft invitation for Cohen to visit Moscow to discuss the Trump Moscow project,along with a note to “[t]ell me if the letter is good as amended by me or  make whatever changes you want and send it back to me.”

  After a further round of edits, on January 25, 2016, Sater sent Cohen an invitation- signed by Andrey Ryabinskiy of the company MHJ-to travel to”Moscow for a working visit” about the “prospects of development and the construction business in Russia,” “the various land plots available suited for construction of this enormous Tower,” and “the opportunity to co-ordinate a follow up visit to Moscow by Mr. Donald Trump.

  This produced nothing. No deal, no trip. But Sater persisted:

  Beginning in late 2015, Sater repeatedly tried to arrange for Cohen and candidate Trump, as representatives of the Trump Organization, to travel to Russia to meet with Russian government officials and possible financing partners. . . .

  Into the spring of 2016, Sater and Cohen continued to discuss a trip to Moscow in connection with the Trump Moscow project. On April 20, 2016, Sater wrote Cohen, ” [t)he People wanted to know when you are coming?,,

  On May 4, 2016, Sater followed up:

  “I had a chat with Moscow. ASSUMING the trip does happen the question is before or after the convention. I said I believe, but don’t know for sure, that’s it’s probably after the convention. Obviously the pre-meeting trip (you only) can happen anytime you want but he 2 big guys where [sic) the question. I said I would confirm and revert.”

  On May 5, 2016, Sater wrote to Cohen:

  “Peskov would like to invite you as his guest to the St. Petersburg Forum which is Russia’s Davos it’s June 16-19. He wants to meet there with you and possibly introduce you to either Putin or Medvedev, as they are not sure if 1 or both will be there. This is perfect. The entire business class of Russia will be there as well.” 

  On June 14, 2016, Cohen met Sater in the lobby of the Trump Tower in New York and informed him that he would not be traveling at that time.

  Why was Felix Sater the one repeatedly identified pushing to arrange deals with the Russians and yet did not face any subsequent charges by the Mueller team? Sater had been working as part of the Trump team since 2003. Why is it that the proposed deals and travel to Moscow came predominantly from Felix Sater? As I noted in my previous piece–The FBI Tried and Failed to Entrap Trump–Sater was an active FBI undercover informant. He had been working with the FBI since 1998. When he agreed to start working as an undercover informant aka cooperator in December 1998 guess who signed off on the deal? Andrew Weissman. You can see the deal here. It was signed 10 December 1998.

  An honest prosecutor would have and should have disclosed this fact. He, Sater, was the one encouraging the Trump team to cozy up to Russia. Mueller does not disclose one single instance of Trump or Cohen or any of the Trump kids calling Sater on the carpet and chewing his ass for not bringing them deals and not opening doors in Russia. Omitting this key fact goes beyond simple disingenuity. It is a conscious lie.

  The circumstantial evidence indicates that Sater was doing this at the behest of FBI handlers. We do not yet know who they are.

  But Sater’s behavior and status as an FBI Informant was not an isolated incident. We also have the case of Michael Caputo and Roger Stone being approached by a Russian gangster named Henry Greenberg. According to democratdossier.com:

  Greenberg’s birth name is Gennady Vasilievich Vostretsov, the son of Yekatrina Vostretsova and Vasliy Vostretsov. He later adopted new names twice as a result of two different marriages and became Gennady V. Arzhanik and later Henry Oknyansky. Henry Greenberg is not a legal alias, but he uses it quite commonly in recent years.

  But you would not know this from reading the Mueller report. Mr. Disingenuous strikes again:

  In the spring of 2016, Trump Campaign advisor Michael Caputo learned through a Florida-based Russian business partner that another Florida-based Russian, Henry Oknyansky (who also went by the name Henry Greenberg), claimed to have information pertaining to Hillary Clinton . Caputo notified Roger Stone and brokered communication between Stone and Oknyansky.

  Oknyansky and Stone set up a May 2016 in-person meeting.260 Oknyansky was accompanied to the meeting by Alexei Rasin, a Ukrainian associate involved in Florida real estate. At the meeting, Rasin offered to sell Stone derogatory information on Clinton that Rasin claimed to have obtained while working for Clinton. Rasin claimed to possess financial statements demonstrating Clinton’s involvement in money laundering with Rasin’s companies. According to Oknyansky, Stone asked if the amounts in question totaled millions of dollars but was told it was closer to hundreds of thousands. Stone refused the offer, stating that Trump would not pay for opposition research.

  How does a guy like Vorkretsov/Greenberg, with an extensive criminal record and circumstantial ties to the Russian mob gain entrance into the United States? Very simple answer. He too was an FBI informant:

  In an affidavit, Vostretsov explained to an immigration judge he worked for the FBI for 17 years throughout the world, including in the US, Iran and North Korea. He explained in the same paperwork the FBI granted him several temporary visas to visit the US in exchange for information about criminal activities.

  Please take time to read the full dossier at democrat dossier.

  This is more than an odd coincidence. This is a pattern. The FBI was targeting the Trump campaign and personnel in a deliberate effort to implicate them in wanting to work with Russians.

  And there is more. George Papodopoulus was entrapped by individuals linked to British MI-6 and the CIA with offers to provide meetings with Russians and Putin. The Mueller account is a lie:

  In late April 2016, Papadopoulos was told by London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, immediately after Mifsud ‘s return from a trip to Moscow, that the Russian government had obtained “dirt” on candidate Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. One week later, on May 6, 2016, Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to candidate Clinton.

  Papadopoulos shared information about Russian “dirt ” with people outside of the Campaign, and the Office investigated whether he also provided it to a Campaign official. Papadopoulos and the Campaign officials with whom he interacted told the Office that they did · not recall that Papadopoulos passed them the information. Throughout the relevant period of time and for several months thereafter, Papadopoulos worked with Mifsud and two Russian nationals to arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government. That meeting never came to pass.

  Once again, the Mueller team treats the provocateur–i.e., Joseph Mifsud–as some simple guy with ties to Russia’s political elites. Another egregious lie. Mifsud was not working on behalf of Russia. He was deployed by MI-6. Disobedient Media has been on the forefront of exposing Mifsud’s ties to western intelligence in general and the Brits in particular.

  Mifsud’s alleged links to Russian intelligence are summarily debunked by his close working relationship with Claire Smith, a major figure in the upper echelons of British intelligence. A number of Twitter users recently observed that Joseph Mifsud had been photographed standing next to Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee at Mifsud’s LINK campus in Rome. Newsmax and Buzzfeed later reported that the professor’s name and biography had been removed from the campus’ website, writing that the mysterious removal took place after Mifsud had served the institution for “years.”

  WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange likewise noted the connection between Mifsud and Smith in a Twitter thread, additionally pointing out his connections with Saudi intelligence: “[Mifsud] and Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and eight-year member of the UK Security Vetting panel both trained Italian security services at the Link University in Rome and appear to both be present in this [photo].”

  The photograph in question originated on Geodiplomatics.com, where it specified that Joseph Mifsud is indeed standing next to Claire Smith, who was attending a: “…Training program on International Security which was organised by Link Campus University and London Academy of Diplomacy.” The event is listed as taking place in October, 2012. This is highly significant for a number of reasons.

