Sep 05

Today’s News 5th September 2018

  • Marines Begin Amphibious Landing Exercises In Sweden Ahead Of Massive NATO War Games

    The Marine Corps Times on Tuesday reported the details of the run-up to what’s being described as NATO’s largest ever military games in a decade, called Trident Juncture, set to take place right up along Russia’s border with Europe.

    Currently, the US Marine Corps is engaged in preparatory maneuvers with Swedish counterparts in a training exercise that involves mock raids and amphibious operations up and down Sweden’s coastal island archipelagos. 

    Some 75 US Marines are said to be involved in the training which involves navigating an area of thousands of small islands known as the Stockholm Archipelago and which extend nearly 40 miles to the east into the Baltic Sea. 

    Prior Baltic NATO exercises in Ravlunda, Sweden from 2015. Image source: Flickr/U.S. Navy photo

    Russia is interpreting the exercises as a deeply provocative military action that signals NATO could be planning to use Scandinavian countries as a launch point for a potential future conflict. 

    The Marines are considered America’s most advanced forward deployed force “as the President may direct” according to their founding purpose and codified under the National Security Act of 1947. For this reason they are considered a “force projection” and “first to be deployed” unit in any major conflict.

    Though Trident Juncture, which will involve nearly 40,000 NATO troops, is not set to start until later this Fall, the Marine exercise, called Archipelago Endeavor, is part of a broader and semi-permanent build-up of American Marine forces in Scandinavia which was first reported months ago. 

    It was revealed in early June that the Norwegian government, which is hosting the NATO games, intends to add 400 U.S. Marines to Norway before the most significant military exercise since the Cold War, according to the country’s Ministry of Defense. By the time the Trident Juncture games begin, about 700 Marines in total are expected to be present in the Scandinavian region, and will reportedly be based in Norway for a period of five years. 

    Predictably, Russia has responded by pointing to the “anti-Russia” nature of the impending NATO exercises. 

    View of the Stockholm Archipelago, where the Marines are training this week. 

    During a briefing last week, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, “The troops and equipment of the alliance members and individual partner countries will be used on land, at sea and in the air to improve the skills of defensive and, crucially, offensive operations in the northern latitudes in case of a ‘high intensity’ conflict with a ‘comparable enemy.’” She added, “This demonstration of military potential will unfold in the immediate proximity to Russian borders and has a clear anti-Russian nature.”

    When Norway announced previously that it would double the number of US Marines in the country, Moscow warned of dire consequences and went so far as to describe the move as “an attack”.

    Notably, even though Sweden is a “nonaligned country” it’s increasingly upped its willing participation and closeness with NATO through periphery drills such as the currently ongoing Archipelago Endeavor exercise. Two years ago Russian President Putin formally announced for the first time that Russia would increase its own troop presence along its border with Finland should Moscow sense increased NATO aggression in the region.

    And last May non-NATO members Finland and Sweden formalized their intent to form a closer security relationship with the United States by signing a joint letter representing a non-binding pledge to partner in NATO military exercises. 

    According to the Marine Corps Times report, the US forces are also testing newly accessed weapons as part of the amphibious training drills: 

    The exercise also allows Marines to get their hands on Sweden’s Carl Gustaf recoilless rifle. The Corps plans to equip its grunts in the coming year with the Gustaf as it phases out the Mk 153 Shoulder-Launched Multipurpose Assault Weapon, also known as the SMAW or SMAW MoD 2.

    The three-week training event is scheduled to last to September 8.

    As NATO’s chess pieces continue being positioned in Sweden and Norway and other regions around the Baltic in the largest military exercise since the Cold War this fall, how will Russia respond?

  • Hungary And Italy Unite On Migrants: EU Is About To Take A Nosedive

    Authored by Alex Gorka via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The EU is facing a real problem now that a new alliance has emerged within it. The Aug. 28 Hungary-Italy high-level meeting was a landmark event that seriously jeopardized European unity as those deep divisions emerged into the open. Budapest and Rome agreed to jointly oppose Brussels on the issue of migration. Expressing their determination to take a tough stance, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Italian Deputy Head of State and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini hit it off, creating what CNN called a Trojan horse within the European Union. The two agreed to jointly pursue their anti-immigration agenda prior to the European elections next May. Both slammed French President Macron for his stance on the problem. PM Orban described Macron as “the leader of the pro-migration parties in Europe today.”  According to him, “There are currently two camps in Europe and one is headed by (Emmanuel) Macron.”

    Before that event, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte met with his Czech counterpart Andrej Babis, who is also opposed to relocating refugees.

    The Sunday Express cited Massimiliano Panarari, a political science professor at Luiss University in Rome, who believes that “Italy has become a laboratory of European populism and risks moving away not only from Europe, but also from western democracies and getting closer, together with Orbán’s Hungary, to Vladimir Putin, who enjoys Salvini’s manifestations of sympathy.”

    There was something really important that Mr. Orban said during the press conference after the meeting with Salvini in Milan, the city that gave birth to Silvio Berlusconi, an Italian member of the European People’s Party (EPP) and ex-prime minister. The Hungarian PM “asked permission” to meet the Italian official from Berlusconi, who is a long-standing friend of Russia President Vladimir Putin. So is Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban. And Salvini? He opposes the Russian sanctions and is a member of the government headed by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, who is expected to visit Moscow soon. While Europe is fending off the US attacks and the trade war lingers on, Russia’s influence is growing for the simple reason that many leaders want a friendly relationship with Moscow while defying the rule of Brussels.

    Italy called for immediate changes to EU’s Operation Sophia during the EU-wide summit of defense and foreign ministers in Vienna that was held Aug. 30-31. No agreement was reached about the ports where the ships filled with migrants would disembark. The EU’s anti-trafficking mission in the Mediterranean (Operation Sophia), currently headed by Italy, is in jeopardy. Rome is threatening to close its ports to the mission if no solution is found this week. If so, it’ll be a heavy blow to EU unity right before the Sept. 20 summit in the Austrian city of Salzburg that was convened to discuss migration — a hot-button issue on which the bloc has failed to reach an agreement.

    The anti-migration stance is backed by the Visegrad Group (V4), which includes the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary, as well as Austria, that stands in defense of the right to remain national states instead of becoming part of a federalist entity led by the French-German alliance. The V4 is openly challenging the EU on its refugee policy.

    In July, the EU took legal action against Poland over the reform of its judicial system. But Warsaw is backed by Budapest. Poland and Hungary have joined together in opposition to the EU bureaucracy on many issues. With the two nations supporting one another, no EU sanctions can be levied against them. According to EU’s Article 7, two members are enough to bring that mechanism to a standstill.

    The emerging “anti-Merkel/Macron” alliance, comprising the Visegrad Group, Austria, and Italy, might soon be strengthened by a country that has been known as an exemplary EU member. The parliamentary election in Sweden will take place on September 9. The far-right Eurosceptic Sweden Democrats are expected to win big – by 18.7% – an increase of almost 50% over the 2014 election. Bookies predict an even larger win. If so, that party will hold the balance of power. The Sweden Democrats have threatened to vote down any government that does not give them a say over immigration policy. In any event, they’ll play an important role in the horse trading that will follow the election.

    The idea of a multi-speed Europe has been revived by the French president, auguring a possible split of that bloc that is already divided into mini-coalitions. Chances are slim for the EU to remain united. The bloc is about to take a nosedive. It’ll have to work really hard to survive, but the chances of overcoming the deepening rift appear to be slim at best.

  • Taliban Announces Death Of Notorious Terrorist Jalaluddin Haqqani

    He was head of a terror network that’s been called “the Sopranos of the Afghanistan War” which has been a lead group behind the most feared guerrilla warfare insurgency of the past thirty years in central Asia. 

    Jalaluddin Haqqani’s death was announced by the Taliban early Monday; however, it is unclear when exactly he died as prior death claims have been a matter of intense speculation since at least 2007, which is the year that some Afghan sources claim it actually happened. 

    According to a Taliban statement Haqqani died after a long illness, but further details weren’t given. He’s one of the most notable and controversial figures ever confirmed to have been trained by the CIA. 

    Jalaluddin Haqqani was friends with Osama Bin Laden, but Haqqani’s group goes back further and is more deeply rooted in central Asia than al-Qaeda. 

    The ‘Haqqani network’ has close ties to al-Qaeda and operates largely independently under the Taliban umbrella, and is based in the tribal Pakistani border area of Waziristan. Its roots go back to the 1970’s and the group was among the most effective mujahideen organizations to be trained and sponsored by the CIA in the US war against the Soviets in central Asia. 

    Their favored tactic, as CNN reports, citing war studies is “bold and complex suicide bombings, including high-profile attacks on US and foreign personnel and assassinations of high level people in Kabul and northern Afghanistan”. 

    Fox News reporting of his death describes that he “was considered a prized CIA asset” and a previous LA Times profile of his group says “The network is believed to be financed by some Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, and by the Pakistani establishment”.

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    Indeed when the Trump White House first announced earlier this year that the US would be cutting $300 million in military aid to Pakistan over its failure or refusal to root out Islamist militants, the Haqqani network was precisely one of the groups named. 

    In a September 2011 New York Times profile of Michael Vickers, who had been a top CIA officer planning US arms flow and covert logistics to the Afghan mujahideen, Haqqani was bluntly acknowledged as initially a CIA asset:

    During the Reagan administration, Mr. Vickers funneled weapons to, among others, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, both now morphed into Afghan insurgent leaders who are fighting the United States.

    “Yes, most of my colleagues from those days are now on the dark side,” Mr. Vickers acknowledged in a recent interview in his antiseptic office. “We were well aware that they weren’t the ideal allies.” Nonetheless, he said, “You make a deal with the devil to defeat another devil.”

    The group went on to become “by far the most lethal group, not just inside Afghanistan, but in South Asia in general,” in the words of Ahmad Majidyar, a fellow at the Middle East Institute and an expert on Afghanistan-Pakistan security issues, who further described, “The group is more like a criminal mafia group rather than an insurgent group.”

    Though belatedly listed by the United States as a terror organization in 2012, we wonder if any current or retired CIA officers will have a brief moment of fond memories reminiscing back to the days of training Haqqani’s men during the 1980’s. 

  • How The CIA Undermined Civil Rights

    Submitted by Disobedient Media

    Although the Civil Rights Movement resulted in many well known changes at an institutional level, it is widely agreed that the movement did not succeed in a total transformation of American society. The dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not fully realized. The exact reasons for this are subject to debate, which often unfortunately devolves into partisan blame shifting between conservatives and liberals. In contemplating this history, little attention is given to one of the most unfortunate reasons that the Civil Rights Movement lost steam – interference and attacks from American intelligence agencies bent on neutralizing what they saw as a force of change that could destabilize society.

    Efforts to marginalize and degrade the success of the Civil Rights Movement has played out for many years, but took on an initial intensity during the 1960’s. CIA assets including Gloria Steinem were never far removed from a larger overall process in which black American civil rights leaders were targeted and African American society was disrupted. Agents like Steinem were directly involved with spreading propaganda like a virus during the 60’s and beyond. The effects on the black community in the United States have been so tragically consequential that they could safely be defined as an experiment in population control. An examination of the methods in which the Civil Rights Movement was targeted can teach us much about our history, and even more about what we must vigilantly watch for in the future.

    I. Steinem’s History With The CIA

    The beginning of Steinem’s history with the CIA is somewhat unclear, although the facts indicate she was recruited either during her university years or immediately afterwards. From 1956 to 1958, Steinem traveled to India as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow. According to documentation of Steinem’s career, individuals she met with during her time there included Indian Communist Party founder M. N. Roy and a researcher who appeared to have been a CIA agent. Steinem’s “official” association with the CIA began upon her return to the United States in 1959 when she took charge of a front organization called the Independent Research Service where she was tasked with recruiting students to attend Soviet-controlled youth festivals in 1959 and 1962.

    In 1978, feminist group Restockings wrote in the book Feminist Revolution that Steinem was listed as a co-director of an Independent Research Service pamphlet titled A Review of Negro Segregation in the United States which alleged that segregation of black Americans was at least partially self-perpetuated. When Feminist Revolution was first published, the CIA-connected Ford Foundation was among those to demand that publisher Random House remove all references to Steinem and the Independent Research Service.

    The connection between Steinem, the Independent Research Service the CIA was not exposed until 1967 when the details of the clandestine support were leaked to Ramparts Magazine, then reported widely by the Washington Post and New York Times. Both the CIA and Steinem herself would ultimately acknowledge the connection in subsequent years, although they both insisted that their work aimed to combat Communism.

    Steinem discusses her tenure with the CIA in the aftermath of its exposure

    Steinem’s acknowledged tenure with the CIA resulted in a number of high profile connections with individuals involved in various CIA operations. Research from the University of Missouri-St. Louis lists the Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank chairman John McCloy, OSS psychological warfare expert and senior executive at Time, Inc. C.D. Jackson and Watergate-connected CIA operative Cord Meyer as individuals who supported her work with the Independent Research Service. Although the CIA placed some degree of trust in Steinem, other agencies were wary of her. A few years later the FBI warned the Justice Department’s civil rights division that Steinem was a security risk and an inadvisable hire due to what they considered to be unacceptable far left associations.

    Although the relationship between Steinem and the CIA supposedly terminated after 1962, her associations with high profile figures controlling public policy continued. According to Julian Assange, Steinem dated Henry Kissinger during his years working for the Nixon administration. She would also spend nine years in a relationship with Stanley Pottinger, the former Assistant Attorney General with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division who insisted that there was no evidence of FBI involvement in the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.

    When Steinem founded Ms. Magazine in 1971, she chose Elizabeth Forsling Harris, a PR executive who helped with advance work for John F. Kennedy’s 1963 trip to Dallas, Texas as her co-founder and publisher. An examination of the effects and goal of her work throughout the late 1960’s and early 70’s gives the distinct impression that Steinem’s association with the CIA may not have ended, instead playing a role in the agency’s known attempts to undermine domestic Civil Rights groups during this period.

    II. Targeting Of Black America And Civil Rights

    The rapid initial success of the civil rights movement, and the promise it held to effectively disrupt the power structures in the United States at the height of the Cold War made it an obvious target for intelligence groups, both within the United States and abroad. Actions taken against the black community during these years included targeting civil rights leadership, drafting and deploying black males to fight in foreign conflicts and destruction of black society by targeting the family unit and promoting gender conflict.

    A. Targeting Black Leaders

    Black leaders had been targeted by intelligence and government agencies long before the 1960’s, but it was the 60’s that were marked by a series of targeted assassinations. Two of the most well known from this period are likely Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Although Malcolm X, a Black Nationalist, spent most of his career in opposition to MLK’s nonviolent approach to Civil Rights his opinions shifted just a year prior to his death. In May 1964, Malcolm was quoted in the New York Times as stating that his perspectives of white people had changed and that he would work with the younger generations to combat racism. He was assassinated in February 1965.

    As one of the most iconic leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. was undoubtedly a high-priority target. Although Dr. King delivered a number of socialistic critiques of capitalism during his lifetime he was ardently opposed to communism. It was this opposition in fact that caused him to be the only high profile American to be targeted by intelligence agencies in both the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s KGB opposed Dr. King due to his unwillingness to allow Communist sympathizers to foment poor race relations. His death came several years after Malcolm X’s in 1968.

    Civil rights leader Andrew Young (L) and others standing on balcony of Lorraine motel pointing in direction of assailant after assassination of civil rights ldr. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who is lying at their feet. Joseph Louw—The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

    The removal of leadership figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X was essential to sideline individuals who might be more nationalistically minded or support American socialists over foreign supported extremism intended to deteriorate the Civil Rights situation.

    B. Disrupting Black Society

    Targeted assassinations of leadership figures coincided with the Vietnam War, which lead to a disproportionate number of black men being drafted or otherwise deployed to the war zone. The Oxford Companion to American Military History stated that although blacks represented 11% of the US population from 1965 to 1969, they made up 12.6% of the soldiers in Vietnam. The majority of these served in the infantry where they suffered casualty rates of 14.9%.

    It was statistics like these that caused Martin Luther King Jr. and other Civil Rights leaders to denounce Vietnam as being “a white man’s war, a black man’s fight” where black men were far more likely to see combat. Deploying males to a war zone also had the effect of disrupting society in a manner similar to the Second World War.

    C. Consolidation Of CIA Domestic Intelligence Programs Under Operation CHAOS

    The Central Intelligence Agency has a long and tenured history of interfering in foreign politics. Their domestic operations, however, have been given considerably less attention in recent years. By the end of the 60’s the CIA began to centralize their various domestic operations under a single program known as Operation CHAOS. Officially begun in 1967, all existing CIA domestic programs were consolidated under CHAOS after Richard Nixon assumed the presidency in January 1969.

    Operation CHAOS served as a means for the CIA to infiltrate and spy on groups and individuals they considered to be behaving in a manner that was “illegal and subversive.” Organizations that were targeted by the CIA included socialist-leaning student organizations, the Black Panther Party and Ramparts Magazine, the publication that first exposed Gloria Steinem’s relationship with the CIA.

    On April 4th, 1969, Steinem published her “landmark” piece “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” in New York Magazine. The article’s main focus was to encourage women to break away from the Civil Rights movement and “start concentrating on their own problems.” With Civil Rights leadership weakened by targeted assassination and men of fighting age being shipped out to a foreign theater of combat her writings served to perpetuate these issues by causing gender conflict within the civil rights movement.

    “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” stood in total contrast to previous prevailing philosophies that supported societal models, which Steinem attacked as “patriarchal.” Leadership such as Dr. King preached that the cornerstone to building a strong black American community was the nuclear family. In 1966, King gave a speech where he stated that black America’s “very survival was bound” to their ability to create and foster strong families. “The whole of society,” King said, “rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.” With figures like King out of the way by 1969 there was clear opportunity to attack what he had seen as a cornerstone of the black society in America – healthy and harmonious families. The spark that was lit by Steinem’s article would inoculate the Civil Rights Movement with a new strain of feminism that spread like a pathogen.

    III. Exposure Of Operation CHAOS And Coverup

    The years following 1969 were marked by turbulence and increasing inter agency spats. While the FBI supplied the CIA with intelligence for Operations CHAOS, they refused to provide any context or analysis due to the perception that this would violate their charter. It’s possible that this tension contributed to the outbreak of the 1972 Watergate scandal, where an active CIA asset was arrested while bugging the DNC’s headquarters and a senior FBI official provided information exposing the scandal to the Washington Post.

    With the increasing public scrutiny of covert domestic programs, Operation CHAOS was officially shut down in 1973. In 1974, journalist Seymour Hersh exposed the program with an investigative piece published in the New York Times. The expose caused enough public outrage for the establishment of committees in the House and Senate as well as the Rockefeller Commission, headed Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller. These investigations were marked by attempts from Ford Administration officials to block Congressional committees from accessing information and interview with officials and focusing on the more easily controlled Rockefeller Commission.

    The Commission’s goal was not to reveal wrongdoing by US intelligence agencies but to mitigate damage caused by leaks. Famous revelations such as the disclosure of Project MKULTRA were in fact “safe” because CIA officials considered these programs to be failures. It is already public knowledge that some information including disclosures of the CIA’s involvement in assassination plots was removed from the final report by the Commission. The involvement of Nelson Rockefeller, whose family was involved with government calls for population control and funded Nazi-affiliated eugenics programs which maintained files on millions of Americans marked for genetic elimination was especially inappropriate and showed the pervasive interest of special interests in embedding themselves within the Rockefeller Commission for their own private purposes.

    IV. Post-Rockefeller Commission

    Targeting black communities continued long after the 1960’s. When disclosure of US bioweapon experimentationon American populations began in the 1970’s tragedies such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments showed that black Americans were specifically targeted by various bioweapon programs conducted by various government agencies. Much of the information surrounding these programs remains classified, “destroyed” or otherwise kept from the public sphere. It is impossible to know the full extent of these programs that used American citizens as guinea pigs for experiments in biological warfare and population control methods.

    Reporters who exposed other CIA targeting of black American communities were singled out for discrediting and character assassination. Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance series published with The Mercury News alleged the involvement of the CIA in trafficking of crack cocaine that was rampantly distributed in black communities and resulted in disproportionate sentencing of black Americans. The high incarceration rates that resulted from these policies further contributed to the fragmentation of the black American family unit. Webb was attacked by almost every mainstream media outlet for his revelations and was ultimately found dead with two gunshots to the head.

    The combined effect of legal, biological and sociological attacks on the black community has prevented them from realizing Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a black American society built on bedrock of stable family units. In 1960, two thirds of black children lived with two parents – today that number has been reduced to one third. Over 73% of black children are born out of wedlock according the data published by the Center for Disease Control in 2012 (a dramatic increase from 11% in 1938). These statistics are part of an overall decrease in fertility and birth rates that have continued uninterrupted to this day. This trend is alarming, given that social scientists have been observing since the 1960’s that the breakdown of the family unit was not due to economic factors. The obstacles created by the intelligence community and new social theories degraded the ability of black families to retain their cohesive structure, exposing generations to the struggles of single parenthood and continuous poverty.

    Despite these factors that disrupt family structure and make life more difficult for black women, Gloria Steinem as recently as 2015 told the Huffington Post that she credited black women with “starting the feminist movement” she helped foster and spread in the 1960’s and 70’s. She has remained active in various social justice movements. In January 2017, she was a speaker at the Women’s March protests in Washington DC.

    It seems that Operation CHAOS may have lingered on past 1973 in spirit if not in name. Certain members of the Reagan administration would eventually attempt to allow the CIA to resume domestic operations in the 1980’s. The proposal received strong criticism in the New York Times. In 2015, reports began to emerge highlighting claims that an activist crossing the Canadian border was “randomly selected” for a search as part of a program called “Operation Chaos.”

  • Mapping The United States Of Arms

    Making friends and influencing people since 1950…

    The United States is the world’s largest weapons dealer.

    Will Geary, @wgeary, mapped the flows of arms exports leaving the U.S. from 1950 to 2017 to produce the fascinating video…

    The underlying data comes from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Arms Transfers Database. Units are expressed in trend indicator values (TIV). Each dot on the map = one TIV. Visualization by Will Geary (@wgeary).

  • Paper Money Eventually Returns To Its Intrinsic Value – Zero!

    Authored by Alex Deluce via GoldTelegraph.com,

    In socialist Venezuela, the price of a cup of coffee has doubled every few weeks.

    The annual inflation rate could hit 1,000,000 percent by years end. People can no longer afford food, but that’s okay because there isn’t any food to be found. South America’s once wealthy nation has spiraled from secure and stable into an unimaginable state of hyperinflation. Venezuela is experiencing the results of government mismanagement, corruption, and socialist ideology. President Maduro’s solution to the problem is to proudly lob three zeros off the hyperinflated Bolivar and call it a “miracle solution.”

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    At one time, Venezuela had the largest oil reserves in the world, which provided steady revenues for the country and a good living for its citizens. Oil accounted for most of Venezuela’s exports. Life in Venezuela was excellent. Then, in 1998, came President Hugo Chavez. Chavez used the abundant income stream to go on a spending spree as he instituted a large number of entitlement programs using the oil revenues. A strike in 2003 interrupted Chavez’s plans and caused the GDP to crash by 27 percent in just four months. Chavez began nationalizing industries and instituting price controls, which was the beginning on Venezuela’s inflationary spiral as Venezuelans developed a reliance on their government for products and services.

    The price of crude oil plummeted in 2014, and the economy shrank by 30 percent. Oil revenues, in the form of U.S. dollars, were dwindling, and Venezuela was unable to continue importing necessary goods. These days, in 2018, stores are empty as people attempt to survive on dealing through the black market.

    Venezuela is printing currency at the speed of a copy machine. The more money that is injected into circulation, the more it becomes devalued. The cup of coffee that could be bought for 140,000 bolivars rose to over 1,000,000 within weeks. Today, that cup costs 2,000,000 bolivars. Hyperinflation has placed the purchase of everyday items out of the reach of the average Venezuelan, although President Maduro has granted four wage hikes this year alone.

    Venezuela has lost most of its imports as it remains in a state of unprecedented crisis. People are starving, and the average weight loss is 25 pounds due to lack of food. Still, Maduro continues to print worthless currency. For Venezuela to reach this low abyss has taken a combination of corruption and mismanagement on every level of its nationalized industries.

    Hyperinflation in invariably the result of government mismanagement and the printing of fiat currency. Venezuela isn’t the only country experiencing inflation. According to Steve Hanke of the Cato Institute, the value of the Iranian rial decreased from 98,000 rials to the dollar to 112,000 rials in one day. That’s a one-day devaluation of 12.5 percent. As in Venezuela, the black market currency business in Iran is thriving. While the official exchange rate to the dollar is 44,030, the black market rate is 112,00, an increase of 154 percent over the official rate.

    Professor Hanke has previously dealt with hyperinflation in Bulgaria as adviser to President Petar Stoyanov. At that time, Bulgaria’s rate of inflation was 242 percent a month. Professor Hanke instituted a fixed rate of exchange for Bulgaria’s currency linked to an anchor currency, the German Mark. This prevented manipulation of the country’s currency and allowed market forces to determine its value. This stabilized Bulgaria’s currently quite effectively. Taking the government out of the equation was the prime move to successfully halt the country’s inflation. Bulgaria’s debt has decreased because it was forced to stop printing valueless money and continue spending money it didn’t have.

    Professor Hanke sees this as the solution to Iran’s current inflation problem. He suggests gold as the best “anchor currency” because the value of gold is dependent on market forces instead of government manipulation and whim.

    In 2017, Zimbabwe was another country with a daily inflation rate of 98 percent and an annual rate of 79,600,000,000 percent. Unemployment in Zimbabwe reached 80 percent. The country’s economy had broken down entirely due to its printing of fiat money and extreme socialist policies. In the 1990s, the government began to redistribute land from white farmers to black farmers. The inexperienced black farmers failed to produce enough food and caused a massive shortage and production fell sharply.

    Like other socialist countries, Zimbabwe began to print fiat money and flooding the economy with it. The worse the economic situation became, the more money was being printed. As government debt increased, the money machines continue to crank out currency that became more devalued, thus making it even harder to pay off any debt. As the economic output declined, shortages were on the rise. People had money, but few goods became available. The combination of increased money supply and a higher demand for goods forced up prices sharply. Foregoing all economic logic, President Mugabe blamed the greed of manufacturers for wanting to raise prices. It is the printing of worthless currency that causes inflation and price increase, not greed.

    In a repeat of Chavez’s move in Venezuela, Zimbabwe imposed price controls. But production costs increased quicker than prices, leaving producers with no incentive to produce. This increased the shortages and raised prices even more. Inflation invariably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There was money to go around, but even a million dollars become worthless if the price of bread is two million dollars. The fare for transportation increased between the morning and evening commutes.

    The causes of hyperinflation are always the same, yet countries are refusing to learn from history.

    When governments begin to print money to pay off their debts, the money supply increases, as do prices. When goods become unaffordable, their demand increases, sending prices even higher. People begin to hoard goods, creating even greater shortages and higher prices. And governments continue to print money that keeps losing value. The formula is tried and true. Still, it continues. Since any articulate eight-year-old can state why a commodity that is rarer will be more valuable, it is a puzzle why central banks and governments can’t seem to grasp that increasing the money supply makes it naturally less valuable.

    1930s Germany, of course, is the standard example of hyperinflation. During WWI, the number of Deutschmarks being circulated rose from 13 million to 60 billion as the government kept the printing presses busy 24 hours a day. While the Deutschmark became valueless, the nation’s debt rose from 5 billion to 100 billion.

    The identical scenario has been repeated in Zimbabwe, and now in Venezuela. Governments have instituted the same solutions and have been met with identical failures.

    No country, if properly mismanaged, is immune to hyperinflation. Gold and silver are the best counterattack for individuals faced with fiat currency and spiraling costs. Hard assets are beyond the control of government manipulation and retain their value during the worst of time. Especially in the worst of times. 

  • Japan Paralyzed After Strongest Typhoon In 25 Years Makes Landfall, Killing 8

    Typhoon Jebi struck the heart of one of Japan’s largest metro areas on Tuesday, killing at least eight people and shutting down Osaka’s main international airport indefinitely, leaving close to 3,000 people trapped inside. The storm – the strongest on earth so far in 2018 – made landfall on Tuesday, bringing widespread flooding and winds of up to 130 miles an hour; it paralyzed swaths of the country shuttering shops, factories and amusement parks.