  This is not a meer matter of Mueller and his team “failing” to disclose some important facts.  If they were operating honestly they should have investigated Mifsud, Greenberg and Sater. But they did not. Two of the three–Sater and Greenber–alleged Russian stooges have ties to the FBI. And Mifsud has been living and working in the belly of the intelligence community.

  When you put these facts together it is clear that there is real meat on the bone for Barr’s upcoming investigation of the “spying” that was being done on the Trump campaign by law enforcement and intelligence. These facts must become a part of the public consciousness. The foreign country that worked feverishly to meddle in the 2016 Presidential election and the subsequent rule of Donald Trump is the United Kingdom. Russia is the patsy.

  

• New York's "Green New Deal" To Phase Out Red Meat By 50%

  New York City’s recently-approved “Green New Deal” (not to be confused with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s environmental wish-list) will slash the amount of red meat served in municipally-run facilities by half in order to combat climate change, according to Breitbart‘s Josh Caplan. 

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  The $14 billion “Green New Deal” will phase out purchases of processed meats in city-run schools, hospitals and correctional facilities by 2040, amid an overall cut in purchases of 50 percent. New York would be the first city in the world to adopt such a policy, and was announced after New York Schools adopted “Meatless Monday” in an effort to encourage the consumption of less meat. 

  Chloe Waterman, who serves as Program Manager for the Climate-Friendly Food Program at Friends of the Earth, said of De Blasio’s proposal in a statement: “New York City is strengthening its climate leadership by acknowledging the importance of slashing consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions associated with factory farmed meat. Eliminating processed meat and cutting red meat purchases will pay dividends for the health of future generations and the planet.” –Breitbart

  “We applaud Mayor de Blasio, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, and all of the advocates who made today’s announcement possible. We hope other cities will soon follow suit, said Waterman.

  De Blasio (D) said on Monday during the Green New Deal announcement on Monday that he also plans to introduce a bill banning the construction of glass skyscrapers in an effort to reduce citywide greenhouse emissions by 30%. 

  “We are going to ban the classic glass and steel skyscrapers, which are incredibly inefficient,” said the Mayor on MSNBC‘s ‘Morning Joe’ Monday morning. 

  At one point during that press conference, Mark Chambers, director of the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, chimed in to clarify that there would be no prohibition on buildings made from glass. “I want to call out that it doesn’t mean that buildings can’t use glass anymore,” he said. And the mayor himself followed the “ban” language with a less bold proclamation.

  “If a company wants to build a big skyscraper,” he said, “they can use a lot of glass if they do all the other things needed to reduce the emissions.” In other words, skyscrapers made out of glass and steel will not be banned; instead, they will be required to meet certain energy-efficiency standards. –Curbed

  As part of the Green New Deal, New York will power all of the city’s operations with energy generated from clean sources, such as Canadian hydropower. The city is also rolling out the mandatory recycling of organics, congestion traffic pricing, and phasing out city-wide purchases of single-use plastic utensils. 

  The so-called “Green New Deal” – or Climate Mobilization Act, was passed last Thursday in a 45-2 vote. 

  

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• "Slide Into Chaos": 30,000 Displaced, 300 Dead And 1,200 Wounded In Libya Fighting

  African leaders met in Egypt on Tuesday in a summit addressing continuing violence and dramatic political upheavals in neighboring Libya and Sudan, with Egypt’s President Sisi calling for a unified regional response in order avoid “a slide into chaos”.

  This as since early April fighting around Tripoli between Gen. Khalifa Haftar’s advancing Libyan National Army (LNA) and the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) has resulted in 264+ deaths, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), and some 1,266 people wounded, with 21 among the deceased civilians.

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  Some media reports have cited as many as 300 killed in the violence. The United Nations has put the number of displaced due to Haftar’s offensive on the capital at more than 30,000 civilians.

  Meanwhile in Sudan fierce protests have continue in Khartoum despite the toppling of longtime strongman Omar al-Bashir, resulting in unpopular rule by military council with emergency powers. “The principle of African solutions to African problems is the only way to deal with common challenges facing us,” Sisi said in opening remarks to the summit.

  Concerning Libya, Sisi’s fear’s of a “slide into chaos” — which has actually long been a reality all the way back to the 2011 NATO-led toppling of Muammar Gaddafi — will be viewed as largely hypocritical considering Sisi is among Gen. Haftar’s main backers.

  This week intense fighting has continued in the southern suburbs of Tripoli, with shelling disrupting daily life in the city’s center. Reuters reports: 

  Forces supporting Libya’s internationally recognized government pushed back troops loyal to eastern commander Khalifa Haftar to more than 60 km southwest of the capital Tripoli on Tuesday, Reuters reporters said.

  The town of Aziziya was fully under the control of the Tripoli forces, with shops reopening after days of fighting, a Reuters team at the scene said.

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  However, it appears things could settle into a protracted war and stalemate, as the bulk of pro-Haftar militants have been halted in their push to take the capital, which has included Haftar deploying MiG jet fighters in his arsenal. 

  Meanwhile, EU officials have this week urged President Trump to reverse last week’s surprise declaration of US support for Haftar’s LNA. European officials have further demanded greater clarity of the United States’ position on Libya, saying Washington’s policy confusion will only add fuel to the chaos, similar to recent contradictory US statements on Syria. 

  

• The Burning Of Notre Dame And The Destruction Of Christian Europe

  Authored by Guy Milliere via The Gatestone Institute,

  • Barely an hour after the flames began to rise above Notre Dame — at a time when no explanation could be provided by anyone — the French authorities rushed to say that the fire was an “accident” and that “arson has been ruled out.” The remarks sounded like all the official statements made by the French government after attacks in France during the last decade.

  • The Notre Dame fire also occurred at a time when attacks against churches in France and Europe have been multiplying. More than 800 churches were attacked in France during the year 2018 alone.

  • Churches in France are empty. The number of priests is decreasing and the priests that are active in France are either very old or come from Africa or Latin America. The dominant religion in France is now Islam. Every year, churches are demolished to make way for parking lots or shopping centers. Mosques are being built all over, and they are full.

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  The fire that destroyed much of the Notre Dame Cathedral in the heart of Paris is a tragedy that is irreparable. Even if the cathedral is rebuilt, it will never be what it was before. (Photo by Veronique de Viguerie/Getty Images)

  The fire that destroyed much of the Notre Dame Cathedral in the heart of Paris is a tragedy that is irreparable. Even if the cathedral is rebuilt, it will never be what it was before. Stained glass windows and major architectural elements have been severely damaged and the oak frame totally destroyed. The spire that rose from the cathedral was a unique piece of art. It was drawn by the architect who restored the edifice in the nineteenth century, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who had based his work on 12th century documents.

  In addition to the fire, the water needed to extinguish the flames penetrated the limestone of the walls and façade, and weakened them, making them brittle. The roof is non-existent: the nave, the transept and the choir now lie in open air, vulnerable to bad weather. They cannot even be protected until the structure has been examined thoroughly, a task that will take weeks. Three major elements of the structure (the north transept pinion, the pinion located between the two towers and the vault) are also on the verge of collapse.

  Notre Dame is more than 800 years old. It survived the turbulence of the Middle Ages, the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, two World Wars and the Nazi occupation of Paris. It did not survive what France is becoming in the 21st century.