    The storm was the strongest to make a direct hit on the nation’s main islands in 25 years, causing high tides that flooded Kansai International Airport, a key gateway for flights from China and other Asian countries that was built on an artificial island in 1994.

    The typhoon prompted government evacuation orders for more than 49,000 people across southern Japan, with an additional 2 million people advised to flee, the Fire and Disaster Management Agency said. Early in the afternoon on Tuesday, an oil tanker unmoored by the storm crashed into the only bridge that connects Kansai International Airport in Osaka Bay to the mainland. The Coast Guard was using a helicopter and patrol boats to rescue crew members, the public broadcaster NHK said.

    The storm traversed Japan’s main island of Honshu before traveling up its western coast, leaving a trail of death. Among the fatalities was the owner of a warehouse that collapsed on him, news reports said.

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    At least 700 flights have been canceled across Japan. Kansai Airport will not reopen on Wednesday. The local police said that travelers stranded at the airport, which sits on a man-made island, had been issued emergency water, bread and blankets, and that ferries were expected to start bringing people to safety Wednesday morning.

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    Kansai is the nation’s third largest airport, after Narita, outside of Tokyo in Chiba Prefecture, and Haneda, near central Tokyo. In 2017, it handled 28 million passengers, three quarters of them from overseas.

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    One of the airport’s two runways and the ground floor of a terminal building, used for sorting luggage and other activities, were under dozens of centimeters of water.

    The airport’s ground vehicles were partly submerged by the deluge, and an access bridge that connects the airfield was damaged by a 2,591-ton tanker that the storm unmoored and cast adrift. Public broadcaster NHK aired footage showing a huge crater in the bridge. The tanker had 11 crew aboard, and a helicopter rescue operation was underway.

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    In Kyoto, damage to the roof of the main rail station brought debris crashing down onto passengers below, injuring three people and closing parts of the station. News footage showed shipping containers strewn across Kobe port, a cargo hub. About 2.2 million homes were without power late Tuesday, according to a central government tally.

    The typhoon hit during a summer of meteorological misery for Japan, with floods and landslides killing more than 200 people in western Japan in July, the same month that heat waves claimed more than 130 lives.

    The transport ministry said it has been unable to assess the full amount of damage to Kansai International Airport and that no Japanese airport has reported such large-scale flooding in recent years. It is not known when the gateway might reopen. Repairing the bridge will take quite some time, according to West Nippon Expressway, the operator of the highway running across the bridge.

    Kansai Airport plays a significant role in Japan’s distribution network, and the closure will severely disrupt supply chains, especially for semiconductors.

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    Last year, 5.64 trillion yen ($50.6 billion) in exports and 3.94 trillion yen in imports passed through the airport. Electronic components, such as semiconductors, were the top export at 1.29 trillion yen, while pharmaceuticals were the biggest import, at 690 billion yen. But without an access bridge, the flow of goods from this hub will cease as it becomes little more than an isolated island.

    Precision equipment maker Disco may see delays in certain exports from its factory in nearby Hiroshima Prefecture. Semiconductor equipment manufacturer Screen Holdings uses the airport to deliver products and parts but will consider other channels, depending on how the situation develops, a spokesperson said.

    Companies will work to secure other routes in the event of a prolonged restoration. A shipping company that handles home deliveries said it will use such alternative facilities as neighboring Osaka International Airport, also known as Itami Airport.

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    All Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines canceled all domestic and international flights from Kansai Airport for Wednesday. The airport handled a record 28.8 million travelers last year as the region becomes more popular with tourists, especially in Asia. A slow recovery will inevitably hurt visitors to Japan.

    The Tokaido and Sanyo bullet trains were also out of service Tuesday. The entire Tokaido line was suspended starting at 2 p.m., according to East Japan Railway, known as JR East, with only a special train delivering passengers stuck at stations between Tokyo and Nagoya overnight. Crews are hurrying to remove debris and restore operations, but as of 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday there was no timetable for when service will resume.

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    “We are teaming with local governments and related agencies, who I want to exert every effort to prevent the damage from expanding,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Tuesday afternoon in Tokyo at a meeting at the disaster response headquarters.

    But Jebi, which means “swallow” in Korean, has already left untold economic damage in its wake, shutting down factories across a wide area.

    Huge waves caused by Typhoon Jebi hit a fishing port in Aki, in Kochi Prefecture on Japan’s western coast

    Daikin Industries shut down its Osaka headquarters and three nearby plants on Tuesday, while Panasonic closed air conditioner and refrigerator production facilities in Shiga Prefecture. Daihatsu Motor shuttered three factories in the area, including its main plant in Osaka Prefecture.

    Toyota Motor on Tuesday evening was forced to stop production at 11 car and component factories in Aichi Prefecture, where it is based. Plants in other areas were also shuttered. A Toyota representative said its production and supply networks over a broad area were affected but added that operations will resume Wednesday morning.

    Panasonic also halted production, including at a Shiga Prefecture factory that makes air conditioners and refrigerators.

    Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry says in statement that 1.4 million buildings are without power nationwide as of 5:30am local time after Typhoon Jebi slammed into western Japan on Tuesday. Kansai Electric, the utility worst hit, says in separate statement that there are 1.09 million buildings without power in its service area as of 6am.

    Kansai electric, the utility worst hit, says in separate statement that there are 1.09 million buildings without power in its service area as of 6am. As many as 2.1 million buildings lost power at the height of the storm in Kansai’s service area and the utility has requested 40 high-voltage mobile power stations from rival power suppliers.

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    Major department stores in the Kansai region, around Osaka, were forced to close. J. Front Retailing shut all eight of its Kansai stores for the whole day. It was the first time the Kobe store has closed since 1995, when a 7.2-magnitude earthquake devastated the city.

    H2O Retailing, which operates the Hankyu and Hanshin department store chains, closed 12 stores in Kansai. Takashimaya and Kintetsu Department Store also shut some outlets.

    Universal Studios Japan in Osaka was closed a full day for the first time in 17 years on Tuesday and will remain shut on Wednesday to continue clearing debris. The park is scheduled to reopen on Thursday.

  • '70s TV Show Predicts "End Of Civilization By 2040" As Elites Warn Earth "To Undergo Major Transformation"

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The American Dream blog,

    An old television broadcast from 1973 has been discovered that warns that things will start getting really bad on this planet around the year 2020 and that our current civilization will come to an end in 2040. 

    The 1973 television broadcast focused on an MIT computer model known as “World One” that attempted to predict what growing pollution and population levels would mean for our planet if nothing was done. 

    This computer model was funded by the Club of Rome, and these days the exact same people are still trying to scare us into giving up our national sovereignty “for the good of the planet” so that they can implement their “New World Order”. 

    They hope to convince all of us that we are facing “global problems” that require “global solutions”, and they are convinced that power is better off in the hands of global policy-making institutions such as the United Nations.

    If you would like to watch the doomsday television broadcast from 1973 that was recently unearthed, you can find it right here. 

    If the MIT computer model is correct, things should start getting really, really bad over the next few years, and without a doubt it is entirely possible that we could see that happen.

    But even if the MIT model is proven correct, the goals of those that funded it are deeply insidious.  The Club of Rome was founded by some of the top globalists on the entire planet, and their ultimate goal is “a New World Order with corporations managing everything.”  The following comes from WND…

    Dug up from the TV vaults, the program predicts things are going to get extremely bad in 2020 – just about the time, coincidentally, Donald Trump is seeking re-election as president of the United States. That’s when the quality of life goes down to zero. Pollution becomes so serious it will start to kill people, which in turn will cause the population to diminish, lower than it was in the 1900s.

    “At this stage, around 2040 to 2050, civilized life as we know it on this planet will cease to exist,” the report states.

    Alexander King, the then-leader of the Club of Rome, evaluated the program’s results to also mean that nation-states will lose their sovereignty, forecasting a New World Order with corporations managing everything.

    Since 1973, the goals of the Club of Rome have not changed.

    The organization is getting ready to celebrate their 50th anniversary, and one of their top priorities right now is “implementing the Sustainable Development Goals”…

    In October, a 50th anniversary two-day conference will be hold by the Club of Rome on the “Sustainability Challenges for a World of 10 Billion People.”

    Six sessions are planned:

    1. Addressing a Planetary Emergency: Global Climate Change
    2. What Economy is Needed for a World of 10 Billion People?
    3. Implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
    4. Prospects for Renewable Energy and a True Green Economy
    5. Insuring Humanity Survives the Anthropocene
    6. Human Values for the Anthropocene

    Founded by David Rockefeller, past and current members have included: Al Gore , Mikhail Gorbachev, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Bill Gates, Ted Turner, George Soros, Tony Blair, Deepak Chopra, Henry Kissinger, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Marianne Williamson, King Juan Carlos I and most former United Nations general secretaries and high-ranking officials.

    If you go to the official UN website and read through the 17 point plan, you will rapidly discover that the Sustainable Development Goals are essentially a blueprint for global government.

    Instead of simply focusing on how to fix the environment, the Sustainable Development Goals cover just about every form of human activity imaginable.  The 17 point plan includes “solutions” for economics, healthcare, education, agriculture, gender equality, infrastructure, energy, transportation and “inclusiveness”.

    In essence, it is one of the most extensive blueprints for the New World Order that we have seen yet.

    But in order to get there, the global elite know that they have to scare us, and “climate change” is their favorite boogeyman these days.

    Just this week, Newsweek posted an article warning that if nothing is done “Earth as we know it could be transformed into an unrecognizable, alien world”…

    Within the next 100 years, Earth as we know it could be transformed into an unrecognizable, alien world, with ecosystems around the globe falling apart. After looking at over 500 ancient climate records, scientists have said current climate change is comparable to what the planet went through when it came out of the last ice age—and the seismic shift in biodiversity that took place then will likely happen again.

    Of course what they don’t tell you is that the climate of our planet has always been changing and it will always be changing even if all humans were completely removed.

    Human activity actually plays a very, very small role in the overall rate of climate change.  Primarily, changes in our climate are determined by the giant ball of fire that our planet revolves around.  Anyone that believes that we can stop climate change by altering human activity somewhat is simply being delusional.

    But that is not going to stop the elite from fearmongering.  According to this latest study that Newsweek is gushing about, the landscape of our planet will soon experience changes that are “ubiquitous and dramatic”…

    Study co-author Jonathan Overpeck, from the University of Michigan, said there will be a huge ricochet effect that will eventually threaten water and food security. “If we allow climate change to go unchecked, the vegetation of this planet is going to look completely different than it does today, and that means a huge risk to the diversity of the planet,” he said in a statement.

    “We’re talking about global landscape change that is ubiquitous and dramatic, and we’re already starting to see it in the United States, as well as around the globe. Our study provides yet another wake-up call that we need to act now to move rapidly towards an emission-free global economy.”

    If you have followed my work on a regular basis, then you already know that I believe that major Earth changes are coming.

    But absolutely nothing that these experts are proposing will stop them from happening.

    In the end, every “solution” that the global elite are proposing results in more power being transferred into their hands.

    They desperately want their “New World Order”, and they will do whatever is necessary to get it.

    So don’t fall for their propaganda no matter how good it may sound at times.  Their ultimate goal is global tyranny, and it must be resisted at every turn.

  • "It's All Gone" – New Jersey Couple Spent Homeless Vet's $400k GoFundMe Cash

    Just days after a judge ordered a Jersey couple’s assets frozen after they raised over $400,000 for a homeless veteran (who had shown them considerable kindness) to get his life back together and failed to give him the money, the case took the worst possible turn.

    Last October, Bobbitt came across Kate McClure after she had become stranded on the side of I-95 in a bad section of Philadelphia.  Even though he was living on the streets, he used his last 20 dollars to buy her some gasoline so that she could get home.

    To thank him, McClure and her boyfriend Mark D’Amico created a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to help Bobbitt get off the streets.  The original goal was to raise $10,000, but the story went mega-viral and the campaign ultimately raised a total of $403,000.

    But McClure and D’Amico never gave Bobbitt the money.  Instead, they took charge of it and bought him the things that they thought he “needed”.

    Bobbitt accused the couple of fraud, alleging that the two committed fraud and conspiracy by taking large amounts of the donations to “enjoy a lifestyle they could not afford” and using the account as “their personal piggy bank,” and asked a judge to appoint a supervisor to manage the money in the fundraising account.

    And last Thursday a judge gave the South Jersey couple less than a day to hand over what’s left of the $400,000 they raised through a GoFundMe campaign for Johnny Bobbitt Jr.

    Today,  as The Inquirer reports, Bobbitt’s attorney Chris Fallon said he was told the money is all gone.

    Fallon said he learned of the missing money in a conference call Tuesday morning with lawyers for Kate McClure and Mark D’Amico, the Burlington County couple accused of mismanaging the money raised for Bobbitt.

    “It completely shocked me when I heard,” said Fallon. “It came as a complete surprise to me.”

    Word of the missing money came on the same day Bobbitt’s lawyers asked a judge to impose sanctions on the couple after the pair missed a court-ordered deadline to hand over the remaining GoFundMe money.

    The couple told  the Inquirer and Daily News last month that about $200,000 of the money remained.

    The balance, they said, had been spent to help Bobbitt.

    Bobbitt’s attorneys say he has received closer to $75,000, including the cost of the camper and an SUV, both since sold.

    D’Amico admitted spending $500 of the GoFundMe money to gamble at SugarHouse Casino, but he said he paid it back with his winnings.

    Jacqueline Promislo, one of Bobbitt’s three pro bono lawyers, said in a phone interview as they mulled further legal action: “We’re really concerned about the flight risk.” The lawyers asked the judge to issue sanctions requiring D’Amico and McClure to remain in New Jersey, surrender their passports, post a bond, and be barred from spending any money in their bank accounts.

    According to the application for sanctions, D’Amico and McClure failed to comply with the court’s 24-hour deadline “without explanation or request for extension.”

    GoFundMe spokesman Bobby Withorne said Tuesday that the company had deposited $20,000 into the escrow account created by Bobbitt’s attorneys to provide assistance for him while an investigation into the case proceeds. The Inquirer reports that Fallon said the $20,000 will be used for six months of housing and food for Bobbitt.

    “We are working with law enforcement officials to ensure Johnny receives all of the funds raised on his behalf,” Withorne said.

    “While we assist law enforcement with their ongoing investigation, GoFundMe is also working with Johnny’s legal team to ensure he’s receiving support while the remaining funds are being recovered.”

    As for donors, if GoFundMe determines that donations were misused, the company says it refunds individual contributions of up to $1,000.

    Finally, some potentially good news is that Bobbitt’s legal team says that they were able to enroll their client in a 28-day residential detox program on Monday.

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Sep 04

Today’s News 4th September 2018

  • Sweden's Anti-Immigration Party Set For Record Wins As Election Days Away

    A surge in populism has sent Sweden’s far-right Sweden Democrats (SD) Party surging in the polls leading up to the country’s September 9 election – placing them neck and neck with the Moderate party. The current ruling party, the Swedish Social Democrats (S), however, remain strongly in the lead. 

    Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats

    Perhaps dozens of cars torched by “misguided youths”, rapes, swiming pool sex assaults, news crew attacks, grenade attacks and government funded sex courses to teach migrants that 14 is just too young, aren’t sitting well with Swedes who may regret following their “feminist” government in welcoming over 400,000 people from countries and cultures not exactly known for their embrace of feminism. 

    What’s more, Sweden’s Social Democrats have been criticized by “average wage-earners, pensioners and first-time voters” who now accuse Prime Minister Stefan Lofven of imperiling the country’s cherished welfare state by welcoming a flood of asylum seekers who are seen “as an economic and cultural threat,” according to Stockholm University sociology professor Jens Rydgren. 

    “The balance of power has shifted, because of the EU, globalisation and digitalisation, and the Social Democrats are no longer able to keep their promises,” Sweden’s paper of reference Dagens Nyheter wrote recently. –AFP via France 24

    A poll by Sifo has the Sweden Democrats, led by Jimmie Åkesson, ahead of the Moderates by 1 point, while Ipsos has the Moderates ahead by the same amount. 

    Prime Minister Stefan Lofven’s Social Democrats, who have dominated Swedish politics since the 1930s, will remain the biggest party in the country but likely with a record low score, polls suggest.

    The far-right Sweden Democrats (SD) are heading to make the most gains and come in a close second, followed by the conservative Moderates. -AFP

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    And while Sweden is still quite progressive – legislating paternity leave for new dads while maintaining strict environmentalist policies as the “most sustainable country in the world,” times are changing.  

    But this year’s election campaign posters signal a change of tone in the public debate: “No to Prayer Calls”, “Speak Swedish to become Swedish”, and “Hate or Debate?”.

    Neither Lofven’s left-wing bloc nor the centre-right four-party Alliance are seen winning a majority. And both blocs have ruled out a collaboration with the far-right.

    That said, they may have no choice but to adopt policies that reflect a growing resent towards open-border policies. 

    Nationalism rising

    Sweden isn’t the first “open-border utopia” to experience a surge in nationalism. Germany’s Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party holding steady at 17% in the latest INSA poll. 

    Meanwhile, Italy’s right-wing League rose to 32.2% in the latest poll by SWG, up from 30.3% in their last survey conducted at the end of July. The League notably got 17.4% of the vote in the March general election, while the country’s populist Five Star Movement received 32.7%. The League and the Five Star Movement are currently governing Italy in coalition. 

    Who could have guessed that open-border socialist policies would backfire? And to think, Gadhafi wanted a scant 5 billion Euros to keep illegal migration from North Africa at bay, warning the alternative was a “black Europe.”

    “Tomorrow, Europe might no longer be European and even black as there are millions [of Africans] who want to come in,” Gadhafi said in 2010. Instead “we came, we saw, he died.” 

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  • Paving The Road To The End Of NATO

    Authored by Tom Luongo via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    It’s no secret that President Trump believes NATO is an anachronism. It’s also no secret that French President Emmanuel Macron wants a Grand Army of the EU and a single EU Finance Minister to further integration of the EU into the United States of Europe.

    He and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have been championing these two things since the day after Macron took office. They are both pushing hard for the EU to conduct independent foreign policy, framing Trump’s belligerence as the catalyst for its need now.

    So, I’m not surprised in the wake of Merkel’s garden summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin recently that both of these policy initiatives are being pushed now.

    Both Merkel and Macron are in trouble politically. Their approval ratings are dropping. Both have seen cabinet defections. So, they need political wins and rapprochement with Russia is something very much desired by many European nations, like Italy, and necessary to gain some economic momentum after four years of ruinous sanctions.

    Macron now openly engages the idea of a security framework with Russia. The same Russia that not three months ago Macron was pulling diplomats from over the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

    This admission on his part is a major bombshell. If sincere, it changes the entire narrative and accelerates the shift of Europe away from the U.S.’s abusive use of the dollar as a whip to command compliance.

    It also cuts to the heart of Trump’s criticisms of NATO, that the threat of Russian invasion of Eastern Europe as promoted by Poland and the Baltics is laughable.

    In his recent press conference in Helsinki (ironic that), Macron echoed Merkel’s statements from earlier this year that Europe can no longer rely on the United States for its security; France should build a strategic partnership with Russia and Turkey.

    I’ve been arguing for weeks now that Trump’s hostile policies towards Iran as well as Europe had the ultimate goal of accelerating the end of NATO by putting direct pressure on Germany and France to end the policy of using the U.S. as their defense pack horse.

    Trump was right to point out at July’s NATO Summit the fundamental hypocrisy of spending billions on NATO to defend Germany while Germany is building a gas pipeline with Russia, Nordstream 2, to run its economy and resell gas around Europe.

    This statement by Macron is an admission that Trump has won the standoff between the EU and the U.S.

    Previous to Trump the goal was to simultaneously bind down the U.S. via trade deals and transnational agreements like TTIP and the Paris Accord on Climate Control while elevating Europe’s interests abroad by letting Iran off the hook and back into the global economy and expanding trade with China.

    The inversion of the relationship between the U.S. (master) and Europe (satrap) would have been completed under a Clinton Presidency.

    The arrangement being that the U.S. would continue bankrupt itself maintaining a military empire around the world and pay the lion’s share of NATO’s costs while the EU set policy. Trump rightly called that out during the campaign and has been resolute on this as President.

    And to him, the Iran Nuclear Deal represented the ultimate slap in the face to the U.S., allowing Europe access to cheap Iranian oil and gas, paid for with euros, in exchange for zero real guarantee of Iran not developing a nuclear missile, thereby destabilizing the entire Middle East.

    And, while, I believe Iran was upholding its end of the bargain as written, the spirit of the agreement was the problem. Trump believes, and, here I agree with him, that North Korea and Iran were working together to develop a nuclear ballistic missile. North Korea built the warhead while Iran worked on the delivery system.

    Trump confirmed this was his belief in a tweet last year. It signified that Trump understands this connection and was unhappy about it.

    That tweet changed everything. It set us on the path we’re on today. Here’s what I wrote back in late September of 2017.

    Trump has made a big show about how the JCPOA is a ‘bad deal.’ This tweet tells you why.

    But, so what? Until we show some willingness to define American interests less broadly and honor our agreements, why should anyone negotiate? Why should Iran and North Korea not pursue their interests which is obtaining a nuclear arsenal to deter the U.S. from violent regime change?

    And that’s the place we are in right now with Europe. Why should they negotiate with Trump unless he offers them something in return, something he wants to give them; their foreign policy independence.

    Trump is defining American interests less broadly. He’s saying Europe’s defense isn’t our responsibility anymore. He’s saying you don’t get to have your Iranian oil and hollow out our economy at the same time.

    Macron is actively taking him up on the offer because he knows, like Merkel, that the U.S. will not lift a finger under Trump to tamp down unrest in Europe due to political instability brought on by central bank financial repression and mass immigration.

    Because of this NATO is worried. Selling the world on permanent conflict with the evil Russians and ‘terrorists’ is the main way to keep selling arms around the world. That’s what NATO is at this point; a vast graveyard for productive capital to be wasted on weapons we don’t need to fight enemies that don’t exist.

    This is why it’s political mouthpiece, The Atlantic Council, is advising Facebook on what is and is not ‘fake news’ coming from Russia. This is why the media, bureaucracies and lobbyists in D.C. all hate Trump. He’s undercutting the reasons for all of these weapons by forcing the real narrative about Europe’s security into the open.

    Which is that the biggest danger to Europe’s security is Europe’s own leadership.

    As I said at the outset, these plans for a Grand Army of the EU have been in the works for years. The EU was supposed to have its cake – U.S. money and support – and eat it too – its own private military — with the ultimate goal of merging their command structures with the U.S. in the subservient role.

    And that plays into the other possibility of what this offer by Macron signifies. I’ve given you the bull case, as it were. Now here’s the bear case.

    This statement by Macron could also be meant as an enticement to Russia to abandon its partnership with Iran and China in exchange for a closer relationship with Europe. We all know that Henry Kissinger has been advising Trump on this front; to create conditions by which to break the Russia/China alliance.

    Because, while the U.S. is ‘not agreement capable,’ France and Germany are the kindler, gentler face of Western expansionism. So, Macron offers up a security arrangement for Russia and Turkey that excludes the U.S., giving Trump what he wants, an end to the U.S. funding Europe’s defense, while keeping NATO alive to turn on Russia at a later date, say after Trump is impeached.

    So which path does this offer by Macron represent?

    The one that leads to European independence on foreign and energy policy out from under the umbrella of NATO and the U.S. and into an agreement with Russia and Turkey, as Macron said.

    Or is it simply a stalking horse for further EU integration after Trump is removed from office and the original path paved by Obama re-established but this time with Russia neutered having betrayed its allies, China and Iran?

    I’m betting Putin isn’t that stupid.

  • Ambassador Kurt Volker: US To Drastically Expand Military Assistance To Ukraine

    Authored by Peter Korzun via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Washington is upping the ante in Ukraine. Kurt Volker, US Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations, said in an interview with the Guardian published on September 1 that “Washington is ready to expand arms supplies to Ukraine in order to build up the country’s naval and air defense forces in the face of continuing Russian support for eastern separatists.” According to him, the Trump administration was “absolutely” prepared to go further in supplying lethal weaponry to Ukrainian forces than the anti-tank missiles it delivered in April.

     “They need lethal assistance,” he emphasized.

    Mr. Volker explained that “[t]hey need to rebuild a navy and they have very limited air capability as well. I think we’ll have to look at air defense.” 

    The diplomat believes Ukraine needs unmanned aerial vehicles, counter-battery radar systems, and anti-sniper systems. The issue of lethal arms purchases has been discussed at the highest level.

    The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 allocated $250m in military assistance to Ukraine, including lethal arms. The US has delivered Javelin anti-tank missile systems to Kiev but this time the ambassador talked about an incomparably larger deal. Former President Barack Obama had been unconvinced that granting Ukraine lethal defensive weapons would be the right decision, in view of the widespread corruption there. This policy has changed under President Trump, who — among other things — approved deliveries of anti-tank missiles to Kiev last December.

    Ukraine has officially requested US air-defense systems. According to Valeriy Chaly, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, the Ukrainian military wants to purchase at least three air-defense systems. The cost of the deal is expected to exceed $2 billion, or about $750 million apiece. The system in question was not specified, but it’s generally believed to be the Patriot.

    Volker’s statement was made at a time of rising tensions in the Sea of Azov, which is legally shared by Ukraine and Russia. It is connected to the Black Sea through the Kerch Strait. The rhetoric has heated up and ships have been placed under arrest as this territorial dispute turns the area into a flashpoint. Russia has slammed the US for backing Ukraine’s violations of international law in the area. According to a 2003 treaty, the Sea of Azov is a jointly controlled territory that both countries are allowed to use freely.

    The US military already runs a maritime operations center located within Ukraine’s Ochakov naval base. The facility is an operational-level warfare command-and-control organization that is designed to deliver flexible maritime support throughout the full range of military operations. Hundreds of US and Canadian military instructors are training Ukrainian personnel at the Yavorov firing range.

    NATO has granted Ukraine the status of an aspirant country — a step that is openly provocative toward Russia. Macedonia, Georgia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina are also aspirant nations. Last year, Ukraine’s parliament adopted a resolution recognizing full membership in NATO as a foreign policy goal. In 2008, NATO agreed that Ukraine along with Georgia should become a full-fledged member. In March, Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia announced the formation of an alliance to oppose Russia.

    The US is to render substantial military assistance to a country with an economy in the doldrums, reforms that have foundered, a democracy that is in question, and corruption that is widespread. It will be no surprise if those weapons fall into the wrong hands and are used against the US military somewhere outside of Europe. lIt was the US State Department itself that issued a report this year slamming Ukraine’s human-rights record. The UN human-rights commissioner tells the same story. So do human-rights monitors all over the world.

    By supplying the weapons that Special Representative Volker talked about in his interview, the US will become an accomplice to a conflict that has nothing to do with its national security or interests. The situation in the Donbas is being used by Kiev to distract public attention from the country’s worsening domestic problems. But to Washington Ukraine’s government is the apple of its eye, “a bastard but it’s our bastard” that is ready to do what it’s told.

    The move is provocative and it may have consequences. For instance, Russia could supply the self-proclaimed republics in eastern Ukraine with up-to-date weapons systems in quantities sufficient to deter any military action on the part of Kiev. Once the Minsk accords are no longer functional and cannot command obedience, Moscow could recognize those republics as independent states that are eligible for military cooperation agreements, which would include stationing military bases on their soil. If their governments invited the Russian armed forces to be deployed inside their borders, it would be quite natural to agree to those requests. No international law would be breached. In a nutshell, if the US crosses that red line, Russia will act accordingly.

    Nobody seems to want a war raging in Ukraine, but that’s what the US weapons supplies would promote, egging the Ukrainian government on to seek a military solution.

    And what if it loses? Washington would be to blame for such a scenario.

    By the way, is it a coincidence that Mr. Volker’s interview appeared just as Alexander Zakharchenko, the leader of the Donetsk self-proclaimed republic, was assassinated? Just asking. 

  • The Upside Of 'Global Warming'

    An interview from the Russian Ministry for Maritime and River Transport published on website PortNews says that Arctic ports along the Northern Sea Route are experiencing a surge in cargo. Up to August 24th of this year, 9.95 million tons of goods went through ports in the region, an 81 percent increase on last year’s 5.5 million.

    As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, even though the passage is only feasible for three months of the year, global warming is making it increasingly viable for major shipping companies.

    This year, temperatures in the Arctic Circle have been unusually warm, topping 30C on several occasions.

    That resulted in Maersk confirming that it was sending a ship with a 3,600 container capacity, the Venta Mersk, over the top of Russia on a test run. The decision has been welcomed in Russia where it’s hoped the Arctic route will compete with the southern route through the Suez Canal and Straits of Malacca. The Northern Sea Route runs from Murmansk near Russia’s border with Norway all the way to the Bering Strait in Alaska with all transiting ships requiring a permit from the Russian authorities.

    Even though travel-time can be reduced by two weeks compared to the southern route, costs are generally higher because vessels have to be accompanied by a nuclear-powered icebreaker.

    The Venta Maersk left Vladivostock before docking in Pusan, South Korea.

    It embarked on its long journeythrough the Arctic and its expected to pass through the Bering Strait at the start of September before finishing the trip in St. Petersburg at the end of the month. The following infographic shows how a general container-ship would travel between Europe and East Asia, using Hamburg and Shanghai as example ports.

    Infographic: Global Warming Opens Arctic Passage For Container Ships | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    A ship traveling between those two cities on the Northern Sea Route would travel about 14,000 kilometers, sparing at least two weeks over the 20,000-kilometer long southern route through the Suez Canal and Straits of Malacca.

  • Washington's War On Canada's Health Plan

    Authored by James Petras via Unz.com,

    Introduction

    Republicans and Democrats are befuddled by President Trump’s attacks on Canada and Prime Minister Trudeau; his repudiation of NAFTA; the bilateral agreement with Mexico; tariffs, trade quotas and threats of trade constraints of billions more to come.

    Many are the experts, political leaders and media commentators who have offered a variety of explanations. The most frequent explanation is that the White House is pursuing a nationalist – protectionist policy to weaken and dominate Canada and to increase the US competitive position.

    The problem with that argument is that for the better part of a century Canada has followed US imperialism in global and regional wars and interventions on four continents – even where Ottawa has paid a high military, financial, political and human cost. Canada has always been considered a bulwark of the US led NATO alliance, a reliable trading partner and staunch defender of cross border controls.

    Trump critics attribute his hostility to his unruly, impulsive and unstable temperament which blocks him from an understanding the ongoing historical legacy. Paramount long-term links are sacrificed for short-term economic gains according to some academics.

    Most senior diplomats, accustomed to friendly negotiations, have privately expressed objections to Trump’s ultimatums and his effort to brow-beat Canada into submission, believing that a few genial tweaks over a re-packaged NAFTA would secure Canadian compliance and submission.

    Yet Trump refuses to accept Canada’s partial submission to a modified NAFTA. Apparently, Trump is after long-term, large scale changes which will have a major political, economic and social impact on the US competitive position in the world economy.

    Trump’s War Against Canada’s National Health and Education Programs

    The US economic elite and workers spend hundreds of billions of dollars in a failed private health system. Canada’s capitulation to Trump’s conditions for a bilateral trade agreement will eventually shift the burden of healthcare from a low cost universal public program to the high cost exclusionary private sector – reducing the competitiveness of Canada’s economy especially its exports.

    Trump is neither a demagogue nor an irrational nationalist. He has succeeded in changing Mexico’s trade terms in favor of the US economy, increased the share of US exports and retained a dominant role in setting the terms for re-negotiating agreements. Trump aims for the same result with Canada.

    He sizes up Trudeau as an easy mark-‘very dishonest and weak’. The Saudi Arabian reprisals over a human rights issue caused Trudeau to retract. Trump’s on and off the record remarks are intended to humiliate Trudeau and force him to plea for mercy. Trump’s disparaging remarks of Prime Minister Trudeau ,presiding at the 2018 G-7 meeting in Quebec Canada—accusing Canada of ‘robbing the [US] piggy bank’- and his unilateral slapping of tariffs– went uncontested.

    Trump’s aggressive posture is directed at eliminating those features of Canadian society and economy which are appealing for US working families. Trump’s strategy is to lower Canada’s competitiveness not raise US living standards. US prescription drugs are 60% higher than Canada; the US private health bureaucracy costs the economy five times more than Canada’s public health administration.

    Conclusion

    Trump’s trade rules are intended to pressure Canada to lose competitiveness and reduce its attractiveness to the US public. If he succeeds Trump will reduce pressure from the ‘single payer’ majority and gain support from US exporters to Canada.

    In sum, from a US capitalist perspective, Trump is using his political bullying to increase profits and exports markets.

    The vast majority of Canadians back their public administered and financed health system. They will resist any effort to reduce it via incremented ‘rulings’ by bilateral US-Mexican-Canadian bodies. They will realize that the deck is loaded in Trump’s favor. If Canada is to retain what remains of its welfare state it will have to break with its dependence on Washington – including its support for overseas wars, trade sanctions and Washington’s drive for world domination. A new political leadership in the fashion of Tommy Douglas will need to replace Justin Trudeau. The question is where will it come from?

  • Nevada In Deep Trouble If Recession Strikes, Report Finds

    States deploy reserves and balances to manage budgetary uncertainties, deal with revenue forecasting mistakes, prevent severe spending reductions or tax increases when there are unexpected revenue shortfalls, and cope with unforeseen emergencies. Because reserves and balances are essential to managing sudden changes and maintaining fiscal health, these levels are watched closely.

    According to a report by The Pew Charitable Trusts, if a recession strikes tomorrow and Nevada was forced to run only on reserves, the state government would be out of money in approximately 3.6 days.

    The study determined that Nevada had just $39 million in its rainy day fund for the fiscal year 2017, and ranks 44th out of 50 states in how long government can operate solely on reserves. Nevada was not alone in this potentially dangerous budgetary mess. Three states including Kansas, Montana and New Jersey had no reserve monies at all. Across the board, the median time for all 50 states was roughly twenty days.

    On the opposite side of the spectrum, Alaska and Wyoming lead the rankings, with each having enough reserves to run their respective governments for more than a year.

    The Las Vegas Review-Journal said it is a low probability that any state would be forced to operate on just reserves. The report paints a troubling picture of what could happen to Nevada in the next economic downturn.

    “The funds in those accounts are used to help offset revenue shortfalls and alleviate the need for spending cuts or layoffs during times of economic hardship,” said Las Vegas Review-Journal, adding that without enough reserves, a recession could result in exploding deficits. This would be bad news for the state’s S&P Global Ratings, as for example, the credit rating agency downgraded Massachusetts’ debt rating in 2017, citing its “failure to follow through on rebuilding its reserves.”

    Robert Fellner, director of policy for the Nevada Policy Research Institute, said Nevada’s extremely low reserves is reflective of a “tax-and-spend mentality,” noting attempts by Gov. Brian Sandoval and the State Legislature to increase funding for K-12 education, including the 2015 commerce tax.

    The state, Fellner added, “needs to get spending under control.”

    The Journal noted that the state had nearly $270 million in reserves in 2007, enough to run the government for roughly 27 days. Then the recession hit, and by 2010, the fund was bone dry. Over the cycle, the state attempted to bring up the account’s balance, but financial stress in 2015 through 2016 emptied all funds.

    “Every time we put a dime in there, we had to pull it back out just to keep the government running,” said Mike Wilden, chief of staff to Gov. Brian Sandoval, who took office in 2010.

    Wilden said the state ended the fiscal year 2018, which ended on June 30, with $180 billion in the fund– good for about 14 days of government funding. The significant contributions to the fund have been tax revenues from recreational marijuana industry. Marijuana taxes add about $4 million per month into the account, which started in July 2017, Wilden said.

    As for Nevada and a handful of other states with limited reserves, well, it is a race against time to increase state funds before the next economic slowdown, which could arrive as early as next year.

  • World Misses The Point Amid Internet Frenzy About Bush Sneaking Candy To Michelle Obama

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via CaitlinJohnstone.com,

    As of this writing, a tweet by disgraced Broadway fraud convict Roland Scahill has 113 thousand shares and 472 thousand likes, which if you’re not used to Twitter is a ridiculously high amount that nobody generally hits. The tweet features nothing but four seconds of video footage from the John McCain funeral, and the caption “George W. Bush sneaking a piece of candy to Michelle Obama is warming my heart.”

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

    That’s it. That’s all it took to win Twitter for the day. Those four seconds of footage have been circulated around TV news stations to ‘ooh’s and ‘ahh’s of fawning establishment pundits yammering incessantly about how the death of War Hero John McCain™ has let everyone Put Aside Our Political Differences™ and Come Together As Americans™ to celebrate the life of a man who dedicated his entire political career to sowing death, suffering and devastation at every opportunity. A war criminal giving a piece of candy to the wife of another war criminal at the funeral of a war criminal is all it took to get mainstream American brains gushing with dopamine and oxytocin.

    Because that’s how compartmentalized Americans are from the reality of what war is and what it means. The explosions, the screams, the charred and shredded human bodies, the chaos and displacement and all the suffering, terrorism, slavery and rape that necessarily always comes with it, the million Iraqis killed under Bush, the unfathomable humanitarian disasters created in Libya and Syria under Obama, all the devastation created in all the military interventions McCain helped push for, all of that is so peripheral and distant in American consciousness that it can be dismissed with a wave of the hand and a piece of fucking candy.

    And it isn’t really their fault. The more woke Americans who’ve grown to resent their brainwashed countrymen hate it when I say this, but it isn’t. It’s not a coincidence that the nation with the most powerful military in the history of civilization and the most billionaires in the history of civilization also happens to have the most sophisticated propaganda system in the history of civilization, and that propaganda system is pointed at them from a very early age to normalize the war machine that is used to protect the empire of the billionaires.

    The United States is the most important player in the imperial alliance centralized around it, and therefore its citizenry are necessarily the most propagandized people on earth. You can’t have the populace of such an important nation suddenly demanding that troops be brought home and the resources being spent on bombs be spent eliminating the economic inequality on which your empire depends instead, so you’ve got to get into their minds early and aggressively to manipulate the way they think about war. Everything from flag worship to the fetishization of military personnel to Pentagon-controlled Hollywood movies are used from early childhood to install the assumption that their nation’s bloated military budget is only ever going toward good and never evil, and to prime their minds for the war propaganda they will be fed by the plutocrat-owned news media.

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

    Day after day after day after day, from when they are small until their dying breath, the American psyche is pummeled with this relentless assault upon its natural sense of empathy and reason. So it’s understandable that every now and then one of them snaps and shoots up a building full of people, inflicting the same kind of mass murder at home they’ve been trained to accept as normal abroad. And it’s understandable that they’d be duped into thinking the monstrous evils that have been inflicted upon our world by Bush, Obama and McCain (and Henry Kissinger, who also made an appearance at the funeral) are innocent little oopsie-poopsies which pale in comparison to something so monumentally heroic as correcting a woman who called Obama an Arab once, or sharing a piece of candy.

    But if Americans are ever going to escape from the chains of oligarchy, they’re necessarily going to have to cease consenting to imperialism. Without their resources being funneled into hundreds of bases and countless military and intelligence operations overseas, there’d be a chance to fix America’s infrastructure and make sure everyone gets what they need. Without the US economy being propped up with the barrel of a gun to ensure the success of globalist agendas, Americans would have a chance to create a real economy based on real things that they themselves own and control. Without the ability to use the US war machine to advance their agendas, the oligarchs who control America’s economy, government and media will be unable to rule over the increasingly wealthy and powerful masses. Without the best technology and the brainpower of the brightest Americans being sucked up into the war machine, the nation’s most creative minds will lose their incentive to point their ingenuity at death and destruction, and can point it at useful innovations instead.

    And then the propaganda machine which holds the whole empire together will be useless and impotent, and the shackles on American minds will crumble. And the rest of the empire will follow.

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

    The first step in this direction is to cease normalizing the monsters who facilitate human butchery around the world. Stop believing they need to be regarded as “heroes” just because they wore a uniform at some point. Stop believing that it’s ever okay to push for needless wars which butcher innocent men, women and children. Stop believing a man can facilitate the slaughter of a million people and not have that clearly be his single defining legacy. Stop believing that it’s worse to criticize a warmonger than it is to be a warmonger.

    Because if it’s up to the bastards who rule us currently, they’ll happily keep shushing us into polite silence while continuing to march us along our current ecocidal, omnicidal trajectory until it gets us all killed. They’ll make saints of warmongering empire loyalists and uphold their murderous lives as exemplary and virtuous, and if we say we want to move things in a different direction we’ll be shouted down with buzzwords about heroism and decency until we shut up. If we leave it up to these pricks, we’ll become the first species to go extinct due to politeness.

    Stop letting them normalize and elevate people who embody the very essence of the imperial oppression machine. Stop letting them humanize psychopathic war whores. Stop letting them twist this into a conversation about respecting those with different political opinions and make it about what it is: the mass murder of innocents for power and profit. Refuse to be reprimanded into polite silence. Refuse to die of politeness. Seize control of the narrative and force sanity into our imperiled world.

    * * *

    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. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

  • Israel Warns It Could Attack Iranian Military Assets In Iraq

    In response to what could soon be a big headache for Israeli PM Netanyahu and US “military advisors” to Baghdad, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman indicated on Monday that it could launch air strikes on suspected Iranian military assets in Iraq, as it has widely done in war-torn Syria, Reuters said.

    Last week we reported that according to Reuters, Iran had transferred short-range ballistic missiles to allies in Iraq over the last several months. This revelation comes as tensions between Washington and Tehran are at their highest point in years as aggressive sanctions continue crippling Iran’s economy, and after threats and counter-threats over Tehran laying claim to the vital Strait of Hormuz oil waterway over the past weeks, through which one-third of the world’s oil passes.

    Israel views Iran’s regional expansion as dangerous for its well-being, and has frequently launched air strikes in Syria to thwart any Iranian forces defending Damascus in the war.

    “We are certainly monitoring everything that is happening in Syria and, regarding Iranian threats, we are not limiting ourselves just to Syrian territory. This also needs to be clear,” Lieberman told reporters Monday.

    Explicitly asked if this included new operations in Iraq, Lieberman answered: “I’m saying we will handle any Iranian threat, no matter where it comes from. We are maintaining the right to act… and any threat or anything else that comes up is dealt with.”

    Reuters said there was no response from the government of Iraq – which is technically at war with Israel – nor from the Pentagon, which oversees US military operations in the country.

    The report cited several unnamed Iranian, Iraqi and Western officials who said that several dozen rockets capable of hitting Israel and Tehran’s Sunni rival Saudi Arabia had been deployed with Iran’s Shiite groups in Iraq. It added that Iran was working to provide its Iraqi proxy armies with missile manufacturing facilities, and training to local militia members in operating the new missile systems.

    On Saturday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted that he was “deeply concerned” by the reported Iranian missile transfer. “If true, this would be a gross violation of Iraqi sovereignty and of UNSCR 2231. Baghdad should determine what happens in Iraq, not Tehran,” he said referring to a United Nations Security Council Resolution endorsing the 2015 international nuclear deal with Iran. The Trump admin abandoned that agreement in May, citing Iran’s ballistic missile projects, said Reuters.

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

    Iran’s missile deployment in Iraq would be intended to increase its missile capacity in the region, and to retaliate against any Western or Arab attacks on its territory, as the threat of an upcoming war grows.

    * * *

    Iran on Saturday denied the report. “The lie disseminated by some media on shipment of Iran-made missiles to Iraq is totally irrelevant and unfounded,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi said.

    “Such news comes merely to cause panic among countries in the region and is in line with their policy to spread Iranophobia,” Qasemi said.

    At the end of the conference, Liberman also reiterated his previously stated opposition to ongoing negotiations being moderated by Egypt and the United Nations for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. Indirect negotiations between Hamas and Israel are unlikely to succeed because Israel says the current blockade is in place to stop weapons and other military assets from entering the Strip.

    “I know exactly what’s going on, I’m aware of the negotiations but I’m not involved in that, I don’t believe in it,” Liberman said. “We need to understand that negotiations, whether with [the Palestinian Authority in] Ramallah or with [Hamas in] Gaza, won’t lead us anywhere. All the negotiations have led us to dead ends.”

    He maintained Israel should act unilaterally both in Gaza and the West Bank “and mold the reality as we see fit.” And now it appears that Israel is preparing to launch military action in Iraq over reports from anonymous sources. What is more curious that these developments are taking place just before the US midterm election.

  • Kunstler Warns "Some Kind Of Epic National Restructuring Is In The Works"

    Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

    And so the sun seems to stand still this last day before the resumption of business-as-usual, and whatever remains of labor in this sclerotic republic takes its ease in the ominous late summer heat, and the people across this land marinate in anxious uncertainty.

    What can be done?

    Some kind of epic national restructuring is in the works. It will either happen consciously and deliberately or it will be forced on us by circumstance. One side wants to magically reenact the 1950s; the other wants a Gnostic transhuman utopia. Neither of these is a plausible outcome.

    Most of the arguments ranging around them are what Jordan Peterson calls “pseudo issues.” Let’s try to take stock of what the real issues might be.

    Energy

    The shale oil “miracle” was a stunt enabled by supernaturally low interest rates, i.e. Federal Reserve policy. Even The New York Times said so yesterday (The Next Financial Crisis Lurks Underground). For all that, the shale oil producers still couldn’t make money at it. If interest rates go up, the industry will choke on the debt it has already accumulated and lose access to new loans. If the Fed reverses its current course – say, to rescue the stock and bond markets – then the shale oil industry has perhaps three more years before it collapses on a geological basis, maybe less. After that, we’re out of tricks. It will affect everything.

    The perceived solution is to run all our stuff on electricity, with the electricity produced by other means than fossil fuels, so-called alt energy. This will only happen on the most limited basis and perhaps not at all. (And it is apart from the question of the decrepit electric grid itself.) What’s required is a political conversation about how we inhabit the landscape, how we do business, and what kind of business we do. The prospect of dismantling suburbia — or at least moving out of it — is evidently unthinkable. But it’s going to happen whether we make plans and policies, or we’re dragged kicking and screaming away from it.

    Corporate tyranny

    The nation is groaning under despotic corporate rule. The fragility of these operations is moving toward criticality. As with shale oil, they depend largely on dishonest financial legerdemain. They are also threatened by the crack-up of globalism, and its 12,000-mile supply lines, now well underway. Get ready for business at a much smaller scale.

    Hard as this sounds, it presents great opportunities for making Americans useful again, that is, giving them something to do, a meaningful place in society, and livelihoods. The implosion of national chain retail is already underway. Amazon is not the answer, because each Amazon sales item requires a separate truck trip to its destination, and that just doesn’t square with our energy predicament. We’ve got to rebuild main street economies and the layers of local and regional distribution that support them. That’s where many jobs and careers are.

    Climate change is most immediately affecting farming. 2018 will be a year of bad harvests in many parts of the world. Agri-biz style farming, based on oil-and-gas plus bank loans is a ruinous practice, and will not continue in any case. Can we make choices and policies to promote a return to smaller scale farming with intelligent methods rather than just brute industrial force plus debt? If we don’t, a lot of people will starve to death. By the way, here is the useful work for a large number of citizens currently regarded as unemployable for one reason or another.

    Pervasive racketeering rules because we allow it to, especially in education and medicine. Both are self-destructing under the weight of their own money-grubbing schemes. Both are destined to be severely downscaled. A lot of colleges will go out of business. Most college loans will never be paid back (and the derivatives based on them will blow up). We need millions of small farmers more than we need millions of communications majors with a public relations minor. It may be too late for a single-payer medical system. A collapsing oil-based industrial economy means a lack of capital, and fiscal hocus-pocus is just another form of racketeering. Medicine will have to get smaller and less complex and that means local clinic-based health care. Lots of careers there, and that is where things are going, so get ready.

    Government over-reach

    The leviathan state is too large, too reckless, and too corrupt. Insolvency will eventually reduce its scope and scale. Most immediately, the giant matrix of domestic spying agencies has turned on American citizens. It will resist at all costs being dismantled or even reined in. One task at hand is to prosecute the people in the Department of Justice and the FBI who ran illegal political operations in and around the 2016 election. These are agencies which use their considerable power to destroy the lives of individual citizens. Their officers must answer to grand juries.

    As with everything else on the table for debate, the reach and scope of US imperial arrangements has to be reduced. It’s happening already, whether we like it or not, as geopolitical relations shift drastically and the other nations on the planet scramble for survival in a post-industrial world that will be a good deal harsher than the robotic paradise of digitally “creative” economies that the credulous expect. This country has enough to do within its own boundaries to prepare for survival without making extra trouble for itself and other people around the world. As a practical matter, this means close as many overseas bases as possible, as soon as possible.

    As we get back to business tomorrow, ask yourself where you stand in the blather-storm of false issues and foolish ideas, in contrast to the things that actually matter.

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Sep 03

Today’s News 3rd September 2018

  • Dijsselbloem: Greece Should Have Been Grateful For European Aid, Kept Mouth Shut

    Greece should have been grateful for European aid and kept its mouth shut. That’s the clear message from former Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem in an interview this weekend.

    He has clearly not recovered yet from the traumatic experience with former Greek finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis.

    At the same time and after three painful bailout agreements that increased the debt and pushed millions to impoverishment, KeepTalkingGreece.com reports that Dijsselbloem went on to say that:

    “Greece is obviously not a success story, demands on Greeks were to heavy” and that the Greek “crisis has been so deep, that you can’t call it a success.”

    Euro zone countries have asked for too much from the Greek people in return for international bailout loans, former Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem said in an interview on Dutch television on Saturday.

    “On reforms, we have asked a lot from the Greek people, too much,” Dijsselbloem told current affairs program Nieuwsuur.

    “Reforms are hard enough to accomplish in a society with a well-functioning government, but this was obviously not the case in Greece.”

    “Greece is obviously not a success story,” Dijsselbloem said.

    “Their crisis has been so deep, that you can’t call it a success.”

    At the same time, in the usual North European arrogance, he said that Greece should be grateful for the help it received and keep its mouth shut.

    “Politics is just a tricky job, you have to compromise, Greece was dependent on help from others, and then to put a big mouth against the people who help you…

    We set conditions for that. Disagree, but you can not raise a big finger at them,” Dijsselboem said.

    Does Dijsselbloem – who blindly followed the strict austerity orders by German finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble during 2013-2018 – now show some kind of remorse? Hardly.

    KeepTalkingGreece points out – harshly but fairly – that Dijsselbloem is one – yet another one – of the self-righteous, light-weight men who found themselves in a powerful position and who now has nothing else to do than write a book about his glorious past, when he was at the spotlight of media.

    He and his Labor party were defeated big in the Dutch parliamentary elections last year and is set to publish a book on his time as head of the Eurogroup.

    Read more here…

  • Euroscepticism In The Czech Republic: A Central European Disaster Waiting To Happen, Or Hot Air?

    Authored by Louis Cox-Brusseau via Global Risk Insights,

    The rise of euroscepticism in Central Europe has been well documented, particularly in the Czech Republic. Among the nations of the Visegrad Four, anti-EU sentiments have long provided easy fuel for political actors willing to appeal to populist instincts to secure political power, but rarely do such sentiments crystallize into concrete anti-European movements. In the Czech Republic, however, political instability and populist rhetoric employed at the highest level is frequently warned against as a harbinger for a potential earthquake in Czech – and potentially Central European – relations with the EU. But how likely is such an event in real terms?

    It is no secret that the Czech Republic harbours one of the highest levels of eurosceptic sentiment in the European Union, a fact which has drawn plenty of analytical attention from outsiders and – particularly in light of the tectonic consequences of the Brexit referendum in 2016 – no end of warnings and extrapolations by parties concerned that a similar ‘Czexit’ referendum could very well take place. In the immediate term, it is certainly justifiable for external investors and third parties to be concerned by Czech euroscepticism as an economic and political risk; Eurobarometer has historically recorded significant levels of discontent with the EU both pre- and post-accession, which has never appreciably declined, and in late 2017 36% of Czechs recorded were unhappy with their status as an EU member, the highest percentage of any EU Member State.

    The roots of Euroscepticism

    Euroscepticism in Czech is an ongoing study; whilst the country benefits enormously from EU funding, the EU is nevertheless often held as the cause of economic woes by a salient portion of the Czech populace. Grassroots resentment over inequalities in salary between the Czech Republic and neighbour countries (for example, in Germany, where an occupation as sales assistant can yield a salary five times greater than its Czech counterpart) is widespread.

    Socially, the story is similar: the advent of Brussels-imposed migration quotas in 2015 was almost universally poorly received in the Czech Republic, where anti-migrant and Islamophobic sentiment is extremely widespread, and to this day the migrant quota debacle has dramatically deteriorated Czech perceptions of EU membership, regardless of the fact that the migration quotas were rejected by the Czech government, and that Czech economy and society continues to benefit from and grow with the aid of EU funding programmes.

    Potential outcomes

    The EU continues to be scapegoated by Czech politicians seeking support from the eurosceptic vote. In real terms, the consequences of this may be dramatic: persistent whispers at the highest levels of Czech politics calling for a Czexit referendum suggests that Czech euroscepticism could, if unchecked, become the groundswell behind an anti-EU movement that eventually leads to a referendum on Union membership with dramatic consequences.

    However, whilst the victory of Czech President Miloš Zeman in the January elections of this year, and the reappointment of Andrei Babiš to the post of Prime Minister were received by European analysts as indicators that euroscepticism is gaining ground steadily, the reality may be quite different.

    Both Mr. Zeman and Mr. Babiš stand to gain very little from a Czech departure from the European Union; Mr. Babiš in particular is unlikely to follow through with any threatened referendum on Czech membership given his economic interests in remaining within the EU. In particular, however, it is noticeable that both Mr. Zeman and Mr. Babiš have distanced themselves publically from the extreme anti-EU voices within the Czech government, refusing to enter into cooperation with hardline or single-policy parties advocating for EU departure. Following the 2018 presidential election results, only one extreme eurosceptic party entered the Lower House of the Czech Parliament, the SPD (Freedom and Direct Democracy) party under Tonio Okamura.

    Ahead of the October 2018 Czech parliamentary elections, the outlook on the future of Czech euroscepticism may not be as negative as has been posited by some analyses.

    As long as political movers rely upon the European Union’s status as scapegoat – whether in the form of President Zeman’s reprimands over perceived bureaucratic incompetence in Brussels, or Prime Minister Babiš’ invocation of the sensitive subject of migration quotas – to build their support base, Czech euroscepticism will be considered a potential risk to EU-Czech relations and the interests of external actors in the Czech Republic.

    However, those with the greatest power in Czech politics – although perfectly content to utilise euroscepticism and populism as tools in their political arsenal – are very well aware of the damage a Czech departure from the European Union would cause to the Czech Republic.

  • China's "Dark Sword" UAV Program

    Submitted by SouthFront

    China’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicles development in general corresponds to global trends. Though in view of its technological lag that existed until recently, Beijing emphasized copying US and Israeli craft.

    China, however, has made a qualitative leap in the last 10-15 years in establishing its own UAV scientific and technological infrastructure. The new Chinese UAV types are equal, and in some respects even superior to their US equivalents. They have a competitive price and, therefore, high export potential. This is true, for example, for the reconnaissance CH-5 (Caihong-5).

    The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) UAVs’ tasks and missions are likewise similar to the US ones. Their main functions are:

    • Reconnaissance;
    • Target designation;
    • Missile strikes on land targets;
    • EW;

    Today such craft are mainly used in operations against asymmetrical and, as a rule, technologically less well equipped adversaries like small states, contested grounds via indirect war by proxy, terrorist/rebel forces, etc. At the same time, given the current level of technology, it’s difficult to imagine a conflict among big players without massive UAV use.

    Unlike the US, China does not have its own wealth of experience in UAV combat use, though some believe that Chinese drones used, for example, in Myanmar and Laos, are flown by Chinese operators. The PLA actively uses drones for surveillance of maritime and land borders, and for combating piracy.