  The cause of the fire has so far been attributed to “an accident,” “a short circuit,” and most recently “a computer glitch.”

  If the fire really was an accident, it is almost impossible to explain how it started. Benjamin Mouton, Notre Dame’s former chief architect, explained that the rules were exceptionally strict and that no electric cable or appliance, and no source of heat, could be placed in the attic. He added that an extremely sophisticated alarm system was in place. The company that installed the scaffolding did not use any welding and specialized in this type of work. The fire broke out more than an hour after the workers’ departure and none of them was present. It spread so quickly that the firefighters who rushed to the spot as soon as they could get there were shocked. Remi Fromont, the chief architect of the French Historical Monuments said: “The fire could not start from any element present where it started. A real calorific load is necessary to launch such a disaster”.

  A long, difficult and complex investigation will be conducted.

  The possibility that the fire was the result of arson cannot be dismissed. Barely an hour after the flames began to rise above Notre Dame — at a time when no explanation could be provided by anyone — the French authorities rushed to say that the fire was an “accident” and that “arson has been ruled out.” The remarks sounded like all the official statements made by the French government after attacks in France during the last decade.

  In November 2015, on the night of the massacre at the Bataclan Theater in Paris, in which jihadists murdered 90 people, the French Department of the Interior said that the government did not know anything, except that a gunfight had occurred. The truth came out only after ISIS claimed responsibility for the slaughter.

  In Nice, after the truck-attack in July 2016, the French government insisted for several days that the terrorist who crushed 86 people to death was a “man with a nervous breakdown“.

  In 2018, Sarah Halimi’s murderer, who recited verses from the Quran while torturing his victim, was declared “mentally disturbed” and held in a psychiatric institution immediately after his arrest. He will most likely never face a court. On April 8, Alain Finkielkraut and 38 other intellectuals published a text saying that her murderer must not escape justice. The text had no effect.

  The fire at Notre Dame took place less than three years after a “commando unit” of jihadi women, later arrested, tried to destroy the cathedral by detonating cylinders of natural gas. Three days before last week’s fire, on April 12, the leader of the jihadis, Ines Madani, a young French convert to Islam, was sentenced to eight years in prison for creating a terrorist group affiliated with the Islamic State.

  The Notre Dame fire also occurred at a time when attacks against churches in France and Europe have been multiplying. More than 800 churches were attackedin France during the year 2018 alone. Many suffered serious damage: broken, beheaded statues, smashed tabernacles, feces thrown on the walls. In several churches, fires were lit. On March 5, the Basilica of St. Denis, where all but three of the Kings of France are buried, was vandalized by a Pakistani refugee. Several stained-glass windows were broken, and the basilica’s organ, a national treasure built between 1834 and 1841, was nearly wrecked. Twelve days later, on March 17, a fire broke out at Saint Sulpice, the largest church in Paris, causing serious damage. After days of silence, the police finally admitted that the cause had been arson.

  For months, jihadist organizations have been issuing statements calling for the destruction of churches and Christian monuments in Europe. Notre Dame was repeatedly named as a primary target. Despite all that, the Cathedral was not adequately protected. A couple of young men, who entered the Cathedral at night, climbed on the roof last November and shot a video that they then put on YouTube.

  Many messages were posted by people with Muslim names on social media — Twitter, Facebook, the website of Al Jazeera — expressing a joy to see an important Christian symbol destroyed. Hafsa Askar, a migrant from Morocco and the vice president of the National Union of Students of France (UNEF), the main student organization in France, published a tweet saying, “People are crying on little pieces of wood… it’s a delusion of white trash”.

  French President Emmanuel Macron, who had never even mentioned the attacks on Saint Denis or Saint Sulpice, quickly went to Notre Dame and declared, “Notre Dame is our history, our literature, our imagination”. He totally left out cathedral’s religious dimension.

  The next evening, he said that Notre Dame would be rebuilt in five years: it was a bold statement. Many commentators interpreted his words as dictated by his will desperately to try to regain the confidence of the French people after five monthsof demonstrations, riots and destruction stemming from his ineffective handling of the “Yellow Vests” uprising. (On March 16, much of the Champs-Élysées was damaged by rioters; repairs have barely begun.) All experts agree that it will almost certainly take far longer than five years to rebuild Notre Dame.

  Macron strangely added that the cathedral would be “more beautiful” than before — as if a badly damaged monument could be more beautiful after restoration. Macron went on to say that the reconstruction would be a “contemporary architectural gesture”. The remark raised concern, if not panic, among defenders of historic monuments, who now fear that he may want to ​​add modern architectural elements to a jewel of Gothic architecture. Again, he totally left out the cathedral’s religious dimension.

  Macron’s attitude is not surprising. From the moment he became president, he has kept himself away from any Christian ceremony. Most of the presidents who preceded him did the same. France is a country where a dogmatic secularismreigns supreme. A political leader who dares to call himself a Christian is immediately criticized in the media and can only harm a budding political career. Nathalie Loiseau — the former director of France’s National School of Administration and the leading candidate on the electoral list of Macron’s party, “Republic on the Move,” for the May 2019 European Parliament elections — was recently photographed exiting a church after mass, which led to a media debate on whether her church attendance is a “problem.”

  The results of French secularism are visible. Christianity has been almost completely wiped out from public life. Churches are empty. The number of priests is decreasing and the priests that are active in France are either very old or come from Africa or Latin America. The dominant religion in France is now Islam. Every year, churches are demolished to make way for parking lots or shopping centers. Mosques are being built all over, and they are full. Radical imams proselytize. The murder, three years ago, of Jacques Hamel, an 85-year-old priest who was slaughtered by two Islamists while he was saying mass in a church where only five people (three of them old nuns) were present, is telling.

  In 1905, the French parliament passed a law decreeing that all the properties of the Catholic Church in France were confiscated. Churches and cathedrals became property of the State. Since then, successive governments have spent little money to maintain them. Those churches that have not been vandalized are in poor condition, and most cathedrals are in poor condition, too. Even before the devastating fire, the Archdiocese of Paris stated that “it can’t afford all the repairs” that Notre Dame needed, “estimated at $185 million.” According to CBS News, in a March 20, 2018 report:

  “The French government, which owns the cathedral, has pledged around $50 million over the next decade, leaving a bill of $135 million. To raise the rest, Picaud helped launch the Friends of Notre-Dame of Paris Foundation. It works to find private donors both in France and across the Atlantic.

  “‘We know Americans are wealthy, so we go where we think we can find money to help restore the cathedral,’ Picaud said.”

  On the evening of the fire at Notre Dame, hundreds of French people gathered in front of the burning cathedral to sing Psalms and pray. They seemed suddenly to understand that they were losing something immensely precious.

  Following the fire, the French government decided to start collecting donationsfrom private individuals, businesses and organizations for reconstruction; more than one billion euros have poured in. French billionaires promised to pay large sums: the Pinault family (the main owners of the retail conglomerate Kering) promised 100 million euros, the Arnault family (owners of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury-goods company), 200 million euros, the Bettencourt family (owners of L’Oréal), also 200 million. Many on the French “left” immediately said that wealthy families had too much money, and that these millions would be better used helping the poor than taking care of old stones.