    UAVs play a big role in PLA’s missions in pursuit of Chinese regional and global interests. Beijing seeks to create military capabilities enabling it to act effectively both in indirect and direct clashes with a technologically advanced adversary, which first and foremost includes the United States. Therefore China’s military and political leaders have pursued the development of novel weapons types, including supersonic and hypersonic UAVs.

    One of such future UAV development paths is the AVIC 601-S program. It had led to the construction of such experimental vehicles as Sky Crossbow, Wind Blade, Cloud Bow, Warrior Eagle, Sharp Sword, and Dark Sword. Chinese scientists are actively experimenting on various layout schemes (flying wing, forward-swept wings, etc.) and technological innovations in order to arrive at optimal solutions for UAVs, in order to increase their speed, maneuverability, and stealth.

    The Dark Sword (Anjian), whose photos appeared in the media in early June, is a qualitatively different UAV, according to expert assessments.

    Dark Sword’s conceptual model was initially demonstrated to the public in 2006 at the Chkhuhai airshow in the Guandong Province, and at the 47th International Air Salon at Le Bourget in 2007. Alleged Dark Sword flight photos appeared later, in 2011, but their veracity is doubtful.

    The Dark Sword was being developed by the Shenyang Aeroplane Design Institution as part of the aforementioned  AVIC 601-S program. Its development and production costs are unknown.

    The limited information available in open sources makes it difficult to draw accurate conclusions concerning its characteristics, which led some to claim it is capable of hypersonic speeds. Updated conclusions and assumptions have been made mainly on the basis of a Dark Sword photo which appeared in the Internet.

    This UAV’s design indicates Chinese engineers were aiming to achieve:

    • high speed and flight radius;
    • maneuverability;
    • reduced radar observability;

    According to some estimates Dark Sword can reach Mach 1, though others claim it’s Mach 2. This is suggested by the tail control surfaces and also the Diverterless Supersonic Inlet  (DSI). Its use allows to reduce air resistance at high speeds and radar observability. Similar technologies ae being used on the Chengdu J-20 and J-31 fighters, and on the US F-35 Lightning II.

    Dark Sword ought to have high maneuverability thanks to its canard layout and twin vertical stabilizers. Its stealth is enhanced by the use of radar-absorbing materials and the above-mentioned DSI air intakes. It’s believed Dark Sword could be produced in two variants, manned and unmanned. It will most likely be armed by the most advanced Chinese missiles, such as the PL-15 and its variants.

    Experts’ views on the Dark Sword development vary. According to the Military Watch Magazine, Dark Sword could enter operational use in the near future and thus become the world’s first 6th-generation fighter. It can’t be ruled out, however, this is only an experimental testbed to test a variety of next-generation technologies. Justin Bronk at RUSI notes that “we only see that which the Chinese want us to see”. Therefore we can’t assess the veracity of the photograph or reflect on the circumstances in which it was made. Thus it is unknown whether China is actually financing a project which will soon reach its completion phase, or is merely trying to induce other countries to spend money on similar costly projects with uncertain future.

    It is highly probable that the Dark Sword and other AVIC 601-S program vehicles are mainly experimental. But if Dark Sword becomes an operational weapon, it will have a fundamental impact on the wars of the future.

    The Chinese UAV could be used not only for reconnaissance and ground target strikes as part of the existing UAV doctrine, but also break through enemy defenses and strike deep targets. It could operate independently as a strike UAV or as part of a force package, supporting piloted aircraft.

    Given its extended range, it can be used to attack land, air (including other UAVs) and naval targets, for example, carrier battlegroups. Dark Sword could be further developed for aircraft carrier operations.

    Dark Sword will become a delivery vehicle for various weapons, including long-range air-to-ground and air-to-air missiles, but in the future also lasers. It could also carry mobile and highly effective electronic warfare systems to disrupt land forces, air, and naval communications systems. One has to consider the possibility Dark Sword could be used as a “suicide” UAV, but that’s not as likely considering its cost.

    UAV operator training should take less time and money than pilot training, since their level of qualifications is much lower.

    Other countries could respond to the Chinese challenge in several ways.

    From the technical point of view, other countries will seek to create similar high-speed UAVs in conjunction with already existing systems. This approach would require considerable expenditure and time. It’s highly likely the US will continue the development of own hypersonic technologies.

    Another approach is improving air defense, electronic warfare, and, possibly, lasers, capable of “burning” its electronic payloads. Since UAVs depend on communications systems, this appears to be the optimal approach. Russia, which lags in UAV development, will seek to improve its electronic warfare systems which have traditionally been the Russian MIC’s strong suit. The US will do the same.

    From the point of view of military planning, there will occur a reconceptualization and perfecting of existing approaches. Particular emphasis will be placed on reconnaissance and intelligence efforts to locate UAV command posts and strike them using all available weapons.

    China thus managed to establish an industrial foundation over the last few decades to produce own UAVs. This is a manifestation of China’s political strategy and is driven by Beijing’s desire to consolidate its position as a superpower technologically on a par with the US. As already existing models enter service and future projects are developed (for example, improved air-to-air missiles and others), China will greatly improve its standing both on a regional and global scale.

    China’s ability and readiness to perform a wide range of missions in regions with high conflict potential will also increase. At the same time, China’s main competitors and potential adversaries will also grow concerned with Beijing’s ascendancy, potentially leading to an escalation of global tensions.

  • What An Impeachment Would Look Like

    Once again, the rhetoric about impeaching President Trump has heated back up since Cohen and Manafort were charged; but how would the process work?

    An impeachment is a lengthy process and, as Statista’s Fabian Moebus notes, requires a simple majority from the House Judiciary Committee, the House of Representatives and a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

    While each step is quite explicitly described by the constitution, the possible indictments are worded rather vaguely. Consequently, most attempts to impeach the president are rejected by the House Judiciary Committee.

    Infographic: What an Impeachment Would Look Like | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    There were only two cases in which it went all the way to the senate vote. But the cases of Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998-99 both fell short of the two-thirds majority of the Senators.

    The only actual withdrawal from office came from President Richard Nixon in 1974 after he deflected a potential impeachment by resigning. In his case, the loss of trust from his own party essentially left him with no other choice.

  • Van Dongen: Why Africa Faces The Biggest Threat Of Ebola Explosion

    Authored by John van Dongen via ModernGhana.com,

    Senior government officials in Tanzanian, Rwandan and Ugandan, have said their countries are on a high risk of Ebola outbreak after the disease killed 75 out of 111 patients in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo.

    After we sent a wake-up call in July 2018 to the Ugandan Government that Ebola will be introduced to Uganda after vaccine trials are conducted in DRC Congo and that the Ugandan the Tanzanian, Rwandan and Ugandan governments took excessive measurements.

    We warned the Ugandan government that Ebola will enter in a certain region in the North East of Uganda under the disguise of so-called European proclamation that opposition armed forces will not allow WHO, UNHCR and Europe to interfere in the Ebola outbreak.

    History of Ebola and Crimean Congo Haemorrhagic Virus

    Scientists studying viral disease agents in the laboratory for biowarfare purposes and cure against it have become infected in Russia, United States, Crimea, Tajikistan, Philippines, Germany, Former Yugoslavia, United Kingdom, Netherlands, South Africa many decades ago.

    A similar accident with Ebola had reportedly occurred at the US Army’s biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, where the Ebola virus was invented, but the researcher involved didn’t acquire the disease. This incident is not listed on the CDC’s list of confirmed outbreaks, perhaps because the researcher didn’t develop antibodies.

    At the beginning of the former century, new concerns about bio-weapons being used to generate terror and also with a series of new disease-causing microbes have resulted in infections and deaths of workers studying them in the laboratories. And now we have bats, monkeys, tics, swine, horse flies and mosquitos are spreading genetic manipulated diseases made in biowarfare Centers throughout the hearts of all epidemics.

    Some latest examples: the 2014 infections and deaths of five researchers who were isolating the West African Ebola virus for deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing epidemiology studies. Beginning in March 2014, a devastating Ebola outbreak in West Africa caused widespread suffering and damaged fragile public health systems.

    Hundreds of thousands of unwitting people are systematically exposed to dangerous pathogens and other incurable diseases. Biowarfare scientists using diplomatic cover test man-made viruses at Pentagon bio-laboratories in 25 countries across the world causing especially Ebola and HIV in Africa for depopulation reasons.

    These US Ebola biowarfare-laboratories are funded, amongst many others, by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program, Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), and are located in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.

    It is very striking the number of American research laboratories, who have created the Ebola virus, working on protection against bioterrorism has increased from 20 to 400 over the last 10 years throughout the Ebola and HIV fallout regions.

    Most of these centers appeared in African countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, DRC, Tanzania, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Egypt. Such laboratories allow developing biological weapons.

    US government agencies have a long history of carrying out allegedly defensive biological warfare research at labs in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

    This includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is now the point agency for managing the Ebola spill-over into the US.

    If you look at a map of the west coast of Africa you can see where laboratories are located as they are across the heart of the Ebola epidemic. Probably some of these labs are the origins of the Ebola epidemics.

    Source: SouthFront.org

    Laboratory-acquired viral and bacterial infections in research facilities happen. Although less common than infections of clinical workers handling patient samples, infections of researchers with serious pathogens can lead to death.

    This is an increasing problem as governments of USA and technically advanced nations have increased research on potential bioterrorism agents and as concerns have grown about the capture of such bioweapons by rogue nations and non-government groups.

    Millions or billions on our planet worry whether the African pandemic might be rapidly turning into a global epidemic spreading to every corner of the earth.

    The World Health Organisation (WHO) and US government are busily downplaying the risks to citizens here in North America.

    The specific character of Ebola spreading and high lethality of the virus allows killing people selectively targeting villages, cities or countries. Biological war might be very fast and successful if a state for a case of unforeseen circumstance already has a developed and tested vaccine.

    The US Department of Defense (DoD) is funding Ebola trials on humans, trials which started just weeks before the Ebola outbreak in Guinea and Sierra Leone.

    The reports continue and state that the DoD gave a contract worth $140 million to Tekmira, a Canadian pharmaceutical company, to conduct Ebola research.

    This research work involved injecting and infusing healthy humans with the deadly Ebola virus, which started in January 2014 shortly before an Ebola epidemic was declared in West Africa in March.

    In bringing the two Ebola-infected Americans back from West Africa to the CDC, in addition to optimizing their survival chance, the other all too obvious explanation is to harvest their Ebola cells for extraction that will then be used to patent the most deadly strain ever known to man.

    No doubt the US government is highly invested in Ebola for both potential profits developing a vaccine as well as for a potential solution as a convenient biowarfare global population-killer.

    Speaking of profits, Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, a pharmacological company gets a huge benefit because millions of peoples, as well as governments, bought prepared vaccine.

    It’s not above suspicion that the American military has also been doing research on Ebola as a bioweapon.

    Its stable nature in aerosol makes it attractive as a potential biological weapon. USA have been using DRC, Uganda, Liberia and Sierra Leone as an offshore to circumvent the Convention on Biological Weapons and do bio-warfare work.

    Georgia

    For instance, the US Army has been deployed to Vaziani Military Air Base, 17 km away from the Pentagon bio-laboratory at The Lugar Center in Georgia.

    Leaks from within Western establishments and their behavior fuel the conspiracy theories that Ebola is bio-weapon created by the West to depopulate Africa.

    Crimea

    In 1943 Crimea faced a severe outbreak of Crimean Congo Haemorrhagic Virus CCHV (Ebola). Several scientific textbooks like ‘Medical Aspects of Biological Warfare’ (1997) by Zygmunt F. Dembek, a Lieutenant Colonel of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, as well as ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ by Eric A. Croddy et al. and finally, ‘A Companion to the Anthropology of Environmental Health’ by Wiley Blackwell tell us why Ebola takes its route from Crimea to the Congo.

    So if Ebola came from laboratories of the US Army then, what is the connection of the presence of US Army and World Health Organization WHO and the Centers for Disease Control CDC facilities in the Philippines?

    How is it possible that people from the World Health Organization examined Ebola contaminated pigs and a worker in a pig farm in Bulacan, before the outbreak in Reston in 1976? It is only the WHO and some elements of the US Army in the Philippines that have the capability to transport, spread and identify the Marburg virus in the early sixties.

    Sequential Ebola outbreaks and events

    *In 1967, 31 people from Marburg and Frankfurt, Germany, and then in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, went down with the so-called Marburg fever. It was allegedly imported by green monkeys which originated in Uganda.

    *In 1967, Crimean Congo Haemorrhagic Virus (Ebola) was isolated in what was at that time the Belgian Congo. In 25% of those afflicted, it resulted in bleeding to death. And it resulted just after the aforementioned outbreaks in Germany and Yugoslavia. This virus which then made its appearance in Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa is closely related to the California Encephalitis Virus.

    *In 1975, this disease cropped up 8000 kilometers away in South Africa in 1976 and over 1000 migrants catch the Ebola disease and never returned home. CCHV made it’s appearance as ‘Ebola fever,’ in Sudan and Zaire, (in American hospitals). 50% of patients died.

    It is scientifically well known this CCHV is not only related to California Encephalitis but also to rabies, and its spread is allegedly unknown. And almost all scientists in the field of biowarfare products know about genetic engineered techniques in order to make animals and insects susceptible to the Ebola/CCHV viruses.

    *In 1976 Ebola occurred in Nzara (the source town), Mardi, Tumbura, and Juba (Cities in present-day South Sudan). The index cases were workers in a cotton factory. The disease was spread by close contact with an acute case, usually from patients to their nurses. Much medical care personnel was infected.

    *In 1979 in Sudan Ebola occurred in Nzara and Maridi. This was a recurrent outbreak at the same site as the 1976 Sudan epidemic.

    *In 1989, the CDC reports, Ebola-Reston virus was introduced into quarantine facilities in Virginia and Pennsylvania by monkeys imported from the Philippines. No humans were infected.

    The Reston virus (RESTV) was first identified when it caused high mortality in crab-eating macaques in a primate research facility responsible for exporting animals to the United States. Three workers in the facility developed antibodies to the virus but did not get sick

    *In 1990, Ebola-Reston virus was introduced once again into biowarfare quarantine facilities in Virginia and Texas by monkeys imported from the Philippines. Four humans developed antibodies but did not get sick.

    *In 1994 Ivory Coast This case was the first and thus far only recognition of Tai Forest virus (TAFV). Approximately one week after conducting necropsies on infected western chimpanzees in Tai National Park, a scientist contracted the virus and developed symptoms similar to those of dengue fever. She was discharged from a Swiss hospital two weeks later and fully recovered after six weeks

    *In 1994/1995 Occurred in Makokou and gold-mining camps deep in the rainforest along the Ivindo River. Until 1995, the outbreak was incorrectly classified as yellow fever.

    * From 1994 till 1996 four Ebola outbreaks occurred in the village of Mayibout 2 and neighboring areas. A chimpanzee found dead in the forest was eaten by villagers hunting for food. Nineteen people involved in the butchery of the animal became ill, and other cases occurred in their family members.

    In the Booué area with the transport of patients to Libreville. The index case-patient was a hunter who lived in a forest timber camp. The disease was spread by close contact with infected persons.

    A dead chimpanzee found in the forest at the time was determined to be infected on both sides of the border between Gabon and the Republic of the Congo (RC). This outbreak included the first reported occurrence of Ebola virus disease in the RC.

    *In 1996, Ebola-Reston virus was introduced into a quarantine facility in Texas by monkeys imported from the Philippines. No human infections were identified.

    *In 2000 until the beginning of 2001 Ebola Occurred in the Gulu, Masindi, and Mbarara districts of Uganda. The three greatest risks associated with Sudan virus infection were attending funerals of case-patients, having contact with case-patients in one’s family, and providing medical care to case-patients without using adequate personal protective measures

    *In May of 2004, a Russian scientist died of Ebola after accidentally pricking herself with a syringe while conducting research on infected guinea pigs in Siberia.

    *In 2004 Ebola occurred in Yambio county in Western Equatoria of southern Sudan (present-day South Sudan). This outbreak was concurrent with an outbreak of measles in the same area.

    *In 2004 The largest outbreak of Ebola Marburg virus ever occurred in Angola.

    *In 2007 Ebola Occurred in the Bundibugyo District in western Uganda. This was the first identification of the Bundibugyo virus (BDBV)

    *In 2009, a scientist in Berlin, Germany accidentally pricked herself

    and was infected with Ebola. She was given an experimental vaccine as part of her treatment and did not become ill.

    *In 2012 Ebola occurred in the Kibaale District Uganda.

    *From 2013 till 2016 widespread Ebola outbreaks occurred in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Mali, United States, Senegal, Spain, and Italy.

    If Ebola came from laboratories of the US Army then; what is the connection of the presence of the US Army, the World Health Organization WHO and the Centers for Disease Control CDC in Ebola facilities in the Philippines in the sixties and seventies?

    As the Marburg virus before the outbreak in 1967 has not existed then, how is it possible that worldwide everybody works with the Marburg virus without Leve1-4 laboratories at that particular time, and secondly how could they act without legal permission or official guidelines as we stated: It is noteworthy to remember the signing of the Geneva accord by Nixon in 1970?

    Editorial

    According to all the aforementioned events, namely; involvement of national military, medical and pharmacological biowarfare institutes, track of the green monkeys causing Ebola laboratory outbreaks in 1967, in Germany, Belgrade and Frankfurt at the same time, its discovery in Crimea in 1943, its detection and isolation, the appearances of Ebola virus in insects and animal species, as well as to publish about the Ebola virus at the Fourth Congreso Latinoamericano de Microbiologia in Lima, Peru on the 26th of November 1967, only six days after the identification, shows the man-made interferences of the development of man-made Ebola viruses.

    Whatever the Marburg or Ebola virus may be it must be created long before its first outbreak in 1967 and the first outbreak in The Congo in 1976.

    The virus is human-made and tested on black skinned people in Africa in order to find vaccines against it for military defense purposes and to depopulate the African continent.

  • China's "New Silk Road" Project Hits Debt Jam

    President Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road” trade infrastructure project could be hitting significant bottlenecks as some countries begin to sound alarms regarding the massive debt loads their governments are incurring.

    Xi first announced the trade initiative also known as the “New Silk Road” in 2013, which needs more than $26 trillion of infrastructure investment by 2030 to keep regional economies expanding. The project includes railways, power plants, ports, highways and other projects across the world, with Beijing providing billions of dollars in credit to drive these schemes.

    Major governments including the United States, Japan and India have expressed grave concern Beijing is trying to construct a new economic system that will erode their influence.

    Xi said China’s trade with Belt and Road countries had exceeded $5 trillion, with outward direct investment surpassing $60 billion.

    Already, some Chinese-led projects have experienced high levels of complaints that they are too expensive and give little work to local contractors. In response, some governments including Thailand, Tanzania, Sri Lanka and Nepal have halted, scaled back, and or renegotiated projects with Beijing.

    In August, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad canceled various projects including a $20 billion rail system he said his country could no longer afford.

    Recently, Pakistan’s new prime minister, Imran Khan, has vowed more transparency amid fears about the country’s ability to repay Chinese loans related to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

    Last December, Sri Lanka had to sell its controlling stake of Port of Hambantota to a Chinese state-owned finance firm after it almost defaulted on a $1.5 billion loan from Beijing.

    Hambantota port formally handed over to China-led company 

    Mohamed Nasheed, the exiled leader of the opposition in the Maldives, warned China’s debt-fueled projects in the Indian Ocean archipelago amounted to a “land grab” and “colonialism,” with 80 percent of its debt held by Beijing.

    “China does not have a very competent international bureaucracy in foreign aid, in expansion of soft power,” Anne Stevenson-Yang, co-founder and research director at J Capital Research, told AFP.

    “So not surprisingly they’re not very good at it, and it brought up political issues like Malaysia that nobody anticipated,” she said.

    “As the RMB (yuan) becomes weaker, and China is perceived internationally as a more ambiguous partner, it’s more likely that the countries will take a more jaundiced eye on these projects.”

    The Center for Global Development, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C. that focuses on international development, discovered “serious concerns” about the sustainability of the sovereign debt in eight countries receiving infrastructure project funds from Beijing.

    Those were Pakistan, Djibouti, Maldives, Mongolia, Laos, Montenegro, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

    For example, a $6.7 billion China-Laos railway project represents almost half of the Southeast Asian country’s GDP, according to the study.

    President Choummaly Sayasone (center right), Zhang Dejiang (center left) break ground to commence construction of the China-Laos railway project in Vientiane, capital of Laos, on December 2015.

    In Djibouti, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that the African country faces a “high risk of debt distress” as its public debt soared from 50 percent of GDP in 2014 to 85 percent in 2016.

    Next week, a group of African leaders will gather in Beijing for an economic conference which will include talks on the “Belt and Road” initiative.

    On Friday, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying denied that Beijing is strategically implanting huge amounts of debt in its trading partners to eventually expect default and acquire the country’s assets for pennies on the dollar.

    “It’s unreasonable that money coming out of Western countries is praised as good and sweet, while coming out of China it’s sinister and a trap,” she said.

    Stevenson-Yang said China’s loans are recorded in dollar terms, “but in reality, they’re lending in terms of tractors, shipments of coal, engineering services and things like that, and they ask for repayment in hard currency.”

    Five years into China’s debt-fuelled “New Silk Road” initiative across many countries in the Eastern Hemisphere, it seems as a handful of governments are mounting complaints against Beijing for inducing a debt trap that strips their countries of its critical assets.

  • Russian Oligarch And Putin Pal Admits To Collusion, Secret Meetings

    Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a close associate of Vladimir Putin, has gone on record with The Hill‘s John Solomon – admitting to colluding with Americans leading up to the 2016 US election, except it might not be what you’re thinking. 

    Deripaska, rumored to be Donald Trump’s “back channel” to Putin via the Russian’s former association with Paul Manafort, says he “colluded” with the US Government between 2009 and 2016. 

    In 2009, when Robert Mueller was running the FBI, the agency asked Deripaska to spend $25 million of his own money to bankroll an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired FBI agent – Robert Levinson, who was kidnapped in 2007 while working on a 2007 CIA contract in Iran. This in and of itself is more than a bit strange. 

    Deripaska agreed, however the Obama State Department, headed by Hillary Clinton, scuttled a last-minute deal with Iran before Levinson could be released. He hasn’t been heard from since.

    FBI agents courted Deripaska in 2009 in a series of secret hotel meetings in Paris; Vienna; Budapest, Hungary, and Washington. Agents persuaded the aluminum industry magnate to underwrite the mission. The Russian billionaire insisted the operation neither involve nor harm his homeland. -The Hill

    In other words – Trump’s alleged “back channel” to Putin was in fact an FBI asset who spent $25 million helping Obama’s “scandal free” administration find a kidnapped agent. Deripaska’s admitted 

    Steele, Ohr and the 2016 US Election

    As the New York Times frames it, distancing Deripaska from the FBI (no mention of the $25 million rescue effort, for example), the Russian aluminum magnate was just one of several Putin-linked Oligarchs the FBI tried to flip.

    The attempt to flip Mr. Deripaska was part of a broader, clandestine American effort to gauge the possibility of gaining cooperation from roughly a half-dozen of Russia’s richest men, nearly all of whom, like Mr. Deripaska, depend on President Vladimir V. Putin to maintain their wealth, the officials said. –NYT

    Central to the recruiting effort were two central players in the Trump-Russia investigation; twice-demoted DOJ #4 official Bruce Ohr and Christopher Steele – the author of the largely unverified “Steele Dossier.” 

    Steele, a longtime associate of Ohr’s, worked for Deripaska beginning in 2012 researching a business rival – work which would evolve to the point where the former British spy was interfacing with the Obama administration on his behalf – resulting in Deripaska regaining entry into the United States, where he visited numerous times between 2009 and 2017.  

    The State Department tried to keep him from getting a U.S. visa between 2006 and 2009 because they believed he had unspecified connections to criminal elements in Russia as he consolidated power in the aluminum industry. Deripaska has denied those allegations…

    Whatever the case, it is irrefutable that after he began helping the FBI, Deripaska regained entry to the United States. And he visited numerous times between 2009 and 2017, visa entry records show. –The Hill

    Deripaska is now banned from the United States as one of several Russians sanctioned in April in response to alleged 2016 election meddling. 

    In a September 2016 meeting, Deripaska told FBI agents that it was “preposterous” that Paul Manafort was colluding with Russia to help Trump win the 2016 election. This, despite the fact that Deripaska and Manafort’s business relationship “ended in lawsuits, per The Hill – and the Russian would have every reason to throw Manafort under the bus if he wanted some revenge on his old associate. 

    So the FBI and DOJ secretly collaborated with Trump’s alleged backchannel over a seven-year period, starting with Levinson, then on Deripaska’s Visa, and finally regarding whether Paul Manafort was an intermediary to Putin. Deripaska vehemently denies the assertion, and even took out newspaper advertisements in the US last year volunteering to testify to Congress, refuting an AP report that he and Manafort secretly worked on a plan to “greatly benefit the Putin government” a decade ago. 

    Soon after the advertisements ran, representatives for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees called a Washington-based lawyer for Mr. Deripaska, Adam Waldman, inquiring about taking his client up on the offer to testify, Mr. Waldman said in an interview.

    What happened after that has been in dispute. Mr. Waldman, who stopped working for Mr. Deripaska after the sanctions were levied, said he told the committee staff that his client would be willing to testify without any grant of immunity, but would not testify about any Russian collusion with the Trump campaign because “he doesn’t know anything about that theory and actually doesn’t believe it occurred.” –NYT

    In short, Deripaska wants it known that he worked with the FBI and DOJ, and that he had nothing to do with the Steele dossier.

    Today, Deripaska is banned anew from the United States, one of several Russians sanctioned in April by the Trump administration as a way to punish Putin for 2016 election meddling. But he wants to be clear about a few things, according to a statement provided by his team. First, he did collude with Americans in the form of voluntarily assisting and meeting with the FBI, the DOJ and people such as Ohr between 2009 and 2016.

    He also wants Americans to know he did not cooperate or assist with Steele’s dossier, and he tried to dispel the FBI notion that Russia and the Trump campaign colluded during the 2016 election. –The Hill

    Interestingly, Steele’s dossier which was partially funded by the Clinton campaign, relied on senior Kremlin officials. 

     

    It would be most helpful if the Department of Justice could please investigate and then prosecute themselves and/or members of the previous administration, so that journalists like John Solomon, Sara Carter, Luke Rosiak, Chuck Ross and others don’t have to continue to break stories that are seemingly ignored by all but a handful of Congressional investigators.

  • Chris Martenson: The Whole System Is Rigged

    Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,

    As the dog days of summer wind down, it’s hard not to notice how the climate is suffering brutally right now across many areas of the globe.

    Crop failures have hit hard across Europe. Australia is under an intense drought. Warm water representing ‘archived heat’ has penetrated deep into the arctic.  Coral reefs are dying through mass bleachings. The stocks of ocean fisheries are in deep trouble. Insect and bird populations remain in a state of collapse.

    It couldn’t be any more clear that our society’s demands for ever-more “growth” are taking an increasingly dangerous toll. “Growth” is now the enemy of life on the planet; yet there are precious few leaders willing to admit as much. 

    What we need is less pressure on vital ecological systems and precious remaining resources. But good luck finding a politician willing to admit that.

    Though a refreshing exception is French environmental minister Nicolas Hulot who dramatically resigned his position last week, on live television, declaring “I don’t want to lie to myself anymore.”  His view is that the government is not addressing the major environmental issues properly and he didn’t want his presence to give the false appearance that it was.  Kudos to Nicolas, though I’m not sure that losing such a rare principled person in government is a step in the right direction.

    Operating On Blind Faith

    Most politicians appear to think that there are no big issues out there ecologically-speaking. Of course, very few of them spend any time outside or understand where their food even comes from. Most subsist on the blind faith that our planet will somehow always bounce back from the abuses we inflict on it, despite reams of mounting evidence that it’s hitting a mulitplying number of breaking and tipping points.

    Sadly, the mainstream media chooses to toss wedge issue after wedge issue, ususally in the most inflammatory ways it can, at an increasingly irate general populace that has almost zero clue about the true source of the shocks (financial, economic, and ecological) they are experiencing. This prevents society from having an informed discussion about the real risks we should be concerned with.

    As heart-tugging a topic as ‘border kids’ might be, the monster asset price bubbles blown by the central banks get almost no attention in the media — despite their ability to destroy the futures and dreams of pretty much everyone reading this article.

    Our media is failing us, badly, by focusing on symptomatic issues that enrage and divide us, while remaining silent on the causal matters of vital importance to all of us. 

    In other words, you’d do well to ignore the pre-packaged opinions being spoon fed into your mind by the media professionals. Instead, look at the data yourself and come to your own conclusions about what’s happening.

    Notice the near complete lack of insect diversity and numbers? What about the collapsing populations of frogs and reptiles?  How about the missing seabirds?  Did you know that humans have worked their harvesting down to the lowest part of the food chain and are now netting krill — removing the base of the pedestal for the oceanic food chain?

    Why is it so hard for our culture to recognize that an economic model founded on the idea of perpetual exponential expansion, while living on a planet with finite resources, is a thoroughly unworkable idea?  How can we all so blithely ignore the obvious indicators screaming that we’ve already hit the limits of that model? 

    The lengths to which humans are now going for new deposits of oil, copper, water, arable land and other essential economic inputs are staggeringly desperate.  Each should be a warning sign unto themselves.

    But taken together?

    Ignoring them requires the same degree of self-deception that addicts employ in their belief that they still have things under control, and can stop anytime.

    Yeah, right.  Somehow ‘that day’ never arrives.  It’s always just one more fix, one more day.

    Except in this case it’s just one more election, one more quarter of growth, one more injection of central bank money.

    Frustrating? You bet.

    Trying to elevate the critical observation that pursuing infinite growth on a finite planet is not only impossible, but a really terrible idea, has been a frustrating endeavor.

    We here at PeakProsperity.com have been at this for over a decade, and we can tell you first-hand, Folks, this ain’t easy.

    While the logic support it is extremely straightforward, it runs afoul of the majority’s entrenched belief systems. So even the most basic and compelling of data is ignored. Instead,  tortured anecdotes are held up as “proof” that their treasured belief systems are correct.

    Here’s an example. 

    Anecdote:  “Electric car sales are up 40% in Europe!” 

    Somehow this is proof that we’re on the right track. Electric cars are going to rapidly replace internal combustion cars, and thereby solve all the issues related to the world’s addiction to fossil fuels.

    Basic data: “There’s not enough cobalt or lithium to even replace 25% of all cars on the road, let alone 100%.  EV cars still consume extraordinary resources, and release a huge amount of carbon in their manufacture. Massive subsidies are required to make them economically attractive, even to wealthy citizens of wealthy nations, so they aren’t well suited to the bulk of the world’s population.  And if these cars were somehow all powered by electrcity from solar and wind, those energy sources are still themselves massively dependent on fossil fuels for their mining, manufacture, transportation, installation and replacement.”

    The basic data says that instead of salivating over expensive and advanced personal transportation methods designed to preserve the status quo of our current failing infrastructure, we should instead be dedicating a large part of our efforts towards mass transit, relocating our work/play/farm spaces so that they are closer together, and use vastly fewer resources to deliver the same services we rely on.

    Recently I’ve been frustrated by the efforts to convince Americans that our democracy is under attack by outside agents when there’s ample evidence — concrete, hard, firm evidence which I’ve repeatedly covered — that US elections have been spitting out improbable and even sometimes impossible election results for the past 14 years, ever since insecure, low-integrity eVoting platforms and central tabulators were introduced.

    Yes, nefarious agents may well indeed be undermining our democracy. But the real villains appear much more domestic than foreign.

    There’s nothing more poisonous to the notion of democracy than fraudulent election outcomes. Nothing. And yet the number of people rising up in protest on this issue may as well be zero, as long as we’re rounding to the nearest whole percentage.  Meanwhile millions are up in arms about the still-unproven allegations that Russia tipped the recent presidential elections with a laughably tiny amount of social media ads.

    For those interested in more detail on just how badly manipulated recent voting results have become, read my recent account on the topic here. And then, just for fun, take a look below at the voting “architecture” put in place in Ohio under its disgraced Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and which delivered a very surprising win for G. W. Bush over John Kerry.  The pre and exit polls both showed an overwhelming win for Kerry. Oops! The new Deibold electric voting machines (which Blackwell owned a stake in) instead reported a surprising win for GWB: 

    Click to Enlarge

    You don’t have to be an IT expert to detect that there are numerous places for bad actors to insert themselves into this system and romp about with the vote totals.  It’s a ridiculous joke of an architecture that, honestly, seems to have been specifically-designed to allow fraud.

    In fact, this schematic reveals that the shady company “entrusted” to add up the vote totals had inserted a key piece of machinery as a “man in the middle” and not as a mirror server.  That meant that the vote totals could be easily manipulated in a way that could not be undone or later refuted. 

    Even the most unschooled of individuals must be aware that vote counting cannot ever be a matter of “trust us”.  With so much on the line, it must always be assumed that cheating is going to happen, not that it might happen. Checks and balances need to be in place to counter such abuse.

    Several important questions emerge.  Why did Kerry, knowing all of this, concede defeat so graciously within 24 hours? Why was such an obviously corrupt architecture put in place and not challenged? Why does it still persist to this day? Why have no major news outlets run a major investigative inquiry and publicized a huge expose on the utter lack of integrity within the US voting system?  Why do we have a perfectly secure system in place for using a credit/debt card to buy a $2 slushy at 7-11, but somehow secure and trustworthy voting remains a mysteriously-unachievable outcome for a nation as advanced as the US?

    The simple that explains all this: Voting is rigged, and the entire power structure wants it that way.

    The wonder of it all is that there are a lot of people in Ohio desperately up in arms about Russian meddling right now, blissfully unaware that their entire state is shot through with election fraud courtesy of both major parties. 

    Yes, their democracy is under attack, and it has been for a long time. But it certainly isn’t the Russians designing, installing, and defending the Ohio voting systems. 

    The Outlook Is Deteriorating Fast

    There are lots of things that we should be very concerned about and practically none of them are to be found on the news.  In the rare cases they are, they’re presented without meaningful context and very rapidly replaced by trivial distractions.

    We should be asking ourselves why that’s the case.

    More to the point, you need to understand that very serious risks to your future prospects, well-being and liberty are building. The mounting warning signs are all around you if you look for them, though they’ll be carefully filtered out from the nightly news or your social media feeds.

    Getting access to good information is difficult these days. And it’s getting harder, not easier. Only a few massive corporations own nearly all of our media outlets. They have a narrative they want sold, often developed with the goverment, and they invest billions to refine their craft of delivering it. Better algorithms, in-product placements, and mentally-addictive formats for delivering you distracting, emotionally manipulative context that has practically zero positive bearing on your life. 

    In short: it’s a rigged game. Perhaps it always has been, but in today’s digital age, the tools of state are becoming ever more crafty, sophisticated and complete. 

    Gone are the days when our financial markets served as important signals about the health of the economy.  Today, they’ve been replaced by ““markets”” that central bankers and other bureaucratic planners utterly own and control. The only signals they send are what those running the show want us to hear.

    Our precious ecosphere is disintegrating. The fossil fuels bonanza we are hopelessly addicted to is ending. But there is no Plan B to deal with these existential challenges (beyond the elites’ private plans to bunker down and ride out the trouble when it begins). 

    The message to take from this is: You are on your own.  There’s no benevolent government preparing to step in and sort things out for you if/when collapse arrives.  Your pensions are already gone — the math is cruelly certain on that. Self-interested corporations set the rules. Power will never be fairly redistributed due to elections. 

    Were a future of unlimited growth possible, these worries wouldn’t really matter.  But it isn’t. So none of this is fine.  Now that the pie is no longer growing, the obvious truth is that the rigged system is handing over a larger and larger portion of that stagnant pie to fewer and fewer people.

    That’s an incontrovertible fact. But it’s reported by the media as if it were a wayward comet nobody expected that just showed up in the night sky.  Rich people getting richer, what are you gonna do?

    Never mentioned is that the system is rigged to create that outcome. And that the central banks have engineered it on purpose. 

    It’s time to wake up and see what’s really going on. 

    This is especially true right now for anyone with assets in the US equity ““markets””. With indices back at all-time highs, record complacency reigns. But scratch lightly on the “everything is awesome!” veneer, and an ugly picture of accelerating rot and instability immediately appears

    In Part 2: The Outlook For The Markets Is Deteriorating Fast we expose the truly frightening contagion currently decimating a long list of emerging market countries and explain how it threatens to bring down the world economy with it. Collapse happens from the outside in, and the periphery is falling fast…

    Yes, the entire system is rigged. But when a breaking point is reached, and things get so bad they spiral out of the control of the manipulators, Look out below!

    Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

  • Trump Allies Fume Over "Political Hand-Grenades" At Hyper-Partisan McCain Funeral

    President Trump’s allies, both in Washington D.C. and across the country, are fuming after the funeral for the late Sen. John McCain turned into an anti-Trump rally.

    Meghan McCain, along with former Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, used the somber event to take pot-shots at Trump – who was golfing during the ceremony while his daughter Ivanka sat through harsh criticism of her father – seated next to her husband, Jared Kushner.

    McCain’s service was, on one level, a return to old Washington civility, with Republicans and Democrats, past presidents, friends and foes gathered in unity. But as its tributes echoed with overt criticism of the president, it only deepened the hostility between the city’s establishment and the outsider in the White House. –Politico

    McCain was perhaps Trump’s most prominent nemesis in Washington D.C. – first withdrawing support for Trump during the 2016 election after the Access Hollywood “pussy tape” was leaked, and later hand delivering the infamous “Steele Dossier” to former FBI Director James Comey (who already had a copy). McCain would fly back to Washington D.C. in July of last year to a standing ovation on the Senate floor – only to cast the deciding vote against Trump’s repeal of Obamacare. 

    And after Meghan McCain said during her father’s eulogy that “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great,” and former Presidents Obama and Bush took similar veiled shots at the President – albeit without mentioning him by name, Trump’s allies across the country were left fuming. 

    Following the Saturday spectacle, Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson tweeted: “@realDonaldTrump ran for @POTUS ONE time and WON! Some people will never recover from  that. #SorryNotSorry Yes, #MAGA” 

    American Conservative Union Chair Matt Schlapp tweeted: “I hope I have lots of time but if not: anyone can come, will be about God and not politics, and celebrate.”

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    Others echoed the disgust: 

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     We’re sure McCain would have wanted it this way. 

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Sep 02

Today’s News 2nd September 2018

  • US Strategy In Syria: "Create Quagmires Until We Get What We Want"

    Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

    In 2013, top Obama Administration officials described their policy in the Syrian War as one of keeping the war going. The administration wanted a big seat at the table for a political settlement, which officials clarified meant ensuring that the war kept going so that there was never a clear victor.

    The Trump Administration seems to be slipping into that same destructive set of priorities in Syria. The Washington Post this week quoted an unnamed Administration official as saying that “right now, our job is to help create quagmires [for Russia and the Syrian regime] until we get what we want.”

    As ever, what the US really wants is to have a dominant position in post-war negotiations, so they can dictate the form that post-war Syria takes. This means ensuring that the Syrian government doesn’t win the war outright.

    That’s not as realistic as it once was, with the Assad government, backed by Russia, having retaken virtually all of the rebel-held territory except for a far north bastion in Idlib, dominated by al-Qaeda. This means the US now has to save al-Qaeda to keep the war going, which if we’re being honest has been a recurring undercurrent in US policy in Syria for years.

    It is this desire that has the US repeatedly threatening Syria and warning them not to attack Idlib. It is this desire that is sparking almost daily US threats to intervene militarily if the Idlib offensive involves chemical weapons. Most importantly, it is this desire that has Russia very much believing media reports that the rebels could “stage” a fake chemical attack just to suck the US into the war, and be fairly confident it would work.

    The US is, after all, constantly talking about an imminent chemical attack despite there being no reason to think Syria is poised to launch one. At times, US officials have privately conceded that there is no sign Syria is making any moves to even ready such weapons for the offensive. Yet several times a week, the US issues statements with allegations of a chemical plot featuring prominently, setting the stage for a reaction.

    The Syrian War has been nearing its endgame for months now, with Israeli officials conceding it is all but over as far as they are concerned (while vowing not to honor any post-war deals). When a war is lost and a plan has failed, however, the US government is often the last to know, and that has them determined to drag the war on as long as possible.

  • Army Secretary Wants Hypersonic Weapons On Battlefield In Next 10 Years

    Hypersonic weapons, capable of striking Russia and China at Mach 5 or higher, could be the Pentagon’s answer in correcting American hegemony that is widely perceived to be in terminal decline.

    Army Secretary Mark Esper told reporters at a Defense Writers Group conference in Washington, D.C. Wednesday that hypersonic missiles and directed energy weapons are critical to the service’s top modernization plan, said the Military.com.

    “Long-range precision fires at the strategic level is the capability that we need to ensure we have overmatch in future conflicts, and I think that the way to get to it is through hypersonics,” said Esper.

    Esper said he has communicated with cross-functional organizations responsible for advancing new technologies to expedite the next generation of long-range precision-guided hypersonic missiles.

    “I am pushing them to go as fast as they can, move to the left,” he said, adding that the other services are also working on the technology.

    “The services have been working together. We signed a joint agreement, if you will, in terms on how to proceed. The secretary of the Navy and the secretary of the Air Force and I meet constantly on this and other issues where we can work together. We all recognize that that is a key capability for all of us,” he said.

    Esper then told journalist new information about the hypersonic rollout that even we have not heard before. He specifically mentioned that 2028 is the year when the missiles will be deployed on the modern battlefield.

    “This is one where, clearly, technology is an issue,” he said. “It’s not like there is one out there right now that I am aware of. … This is one that is going to take some technology development. We are pushing hard because we’ve got to get there first.”

    The U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command conducted the first flight of the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW) concept in November 2011 (Source/ Army/ Military.com)

    In the last several months, the US Air Force has awarded nearly $1.5 billion to Lockheed Martin Missiles & Fire Control to develop a hypersonic weapon prototype.

    The contract will cover the critical design review, test, and production readiness support for the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), according to a US Air Force statement.

    “We are going to go fast and leverage the best technology available to get hypersonic capability to the warfighter as soon as possible,” said Secretary of the Air Force Heather A. Wilson.

    Officials from the Defense Department, Missile Defense Agency, Air Force, Navy, and Army signed a memorandum June 28 to work jointly on the development of “hypersonic boost-glide” technology, the release said.

    “The Joint Team requires the right mix of agile capabilities to compete, deter and win across the spectrum of competition and conflict,” said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein. “We must push the boundaries of technology and own the high ground in this era of great power competition and beyond.”

    Esper also said the Army is accelerating efforts to develop directed-energy weapons for use in air and missile defense.

    “I think what’s most exciting, and where the Army is making a good deal of progress, is on directed energy, and I think that is the future for the most part because of the volume and speed of shots that it gives you,” Esper said, we have “put a lot of our investments” toward powerful lasers guns designed to be mounted on tanks and fighter jets.

    In July, the Army awarded Raytheon a $10 million High Energy Laser Tactical Vehicle Demonstration (HEL TVD) contract for a mobile 100 kW laser weapon system. Raytheon said the 100 kW laser would be mounted on a Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles.

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    “We have some things now, and I want to get them out in testing as soon as possible. Within a few years, I want to get something out there,” Esper said. “Initial fielding is something else, but in terms of prototyping, seeing what it can do, I want to get it out sooner rather than later.”

    Directed energy weapons are a challenge because they can travel a great distance, depending on their Kilowatt, “so you have safety concerns you have to work through,” he said. “But like everything else, I am pushing folks to move left. Let’s get it out to the field. Let’s let soldiers experiment with it and see how they can best use it. … They will help shape how we think about the importance of lasers in terms of actually firing them, but also how do we integrate them as part of our formation against everything from small drones to cruise missiles to fast movers.”

    The importance of the year 2028 is symbolic for its peak in the 53.5-Year War Cycle. So, it now makes sense why the Army wants to have hypersonics and other advanced weapons fielded within the next decade. War looms and it is likely to be against Russia and China.

  • McCain's Death Changes Nothing, The "Deep State" Will Replace Him

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,

    The entire world reacted to the Senator’s death last weekend, with most of the Alt-Media Community wildly celebrating it while the Mainstream Media mourned the loss of what they described as an “American hero”.

    Both sides shared a common ground in believing that his death represented something very significant, whether in a positive or negative way, but the reality is that it doesn’t change anything at all.

    McCain voluntarily became one of the public faces of the Liberal-Globalist faction of the American “deep state” and is therefore easily replaceable, even if his cartoonish war-mongering rhetoric isn’t.

    The world isn’t any more or less safe now that he died because the same network that he represented is still in place even if the messenger changes, which is exactly what will happen once Soros and other similar icons eventually pass away too.

    McCain’s pathological hatred of Russia made him stand apart from his “deep state” peers, though the zeal with which he sought to advance his country’s interests as he subjectively understood them interestingly earned him the professional respect of President Putin.

    Speaking to Oliver Stone last June, the Russian leader revealed that:

    “Well, honestly, I like Senator McCain to a certain extent. And I’m not joking. I like him because of his patriotism, and I can relate to his consistency in fighting for the interests of his own country.”

    However, he was quick to add that:

    “People with such convictions, like the Senator you mentioned, they still live in the Old World. And they’re reluctant to look into the future, they are unwilling to recognize how fast the world is changing”, which shows that President Putin thought that McCain’s specific views were outdated.

    Ultimately, McCain’s passing is symbolic because of just how gigantic of a figure he was in the American political and “deep state” scenes, though he was nevertheless just a representative of a particular ideological faction and no one too important in and of himself.

  • Interactive Map Of How Many Days Americans Waste Commuting Over A Lifetime

    If you’ve ever sat in traffic doing wondering how much of your life is wasted commuting, or you’ve just taken a job across the country and want to know what you’ll be facing on the freeways, look no further.

    Using Census Bureau data for average daily round-trip commute times for almost 1,000 cities, the good folks over at Educated Driver have created a highly depressing interactive map. 

    Highlights: 

    • The average American worker spends 52.2 minutes a day commuting to and from work, or 4.35 hours a week. 
    • This translates to an average of 408 days of one’s life commuting – and more in large cities

    While residents of Jersey City spend 580 days of their lives commuting, those working in North Platte, Nebraska spend just 236 days in traffic – or nearly a year more of their lives with a difference of 344 days. Then again, 

    vs.

    Of course, if you’re not really into Kansas, sunny San Diego’s average lifetime commute time is just 395 hours. 

    Methodology: 

    So, how did we calculate the number of days you can expect to spend commuting in your life in each city?

    For the purposes of this study, we assumed the average person starts full-time work at 18 (some people start earlier, others a bit later). We also know the average retirement age is 63 in the United States.

    That’s 45 years of working a full-time job.

    We then worked from the assumption that most people work about 250 days per year, which accounts for 2 weeks annual vacation and time off.

    That’s 11,250 days of working/commuting over a career.

    From here, we simply used data from the US Census Bureau on average daily roundtrip commute times for nearly 1,000 cities and towns across the country and then did the math. –EducatedDriver

  • Escobar: 'The Axis Of Gold' And A Persian Cryptocurrency?

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

    Cryptocurrencies show promise as economies stumble under sanctions and other pressures…

    The Iranian rial: crash. The Turkish lira: crash. The Argentine peso: crash. The Brazilian real: crash. There are multiple, complex, parallel vectors at play in this wilderness of crashing currencies.

    Turkey’s case is heavily influenced by the bubble of easy credit created by European banks.

    Argentina’s problem is mostly to do with the neoliberal austerity of President Mauricio Macri’s government admitting it won’t be able to fulfill payment targets agreed with the IMF less than three months ago.

    Iran’s has to do with harsh United States sanctions imposed after the Trump administration’s unilateral pullout from the Iran nuclear deal.

    Brazil’s has to do with what the Goddess of the Market considers anathema: a victory by the imprisoned Lula (former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) or his appointed candidate in the presidential election next October.

    This is a serious currency crisis affecting key emerging markets. Three of these – Brazil, Argentina and Turkey – are G20 members, and Iran, absent external pressure, would have everything to qualify as a member. Two – Iran and Turkey – are under US sanctions while the other two, at least for the moment, are firmly within Washington’s orbit.

    Now, compare it with currencies that are gaining against the US dollar: the Ukrainian hryvnia, the Georgian lari and the Colombian peso. Not exactly G20 heavyweights – and all of them also inside Washington’s influence.

    Behold the axis of gold

    Independent analysts from Russia and Turkey to Brazil and Iran largely agree that the overwhelming factor in the current currency crisis is a reversing of the US Federal Reserve quantitative easing (QE) policy.

    As investment banker and risk manager Jim Rickards noted, QE for all practical purposes represented the Fed declaring a currency war against the whole planet – printing US dollars at will on a trillion-dollar scale. That meant mounting US debt was devalued so foreign creditors were paid back with cheaper US dollars.

    Now, the Fed has dramatically reversed course and is all-out invested in quantitative tightening (QT).

    No more liquid dollars flooding emerging markets such as Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia or India. US interest rates are up. The Fed stopped buying new bonds. The US Treasury is issuing new bond debt. Thus QT, combined with a global, targeted trade war against major emerging markets, spells out the new normal: the weaponization of the US dollar.

    It’s no wonder that Russia, China, Turkey, Iran – nearly every major regional player invested in Eurasia integration – is buying gold with the aim of progressively getting out of US dollar hegemony. As JP Morgan himself coined it over a century ago, “Gold is money. All else is credit.”

    Every currency war though is not about gold; it’s about the US dollar. Yet the US dollar now is like an inscrutable visitor from outer space, dependent on massive leverage; a galaxy of dodgy derivatives; the QE printing scheme; and gold not being awarded its true importance.

    That is about to change. Russia and China are heavily invested in buying gold. Russia has dumped US Treasuries en masse. And what the BRICS had been discussing since the mid-2000s is now in motion; the drive to build alternative payment systems to the US dollar-subordinated SWIFT.

    Germany appears to be coming around to the idea. If that does happen, it could possibly lead the way towards Europe redefining itself geopolitically in terms of its military and strategic independence.

    When and if that happens, arguably at some point in the next decade, US foreign policy configured as an avalanche of sanctions may be effectively neutralized.

    It will be a long, protracted affair – but some elements are already visible, as in China using US trading markets to help the emergence of a wider platform transference. After all key emerging markets cannot wiggle out of the US dollar system without full yuan convertibility.

    And then there are nations contemplating the creation of their own cryptocurrencies. Digital finance is the way to go.

    Some nations, for instance, could use a cryptocurrency denominated in SDRs (special drawing rights) – which is, in practice, the world money as designated by the IMF. They could back their new digital coins with gold.

    Mired-in-crisis Venezuela is at least showing the way. The “sovereign bolivar” started circulating last week – pegged to a new cryptocurrency, the petro, which is worth 3,600 sovereign bolivars.

    The new cryptocurrency is already posing a fascinating question: “Is the petro a forward sale of oil or an external debt backed by oil?” After all, BRICS members are buying a large chunk of the 100 million petros – confident that they are backed by a surefire reserve, the Ayacucho block of the Orinoco Oil Belt.

    Venezuelan economist Tony Boza nailed it when he stressed the peg between the petro and international oil prices: “We are not going to be subject to the value of our currency being determined by a website, the oil market will determine it.”

    A Persian cryptocurrency?

    And that brings us to the key question of the US economic war on Iran. Persian Gulf traders are virtually unanimous: the global oil market is tightening, fast, and it will run short in the next two months.

    Iran oil exports will likely drop to just over 2 million barrels a day in August. Compare it to a peak of 3.1 million barrels a day in April.

    It looks like a lot of players are folding even before Trump’s oil sanctions kick in.

    It also looks like the mood in Tehran is “we will survive,” but it’s not exactly clear the Iranian leadership is really aware of the nature of the incoming tempest.

    The latest Oxford Economics report seems pretty realistic: “We expect the sanctions to tip the economy back into recession, with GDP now seen contracting by 3.7% in 2019, the worst economic performance in six years. For 2020, we see growth of 0.5%, driven by a modest recovery in private consumption and net exports.”

     The authors of the report, Mohamed Bardastani and Maya Senussi, say “the other signatories to the original deal [the JCPOA, especially the EU-3] have yet to spell out a clear strategy that would allow them to circumvent US sanctions and continue importing Iranian oil.”

    The report also admits the obvious: there will be no internal push in Iran for regime change (that’s a thing only happening in warped US neocon minds) while “both reformers and conservatives are united in defying the sanctions.”

    But defying how? Tehran has not come up with a win-win roadmap capable of being sold to anyone – from JCPOA members to energy importers such as Japan, South Korea and Turkey. That would represent true Eurasia integration. Just having Ayatollah Khamenei saying Iran is ready to pull out of the JCPOA is not good enough.

    What about a Persian cryptocurrency?

  • Crunching The Numbers On Mortality

    One of the key traits that make human beings unique on planet Earth is that we’re aware of our own mortality.

    But, as Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley notes, scientific advances have given us insight into which behaviors may prolong life, and which activities carry the greatest risk of death. Naturally, there have been some unique attempts to create a unified structure around risk and benefit, and to quantify every aspect of the human lifespan.

    As today’s graphic from TitleMax demonstrates, even when we’re thinking about death, the human desire to codify the world around us is alive and well.

    Courtesy of: Visual Captitalist

    MORTALITY UNITS

    Certain events – such as a parachute failing to open or being hit by a meteor – have an easily quantifiable effect on life, but how do we measure the riskiness of day-to-day habits and situations? This is where a unique unit of measurement, micromorts, comes into play.

    This concept, invented by renowned decision analyst Ronald A. Howard, helps compare any number of potentially lethal risks. One micromort equals a one in a million chance of sudden death. Here’s the riskiness of various activities measured in micromorts:

    LIFE UNITS

    The average person, by the time they reach adulthood, will live approximately one million half-hours. Those 30 minute units are known as microlives.

    The microlife concept was invented by professor David Spiegelhalter as a way to measure the consequences of various behaviors. For example, 20 minutes of physical activity earns us two microlives, while watching TV for two hours subtracts one microlife.

    This measurement extends beyond nutrition and eating habits. Simply living in a modern era earns us an additional 15 microlives per day compared to those who lived a century earlier.

    CASTING THE DIE ON HOW WE’LL DIE

    How will the estimated 353,000 humans that will be born today eventually meet their end? This was the thought experiment conducted by Reddit user, Presneeze.

    While our focus is often drawn to people who meet their end in spectacular and tragic ways, the vast majority of humanity will succumb to conditions such as heart disease and cancer.

    Geography can play a big role in shifting these odds:

    • In the United States, which is grappling with an opioid addiction crisis, there is a 1-in-96 chance of dying from a drug overdose.

    • Diarrheal diseases may not be on the radar of most people living in first world countries, but in developing regions, they remain a leading cause of preventable death – particularly for children.

    • In Russia, the odds are 1-in-4 that a man will not live beyond 55 years. The main culprit? Vodka.

    “On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

    –’Tyler Durden’ via Chuck Palahniuk

  • Which Companies Have The Highest Gross Profit Per Employee?

    Submitted by Priceonomics

    The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, “S&P 500” includes the 500 largest American companies by market value listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ stock exchanges. In 2017, the S&P 500 index number increased by 22% from 2016-2017. S&P 500 companies generated $11 trillion in combined revenue and employed more than 25 million people worldwide.

    As a follow up to the report we published previously (What Industry Has The Highest Revenue Per Employee?), we ranked the companies by Gross Profit Per Employee (GPPE), exploring how efficiently they leverage human capital after direct product costs (Cost of Goods Sold) have been deducted. We also look at the Gross Profit per employee for tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple.

    Note: Real estate investment trusts (REITs) were excluded from the rankings, resulting in 439 companies in total remaining.

    Energy is the sector with the highest GPPE (it was also the sector with the highest Revenue Per Employee). Financial and Healthcare companies remained high on the list, while Industrials, Materials, and Consumer Discretionary continue to perform the worst.

    The table below shows the top 50 companies in the S&P 500 ranked by GPPE in 2017: 

    The Top 50 includes ten Energy and eleven Healthcare companies. Insurance provider Brighthouse Financial topped the GPPE ranking. Pharmaceuticals, Gilead Sciences and Celgene, and Altria Group, a Tobacco company, were the runner-ups.