  For the foreseeable future, the heart of Paris will bear the terrible scars of a fire that devastated far more than a cathedral. The fire destroyed an essential part of what is left of the almost-lost soul of France and what France could accomplish when the French believed in something higher than their own day-to-day existence.

  Some hope that the sight of the destroyed cathedral will inspire many French people to follow the example of those who prayed on the night of the disaster. Michel Aupetit, Archbishop of Paris, said on April 17, two days after the fire, that he was sure France would know a “spiritual awakening”.

  Others, not as optimistic, see in the ashes of the cathedral a symbol of the destruction of Christianity in France. The art historian Jean Clair said that he sees in the destruction of Notre Dame an additional sign of an “irreversible decadence” of France, and of the final collapse of the Judeo-Christian roots of Europe.

  An American columnist, Dennis Prager, wrote:

  “The symbolism of the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral, the most renowned building in Western civilization, the iconic symbol of Western Christendom, is hard to miss.

  “It is as if God Himself wanted to warn us in the most unmistakable way that Western Christianity is burning — and with it, Western civilization.”

  Another American author, Rod Dreher, noted:

  “This catastrophe in Paris today is a sign to all of us Christians, and a sign to all people in the West, especially those who despise the civilization that built this great temple to its God on an island in the Seine where religious rites have been celebrated since the days of pagan Rome. It is a sign of what we are losing, and what we will not recover, if we don’t change course now.”

  For the moment, nothing indicates that France and Western Europe will change course.

  

• UK Borrowing Surpasses Most Other Countries

  The rate at which UK institutions, households and businesses are borrowing money is greater than that of all other OECD countries.

  This fact is alarming some economists not only because the rate of UK borrowing is high against the country’s GDP, but, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz points out, it also because households, business and state coffers are running a deficit simultaneously for the first time since the 1980s.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Yet, a lot of the of the money borrowed is going into the housing market that is currently booming in the UK, therefore potentially creating valuable assets for citizens in the future. The same is true for the state, with some economists claiming investment in the future to be more important than a positive net lending score, according to reporting by the Financial Times.

  The opposite of this attitude can be observed in OECD countries like Germany, where the government is among those pursuing a radically different borrowing strategy aimed at reducing debt. The country with the lowest borrowing rate in the OECD was Ireland.

  Not included in the data by the OECD are overseas investments by Britons as well as foreigners’ financial business in the UK. Here, another troublesome statistic emerges. While the UK had been running a net profit for overseas lending and borrowing in the past, the situation has reversed since the financial crisis.

  

• Pepe Escobar: War On Iran & Calling America's Bluff

  Authored by Pepe Escobar via ConsortiumNews.com,

  Vast swathes of the West seem not to realize that if the Strait of Hormuz is shut down a global depression will follow…

  The Trump administration once again has graphically demonstrated that in the young, turbulent 21st century, “international law” and “national sovereignty” already belong to the Realm of the Walking Dead.

  As if a deluge of sanctions against a great deal of the planet was not enough, the latest “offer you can’t refuse” conveyed by a gangster posing as diplomat, Consul Minimus Mike Pompeo, now essentially orders the whole planet to submit to the one and only arbiter of world trade: Washington.

  First the Trump administration unilaterally smashed a multinational, UN-endorsed agreement, the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal. Now the waivers that magnanimously allowed eight nations to import oil from Iran without incurring imperial wrath in the form of sanctions will expire on May 2 and won’t be renewed.

  President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran deal upheld his highest obligation: to protect the safety and security of the American people.

  Why Iran sanctions are necessary: https://t.co/YQtmSA9hZX pic.twitter.com/n5r8mhZTl5

  — The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 6, 2018

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The eight nations are a mix of Eurasian powers: China, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Italy and Greece.

  Apart from the trademark toxic cocktail of hubris, illegality, arrogance/ignorance and geopolitical/geo–economic infantilism inbuilt in this foreign policy decision, the notion that Washington can decide who’s allowed to be an energy provider to emerging superpower China does not even qualify as laughable. Much more alarming is the fact that imposing a total embargo of Iranian oil exports is no less than an act of war.

  Ultimate Neocon Wet Dream 

  Those subscribing to the ultimate U.S, neocon and Zionist wet dream – regime change in Iran – may rejoice at this declaration of war. But as Professor Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran has elegantly argued, “If the Trump regime miscalculates, the house can easily come crashing down on its head.”

  Reflecting the fact Tehran seems to have no illusions regarding the utter folly ahead, the Iranian leadership — if provoked to a point of no return, Marandi additionally told me — can get as far as “destroying everything on the other side of the Persian Gulf and chasing the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan. When the U.S. escalates, Iran escalates. Now it depends on the U.S. how far things go.”

  This red alert from a sensible academic perfectly dovetails with what’s happening with the structure of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — recently branded a “terrorist organization” by the United States. In perfect symmetry, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council also branded the U.S. Central Command — CENTCOM — and “all the forces connected to it” as a terrorist group.

  The new IRGC commander-in-chief is Brigadier General Hossein Salami, 58. Since 2009 he was the deputy of previous commander Mohamamd al-Jafari, a soft spoken but tough as nails gentleman I met in Tehran two years ago. Salami, as well as Jafari, is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war; that is, he has actual combat experience. And Tehran sources assure me that he can be even tougher than Jafari.

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  In tandem, IRGC Navy Commander Rear Admiral Alireza Tangsiri has evoked the unthinkable in terms of what might develop out of the U.S. total embargo on Iran oil exports; Tehran could block the Strait of Hormuz.

  Western Oblivion 

  Vast swathes of the ruling classes across the West seem to be oblivious to the reality that if Hormuz is shut down, the result will be an absolutely cataclysmic global economic depression.

  Warren Buffett, among other investors, has routinely qualified the 2.5 quadrillion derivatives market as a weapon of financial mass destruction. As it stands, these derivatives are used — illegally — to drain no less than a trillion U.S. dollars a year out of the market in manipulated profits.

  Considering historical precedents, Washington may eventually be able to set up a Persian Gulf of Tonkin false flag. But what next?

  If Tehran were totally cornered by Washington, with no way out, the de facto nuclear option of shutting down the Strait of Hormuz would instantly cut off 25 percent of the global oil supply. Oil prices could rise to over $500 a barrel, to even $1000 a barrel. The 2.5 quadrillion of derivatives would start a chain reaction of destruction.

  Unlike the shortage of credit during the 2008 financial crisis, the shortage of oil could not be made up by fiat instruments. Simply because the oil is not there. Not even Russia would be able to re-stabilize the market.

  It’s an open secret in private conversations at the Harvard Club – or at Pentagon war-games for that matter – that in case of a war on Iran, the U.S. Navy would not be able to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. 

  Russian SS-NX-26 Yakhont missiles — with a top speed of Mach 2.9 — are lining up the Iranian northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz. There’s no way U.S. aircraft carriers can defend a  barrage of Yakhont missiles.

  Then there are the SS-N-22 Sunburn supersonic anti-ship missiles — already exported to China and India — flying ultra-low at 1,500 miles an hour with dodging capacity, and extremely mobile; they can be fired from a flatbed truck, and were designed to defeat the U.S. Aegis radar defense system.

  What Will China Do?

  The full–frontal attack on Iran reveals how the Trump administration bets on breaking Eurasia integration via what would be its weakeast node; the three key nodes are China, Russia and Iran. These three actors interconnect the whole spectrum; Belt and Road Initiative; the Eurasia Economic Union; the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; the International North-South Transportation Corridor; the expansion of BRICS Plus.

  So there’s no question the Russia-China strategic partnership will be watching Iran’s back. It’s no accident that the trio is among the top existential “threats” to the U.S., according to the Pentagon. Beijing knows how the U.S. Navy is able to cut it off from its energy sources. And that’s why Beijing is strategically increasing imports of oil and natural gas from Russia; engineering the “escape from Malacca” also must take into account a hypothetical U.S. takeover of the Strait of Hormuz.

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  Night view of coast of Oman, including Strait of Hormuz. (Intl Space Station photo via Wikimedia)

  A plausible scenario involves Moscow acting to defuse the extremely volatile U.S.-Iran confrontation, with the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense trying to persuade President Donald Trump and the Pentagon from any direct attack against the IRGC. The inevitable counterpart is the rise of covert ops, the possible staging of false flags and all manner of shady Hybrid War techniques deployed not only against the IRGC, directly and indirectly, but against Iranian interests everywhere. For all practical purposes, the U.S. and Iran are at war.

  Within the framework of the larger Eurasia break-up scenario, the Trump administration does profit from Wahhabi and Zionist psychopathic hatred of Shi’ites. The “maximum pressure” on Iran counts on Jared of Arabia Kushner’s close WhatsApp pal Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) in Riyadh and MbS’s mentor in Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed, to replace the shortfall of Iranian oil in the market. Bu that’s nonsense — as quite a few wily Persian Gulf traders are adamant Riyadh won’t “absorb Iran’s market share” because the extra oil is not there.

  Much of what lies ahead in the oil embargo saga depends on the reaction of assorted vassals and semi-vassals. Japan won’t have the guts to go against Washington. Turkey will put up a fight. Italy, via Salvini, will lobby for a waiver. India is very complicated; New Delhi is investing in Iran’s Chabahar port as the key hub of its own Silk Road, and closely cooperates with Tehran within the INSTC framework. Would a shameful betrayal be in the cards?

  China, it goes without saying, will simply ignore Washington.

  Iran will find ways to get the oil flowing because the demand won’t simply vanish with a magic wave of an American hand. It’s time for creative solutions. Why not, for instance, refuel ships in international waters, accepting gold, all sorts of cash, debit cards, bank transfers in rubles, yuan, rupees and rials— and everything bookable on a website?

  Now that’s a way Iran can use its tanker fleet to make a killing. Some of the tankers could be parked in— you got it — the Strait of Hormuz, with an eye on the price at Jebel Ali in the UAE to make sure this is the real deal. Add to it a duty free for the ships crews. What’s not to like? Ship owners will save fortunes on fuel bills, and crews will get all sorts of stuff at 90 percent discount in the duty free.

  And let’s see whether the EU has grown a spine —  and really turbo-charge their Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) alternative payment network conceived after the Trump administration ditched the JCPOA. Because more than breaking up Eurasia integration and implementing neocon regime change, this is about the ultimate anathema; Iran is being mercilessly punished because it has bypassed the U.S. dollar on energy trade.

  *  *  *

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• America's Hottest Housing Markets See Biggest Sale Declines 

  Given mortgage rates have plummeted and home prices aren’t appreciating fast enough, the real estate industry has transformed into a buyers market, where inventory is flooding top metropolitan areas across the US, reported Redfin.

  Home prices were slightly lower in March, falling .10% from a year ago, to a median of $295,100 across 85 metros Redfin monitors. Although this hardly reads as a decline, it’s the first y/y decrease since February 2012.

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  About 10.5% or nine of the 85 metros Redfin tracks saw y/y declines in their median price in March, including a 13% plunge in San Jose and a 1% decline in San Francisco. West Coast markets are under pressure, including Los Angeles, Orange County, and Seattle recorded the largest y/y declines in the number of homes sold while more affordable markets on the East Coast saw annual sale increases.

  Redfin notes that housing market activity is shifting to less expensive regions, the slight decline in the median price last month reflects just that.

  “Homebuyers have backed off in West Coast metros where home prices have risen far out of their budgets,” said Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather. “The opposite is happening in more affordable metros where buyers are eager to buy now to take advantage of low mortgage rates. In California, where the tax burden is high, some people are finding they have to move out of state to afford to buy a home. As a result, home sales are down in metros throughout the state.”

  Home sales increased 2% y/y in March, but there was a lot of variation among the 85 metro areas. Homes sold in 37 of the 85 metros recorded declines, while 24 metros saw double-digit increases in sales compared to last year.

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  The report showed most of the home sale declines were situated on the West Coast and some of the biggest increases were on the East Coast:

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  Demand in Orange County went from “good to horrible” in late 2018 Rick Palacios, director of research at John Burns Real Estate Consulting LLC, told Bloomberg. In 4Q18, sales of new homes on the coast were the weakest since the Great Recession, he said.

  Across the 85 metros, cities that saw the weakest activity in home sales were listed at a steep premium versus the median price, indicating demand for luxury real estate has collapsed.

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  The number of homes for sale at the end of the month was up 3.6% from a year earlier in March. The number of homes newly listed for sale fell 2.8% from March 2018.

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  Redfin warns that 46 of the 85 metro areas were currently experiencing a flood of inventory in March on a y/y basis, with the largest gains coming from the West Coast: San Jose (+104.3%) and Seattle (+82.9%).

  The report shows that housing markets across the US could be at a cycle turn. Let’s hope this isn’t the start of a multi-year housing slump that could leave many millennials holding the bag in West Coast cities. 

   

  

• Globalists Detail Short- And Long-Term Guidance For Further Centralisation Of Powers

  Authored by Steven Guinness,

  During this month’s Spring Meetings in Washington DC, the IMF and World Bank held their annual Development Committee conference which looked at the economic outlook and potential risks for the global economy.

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  As is tradition, IMF head Christine Lagarde produced a written statement outlining several areas of priority. All of them were predicated on ‘reaching the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals‘. Whilst on paper the statement is geared towards emerging and developing countries, elements of it relate notably to western nations such as the United Kingdom, despite Britain being considered an advanced economy.

  To explain, let’s first examine the stance taken on monetary policy:

  In countries with elevated inflation or where exchange rate depreciations could trigger inflation pass-through, central banks should focus on containing inflation expectations (Angola, Argentina, Iran, Turkey). By contrast, monetary policy can be more accommodative where expectations are well anchored (Brazil, Indonesia).

  In October 2018, a communique from the thirty-eighth meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee stated that where inflation was ‘close to or above target‘, central banks should tighten policy. On the opposite end of the scale, banks should ‘maintain monetary accommodation where inflation is below target‘.

  As we have already seen since the 2016 EU referendum, the sustained fall in the value of sterling was according to the Bank of England ‘entirely‘ responsible for a subsequent spike in inflation. Doing what very few thought they would, the BOE raised interest rates in response – the first rise in over ten years. They then followed up with a second hike nine months later, with inflation remaining above the central bank’s mandate of 2%.

  Today, inflation has fallen back to just below 2%. Little surprise then that there are no immediate signs of the BOE planning to raise rates for a third time in under two years. Leaving the EU without a withdrawal agreement could quickly see that change. As I have reasoned on several occasions, I believe further depreciation of the pound amidst a no deal scenario would likely see the BOE raise interest rates rather than cut them.