    In Revenue Per Employee, pharmaceutical supplier AmerisourceBergen was ranked second, but for GPPE, the company drops into 192nd place, having a gross margin of only 3%, and GPPE of $227,300.

    Compared to Revenue Per Employee, GPPE brings Technology companies, including Facebook and Apple, significantly higher the rankings. Due to their low cost of revenue, Verisign, Alphabet, Mastercard, Broadcom, and Intuit all appear in the Top 50.

    By grouping the companies into different sectors, we computed the average GPPE for each sector.

    Energy remains the sector with the highest Gross Profit Per Employee, as well as Revenue Per Employee. Financials moved higher in the ranking due to a high average sector Gross Margin of 67%.

    We also looked at the ten lowest performing companies in the S&P 500, based on Gross Profit Per Employee:

    Looking at the bottom of the GPPE rankings: Consumer Discretionary companies Chipotle, Ross, and Darden Restaurants all generated less than $25K gross profit per employee. Consulting firms, Accenture and Cognizant, remained on the list due to large employee growth for the past few years and low gross margin.

    Now we focus solely on the TMT sector, looking at the top 20 tech companies by Gross Profit Per Employee:

    Facebook tops the list with a high gross margin of 87%. Payment network companies, Visa and Mastercard, also appear in the Top 5. Interestingly, all companies on this ranking have a Gross Margin of 50% or more.

    Key takeaways:

    • The Energy sector has the highest Gross Profit Per Employee, as well as Revenue Per Employee.
    • More Tech companies appeared in the Top 50 on GPPE vs. Revenue Per Employee due to high gross margins in the tech sector.

  • California Democrats Boycott Of In-N-Out Backfires Spectacularly

    A call from the head of the California Democratic Party to boycott In-N-Out Burger over its $25,000 donation to the GOP, appears to have backfired rather spectacularly according to the Los Angeles Times. Take Anthony Grigore, a true-blue Democrat. But as he waited Thursday at an In-N-Out Burger in El Segundo for his meal, Grigore made it clear party loyalty would only go so far.

    Just hours earlier, the head of the California Democratic Party called for a boycott of the famed burger chain after a public filing revealed that the company had recently donated $25,000 to the state’s Republican Party.

    “Eating at In-N-Out is such a standard thing to do across California,” Grigore told the LA Times dismissing the boycott idea as a bit silly.

    On Wednesday, Journalist Gabe Schneider tweeted a filing from the burger joint showing the $25,000 donation (while failing to note the $80,000 In-N-Out has donated to a liberal PAC over two years). 

    Hours after Schneider’s tweet, California Democratic Party chairman Eric Bauman kneejerked into action and called for a boycott, tweeting; “Et tu In-N-Out? Tens of thousands of dollars donated to the California Republican Party… it’s time to #BoycottInNOut – let Trump and his cronies support these creeps…  perhaps animal style!” along with a link to a local paper. 

    At this point, Bauman went too far for some California Democrats who distanced themselves from the political dust-up between their social justice warrior leadership and the California eatery owned by an evangelical Christian family with a history of support for GOP candidates. 

    By the end of the day, Democrats were distancing themselves from the idea and Republicans were enjoying a political feast, with many making big lunch orders to show their support for the chain and posting photos on social media. Some were even feeding their dogs:

    “We have all of our children eating In-N-Out burgers. Even my son’s German shepherd eats In-N-Out,” said state Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, whose staff ordered 25 burgers and 50 bags of fries for lunch.

    Political experts said they aren’t surprised that In-N-Out has proved hard to demonize, especially if the company’s sin was simply donating to the Republican Party.

    “The stomach overrules the mind,” Jaime Regalado, emeritus professor of political science at California State University, Los Angeles. “A cheap, good-tasting burger is hard to dismiss politically.” –LA Times

    Shortly after the story went viral, In-N-Out issued a statement from Executive Vice President Arnie Wensinger noting that the company had “made equal contributions to both Democratic and Republican” PAC’s in 2018.

    “For years, In-N-Out Burger has supported lawmakers who, regardless of political affiliation, promote policies that strengthen California and allow us to continue operating with the values of providing strong pay and great benefits for our associates,” Wensinger said.

    The boycott quickly turned into a free publicity stunt for republicans: GOP gubernatorial candidate John Cox posted a photo of himself in front an In-N-Out on Thursday on Twitter and declared, “There’s nothing more Californian than In-N-Out Burger.”

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    After Bauman’s tweet went viral and made national news, Bauman referred questions to the party’s communications director, John Vigna, who responded that the Bauman’s tweet was “just his personal view,” and that the official California Democratic Party was not involved. 

    “We’re not happy that In-N-Out gave the money, but we’re not calling for an official boycott,” Vigna said. “Democrats are very fired up. Chair (Bauman) is definitely giving voice to a feeling a lot of people have right now.”

    Amusingly, boycotts of companies that give money to the opposition would take political partisanship to a whole new level. The SF Chronicle looked at 2018 donations to the two main California parties, to  shows just what dueling, tit-for-tat boycotts could mean for businesses.

    Democrats, for example, would have to avoid not only In-N-Out, but also Facebook, Target, Microsoft, Anheuser-Busch, McDonald’s and virtually every oil company. They’re just some of the many groups that have given money to the state Republican Party this year.

    For Republicans, boycotting Democratic supporters would mean never using Uber, not drinking Gallo wine or Pepsi, dropping T-Mobile cellular service, refusing to have garbage hauled by Recology or to go to a Paramount Pictures movie.

    Ultra-partisan fighting over who gives what to whom is something neither party wants to contemplate. If companies are forced to choose between a boycott by their customers or making political contributions, it would suddenly become much tougher for Democrats and Republicans to raise money to run their campaigns.

    For Democratic Party officials, the answer was to laugh off Bauman’s hasty tweet and hope the kerfuffle goes away.

    “Chair Bauman’s personal tweet reflects his belief that he shouldn’t support companies that support the Trump agenda, and that Jeff’s Gourmet Kosher Sausage Factory on West Pico Boulevard is the best All-American treat in California,” the party said.

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  • Google Tracking 70% Of Retail Purchases Thanks To Secret Deal With Mastercard

    Over the past year, certain Google advertisers have been able to use a “potent new tool” which allows them to track whether ads they run online translated to sales at physical stores throughout the United States, thanks to a secret deal between the Silicon Valley tech giant and Mastercard, reports Bloomberg. 

    Illustration: Tam Nguyen, AdAge

    Most of Mastercard’s two billion customers weren’t aware of this arrangement, since neither Google parent Alphabet Inc. nor the credit card company told the public about the deal which was brokered after four years of negotiations. The alliance, says Bloomberg, “gave Google an unprecedented asset for measuring retail spending,” as part of the search giant’s “strategy to fortify its primary business against onslaughts from Amazon.com Inc. and others.” 

    Through this test program, Google can anonymously match these existing user profiles to purchases made in physical stores. The result is powerful: Google knows that people clicked on ads and can now tell advertisers that this activity led to actual store sales.

    …

    It works like this: a person searches for “red lipstick” on Google, clicks on an ad, surfs the web but doesn’t buy anything. Later, she walks into a store and buys red lipstick with her Mastercard. The advertiser who ran the ad is fed a report from Google, listing the sale along with other transactions in a column that reads “Offline Revenue” — only if the web surfer is logged into a Google account online and made the purchase within 30 days of clicking the ad. The advertisers are given a bulk report with the percentage of shoppers who clicked or viewed an ad then made a relevant purchase. –Bloomberg

    Last year Google boasted that that the service, called “Store Sales Management,” had access to “approximately 70 percent” of US credit and debit cards. 

    Last year, when Google announced the service, called “Store Sales Measurement,” the company just said it had access to “approximately 70 percent” of U.S. credit and debit cards through partners, without naming them. –Bloomberg

    Since Google doesn’t define what this means, Bloomberg speculates that it could mean “70 percent of the people who use credit and debit cards. Or it could mean that the company has deals with companies that include all card users, and 70 percent of those are logged into Google accounts like Gmail when they click on a Google search ad.” 

    The deal is likely to raise broader privacy concerns about the volume of consumer data is in the hands of data technology companies such as Google. Of note, “Since 2014, Google has flagged for advertisers when someone who clicked an ad visits a physical store, using the Location History feature in Google Maps.”

    “People don’t expect what they buy physically in a store to be linked to what they are buying online,” said Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) counsel Christine Bannan. “There’s just far too much burden that companies place on consumers and not enough responsibility being taken by companies to inform users what they’re doing and what rights they have.”

    Google reportedly paid Mastercard millions of dollars for the data, according to two people who worked on the deal. The companies also discussed sharing a portion of Google’s ad revenue, according to one source. A Google spokeswoman denied any revenue sharing agreement with its partners – while addressing privacy concerns: 

    “Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information,” the company said in a statement. “We do not have access to any personal information from our partners’ credit and debit cards, nor do we share any personal information with our partners.”

    The company says that google users can opt out of ad tracking using their “Web and App Activity” online console (though no word if the service will continue to secretly track your purchases like Google’s location history, which tracks users regardless of whether they’ve turned the feature off.) 

    Mastercard spokesman Seth Eisen said that the company shares transaction trends with merchants and service providers to assist them in measuring “the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns.” 

    The information, which includes sales volumes and average size of the purchase, is shared only with permission of the merchants, Eisen added. “No individual transaction or personal data is provided,” he said in a statement. “We do not provide insights that track, serve up ads to, or even measure ad effectiveness relating to, individual consumers.”  –Bloomberg

    According to people familiar with the program, Google has approached other payment companies fopr similar deals – however it is unknown whether they actually signed any. Google, meanwhile, confirmed that the service only applies to people who are logged in to one of its accounts and haven’t opted out of ad tracking. 

    Google is testing the data service with a “small group” of advertisers in the U.S., according to a spokeswoman. With it, marketers see aggregate sales figures and estimates of how many they can attribute to Google ads — but they don’t see a shoppers’ personal information, how much they spend or what exactly they buy. The tests are only available for retailers, not the companies that make the items sold inside stores, the spokeswoman said. The service only applies to its search and shopping ads, she said. –Bloomberg

    According to Bloomberg, Google’s first attempt to link consumer browsing habits with spending came in the form of it’s mobile payment service; Google Wallet – however adoption never took off.

    As we mentioned earlier, Google has been pinging advertisers through their Location Services feature when a user visited a store, however the advertiser wasn’t able to know whether the shopper made a purchase. 

    So Google added more. A tool, introduced the following year, let advertisers upload email addresses of customers they’ve collected into Google’s ad-buying system, which then encrypted them. Additionally, Google layered on inputs from third-party data brokers, such as Experian Plc and Acxiom Corp., which draw in demographic and financial information for marketers. –Bloomberg

    In May, 2017, Google introduced “Store Sales Management” which let companies with personal info on consumers such as encrypted email address, upload information into Google’s system and synchronize advertising expenditures with offline sales. The second component injects card data. 

    Early indications suggest the Mastercard deal has been a boon for Google. “Malcolm said her agency has tested the card measurement tool with a major advertiser, which she declined to name. Beforehand, the company received $5.70 in revenue for every dollar spent on marketing in the ad campaign with Google, according to an iProspect analysis. With the new transaction feature, the return nearly doubled to $10.60,” according to Bloomberg. 

    “That’s really powerful,” Malcolm said. “And it was a really good way to invest more in Google, frankly.“

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Sep 01

Today’s News 1st September 2018

  • Vigilantes With A Badge: Warrior Cops Endanger Our Lives And Freedoms

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.”

    – Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

    I have known a lot of good cops, I have defended a lot of good cops, and I have been fortunate to call a number of good cops friends.

    So when I say that warrior cops – hyped up on their own authority and the power of the badge – have not made America any safer or freer, I am not disrespecting any of the fine, decent, lawful police officers who take seriously their oath of office to serve and protect their fellow citizens, uphold the Constitution, and maintain the peace.

    My beef is with the growing squads of warrior cops who have been given the green light to kill, shoot, taser, abuse and steal from American citizens in the so-called name of law and order. 

    These cops are little more than vigilantes with a badge.

    Indeed, it is increasingly evident that militarized police armed with weapons of war who are allowed to operate above the law and break the laws with impunity have not made America any safer or freer.

    Don’t take my word for it.

    A new study by a political scientist at Princeton University concludes that militarizing police and SWAT teams “provide no detectable benefits in terms of officer safety or violent crime reduction.”

    In fact, according to researcher Jonathan Mummolo, if police in America are feeling less safe, it’s because the process of transforming them into extensions of the military makes them less safe, less popular and less trust-worthy.

    The study, the first systematic analysis on the use and consequences of militarized force, reveals that “police militarization neither reduces rates of violent crime nor changes the number of officers assaulted or killed.”

    In other words, warrior cops aren’t making us or themselves any safer.

    Consider that not a day goes by without reports of police officers overstepping the bounds of the Constitution and brutalizing, terrorizing and killing the citizenry. Indeed, the list of incidents in which unaccountable police abuse their power, betray their oath of office and leave taxpayers bruised, broken and/or killed grows longer and more tragic by the day.

    Americans are now eight times more likely to die in a police confrontation than they are to be killed by a terrorist.

    The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone.”

    This battlefield mindset has gone hand in hand with the rise of militarized SWAT (“special weapons and tactics”) teams.

    Frequently justified as vital tools necessary to combat terrorism and deal with rare but extremely dangerous criminal situations, such as those involving hostages, SWAT teams—which first appeared on the scene in California in the 1960s—have now become intrinsic parts of local law enforcement operations, thanks in large part to substantial federal assistance and the Pentagon’s military surplus recycling program, which allows the transfer of military equipment, weapons and training to local police for free or at sharp discounts.

    Ponder this: In 1980, there were roughly 3,000 SWAT team-style raids in the US.

    Incredibly, that number has since grown to more than 80,000 SWAT team raids per year.

    There are few communities without a SWAT team today.

    Where this becomes a problem of life and death for Americans is when these SWAT teams dressed, armed and trained in military tactics are assigned to carry out routine law enforcement tasks, such as serving a search warrant.

    No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day. In the state of Maryland alone, 92 percent of 8200 SWAT missions were used to execute search or arrest warrants.

    For example, police in both Baltimore and Dallas have used SWAT teams to bust up poker games.

    A Connecticut SWAT team swarmed a bar suspected of serving alcohol to underage individuals.

    In Arizona, a SWAT team was used to break up an alleged cockfighting ring.

    An Atlanta SWAT team raided a music studio, allegedly out of a concern that it might have been involved in illegal music piracy.

    A Minnesota SWAT team raided the wrong house in the middle of the night, handcuffed the three young children, held the mother on the floor at gunpoint, shot the family dog, and then “forced the handcuffed children to sit next to the carcass of their dead pet and bloody pet for more than an hour” while they searched the home.

    A California SWAT team drove an armored Lenco Bearcat into Roger Serrato’s yard, surrounded his home with paramilitary troops wearing face masks, threw a fire-starting flashbang grenade into the house in order, then when Serrato appeared at a window, unarmed and wearing only his shorts, held him at bay with rifles. Serrato died of asphyxiation from being trapped in the flame-filled house. Incredibly, the father of four had done nothing wrong. The SWAT team had misidentified him as someone involved in a shooting.

    And then there was the police officer who tripped and “accidentally” shot and killed Eurie Stamps, an unarmed grandfather of 12, who had been forced to lie facedown on the floor of his home at gunpoint while a SWAT team attempted to execute a search warrant against his stepson.

    Equally outrageous was the four-hour SWAT team raid on a California high school, where students were locked down in classrooms, forced to urinate in overturned desks and generally terrorized by heavily armed, masked gunmen searching for possible weapons that were never found.

    These incidents are just the tip of the iceberg.

    Nationwide, SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling.

    If these raids are becoming increasingly common and widespread, you can chalk it up to the “make-work” philosophy, in which you assign at-times unnecessary jobs to individuals to keep them busy or employed. In this case, however, the make-work principle is being used to justify the use of sophisticated military equipment and, in the process, qualify for federal funding.

    Remember, SWAT teams originated as specialized units dedicated to defusing extremely sensitive, dangerous situations. They were never meant to be used for routine police work such as serving a warrant.

    As the role of paramilitary forces has expanded, however, to include involvement in nondescript police work targeting nonviolent suspects, the mere presence of SWAT units has actually injected a level of danger and violence into police-citizen interactions that was not present as long as these interactions were handled by traditional civilian officers. 

    What we are witnessing is an inversion of the police-civilian relationship.

    Rather than compelling police officers to remain within constitutional bounds as servants of the people, ordinary Americans are being placed at the mercy of militarized police units. 

    This is what happens when paramilitary forces are used to conduct ordinary policing operations, such as executing warrants on nonviolent defendants.

    Moreover, general incompetence, collateral damage (fatalities, property damage, etc.) and botched raids tend to go hand in hand with an overuse of paramilitary forces.

    In some cases, officers misread the address on the warrant.

    In others, they simply barge into the wrong house or even the wrong building.

    In another subset of cases (such as the Department of Education raid on Anthony Wright’s home), police conduct a search of a building where the suspect no longer resides.

    SWAT teams have even on occasion conducted multiple, sequential raids on wrong addresses or executed search warrants despite the fact that the suspect is already in police custody. Police have also raided homes on the basis of mistaking the presence or scent of legal substances for drugs. Incredibly, these substances have included tomatoes, sunflowers, fish, elderberry bushes, kenaf plants, hibiscus, and ragweed.

    As you can see, all too often, botched SWAT team raids have resulted in one tragedy after another for the residents with little consequences for law enforcement.

    Unfortunately, judges tend to afford extreme levels of deference to police officers who have mistakenly killed innocent civilians but do not afford similar leniency to civilians who have injured police officers in acts of self-defense. 

    Even homeowners who mistake officers for robbers can be sentenced for assault or murder if they take defensive actions resulting in harm to police.

    And as journalist Radley Balko shows in his in-depth study of police militarization, the shock-and-awe tactics utilized by many SWAT teams only increases the likelihood that someone will get hurt. 

    Drug warrants, for instance, are typically served by paramilitary units late at night or shortly before dawn. Unfortunately, to the unsuspecting homeowner—especially in cases involving mistaken identities or wrong addresses—a raid can appear to be nothing less than a violent home invasion, with armed intruders crashing through their door. The natural reaction would be to engage in self-defense. Yet such a defensive reaction on the part of a homeowner, particularly a gun owner, will spur officers to employ lethal force.

    That’s exactly what happened to Jose Guerena, the young ex-Marine who was killed after a SWAT team kicked open the door of his Arizona home during a drug raid and opened fire. According to news reports, Guerena, 26 years old and the father of two young children, grabbed a gun in response to the forced invasion but never fired. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed. Police officers were not as restrained. The young Iraqi war veteran was allegedly fired upon 71 times. Guerena had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home.

    The problems inherent in these situations are further compounded by the fact that SWAT teams are granted “no-knock” warrants at high rates such that the warrants themselves are rendered practically meaningless. 

    This sorry state of affairs is made even worse by U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have essentiallydone away with the need for a “no-knock” warrant altogether, giving the police authority to disregard the protections afforded American citizens by the Fourth Amendment.

    In the process, Americans are rendered altogether helpless and terror-stricken as a result of these confrontations with the police.

    Indeed, “terrorizing” is a mild term to describe the effect on those who survive such vigilante tactics. “It was terrible. It was the most frightening experience of my life. I thought it was a terrorist attack,” said 84-year-old Leona Goldberg, a victim of such a raid. 

    Yet this type of “terrorizing” activity is characteristic of the culture that we have created.

    If ever there were a time to de-militarize and de-weaponize local police forces, it’s now.

    While we are now grappling with a power-hungry police state at the federal level, the militarization of domestic American law enforcement is largely the result of the militarization of local police forces, which are increasingly militaristic in their uniforms, weaponry, language, training, and tactics and have come to rely on SWAT teams in matters that once could have been satisfactorily performed by traditional civilian officers.

    Yet American police forces were never supposed to be a branch of the military, nor were they meant to be private security forces for the reigning political faction.

    Instead, they were intended to be an aggregation of countless local police units, composed of citizens like you and me that exist for a sole purpose: to serve and protect the citizens of each and every American community.

    As a result of the increasing militarization of the police in recent years, however, the police now not only look like the military—with their foreboding uniforms and phalanx of lethal weapons—but they function like them, as well. 

    Thus, no more do we have a civilian force of peace officers entrusted with serving and protecting the American people.  Instead, today’s militarized law enforcement officials have shifted their allegiance from the citizenry to the state, acting preemptively to ward off any possible challenges to the government’s power, unrestrained by the boundaries of the Fourth Amendment.

    As journalist Herman Schwartz observed, “The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official.”

    Armed police officers, the end product of the government—federal, local and state—and law enforcement agencies having merged, have become a “standing” or permanent army, composed of full-time professional soldiers who do not disband. 

    Yet these permanent armies are exactly what those who drafted the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights feared as tools used by despotic governments to wage war against its citizens.

    This phenomenon we are experiencing with the police is what philosopher Abraham Kaplan referred to as the law of the instrument, which essentially says that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 

    In the scenario that has been playing out in recent years, we the citizenry have become the nails to be hammered by the government’s henchmen, a.k.a. its guns for hire, a.k.a. its standing army, a.k.a. the nation’s law enforcement agencies.

    Yet the tension inherent in most civilian-police encounter these days can’t be blamed exclusively on law enforcement’s growing reliance on SWAT teams and donated military equipment.

    It goes far deeper, to a transformation in the way police view themselves and their line of duty.

    Specifically, what we’re dealing with today is a skewed shoot-to-kill mindset in which police, trained to view themselves as warriors or soldiers in a war, whether against drugs, or terror, or crime, must “get” the bad guys—i.e., anyone who is a potential target—before the bad guys get them.

    The result is a spike in the number of incidents in which police shoot first, and ask questions later.

    Making matters worse, when these officers, who have long since ceased to be peace officers, violate their oaths by bullying, beating, tasering, shooting and killing their employers—the taxpayers to whom they owe their allegiance—they are rarely given more than a slap on the hands before resuming their patrols.

    As I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this lawlessness on the part of law enforcement, an unmistakable characteristic of a police state, is made possible in large part by police unions which routinely oppose civilian review boards and resist the placement of names and badge numbers on officer uniforms; police agencies that abide by the Blue Code of Silence, the quiet understanding among police that they should not implicate their colleagues for their crimes and misconduct; prosecutors who treat police offenses with greater leniency than civilian offenses; courts that sanction police wrongdoing in the name of security; and legislatures that enhance the power, reach and arsenal of the police, and a citizenry that fails to hold its government accountable to the rule of law.

    Clearly, it’s time for a reality check, for both the police and the citizens of this nation.

  • FedEx'd Diamonds Fueled India's Largest Bank Fraud

    Three bankrupt US firms with “direct” links to the Indian billionaire Nirav Modi were involved in transactions related to an alleged multibillion-dollar international scheme for which Modi has been charged by Indian authorities, according to Bloomberg. The firms sought protection from creditors earlier this year as the celebrity jeweler’s empire quickly unraveled. In February, the Punjab National Bank, India’s second-largest state lender, reported that the Indian billionaire had siphoned billions of dollars from its coffers.

    John J. Carney, an examiner appointed by the US bankruptcy court, found “substantial evidence” that officers at Firestar Diamond Inc., A. Jaffe Inc., and Fantasy Inc., knew about the scheme alleged by Indian officials, according to the report filed Saturday. The Examiner uncovered millions of dollars of diamond transactions by various shadow entities owned by Modi, where payment can be traced to proceeds from the alleged bank fraud, the report said.

    According to Carney, a three-carat gem was FedEx’d around the world between shadowy entities allegedly controlled by the Indian billionaire in 2011. The accounting practice of round-tripping, also known as round-trip transactions or “Lazy Susans,” was paramount to the biggest bank fraud in Indian history and charges by the Indian government against the celebrity jeweler.

    During the course of the fraud, Modi “fraudulently borrowed approximately $4 billion over a period of years by manufacturing sham transactions purportedly to ‘import’ diamonds and other gems into India using a web of more than 20 secretly controlled shell entities,” Carney said in the report.

    Bloomberg provides a summary of how Modi roundtripped diamonds through his various companies:

    “The “fancy vivid yellow orange cushion cut” diamond was first sold by Firestar Diamond Inc., a U.S. company indirectly owned by Modi, and shipped to Fancy Creations Company Ltd., a foreign shell company in Hong Kong also allegedly controlled by Modi, in August 2011, the report says. The price was almost $1.1 million.

    The colorful stone was then shipped out two weeks later by Solar Export, a partnership formed by the Nirav Modi family trust, back to Firestar Diamond in the U.S., for closer to what it was really worth: $183,000, the examiner wrote.

    Less than a week later, Firestar, which has offices on Fifth Avenue in New York City, shipped the diamond back to Fancy Creations in Hong Kong, this time for $1.16 million, the report asserts.

    And two weeks after that, A. Jaffe, the New York City-based diamond company owned by Modi, sold the diamond to World Diamond Distribution, which the report describes as a Modi shell company in the United Arab Emirates, this time for more than $1.2 million.”

    According to Carney, the practice of round-tripping totaled $213.8 million between 2011 and 2017, which shipping invoices were then sent to the Indian state-owned Punjab National Bank to obtain short-term loans.

    Bloomberg explains the proceeds were then used to fund Modi’s extravagant lifestyle and business entities. Modi even used the funds to pay off old debts, as what some would call a classic Ponzi scheme.

    Carney specified in the report that shipments were so large and high-priced “that the packing slips alone should have raised suspicion.”

    In another instance, the Modi-owned US firms exported diamonds via FedEx instead of with a bonded courier, including a 17-carat diamond sold for $1.7 million and transferred from New York City to Hong Kong. Carney wrote in the report that FedEx only insures packages up to $150,000.

    “There is no legitimate business reason to ship diamonds worth millions of dollars without obtaining appropriate insurance,” Carney wrote, citing a jewelry specialist retained by the bankruptcy trustee.

    Modi has previously denied wrongdoing, and a lawyer representing him declined to comment Monday when Bloomberg asked about the examiner’s report.

    As for Modi’s location, Republic TV claims to have narrowed it down to the UK, though, he has two luxury apartments in Westminister and London, where he has been served his extradition notices.

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    Nirav Modi is wanted by the Indian law enforcement authorities for the billion dollar scam. The Interpol had also issued a red corner notice on him in July. As the Indian government’s attempt to extradite him from the UK, it seems as the celebrity jeweler has finally met his fate. Stay tuned because this type of fraud generally becomes discovered at the end of an economic cycle.

  • Earth's "Big Freeze" Looms As Sun Remains Devoid Of Sunspots For Most Of 2018

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    Scientists believe that Earth could experience a “big freeze” as the sun goes through what’s known as “solar minimum.” During this time, sunspots are minimal and the globe could be in for a wicked cold snap.

    Scientists are reporting that the sun has been free of sunspots for a total of 133 days this year, according to The Express UK. With only 241 days of 2018 passing, that means the sun has been blank for the majority of the year. Experts continue to warn that this is a sign that the solar minimum is on its way.

     “The sun is spotless again. For the 133rd day this year, the face of the sun is blank,” wrote the website Space Weather.

    “Solar minimum has returned, bringing extra cosmic rays, long-lasting holes in the sun’s atmosphere, and strangely pink auroras,” the website continued.

    The sun follows a cycle of roughly 11 years where it reaches a solar maximum and then a solar minimum.

    During a solar maximum, the sun gives off more heat and solar particles and is littered with sunspots. Less heat in a solar minimum is due to a decrease in the sun’s magnetic waves.  Our sun was not expected to head into a solar minimum until around 2020, but it appears to be heading in that direction a little early which could prove to be bad news for warm weather lovers.

    But a prolonged solar minimum could mean a “mini ice age.” The last time there was a prolonged solar minimum, it did, in fact, lead to a mini ice-age which was scientifically known as the Maunder minimum.  That little cold snap lasted for 70 years between the years 1645 and 1715. During this period, temperatures dropped globally by 1.3 degrees Celsius leading to shorter seasons and ultimately food shortages.