  The statement goes on to mention that for central banks to combat exchange rate instability, they should fall back on their foreign exchange reserves. According to the IMF, such intervention ‘can be used to mitigate disorderly market conditions‘.

  In the 21st century, this has yet to be tested in the UK. In a series of posts I published last month which discussed the possible demise of sterling as a reserve currency, I detailed how the Bank of England’s foreign currency holdings stand close to $150 billion. In the event of a run on the pound, it is these reserves which the bank could use to purchase sterling in an attempt to stave off a collapse. The last example of the BOE doing this was on Black Wednesday in 1992. Some $15 billion was spent on interventions, which at the time amounted to around half the bank’s currency reserves.

  The IMF’s guidance on monetary policy and exchange rates are presented around policies in the ‘short term‘. The ‘medium to longer term‘ takes in a potentially much wider breadth of economic reforms.

  As expressed by the Bank for International Settlements, short term plans for central banks are measured at one to three years, with the medium term at one to six years. We can therefore assume that plans beyond the medium term would stretch out to the ten year mark and beyond, bringing them into line with the United Nation’s Agenda 2030.

  Two key aspects for the medium to longer term include fiscal policy and the rise of Fintech (Financial Technology).

  The IMF make it clear that ‘the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals cannot be achieved‘ without ‘robust and inclusive growth‘. This is a roundabout way of saying that widescale reforms of financial and ecological systems are necessary for globalists to fulfil the objectives mapped out by the UN.

  Looking at fiscal policy first, the statement reads:

  Fiscal policy needs to generate space for priority development spending, while at the same time preserving public debt sustainability. This requires tax policies and administrative reforms that broaden the tax base and enhance revenue collection, as well as prudent debt management. Increasing the efficiency of public spending is also needed, including in priority areas such as education, health, and infrastructure.

  Back in 2017 I posted two articles that discussed the ‘normalisation‘ of monetary policy in the EU using speeches given by Bundesbank chairman and BIS director Jens Weidmann. The subject of national fiscal policies is one that Weidmann paid particular attention to. From his perspective, a future rise in interest rates would serve to place greater emphasis on the importance of ‘fiscal consolidation‘. Central bank intervention in the EU had, according to Weidmann, ‘blurred the boundary between monetary and fiscal policy‘.

  A line that has often been spoken by central banks is that they cannot forever be ‘the only game in town‘. Weidmann’s ideal scenario would see member states relinquish their fiscal autonomy (and with it suffer further inroads into their national sovereignty) by handing control of their national finances over to a centralised authority under the directorship of the EU.

  A fiscal union within the EU would represent a major advancement in the project for European integration. The first step towards the creation of the EU began in 1947 with the Paris agreement on multilateral payments. After multiple stages of centralisation spanning over forty years (for which the Bank for International Settlements played an instrumental part), 1992 saw the inception of the Maastricht Treaty which brought the EU into existence and in so doing established the Economic and Monetary Union. Six years later the European Central Bank was created, and four years on from that marked the introduction of the Euro. So far, though, a fiscal union that binds together national budgets has yet to be conceived.

  Unsurprisingly, globalists continue to call for it. In 2018 the IMF published a paperdetailing the case for a fiscal union in the Euro Area. This was followed by a short precis titled, ‘The Euro Area Needs a Fiscal Union.’

  To summarise, without a fiscal union in place, the IMF’s position is that ‘the architecture supporting Europe’s currency union remains incomplete and leaves the region vulnerable to future financial crises.’ They outline the solution as consisting of a ‘common fiscal policy‘, brought to fruition in the name of preserving ‘financial and economic integration and stability‘ and ‘sharing fiscal risk‘.

  One important aspect the precis highlights is that the 2010-12 Euro debt crisis (which globalists coined as a ‘sovereign‘ debt crisis) led to the creation of the European Stability Mechanism. The ESM is described as being an ‘international financial institution‘ that helps countries in major financial distress by providing them with emergency loans. It currently has the capacity to lend a total of €700 billion.

  Once again this is another example of crisis leading to consolidation. The push for a fiscal union has intensified over the past few years. With public debt at record highs and stymied growth in the Euro Area, it is logical to conclude that the first steps of its introduction would coincide with major economic rupture in the EU. Crisis invariably breeds opportunity for globalists.

  In the IMF’s words, a fully realised fiscal union would need ‘effective rules and institutions to contain it.’ They readily admit that for such rules to get off the ground would likely require ‘moving some decision-making power from the member states to the central level.’

  The economic jeopardy caused by unsustainable levels of debt is a vehicle which globalists may attempt to utilise in a bid to gain full spectrum control over national budgets.

  Along with efforts towards a fiscal union is the development of Financial Technology (Fintech). On this, the statement issued by the Development Committee reads:

  Diversified financial systems increase resilience and facilitate access to financial services for small enterprises and lower-income households. Recent developments in Fintech hold both promise and risks in this regard.

  Fintech relates directly to the rise of digital money through the use of cryptocurrencies and the future issuance of central bank digital currencies (CBDC’s). Over the past year I have written about how both the BIS and IMF have begun to openly question ‘money in the digital age‘, whilst central banks are in the midst of reforming national payment systems that will be compatible with distributed ledger technology (DLT).

  To develop a clearer picture on Fintech, once again we can reference the IMF. At the beginning of April the institution held its second meeting of the IMF Fintech Roundtable Program. Tobias Adrian, Financial Counsellor and Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department, gave a speech to mark the occasion (Framing the Debate on Fintech: Current Trends and Continuing Policy Concerns).

  In the speech, Adrian mentions the correlation between the reform of payment systems and the use of DLT:

  Recent developments in retail payments systems suggest a move toward real-time settlements, flatter structures, continuous operations, and global reach. Coinciding with these developments, an increasing number of countries are experimenting with, or researching, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) for use in financial market infrastructures, although few countries have carried out pilot projects.

  We also learn from the speech that the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank and the Central Bank of the Bahamas are in the advanced stages of carrying out ‘blockchain-based CBDC pilots‘. The Riksbank of Sweden, a country that is rapidly becoming cashless, is also advancing plans to issue what is termed an ‘e-krona‘ currency.

  Adrian makes the point that Fintech provides ‘new opportunities for central banks to improve their services – including issuing digital currency.’ A recent blog post of mine (BIS General Manager Outlines Vision for Central Bank Digital Currencies) looks into this in more detail.

  Exactly how far advanced globalists are in introducing digital currencies is an open question. If we go simply by what the IMF and the BIS are communicating, they remain in the developmental stages, with less than a quarter of central banks actively seeking to issue CBDC’s and just four pilot tests being undertaken. But behind the scenes the push in the direction of digital currencies grows exponentially. A sign that globalists are rapidly advancing an agenda is when they ratchet up communications on the subject.

  According to Adrian, the Fintech Roundtable Program was launched to ‘facilitate peer-to-peer, in-depth dialogue and information-sharing among the IMF’s member countries regarding the fintech challenges they face and discuss policy responses.’

  The sharing of information, under the direction of the IMF, has no doubt accelerated over the past twelve months. As central banks undertake surveys and conduct pilot tests of new technology, the data accrued eventually goes towards building what Adrian calls a ‘global consensus‘.