    “Low solar activity is known to have consequences on Earth’s weather and climate and it also is well correlated with an increase in cosmic rays that reach the upper part of the atmosphere. The blank sun is a sign that the next solar minimum is approaching and there will be an increasing number of spotless days over the next few years,” wrote a meteorological website called Vencore Weather.

  • Israeli Reports Claim New Images Confirm Iranian Surface-to-Surface Missile Facility In Syria

    At the end of a week where tensions with Iran and Syria have reached a high point of late, and as the final showdown between the Syrian Army and al-Qaeda insurgents in Idlib looms, multiple Israeli media reports claim Iran is constructing new surface-to-surface ballistic missile factories in Syria.

    What’s more, the reports claim, Iran’s military is taking advantage of Russia’s sophisticated antiaircraft defense missile systems in Syria to build the sites within range of the their protective defense umbrella. 

    The Jerusalem Post, for example, echoing other Israeli outlets, relies on the open-source satellite image analysis site ImageSat to claim Iran is taking advantage of Russian defenses to avoid Israeli retaliation.

    According to the Jerusalem Post report:

    According to ImageSat, both the facility in Masyaf and the one in Wadi Jahannam are located within the operational range of a Russian S-400 deployment, showing that Iran is “utilizing or exploiting the defense abilities of Russia.”

    Russia deployed the advanced mobile S-300 and S-400 anti-aircraft batteries to Syria in October 2017. The batteries are capable of engaging multiple aircraft and ballistic missiles at a distance of up to 380 kilometers, covering virtually all of Syria as well as significant parts of Israel and neighboring countries such as Turkey and Jordan.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has on multiple occasions over the past year warned that Iranian missiles in Syria would constitute a “red line” for which Israel would act militarily.

    Over a dozen Israeli strikes have occurred at different locations in Syria recently — mostly in the south and central parts of the country, ostensibly aimed at curtailing the establishment of any permanent Iranian troop or weapons deployment presence. 

    As lately as Wednesday Netanyahu warned that Israeli would continue being proactive against its enemies and that it “has the means to destroy them”.

    The Israeli prime minister said during a ceremony: “Those who threaten to wipe us out put themselves in a similar danger, and in any event will not achieve their goal.”

    Israeli officials and military officials have lately tried to claim Iran “is taking over” Syria, though Syrian war analysts have by and large dismissed the claims. 

    In a similar vein, the Jerusalem Post provides the following commentary on supposed Iranian expansion right up to Israel’s border:

    In the past year, the IDF noticed that Iranian efforts in Syria have been increasing, with Soleimani sending from Iran advanced air defense systems with a range of up to 110 kilometers that could threaten Israel’s freedom of action in Syria. 

    The satellite images, provided by ImageSat as part of a lengthy formal report, purport to show at least one Iranian missile production site under construction which the unconfirmed report notes is in “its final stages of construction and will likely be completed by early 2019”.

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    While we don’t know the accuracy of such claims, and it appears the threshold of “proof” ought to be much higher (and more than mere visual comparisons of buildings between Iran and Syria based on remote viewed satellite images), it seems that Israeli government and media sources begin circulating such claims every time Washington or Tel Aviv ramps up threats, or are preparing for military strike on targets in Syria. 

    Meanwhile, Iran has owned up to placing long-range ballistic missiles inside Iraqi territory, under the control of Iraqi Shia paramilitary units (PMF) being trained by the IRGC, according to a Reuters report out Friday. 

    As we warned previously this week, it appears that something big is coming in Syria. 

  • Jim Rogers: "Before This Is Over, Gold Might Turn Into A Bubble"

    Authored by Umair Tariq via ValueWalk.com,

    Famed investor Jim Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings, told Kitco News that while he is not yet buying gold at current levels, a rebound in the yellow metal could cause it to overheat.

    “Before this is over, gold could turn into a very overpriced asset, it might even turn into a bubble,” he said. Rogers noted that while he holds physical gold, he would not buy more until prices drop below $1,000 an ounce. “I’m still waiting for $950 an ounce, or something like that,” he said.

    On U.S. equities, Rogers said that current valuations are overstretched, although stock prices could still climb higher on good news. He added that the next bear market could be “the worst in my lifetime,” and that instead of U.S. stocks, he is looking at investing in Zimbabwe, an emerging market.

    “I’m buying Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe was ruined for 40 years by a crazy dictator. There’s a new guy, he may be worse, he may be better, but he’s certainly different, so you should think about Zimbabwe,” he said.

    Jim Rogers: “Before This Is Over, Gold Might Turn Into A Bubble”

    Transcript

    Joining me today is Jim Rogers chairman of Rogers Holdings. Jim good to see you again. Thank you for joining us. I’m delighted to be here. How are you. I’m doing great.

    And since about last time we spoke you said that if gold doesn’t rally when bad things are happening then the correction isn’t over.

    Now we’re up a little bit this Thursday. But what’s keeping gold from really taking off here.

    Jim: Daniela as I’ve said to you several times before I’m still not a buyer until gold goes under a thousand U.S. dollars an ounce. I own gold. I hope I’m smart enough to buy a lot of gold when it gets there. But you know we had a huge blow off back in 2011. And I’ve been around long enough to know the huge blow offs usually take a long time to correct. In my view that’s what’s going on. I mean I’m not a very good trader but that’s how I see the world.

    Daniela: So with the tough summer it’s been for gold, I know you’ve said in the past many times that you buy when gold is down. Was that a good time for you.

    Jim: Not yet. I’m still waiting for U.S. dollars an ounce or something like that. It may not get there if it doesn’t. It’s ok I’ll own a lot of gold but that’s not what I plan to do Daniela. If it gets there I hope I’m smart enough and brave enough to buy a lot of gold because before this is over before this is over any gold is going to turn into a very overpriced asset. It might even turn into a bubble.

    Daniela: Let’s move onto equities now and my stock markets as you know have climbed even higher since the last time we spoke. Our valuations just over stretched here. It is now a risk-on or risk-off period.

    Jim: But Danielle you say markets… in many markets in the world that have collapsed that are down a lot. You’re talking about United States stock market. Let’s look at the U.S. believe it or not that’s not the only market in the world. Yeah the U.S. markets making all time highs. I’m not interested in buying any market making all time highs. And it looks like it might well go higher. You know if Trump comes up with some good news for a while instead of all this bad news you could have a blow off in the U.S. stock market right. Never. One final move. But I don’t I’m not smart enough to buy blow offs. I can’t I I don’t know how to do that.

    Daniela: I know we also spoke about how you for Sa’ar could easily see an over 50 percent correction happening in the U.S. stock market. Are you sticking to that.

    Jim: Oh yes going to be worse than that Daniella. When the next time we have a bear market and I wish I were smart enough to know when it’s going to be the worst in my lifetime and 2008 we had a problem because of too much debt. And you know the debt has gone through the roof since 2008. The Federal Reserve in America alone has increased its balance sheet by 500 percent in 10 years. I mean that’s unheard of that has never nothing like that has ever happened in history. And these are crazy things going on.

    Daniela: Jim I’d love to get your thoughts now on the Nafta deal and unfold Lee unfolding and dismantling here you have a risk with that pose to someone’s portfolio.

    Jim: Well if it turns into a trade war and Mr. Trump keeps saying he wants trade wars it’s not good for anybody nobody’s ever won a trade war and trade wars have never been good for anybody. We saw that the Mexicans and the Americans did something recently. But I look at that what details we have and I see what’s going on here. This is bad for America. It means that prices are going to go up in the United States how is that good for anybody at all. Maybe there are the details I don’t know about. But so far what’s being negotiated Mr. Trump keeps saying it is a triumph. But I’m an American citizen and at 325 million of us. It’s doesn’t look good for us. From what I can see.

  • Iran Stuns Enemies By Moving Ballistic Missiles To Iraq – Within Easy Striking Distance of Tel Aviv

    In what is sure to be a realization of one of Netanyahu’s worst nightmares, and deeply awkward for US advisers to Baghdad, Iran has transferred ballistic missiles to Shia proxy forces in Iraq, according to Western and Iraqi intelligence sources cited in a new Reuters report. 

    The revelation comes as tensions between Washington and Tehran are already at their highest point in years as aggressive sanctions continue crippling Iran’s economy, and after threats and counter-threats over Tehran laying claim to the vital Strait of Hormuz oil waterway over the past weeks, through which some one-third of the world’s oil passes. 

    The Reuters report cites multiple officials and intelligence sources, including Iranian officials who seem willing to inform the world of the provocative move:

    According to three Iranian officials, two Iraqi intelligence sources and two Western intelligence sources, Iran has transferred short-range ballistic missiles to allies in Iraq over the last few months. Five of the officials said it was helping those groups to start making their own.

    “The logic was to have a backup plan if Iran was attacked,” one senior Iranian official told Reuters. “The number of missiles is not high, just a couple of dozen, but it can be increased if necessary.”

    Via Israel national news Arutz Sheva

    The news is sure to cause a stir for European signatories to the 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA) like Germany, the UK, and France, who are still trying to salvage it, as it is a clear sign that the deal which the Trump White House pulled out of is in tatters. 

    Reuters identifies the Zelzal, Fateh-110 and Zolfaqar missile systems as among those transferred — with ranges of between 200 and 700km, which puts “Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh or the Israeli city of Tel Aviv within striking distance if the weapons were deployed in southern or western Iraq”.

    And notably the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds force head, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, is overseeing the missile transfers and their operation in what regional foes Saudi Arabia and Israel are sure to interpret as the most provocative and escalatory move by its archenemy in recent years. 

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently lobbied the White House for more aggressive action against Iran, and speaking last week along side US National Security Advisor John Bolton, affirmed Bolton’s call for both to weaken Iran’s regional presence in places like Syria.

    Bolton had praised Israel’s repeat attacks on Iranian targets inside Syria, saying “every time Iran has brought missiles or other threatening weapons” into the country, Israel hasn’t hesitated to act. Bolton hailed those strikes as “a legitimate act of self-defense”.

    However, the case of Iraq is clearly a more delicate situation, as the pro-Shia government in Baghdad is propped up by the United States, and Baghdad in turn facilitates the operation of Tehran-aligned militias who act in concert with Iraqi military forces. Of course, in an irony that won’t be lost on future historians, it was the United States and its allies that installed a Shia government in Baghdad in the first place by toppling Saddam Hussein in its 2003 invasion, which Netanyahu had given loud and consistent support for. 

    One Western source cited by Reuters says the missile transfer is clearly intended as a “warning” to both the US and Israel. “It seems Iran has been turning Iraq into its forward missile base,” the source said.

    The so-called “Shia land bridge” extends from Iran to allies Iraq, Syria, and to Lebanese Hezbollah. 

    The sources also pointed out that elite Iranian IRGC forces have already trained Iraqi personnel to operate its sophisticated missiles, and that Iran has already long established forward bases in parts of Iraq. 

    One senior IRGC commander confirmed this to Reuters, saying: “We have bases like that in many places and Iraq is one of them. If America attacks us, our friends will attack America’s interests and its allies in the region.” 

    Western and Iraqi sources identified that missile producing factories overseen by Iranians are present in al-Zafaraniya, east of Baghdad, and Jurf al-Sakhar, north of Kerbala. And further there is said to be a site under the operation of Kata’ib Hezbollah, which is considered one of Iran’s closest proxy paramilitary forces. 

    Though the Iraqi government didn’t comment on an official level, Reuters cites the following alarming words from an Iraqi government source: 

    The Iraqi source said it was difficult for the Iraqi government to stop or persuade the groups to go against Tehran.

    “We can’t restrain militias from firing Iranian rockets because simply the firing button is not in our hands, it’s with Iranians who control the push button,” he said.

    The Iraqi official continued, “Iran will definitely use the missiles it handed over to Iraqi militia it supports to send a strong message to its foes in the region and the United States that it has the ability to use Iraqi territories as a launch pad for its missiles to strike anywhere and anytime it decides.”

    And meanwhile, hours after the Reuters story broke early Friday, Iran’s Tasnim news agency reported the country’s domestically produced long-range ballistic missiles will be ready for use by the Spring of 2019, according to a commander that oversees Iran’s Air Defense. 

    Surely, Israel will respond at some point to what Netanyahu has long ago identified as a “red line” concerning Israel’s security interests in the region. The only question is how and when, and how awkward will in be for US officials in Baghdad? 

  • China Moves Into Afghanistan As Part Of Its Global Expansion Mission

    Authored by Retired Colonel Lawrence Sellin, op-ed via The Daily Caller,

    For many, it was a stunning development. China will build a brigade-size military training facility in the strategic Wakhan Corridor, the land bridge between Tajikistan and Pakistan, which is located in Afghanistan’s northeast Badakhshan province and borders China.

    Although Beijing denied the claim that hundreds of Chinese soldiers will be deployed to Afghanistan, a source close to the Chinese military stated, “Construction of the base has started, and China will send at least one battalion of troops, along with weapons and equipment, to be stationed there and provide training to their Afghan counterparts.”

    For those who have been closely following growing Chinese influence in Afghanistan, the above report comes as no surprise.

    A year earlier on August 14, 2017, Spogmai radio quoted the spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense (translation): “A brigade base will be built to maintain the security of Badakhshan, which will be funded by China.”

    The spokesman stated that China has steadily increased its military cooperation with Afghanistan and had, at that point, already provided $73 million in military aid.

    Beyond the enormous geopolitical implications of a Chinese military base inside Afghanistan, the Badakhshan installation is the final security link between Tajikistan, vital to China’s commercial interests in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, China’s “all-weather” ally in South Asia.

    It was largely unreported that China financed border outposts and deployed troops to Tajikistan’s eastern Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, which borders Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province and is part of the Wakhan Corridor.

    Consolidating a Chinese presence in Badakhshan province, the Afghan Ministry of Information and Technology has discussed signing a contract with China Telecom for a fiber optic network connecting China to the Wakhan Corridor. No doubt, the intention is to couple that system to the larger network linking China with Pakistan, the Middle East and Africa.

    China is already Afghanistan’s biggest investor. In 2007 it took a $3 billion, 30-year lease for the Aynak copper mine. China and Pakistan have offered to extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to Afghanistan. Some have concluded that the CPEC invitation is a prelude to positioning China as a mediator to end the Afghan conflict.

    In the June meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Group (SCO) held in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping said in order to “facilitate peace and reconstruction in Afghanistan, we need to give full play to the role of the SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group,” which includes Russia, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. The SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group may become a vehicle to remove the U.S. from Afghanistan.

    Underlying the soft power component represented by China’s commercial Belt and Road Initiative is a hard power plan for global military expansion.

    A Chinese military base in Badakhshan will be the second overseas military base joining the Djibouti naval facility inaugurated in 2017, allegedly to protect China’s interests in Africa, but conveniently located at a strategic choke point near the sea route to the Suez Canal. A similar Chinese naval facility is reportedly planned for Pakistan’s Jiwani Peninsula within reach of the strategically important Strait of Hormuz.

    Control of Afghanistan will allow China to complete transportation corridors, power grids and oil and gas pipelines throughout Central and South Asia. China can then begin to exploit Afghanistan’s estimated $3 trillion in untapped mineral resources, in addition to Balochistan’s $1 trillion in gold, copper, oil, precious stones, coal, chromite and natural gas.

    China cannot achieve its regional ambitions while the United States maintains a presence in Afghanistan. Both Pakistan and China know that, militarily, American policy in Afghanistan is untenable and the U.S. has few diplomatic cards to play in a negotiated settlement.  With the encouragement of China, Pakistan, through its Taliban proxy, will always do just enough to prevent us from achieving our goals in Afghanistan. Clearly, China is winning in South Asia.

    The United States needs to look beyond the current strategic conditions, to create leverage, where we currently don’t have any. Forget the Taliban. Once China achieves its aim of an American withdrawal, the Taliban will eventually be thrown under the bus with the help of the Taliban’s sponsor, Pakistan.

    CPEC is the center of gravity and Balochistan is CPEC’s pain point.

  • Flesh-Eating Genital Infections Caused By Common Diabetes Drugs

    The FDA has issued a warning over a rare form of flesh-eating bacteria which targets the genitals, caused by several widely-used diabetes medications, reports Bloomberg‘s Michelle Cortez. 

    The condition, known as “necrotizing fasciitis of the perineum,” or Fournier’s gangrene, has only affected 12 diabetes patients over a five-year span (seven men and five women), one of whom died – so if you come down with it the support group is going to be small. Also, if you’d like to never eat again, click here (don’t do it). 

    The drugs covered by the warning include Johnson & Johnson’s Invokana, AstraZeneca Plc’s Farxiga and Eli Lilly & Co.’s Jardiance. Known as SGLT2 inhibitors, they were approved in 2013, 2013 and 2016, respectively. The drugs help the body lower blood-sugar levels via the kidneys, and excess sugar is excreted in a patient’s urine. Urinary tract infections are a known side effect. –Bloomberg

    Cortez notes that in the past three decades, the FDA only found six other cases of the condition – all men, while reviewing all other diabetes drug classes. 

    The FDA estimates apprximately 1.7 million patients were prescribed one of the affected medications from a retail pharmacy in 2017, while Bloomberg Intelligence believes the drugs are anticipated to generate as much as $7.1 billion in sales by 2020.

    All of the drugs in the class except Merck & Co.’s Steglujan, the most recently approved, have been linked to the condition. The manufacturers must add information about the risk to the prescribing information and medicine guides given to patients. AstraZeneca said it is working with the agency on updating the label and noted that it hadn’t seen any cases of the condition during the development of Farxiga.  –Bloomberg

    And now for the fine print from the FDA: 

    • Patients should seek medical attention immediately if you experience any symptoms of tenderness, redness, or swelling of the genitals or the area from the genitals back to the rectum, and have a fever above 100.4 F or a general feeling of being unwell. These symptoms can worsen quickly, so it is important to seek treatment right away.
    • Health care professionals should assess patients for Fournier’s gangrene if they present with the symptoms described above. If suspected, start treatment immediately with broad-spectrum antibiotics and surgical debridement if necessary. Discontinue the SGLT2 inhibitor, closely monitor blood glucose levels, and provide appropriate alternative therapy for glycemic control.
    • Publications report that Fournier’s gangrene occurs in 1.6 out of 100,000 males annually in the U.S., and most frequently occurs in males 50-79 years (3.3 out of 100,000).1-3 In our case series, however, we observed events in both women and men.

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  • FBI Arrests All Five New Mexico "Jihad Compound" Suspects

    Five suspects who were arrested in a raid on a northern New Mexico compound have been taken into custody by the FBI after local prosecutors botched their case, resulting in the release of three of the individuals. 

    The defendants, Jany Leveille, 35, a Haitian national illegally present in the United States, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, 40, Hujrah Wahhaj, 37, Subhanah Wahhaj, 35, and Lucas Morton, 40, are charged in a criminal complaint that was filed earlier today in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico. The criminal complaint charges Jany Leveille with being an alien unlawfully in possession of firearms and ammunition in the District of New Mexico from Nov. 2017 through Aug. 2018. The criminal complaint charges the other four defendants with aiding and abetting Leveille in committing the offense, and with conspiring with Leveille to commit the offense. –KRWG

    In other words, the feds have pinned firearms offenses on one of the women arrested at the compound – Jany Leveille, while the other four defendants – one of whom Police believe abducted and then ritualistically murdered his 4-year-old son on the property (and happens to be the son of a famous New York Imam), are charged with helping her. We didn’t note any charges connected to the dead child, Abdul-ghani Wahha. If convicted of all charges, each defendant faces a maximum of ten years in prison. 

    So according to the FBI: 

    Eleven children were found on the property in a state of malnourishment and squalor, who local authorities say were being trained to commit acts of terrorism. Children from the compound told police that Jany Leveille, 35 – the partner of the dead boy’s father, Siraj Wahhaj, 40, “intended to confront ‘corrupt’ institutions or individuals, such as the military, big businesses, CIA, teachers/schools and reveal the ‘truth’ to these corrupt institutions or individuals.” 

    Police also found a “terrorist training manual” on the property: 

    The handwritten document contained “instructions for ‘The one-time terrorist,‘ instructions on the use of a ‘choke point,’ a location ‘called the ideal attack site,’ the ‘ability to defend the safe haven,’ the ‘ability to escape-perimeter rings,’ and ‘sniper position detection procedure,'” according to the court filing.

    Some of the children at the compound told police that Morten allegedly “stated he wished to die in Jihad, as a martyr,” prosecutors said in the motion.

    “At times, Jany Leveille would laugh and joke about dying in Jihad as would Subhanna Wahhaj,” according to the court document. –CNN

    The FBI had been surveilling the compound for several months prior to the August 3 raid by the Taos County Sheriff’s Office – however they must not have been watching when the child was allegedly murdered. 

    Twe weeks after the raid, the compound was mysteriously destroyed by authorities with no explanation, while an RV central to the property in which the suspects and the children were living was seized. 

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    The last time the FBI was found to have been surveilling radical Islamic terrorists in the Southwest was May 2015, when an undercover FBI agent was caught driving behind two armed Jihadis, filming them as they pulled up to a “Draw Muhammad” exhibit in Garland, Texas – ostensibly to attack the event. The would-be terrorists were shot dead on the spot by security guards, while the FBI agent – who encouraged one of the terrorists to “tear up Texas” in a text message, was arrested at gunpoint and later released. 

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Aug 31

Today’s News 31st August 2018

  • Israel Developing Missiles To Strike Any Target In Mideast

    Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced earlier this week that Israel is purchasing new, advanced missiles that he states can strike “anywhere in the Middle East.” The Jerusalem Post said the Defense Ministry’s decision to purchase precision ground-to-ground rockets “is nothing short of a revolution,” as the region marches towards the next military conflict.

    Israeli missiles (Source/ TASS) 

    Lieberman inked a deal with State-owned defense manufacturer Israel Military Industries (IMI) for the purchase of the rockets, which would be delivered “within a few years,” he said in a statement.

    According to a January report in Yedioth Ahronoth, a daily newspaper published in Tel Aviv, Israel, Liberman met with senior Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officers for the first round of funding negotiations for the new missiles that could exceed half a billion shekels (USD 140 million), with the potential for far more in the coming years.

    “The project for setting up a precision rocket and missile system is underway. Part of it is already in production and part is in the final phases of research and development.” Lieberman said. “We are acquiring and developing precision fire systems that will allow… the Israel Defense Forces to cover within a few years every point in the region.”

    In conjunction with the new missiles — expected to arrive in the early 2020s, Liberman wants to revolutionize how Israel wages war through a new “Missile Corps.”

    “The thinking was simple: Proponents believed it was important to diversify Israel’s offensive capabilities, while opponents feared budgets would be taken away from the Israeli Air Force (IAF), which until now has had a monopoly on Israel’s sole long-range offensive strike capability,” said the Jerusalem Post.

    For almost two decades, Lieberman has advocated for a “Missile Corps,” however, the IAF lobby succeeded in warding off the corps’ establishment – until today.

    A missile launched from Palmachim air base in central Israel on July 4, 2018 (Source/ Defense Ministry)

    In the last several years, rapid advances in missile technologies have allowed GPS guided rockets to strike their targets with unprecedented precision in all weather conditions – sun, rain or fog.

    The planned missile corps with GPS guided rockets is believed to act as the offensive counter to Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the Lebanese Hezbollah terror group’s massive stockpile of 100,000 short- and medium-range rockets.

    Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ political head in Gaza, said on Wednesday that Hamas has the capability of “causing six months of rising and falling air raid sirens” in Tel Aviv.

    “We don’t want a military confrontation, but we are not afraid of one,” Sinwar said.

    On Thursday, Lieberman ruled out the possibility of another large-scale military assault on Hamas, saying Israel would pay a “heavy price” for such a move.

    “There are two options: to topple Hamas with the Israeli army, for which we would pay a heavy price, or to try to find a situation in which the [Gazan] public itself would topple the [Hamas] regime,” Lieberman told Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. 

    While Israeli officials have warned their citizens about a flare-up on the Israel–Gaza barrier, the real move for major military conflict, is, in fact, conflict with Hezbollah and Iran. These missiles give Israel unprecedented reach in the Middle East, and it should be seen as a preparation for war.

  • US Military Presence In Africa: All Over Continent And Still Expanding

    Authored by Arkady Savitsky via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Around 200,000 US troops are stationed in 177 countries throughout the world. Those forces utilize several hundred military installations. Africa is no exception. On August 2, Maj. Gen. Roger L. Cloutier took command of US Army Africa, promising to “hit the ground running.”

    The US is not waging any wars in Africa but it has a significant presence on the continent. Navy SEALs, Green Berets, and other special ops are currently conducting nearly 100 missions across 20 African countries at any given time, waging secret, limited-scale operations. According to the magazine Vice, US troops are now conducting 3,500 exercises and military engagements throughout Africa per year, an average of 10 per day — an astounding 1,900% increase since the command rolled out 10 years ago. Many activities described as “advise and assist” are actually indistinguishable from combat by any basic definition.

    There are currently roughly 7,500 US military personnel, including 1,000 contractors, deployed in Africa. For comparison, that figure was only 6,000 just a year ago. The troops are strung throughout the continent spread across 53 countries. There are 54 countries on the “Dark Continent.” More than 4,000 service members have converged on East Africa. The US troop count in Somalia doubled last year.

    When AFRICOM was created there were no plans to establish bases or put boots on the ground. Today, a network of small staging bases or stations have cropped up. According to investigative journalist Nick Turse, “US military bases (including forward operating sites, cooperative security locations, and contingency locations) in Africa number around fifty, at least.” US troops in harm’s way in Algeria, Burundi, Chad, Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan Tunisia, and Uganda qualify for extra pay.

    The US African Command (AFRICOM) runs drone surveillance programs, cross-border raids, and intelligence. AFRICOM has claimed responsibility for development, public health, professional and security training, and other humanitarian tasks. Officials from the Departments of State, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Energy, Commerce, and Justice, among other agencies, are involved in AFRICOM activities. Military attachés outnumber diplomats at many embassies across Africa.

    Last October, four US soldiers lost their lives in Niger. The vast majority of Americans probably had no idea that the US even had troops participating in combat missions in Africa before the incident took place. One serviceman was reported dead in Somalia in June. The Defense Department is mulling plans to “right-size” special operations missions in Africa and reassign troops to other regions, aligning the efforts with the security priorities defined by the 2018 National Defense Strategy. That document prioritizes great power competition over defeating terrorist groups in remote corners of the globe. Roughly 1,200 special ops troops on missions in Africa are looking at a drawdown. But it has nothing to do with leaving or significantly cutting back. And the right to unilaterally return will be reserved. The infrastructure is being expanded enough to make it capable of accommodating substantial reinforcements. The construction work is in progress. The bases will remain operational and their numbers keep on rising.

    A large drone base in Agadez, the largest city in central Niger, is reported to be under construction. The facility will host armed MQ-9 Reaper drones which will finally take flight in 2019. The MQ-9 Reaper has a range of 1,150 miles, allowing it to provide strike support and intelligence-gathering capabilities across West and North Africa from this new base outside of Agadez. It can carry GBU-12 Paveway II bombs. The aircraft features synthetic aperture radar for integrating GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The armament suite can include four Hellfire air-to-ground anti-armor and anti-personnel missiles. There are an estimated 800 US troops on the ground in Niger, along with one drone base and the base in Agadez that is being built. The Hill called it “the largest US Air Force-led construction project of all time.” 

    According to Business Insider, “The US military presence here is the second largest in Africa behind the sole permanent US base on the continent, in the tiny Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti.” Four thousand American servicemen are stationed at Camp Lemonnier (the US base located near Djibouti City) — a critical strategic base for the American military because of its port and its proximity to the Middle East.

    Officially, the camp is the only US base on the continent or, as AFRICOM calls it, “a forward operating site,” — the others are “cooperative security locations” or “non-enduring contingency locations.” Camp Lemonnier is the hub of a network of American drone bases in Africa that are used for aerial attacks against insurgents in Yemen, Nigeria, and Somalia, as well as for exercising control over the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. In 2014, the US signed a new 20-year lease on the base with the Djiboutian government, and committed over $1.4 billion to modernize and expand the facility in the years to come.

    In March, the US and Ghana signed a military agreement outlining the conditions of the US military presence in that nation, including its construction activities. The news was met with protests inside the country.