  Tied in with this are calls for regularly reforms which Adrian eludes to:

  New issues are also being raised by the introduction of new products that fall within cross-sectoral regulatory gaps, and that are outside existing legal definitions. Such products require adapting prudential regimes and modernizing the legal frameworks.

  Changes on the legal and regularly front are already underway, with China devising a new system of regulations on Fintech and the Swiss Federal Council beginning a consultation on adapting federal law to ‘DLT developments‘.

  What I believe these issues combined illustrate is that ambitions for regional fiscal unions and digital currencies are in no way confined to developing countries. If anything, such nations are being used as test beds for piloting technology and preparing the groundwork for its implementation to advanced economies.

  I also think it would be unwise to assume that extreme fluctuations in currency markets, as witnessed in countries like Argentina and India, will not become a feature in the West as central banks edge nearer to making CBDC’s a reality. From a UK perspective, Brexit is a prime vehicle for destabilising foreign exchange markets.

  If globalists ever manage to successfully present CBDC’s as a solution to economic crisis – one that the general population buys into – that is when their rise will be unstoppable.

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  2025 is one staging post for reforms to the financial system. 2030 remains the target for implementing sustainable development goals – goals that work hand in hand with the full digitisation of money. Time is increasingly short, but recognising the dangers now and resisting the advancement of what is a globalist agenda for control remains within our ability.

  

• She Wrote The Patriot Act. Her Next Job Is With Facebook

  Facebook announced Monday that Jennifer Newstead, a Trump appointee who served in the Department of Justice (DoJ) under President Bush, will join the social media company as General Counsel, supervising its global legal functions.

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  Newstead replaces Colin Stretch, who announced in 3Q18 that he will exit. Stretch will remain with Facebook through the transition phase, expected to be completed in the coming months.

  “Jennifer is a seasoned leader whose global perspective and experience will help us fulfill our mission,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer. “We are also truly grateful to Colin for his dedicated leadership and wise counsel over the past nine years. He has played a crucial role in some of our most important projects and has created a strong foundation for Jennifer to build upon.”

  Newstead brings a terrifying history of lobbying and legislating for an Orwellian style of mass electronic surveillance of Americans.

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  The Hill explains she was credited with writing the controversial 2001 Patriot Act, a piece of legislation that stripped Americans of their First and Fourth Amendments in the name of fighting the War on Terror.

  In a 2002 statement, Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh described Newstead’s role in drafting the Patriot Act: “Her enhanced leadership duties and her excellent service on a range of issues — including helping craft the new U.S.A. Patriot Act to protect the United States against terror — have earned her this important distinction. She is first among equals.”

  Congress enacted the Patriot Act in the wake of September 11, 2001 attacks, the Act expanded the scope of the government’s surveillance powers to investigate terrorism, organized crime, and drug trafficking. It allowed government investigators to use roving wiretaps and the ability to collect telephone records from US carriers.

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  The Patriot Act also launched the national security letter (NSL), an administrative subpoena issued by the government to collect specific data without the authorization of a court or judge, citing threats to national security.

  Facebook continues to process the National Security Agency (NSA) data demands, which have spiked in the last five years. The company’s lawyers received more than 32,000 requests for data from law enforcement in the second 2H18, and 20,000 accounts were requested by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court over the same period.

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  Newstead’s new position will likely spearhead Facebook’s legal troubles as the company continues to fight ongoing privacy battles. Her professional history suggests – she will be more inclined to accept government requests for users’ data than fight them. 

  

• REIT ETF Routed With Biggest Outflow In History

  Last week, with a delay of about two years, mall and shopping center stocks and REITs finally tumbled, led by Tanger Factory Outlet Centers, as Scotiabank warned about surging mall occupancy risks, while the 10-year Treasury yield reached its highest level since the March Fed meeting, an ominous development for most REITs.

  How are REITs only now pricing in mall occupancy risks

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 16, 2019

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  In justifying its opinion, ScotiaBank calculated that the potential impact of bankruptcies to malls (SKT, MAC, SPG, TCO) was at least double that of shopping centers (REG, WRI, KIM, FRT, BRX) due to apparel exposure; meanwhile Tanger crashed to a nine-year low as the stock screened as having the greatest level of exposure to tenants with a bankruptcy risk in malls.

  As a reminder, shorting malls via CMBX has long been dubbed the “next big short”, one which even Goldman recommended to clients, while providing the handy cheat sheet which CMBX has the most sensitivity to what part of the commercial real estate sector.

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  And while investors have long been shorting the melting ice cube that is malls, via CMBX, that changed last week when REITs finally got routed: “About 60% of the ~40 retailer bankruptcies since 2017 were apparel-focused; only 4 of the total bankruptcies were listed as top REIT tenants, so we caution that our analysis may under-represent true bankruptcy risk,” ScotiaBank analyst Nicholas Yulico wrote.

  Then this week, the rout finally spilled over to REIT ETFs, and in the first three days of the week, more than $475 million in funds was pulled from the $2.4 billion SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF, or RWR, reducing the fund’s assets by about 15% according to Bloomberg. The bulk of outflows took place on Monday, when the fund lost $403 million, the most since 2004, in what appeared to be a delayed response to last week’s REIT collapse.

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  And while the general aversion to REITs took place in response to a (delayed) realization that creeping mall defaults will sooner or later catch up with the equity tranche, another reason cited for the plunge has been the creeping push higher in interest rates, although considering the sharp rate drop in recent days, the REIT plunge was driven not by interest rate fears but by idiosyncratic factors such as mounting delinquencies and defaults.

  Confirming as much, Bloomberg notes that REITs have other exogenous concerns, including potential impacts of retailer and mall bankruptcies. Curiously, despite the sudden and sharp outflow from the ETF, both RWR and the MSCI US REIT Index remain up about 14% year-to-date, as investor refuse to anticipate a worst case scenario.

  

• Mueller Time Is Finally Over (But Not For Democrats)

  Authored by Peter van Buren via The American Conservative,

  When it comes to the Mueller report, believing there are still more questions than answers means refusing to accept the answers. With the release of the redacted report, #MuellerTime is now over. Robert Mueller has ended conclusively the three-year Russiagate tantrum, and chosen not to pursue obstruction via indictment or a direct referral to Congress for action. He could have but he did not. Trump will serve his full term and voters will decide whether he gets another. That should be it.

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  But it won’t be. Mueller’s inclusion of information on obstruction of justice that portrays unbecoming conduct by the president that nonetheless doesn’t rise to the level of indictable crime allows Democrats to decide where to take this next. Mueller has not tossed the ball to a Democratic Congress to play out its check and balance role so much as handed dirt to Democratic politicians to use as they see fit. It’s an odd end for the righteous Robert Mueller, twisting the tools of justice and state to slander.

  The report was issued in two “volumes.” Volume I focuses on Russian interference in the election. Volume II focuses on obstruction of justice.

  Volume I concludes two important and exclusive things. First, the Russian government, under Barack Obama’s watch, tried to influence the election via social media and by obtaining Democratic National Committee emails. And second, no American colluded, cooperated, or coordinated with that effort. The report (volume I, page 2) is clear that the Trump campaign’s reacting to or even anticipating released materials was not criminal. A crime would have required coordinated interaction, not merely two parties (in Mueller’s words) “informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests.”

  An analogy (not in the report) might involve the Clinton campaign and the infamous Access Hollywood tape. The campaign may have heard that the tape was going to leak and exploited its release, but that would not have created “collusion” between Clinton and the leaker.

  The report also deflates any credibility left in the Steele Dossier and most of the Russiagate reporting. None of the subplots matter outside of the Washington-Twitter-New York corridor because either they didn’t happen or they did not constitute a crime. That includes the Trump Tower meeting, the Moscow Hotel Project, the polling data, the Alfa Bank server, the changed Republican platform on Ukraine, Jeff Sessions meeting Ambassador Kislyak, the meeting in the Seychelles, Cohen (not) in Prague, Manafort (not) meeting Assange, and Trump (not) ordering Cohen to lie to Congress.

  All of that should be in the headlines but isn’t. That’s because of a new focus on obstruction of justice.

  Volume I of the report deals with actions taken independently by the Russians that had no coordinated connection to Trump’s own actions or decisions. The second half deals with obstruction of justice, events that occurred because there was an investigation into collusion that itself never happened. Obstruction, like a perjury trap, is a process crime, which can only exist because an investigation exists. As with most of Mueller’s perjury convictions in this saga, there was no underlying crime

  And as with collusion, we already know the ending on obstruction. Mueller did not indict because the evidence did not support it. Attorney General Bob Barr and his deputy Rod Rosenstein, by law the actual intended recipients of the report, agreed with Mueller. Trump’s actions were lawful. Though some of them were troublesome and even immoral, they were not criminal. Most significantly, Mueller could not indict on obstruction because it was not possible to determine that Trump had showed the legally required corrupt intent. All of that precedes any consideration given to Department of Justice and Office of Legal Counsel advice that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

  If Mueller had an obstruction case, he would have made it. He could have specifically recommended indictment and made explicit that the complex legal issues around presidential obstruction meant a decision was beyond his and the attorney general’s constitutional roles and must be addressed by Congress via impeachment. He could have indicted any number of people in Trump’s inner circle, or issued a sealed indictment against post-White House Trump himself. He could have said that he couldn’t indict solely because of DOJ/OLC rules and therefore explicitly created a road map for impeachment to guide the next step.

  None of that happened. Mueller had no reason to speak in riddles, show restraint, send signals, embed hidden messages, or hint at things that others should do. He could have swung in any number of ways but instead found reason to leave the bat on his shoulder. Volume II should have ended there.

  But it seems obvious from reading the report that stories alleging that members of Mueller’s team saw evidence of obstruction that they found “alarming and significant” were true. Barr did a great disservice in omitting at least mention of this from his summary, as it forms the bulk of Volume II and will fuel nearly everything that happens next.

  Despite no indictment, the report outlines 10 instances containing elements of obstructed justice by Trump, with a suggestion (volume II, page 8) that someone may want to look again. Apparently not everyone on Mueller’s team agreed with the boss’s conclusion that the evidence was insufficient, and Mueller chose to allow what is essentially dissent Talmudically contradicting his major Volume II conclusion to be baked into his own work.

  Mueller was tasked with making an unambiguous decision: either to prosecute or not. He made it, and then included pages of reasons suggesting he might be wrong even as he also found space to say that the dissent might also be missing the key element of corrupt intent. There is no explanation for this confusing, ambiguous, and jumbled departure from traditional prosecutorial judgment. The final line (volume II, page 182) reads like a Twilight Zone script: “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

  One focus of the dissent is on Trump firing former FBI director James Comey. For this to be obstruction, Trump would have had to have fired Comey with the corrupt intent to impede the investigation. The Mueller report is clear that this was not what happened. Despite the public messaging, the firing was related to Comey’s mishandling of the Clinton email case. The report shows that the president was angry at Comey for telling him privately that he was not under investigation but refusing to say so publicly, as Comey had done (once) for Hillary Clinton. Volume II, page 75: “Substantial evidence indicates that the catalyst for the president’s decision to fire Comey was Comey’s unwillingness to publicly state that the president was not personally under investigation.” That’s not obstruction of justice; it’s presidential rage.

  Yet elsewhere, the report says something more…leading to set up the argument for obstruction post-Comey. Volume II, page 7: “Some of [Trump’s] actions, such as firing the FBI director, involved facially lawful acts,” but “at the same time, the President’s position as the head of the Executive Branch provided him with unique and powerful means of influencing official proceedings, subordinate officers, and potential witnesses—all of which is relevant to a potential obstruction-of-justice analysis.” It was even clearer elsewhere. Volume II, page 157: “[we] found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations.”

  Mueller’s team concluded that Trump lawfully fired Comey, as the intent was not to obstruct, but it was still dirty play, “undue influence,” not a crime but still something that, according to Volume II, page 2, “presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred.”

  Ironically, while Trump was not under investigation when he fired Comey for refusing to say that publicly, he was placed under investigation by the FBI (for obstruction) after he fired Comey.

  The report suggests that Trump’s post-Comey actions (broken down into 10 episodes) would have constituted obstruction if seen as a pattern of behavior, not as the discrete acts the law focuses on, and if they had included the critical element of corrupt intent. Those “if” words are doing all the work because there was no corrupt intent. Mueller said so.

  So if Trump could not take his obstructive actions to cover up his crimes with Russia because they did not exist to be covered up, i.e. corrupt intent, why did he act in ways that appear designed to disrupt the investigation? Mueller answers the question. Vol II, page 61:

  Evidence indicates that the President was angered by both the existence of the Russia investigation and the public reporting that he was under investigation, which he knew was not true based on Comey’s representations. The President complained to advisers that if people thought Russia helped him with the election, it would detract from what he had accomplished. Other evidence indicates that the President was concerned about the impact of the Russia investigation on his ability to govern. The President complained that the perception that he was under investigation was hurting his ability to conduct foreign relations, particularly with Russia.

  If you believe Mueller, Trump was concerned about his ability to govern, about as far from corrupt intent as you can get. At the pre-release press conference, Barr agreed with Mueller’s assessment. Trump knew, and Mueller came to know, that he did not collude with the Russians. To show corrupt intent, Mueller would have had to prove Trump was trying to stymie the process that would ultimately clear him. And while there can be obstruction without an underlying crime, that requires even clearer evidence of corrupt intent, because in such cases obstruction on its face is counterproductive.

  Everything that’s happened over the last two years was because Democrats, the media, and the FBI falsely conflated Russia’s actions with Trump’s, and then imagined that Trump committed serial acts of obstruction to cover up something he never did.

  Prosecutors don’t issue road maps for others. They charge or drop a case. Not charging is a conclusion and the only one that matters in the end. The Mueller report is not a pretty picture of power being exercised. But ultimately Trump did not commit a chargeable crime, and in between some muddled dissent text, Mueller the prosecutor said so.

  Politicians, however, are bound by a different code. They can conduct investigations, hold hearings, speculate about what’s under black redaction bars, and file articles of impeachment whose only purpose is to drag Trump through the Benghazi-like muck. They can desperately pursue a climax to this anti-climatic report, but they’ll never achieve it. Democrats know they have no chance of impeaching Trump.

  The question is, by playing at trying, do they think they have a better chance of defeating him in 2020?

  

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