    It should be noted that the drone attacks that are regularly launched in Africa are in violation of US law. The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), adopted after Sept. 11, 2001, states that the president is authorized to use force against the planners of those attacks and those who harbor them. But that act does not apply to the rebel groups operating in Africa.

    It’s hard to believe that the US presence will be really diminished, and there is no way to know, as too many aspects of it are shrouded in secrecy with nothing but “leaks” emerging from time to time. It should be noted that the documents obtained by TomDispatch under the United States Freedom of Information Act contradict AFRICOM’s official statements about the scale of US military bases around the world, including 36 AFRICOM bases in 24 African countries that have not been previously disclosed in official reports.

    The US foothold in Africa is strong. It’s almost ubiquitous. Some large sites under construction will provide the US with the ability to host large aircraft and accommodate substantial forces and their hardware. This all prompts the still-unanswered question — “Where does the US have troops in Africa, and why?” One thing is certain — while waging an intensive drone war, the US is building a vast military infrastructure for a large-scale ground war on the continent.

  • Are Multiple "Failed Coups" Leading To The Engineered Fall Of America

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

    There has been a lot of talk about “coups” the past two years, not just in the U.S. but around the globe. As I have noted in recent articles, failed coups in particular have been very popular as a way for certain governments to solidify power and assert dictatorial changes. In some cases, there has been no concrete evidence presented that the coup ever really existed.

    In Turkey in 2016, Recep Erdogan claimed “success” in stopping a potential coup involving numerous government employees and military personnel which included active combat around major government sites such as the presidential palace and Turkish parliament. Erdogan argues that the coup was a part of the “Gulen Movement,” a political opposition movement surrounding Fethullah Gulen, a former ally of Erdogan who has resided in the U.S. since 1999 and had a falling out with the Turkish president in 2013 after criticisms of Erdogen’s corruption.

    So far, evidence of actual “combat” with coup forces is thin to the point that it is questionable whether a coup ever really happened. Most reports cite fire from tanks and planes, as well as nearly 300 people killed. Video footage shows random firing, some explosions in civilian areas as well as Turkish citizens mobbing aimlessly around tanks. With tens of thousands of government employees imprisoned or dismissed after the event, the amount of kinetic conflict seems rather limited and tame.

    Two years later, Turkey has yet to produce any hard proof of a coup, let alone proof that the “Gulen Movement” was involved. In July of this year, Erdogan submitted “evidence” which he says is grounds for extradition of Fethullah Gulen. This evidence appears to revolve around alleged visits made to Gulen’s FETO compound in Pennsylvania by accused members of the coup, but does not provide any clarification on evidence of the coup itself.

    The chaotic event lasted mere hours and smells of a “wag the dog” scenario; a completely fabricated “Reichstag Fire” attack which could have been easily scripted by Erdogan himself as an excuse to assert totalitarian controls in Turkey and to remove pesky political critics and people within government and the military that held contrary views to Erdogan. Erdogan pointed a finger at the Gulen Movement before the smoke even cleared on the coup attempt, which suggests a predetermined scapegoat. Erdogan controls the Turkish media (including access to social media) and the judiciary, which means he also controls the narrative leaving the country in terms of facts and evidence.

    The only things that the coup seems to have accomplished are cementing Erdogen as the center of political dominance for years to come, and causing considerable division between the U.S. and Turkey, threatening the breakup of NATO. Turkey is now moving toward bilateral agreements with Russia, which may have been the plan all along.

    As I have noted in my articles on the false East/West paradigm, financial elites are getting ready to initiate what they call the “global economic reset,” and this reset will shift economic power (and thus geopolitical power) away from the U.S. and parts of the West into the hands of Eastern nations as well as institutions like the IMF and BIS. Turkey is a key component of geostrategic dominance for the U.S. and NATO. The nation’s realignment to the East will change the center of power for the globe.

    A “failed coup” or what some analysts might call a “self-coup” also took place this year for another key U.S. ally — Saudi Arabia. Rumors of attempts on the life of Saudi Prince Mohammad Bin Salman as well as calls for a coup by exiled crown prince Khaled bin Farhan culminated in the arrest and detainment of numerous Saudi officials by MBS. No evidence of an actual coup against the Prince has been presented so far.

    Salman proceeded in the wake of the crisis to consolidate his power as the successor to the king, as well as extorting billions of dollars from his captives in exchange for their freedom. He has retained the most vital positions in the Saudi government for himself, including the positions of Defense Minister, Interior Minister and head of the National Guard.  His only obstacle now is to wait for the king to officially abdicate or die.

    MBS is best known in the economic world for his “Vision For 2030,” which is designed to end Saudi reliance on oil revenues, but also appears to seek alternatives to the petrodollar in terms of trade as the nation strengthens ties to China and Russia. If Saudi Arabia breaks from the U.S. dollar as the primary means of oil trade, this will inevitably kill the dollar’s world reserve currency status.  The Vision For 2030 also appears to align exactly with the “sustainable development goals” of the IMF’s 2030 Agenda.

    Salman is supported in his 2030 endeavor through his Public Investment Fund (which in ironic globalist style is not actually a public fund).  The fund is heavily financed by major globalist donors including The Carlyle Group, Goldman Sachs, as well as Blackstone and Blackrock. This support for a decoupled Saudi Arabia by international corporations suggests yet again that the globalist goal is to kill the dollar’s world reserve status, rather than protect it.

    As the “failed coup” narrative continues to escalate, I have noticed a disturbing trend in America which matches certain elements of the coups in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. That is to say, it is possible that another “failed coup” is pending for the U.S, opening the path for Donald Trump to initiate martial law-like measures.

    I warned of this possibility months before the election in my article ‘Clinton Versus Trump And The Co-Option Of The Liberty Movement‘, which partially explains the reasons why I predicted that Trump would win and ascend to the Oval Office.

    At that time I was certain that the globalists would find great use for a Trump presidency, more so in fact than a Clinton presidency. However, I was not sure whether Trump was controlled opposition or simply a useful scapegoat for the economic crisis that globalists are clearly engineering.  Now it appears that he is both.

    Trump’s history was already suspicious. He was bailed out of his considerable debts surrounding his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City in the early 1990s by Rothschild banking agent Wilber Ross, which saved him from embarrassment and possibly saved his entire fortune. This alone was not necessarily enough to deny Trump the benefit of the doubt in my view.

    Many businessmen end up dealing with elitist controlled banks at some point in their careers. But when Trump entered office and proceeded to load his cabinet with ghouls from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, the Council on Foreign Relations and give Wilber Ross the position of Commerce Secretary, it became obvious that Trump is in fact a puppet for the banks.

    Some liberty movement activists ignore this reality and attempt to argue around the facts of Trump’s associations. “What about all the media opposition to Trump? Doesn’t this indicate he’s not controlled?” they say. I say, not really.

    If one examines the history of fake coups, there is ALWAYS an element of orchestrated division, sometimes between the globalists and their own puppets.  This is called 4th Generation warfare, in which almost all divisions are an illusion and the real target is the public psyche.

    This is not to say that leftist opposition to Trump and conservatives is not real. It absolutely is. The left has gone off the ideological deep end into an abyss of rabid frothing insanity, but the overall picture is not as simple as “Left vs. Right.” Instead, we need to look at the situation more like a chess board, and above that chess board looms the globalists, attempting to control all the necessary pieces on BOTH sides. Every provocation by leftists is designed to elicit a predictable response from conservatives to the point that we become whatever the globalists want us to become.

    Meaning the globalists are hoping that through the exploitation of useful idiots on the left they can infuriate conservatives to the point of abandoning their constitutional principles. For example, the use of social media censorship of conservative views is clearly designed to lure conservatives into turning to big government to force companies like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube into the role of “public utilities.” In other words, conservatives would be abandoning their principles on private property by nationalizing social media much like communists would do.

    Of course, a simpler solution would be for conservatives to launch their OWN social media platforms and offer a better alternative. We should be reducing government influence in these sectors and ending protections for corporations, not increasing the influence of government even further. But this solution is never offered within the narrative, thus, the public discourse is completely controlled.

    As this is taking place, conservatives are growing more sensitive to the notion of a leftist coup, from silencing of conservative voices to an impeachment of Trump based on fraudulent ideas of “Russian collusion.”

    To be clear, the extreme left has no regard for individual liberties or constitutional law. They use the Constitution when it suits them, then try to tear it down when it doesn’t suit them. However, the far-left is also a paper tiger; it is not a true threat to conservative values because its membership marginal, it is weak, immature and irrational. Their only power resides in their influence within the mainstream media, but with the MSM fading in the face of the alternative media, their social influence is limited. It is perhaps enough to organize a “coup,” but it would inevitably be a failed coup.

    Therefore it is not leftists that present the greatest threat to individual liberty, but the globalist influenced Trump administration. A failed coup on the part of the left could be used as a rationale for incremental and unconstitutional “safeguards.” And conservatives may be fooled into supporting these measures as the threat is overblown.

    I have always said that the only people that can destroy conservative principles are conservatives. Conservatives diminish their own principles every time they abandon their conscience and become exactly like the monsters they hope to defeat. And make no mistake, the globalists are well aware of this strategy.

    Carroll Quigley, a pro-globalist professor and the author of Tragedy and Hope, a book published decades ago which outlined the plan for a one world economic and political system, is quoted in his address ‘Dissent: Do We Need It‘:

    “They say, “The Congress is corrupt.” I ask them, “What do you know about the Congress? Do you know your own Congressman’s name?” Usually they don’t. It’s almost a reflex with them, like seeing a fascist pig in a policeman. To them, all Congressmen are crooks. I tell them they must spend a lot of time learning the American political system and how it functions, and then work within the system. But most of them just won’t buy that. They insist the system is totally corrupt. I insist that the system, the establishment, whatever you call it, is so balanced by diverse forces that very slight pressures can produce perceptible results.

    For example, I’ve talked about the lower middle class as the backbone of fascism in the future. I think this may happen. The party members of the Nazi Party in Germany were consistently lower middle class. I think that the right-wing movements in this country are pretty generally in this group.”

    Is a “failed coup” being staged in order to influence conservatives to become the very “fascists” the left accuses us of being?  The continuing narrative certainly suggests that this is the game plan.

    *  *  *

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  • North America's Devastating Wildfires, Viewed From Space

    If you live on the west coast of North America, it’s likely that you’ve felt a bit smoked out, lately.

    Wildfires in British Columbia, Canada are already the worst in the province’s history, while California has had a particularly rough season with human deaths, evacuations, and billions of dollars of damage.

    Oregon has one confirmed death from a wildfire in mid-July, and Washington hasn’t gotten off easy, either. On July 31, 2018 a state of emergency was declared in the Evergreen State.

    VISUALIZING WILDFIRES FROM SPACE

    Today’s image comes to us from NASA, and it shows aerosols around the world including those originating from volcanoes, desert dust, cloud cover, sea-salt – and of course, smoke.

    Here’s the same image with labels, indicating black carbon on the west coast of the continent:

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

    The wildfires are just as visible as the massive slash-and-burning occurring in Central Africa, hurricanes and typhoons, and even the dust swirling up from the Sahara, the world’s largest desert.

    Here’s a visualization of the fires in North America, with some extra zoom:

    It’s clear from this image that smoke isn’t just affecting the coast – in fact, experts say it has been travelling as far as Ireland, in lesser concentrations of course.

    OTHER VISUALS

    While we thought the visualization above was the most striking, there are countless of other examples from the last month that show the extent of wildfires and smoke on the west coast.

    Here’s another shot from NASA from a few weeks ago, during peak wildfire season in California and Oregon:

    And here’s an image of Seattle and Vancouver from mid-August, when smoke from Canadian fires was so bad in those cities that it was like “inhaling seven cigarettes” per day:

    FUTURE FORECAST

    As we roll into September, the worst of the wildfire season is over.

    Unfortunately, it’s already been the worst in British Columbia’s history. Here are the 10 worst fire seasons graphed since 1950, based on square kilometers burned:


    Data as of Aug 29, 2018, and from the BC Forest Service

    While this year has been an anomaly, it may also be a preview of what’s to come. One recent report out of California said that the number of wildfires over 25,000 acres is likely to increase by 50% leading up to 2050.

    Is this the new normal?

  • Uber Driver Shoots Woman's Enraged Boyfriend In "Stand Your Ground" Mixup

    A Florida man with a lengthy criminal history was shot by an Uber driver in what the local sheriff called a “classic Stand Your Ground case” – a self-defense law which Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum opposes, and has called for Governor Rick Scott to suspend. 

    The deadly exchange began at a Winter Haven bar Tuesday morning around 2:20 a.m., when an intoxicated woman was helped into an Uber by another patron she didn’t know. 

    Observing this from his Ford F-250 pickup truck was 34-year-old Jason Boek, now dead, who police believe mixed up his ex-girlfriend and the woman who got into the Uber – a Hyundai Elantra driven by 38-year-old Robert Westlake.

    Westlake, a licensed security guard and concealed weapon permit holder who just graduated from the police academy, was armed. 

    In a dashcam video posted by the Polk Sheriff, Boek can be seen chasing down Westlake, try to run him off the road, and then threaten to shoot him after angrily charging towards Westlake. 

    Westlake grabbed his gun and fired a single shot, killing Boek. 

    Boek got out and walked towards the Hyundai, yelling at Westlake and claiming that he had a “pistol” (as heard in the attached dash cam video from the Uber). Boek continued to approach, at which time Westlake, who is a concealed weapon permit holder and a licensed armed security guard, reached into the pocket of the driver door and retrieved a handgun, firing one shot at the truck driver. –Polk Sheriff

    Following the shooting, Westlake called 9-1-1 and began lifesaving measures. Officials say he continues to cooperate with law enforcement. Neither Westlake or his Uber passenger know Boek – who has a lengthy criminal history which includes “previous arrests for aggravated battery, battery, burglary, marijuana possession, forgery, larceny, resisting arrest, and VOP (violation of probation). He’s on felony probation for battery, which began in June 2016 and was scheduled to end in June 2021. His driver’s license was suspended in May 2018, and the truck he was driving does not belong to him – he borrowed it from a friend.”

    Deputies found a marijuana joint in the truck Boek was driving as well as a glass pipe with meth residue. 

    Stand your ground

    “This is a justifiable homicide all day long,” Sheriff Grady Judd stated at a news conference. “You have the right to protect yourself. This is a classic stand your ground case. This was the intent of the law.”

    Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd called the shooting of Jason Boek a “classic stand your ground case.”  (FOX13)

    “At the end of the day, the message is clear,” he told reporters. “Don’t mess with the Uber driver.”

  • BlackRock Voted To Replace Musk With Independent Board Chair: Reuters

    While the public grumblings over whether Elon Musk is qualified to lead Tesla, have been growing in recent weeks in the aftermath of the CEO’s increasingly erratic public behavior and statements, one especially powerful name – in fact the world’s largest asset manager – voted for a shareholder proposal to replace chairman Elon Musk with an independent director: BlackRock.

    According to Reuters, a BlackRock filing with the SEC showed that BlackRock-managed funds voted for a measure requiring the board chairman to be an independent director. Ultimately, the proposal was killed, when more than 86 million shares voted against it at the June shareholder meeting while fewer than 17 million voted in favor, but today is the first time that it emerged that BlackRock was one of the entities voting for. 

    “BlackRock’s approach to investment stewardship is driven by our fiduciary duties to our clients, the asset owners,” a BlackRock spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. “Our approach to engaging with companies and proxy voting activities is consistent with our commitment to drive long term shareholder value for our clients.”

    Blackrock was not the only one to object: top proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services also supported the proposal, citing concerns about Musk’s pay and board independence, which in retrospect should have been heeded.

    Musk, whose recent public disclosures have drawn sharp scrutiny from both the investing public and the SEC in the aftermath of the “going private” debacle – serves both as Tesla’s chairman and chief executive officer, and some corporate-governance activists have called for the role to be split between two people to improve oversight. Today is the first time it emerged that BlackRock was one of them.

    Tesla’s board – which in recent days has also attracted attention for being too close to Musk and may itself be in jeopardy over its handling of “funding secured-gate” – had said that the company’s success “would not have been possible” without Musk’s “day-to-day exposure to the company’s business.”

    It may have to change its tune, however, as more investors side with Blackrock, which is the 7th largest Tesla stockholder and controls nearly 6.5 million of Tesla’s 170 million shares.

    On the other side of the aisle, Vanguard Group-run funds voted against the independent-chair proposal, a recent filing showed. Funds run by Fidelity Investments sided with Tesla on director votes and other controversial items this spring, earlier filings showed.

    Tesla is not the only company where BlackRock tried to bring more balance to the org chart: filings also showed it voted this year in favor of shareholder proposals at Facebook and Google parent Alphabet to give each shareholder an equal vote on governance matters. BlackRock withheld votes or voted against nearly all management recommendations at Netflix Inc, including an advisory vote on executive pay.

  • "Hard To Refute" FBI Leaked Stories To Media And Used Them To Obtain FISA Warrants

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    Special Agent Jonathan Moffa testified last Friday behind closed doors and before the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight Committee. Moffa said that FBI personnel would use media reports based on information they leaked to justify applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants.

    Moffa, who worked with controversial former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, did not come forward to the media, but according to a report by Fox News, a source familiar with his testimony has spoken about it.

    When pressed by the committees on whether this was common practice at the FBI, Moffa acknowledged the FBI had at least engaged in this activity in other cases. However, the source also told Fox News that Moffa did not specifically confirm that the practice of using leaked information to bolster warrant applications was employed with regard to the dossier. 

    The source told Fox News that Moffa acknowledged this “had been a practice in the past.”

    Republicans have long questioned to what extent leaked information, related to the unverified anti-Trump dossier, was used as a basis for surveillance warrants against former Trump adviser Carter Page in 2016 — when the bureau was led by James Comey and deputy Andrew McCabe. –Fox News

    House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, told Fox News on Tuesday that the committee had evidence of the FBI’s practice that would be “hard to refute,” and the FBI did not immediately respond to Fox News‘ request for comment.

     “We know that some people at the Department of Justice and the FBI actually gave information to the media, then the stories were reported. Then they used those reports to justify further investigations,” Meadows said on “America’s Newsroom” Tuesday. 

    “You know, that’s like saying, we’re going to incriminate on one hand, and be the jury on the other. It just doesn’t work that way.”

    Meadows also took to Twitter to announce this new information

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

    The Daily Caller was the first to report on the specifics of Moffa’s claims.

  • Chuck Todd Warns Of Possible Mueller Bombshell: "Don't Miss Work Tomorrow"

    On Thursday evening, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd issued a warning to the press regarding the Mueller Russia investigation: Don’t miss work tomorrow.

    During a discussion of Special Counsel Robert Mueller‘s probe, Todd’s MTP Daily panel was speculating when the investigation will wrap up, as Mediaite first reported:

    “Here’s what I’ve learned about Bob Mueller,” Todd said. “Not a single person that has known him, been with him, worked with him, wouldn’t say that he would have ended this investigation if there was no collusion. He would have already ended this investigation.”

    “We can’t tell that, though, until he tells us,” strategist Brad Todd said.

    The panel then went on to discuss whether Mueller can make any major announcements in the investigation between Labor Day and the midterm elections. The reason: any new, major developments after Labor Day could be seen as interference in elections.

    “I think he knows, more than anything, he keeps quiet between Labor Day and Election Day,” Chuck Todd said and then issued the following preview: “I’m not missing work tomorrow,” he continued. “I wouldn’t miss work tomorrow. Tomorrow is the last business day of the pre-Labor Day to Election Day window.” (3:30 mins into the video).

  • Bridge: Schools, Universities Are Liberals' Trojan Horse For New World Order Indoctrination

    Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    From NFL players ‘taking a knee’ during the national anthem, to preschoolers being brainwashed with the ideology of transgenderism, these left-leaning movements have one goal in mind, and that is to undermine and destroy the foundation of the Western nation state.

    This month, the Liberal propaganda machine shifted into overdrive, publicizing yet another divisive scandal to forward their agenda of creating a New World Order.

    Atlanta school Principal Lara Zelski clearly did not have her local community in mind when she informed parents and faculty that the morning recital of the pledge of allegiance would be eliminated, substituted with a pledge to “school family, community, country and our global society.”

    “Over the past couple of years it has become increasingly obvious that more and more of our community were choosing to not stand and/or recite the pledge,” Zelski said. “There are many emotions around this and we want everyone in our school family to start their day in a positive manner.”

    Zelski never reveals any numbers to support what she means by “more and more of our community” who are purportedly snubbing the flag. This is how the proponents of a “global society” move forward with their destructive agenda. Using the Hegelian dialectic, they press some hot-button ‘issue’ – same-sex marriage, unisexual bathrooms, transsexual rights, Civil War statues in the public square, marijuana use, you name it – that is guaranteed to pit America’s two primary political ideologies fiercely against each other. Then they sit back and watch the fireworks display of their creation.

    “Leftists must stay up nights thinking of ways to defame, attack, intimidate and bully the rest of us with their endlessly long lists of angry demands,” wrote Carol S. Benson, in a letter to the editor that perfectly summed up the frustration being felt by average Americans as the PC goon squads gradually take control. “We the little people just want to raise our families and be left alone by our ever-expanding draconian government.”

    Although Zelski was forced to reverse course on her decision following severe criticism from parents and staff, the seeds of discontent, planted in the soil of febrile emotions, have already taken root in the public mind. Now, it will be the easy task of the compromised mainstream media – whose main function today is that of provocateur as opposed to purveyor of news and information – to sensationalize the issue, fanning the flames of this artificial crisis. Indeed, judging by the backlash, the actual number of students who refused to honor the flag every morning at this Atlanta school was negligible to none. Once the media imposes its false narrative on the public, however, it is then child’s play to keep the ball on the non-story moving forward.

    Students in the United States have been proudly reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, hand over heart, without incident for decades. But these are radical new days. With the NFL ‘take a knee’ movement, first popularized by former San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick as a sign of protest against police brutality, the game has changed. Popularized by a celebrity athlete, it will increasingly be considered ‘cool’ and rebellious for students to snub the national anthem in their taxpayer-supported public schools. And who’s to say how many educators with a hyper-Liberal bent of mind are working behind the scenes, playing games with our children’s minds on sociopolitical issues instead of doing their job, to ensure exactly such an outcome?

    For those who believe that such protests – aimed at the very symbol of the country, the American flag – are some sort of grassroots’ movement, think again. After all, what would really motivate an elementary teacher from Atlanta to promote such a vague concept like “global society” as opposed to local and national initiative? Most likely the very same venomous ideology that has underwritten the NFL ‘take a knee’ protest, for example, and the Black Lives Matters campaign. Yes, you guessed it. Although it may sound overly simplistic to point the finger of blame at the billionaire ‘philanthropist’ George Soros every time some divisive issue further fragments the American commons, his name and organization has a strange tendency for being connected to every uprising.

    But there are other significant factors at play, as this destructive wave of Cultural Marxism sweeps the nation, threatening to destroy any semblance of what it means to be truly American. The problem, as underscored by the Atlanta teacher’s attempt to ditch the morning salute to the flag, has its roots in the educational system, at all levels.

    “People are being taught by ideologues, not by educators,” University of Toronto Psychology professor and author Jordan Peterson told Fox News in an interview. “And ideologues have a very simple way of looking at the world… they reduce it to a few principles like inequality and unfairness and power, those would be the fundamental principles at the moment that are operating on the radical left, and they’re on an ideological campaign.

    According to Peterson, most Western institutions of education, at all levels, are “full of people who are radical.”

    We have witnessed that radical behavior in full display on so-called liberal college campuses, where Liberal has come to mean ‘if you don’t support my particular worldview, you are a fascist’ and that gives me the right to violently shut down your freedom of speech.

    The political battleground in the United States is not to be found on the streets and public squares, but inside of the classrooms, where dangerous ideologues are more concerned with indoctrinating impressionable young minds to their particular worldview, as opposed to creating an atmosphere conducive to the free dissemination of all opinions and ideas, which is exactly what our institutions of higher learning were meant to do.

    It’s time to break the Liberal stranglehold on the American mind before the rot goes any further.

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Aug 30

Today’s News 30th August 2018

  • Where People Are Most And Least Proud To Be European

    Late last year, Pew Research polled people in 15 countries across Europe about how proud they were to identify as European.

    As Statista’s Niall McCarthy shows in the following infographic, respondents in Finland had the highest level of pride with 87 percent saying they were very or somewhat proud to identify as European.

    Infographic: Where People Are Most And Least Proud To Be European | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Unsurprisingly given Brexit, people in the UK had the lowest level of pride in their European identity.

  • Nazis Were Not Marxists, But They Were Socialists

    Authored by Jörg Guido Hülsmann via The Mises Institute,

    The abject practical failure of the Marxist revolutionaries in the post-WWI period had done much harm to their image as the vanguard of social progress.

    The explanation for this failure in the writings of Mises, Max Weber, and Boris Brutzkus had led many economists to revise their views about the suitable scope of government within society. But others remained unrepentant advocates of the total state. They merely rejected the specifically egalitarian agenda of the socialists.

    The uncontested leader of this group was Werner Sombart, the greatest star among the interwar economists in Germany. Sombart had started his career popularizing Marxism in academic circles with his 1896 book Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung im 19. Jahrhundert (Socialism and Social Action in the Nineteenth Century). Later editions testified to Sombart’s increasing estrangement with his initial Marxist ideals. The tenth edition, which appeared under a new title in 1924, featured an outright demolition of Marxist socialism. Sombart had turned back to the mainstream Schmollerite socialism, which advocated the total state without an egalitarian agenda.

    Sombart’s intellectual qualities had gained him a place of preeminence. Where most Marxist intellectuals held dogmatically to the tenets of Marx and Engels, Sombart sought to analyze and develop their doctrines with a critical mind in quest of objectivity. This made his work the perfect target for a thorough criticism of the intellectual current of anti-Marxist socialism, and Mises provided such a criticism in an article with the title “Antimarxismus” (Anti-Marxism).

    Already in his article on price controls, Mises had pointed out that the shortcomings of interventionism did not result from the egalitarian agenda that some governments pursued, but from the very nature of government intervention itself, namely, the infringement of private property rights. Socialism and interventionism were destructive economic systems whether explicitly egalitarian or not. They would be unsuitable forms of social organization even if they pursued some other ideal of distribution—even meritocracy. There might be certain superficial similarities between a free society and a non-egalitarian one controlled by a total state, but these two would still be essentially different:

    On the surface the social ideal of etatism does not differ from the social order of capitalism. Etatism does not seek to overthrow the traditional legal order and formally convert all private property in production to public property… But in substance all enterprises are to become government operations. Under this practice, the owners will keep their names and trademarks on the property and the right to an “appropriate” income or one “befitting their ranks.” Every business becomes an office and every occupation a civil service. … Prices are set by government, and government determines what is to be produced, how it is to be produced, and in what quantities. There is no speculation, no “extraordinary” profits, no losses. There is no innovation, except for that ordered by government. Government guides and supervises everything.

    Mises showed that the error in the idea of the omnipotent state has nothing to do with the state’s particular agenda. The government is not omnipotent if its goal is to improve “collective life” (as opposed to that of mere aggregates of individuals). But neither is it omnipotent if it seeks to enhance the welfare of the totality of individual citizens. In both cases, government intervention is counterproductive. It follows that the time-honored and seemingly significant distinction between individualism and collectivism is of only secondary importance. The primary distinction is between policies that work and policies that do not work, which leads in turn to the distinction between a social order based on private property (which works) and those social orders that depend on infringements of private property rights (and do not work). It is therefore beside the point whether individuals or collectives run the economy—provided only that the property rights of all individual members of the collectives are preserved. It also follows that the size of the firm is of no importance. As long as private property is respected, the buying decisions of the consumers reward only those companies that offer the best products. If these companies are larger than others, so be it.

    Mises emphasized this fact against the doctrines of Dietzel, Karl Pribram, and Spann, which had a great influence on interwar political thought in Germany and, after World War II, in the wider western world. Dietzel and Pribram sided with individualism, whereas Spann championed collectivism, but they all agreed that these were the ultimate categories and that all political points of view derived from them. Mises disagreed.

    He argued that there was a point of view that was derived from neither individualism nor collectivism, namely, the utilitarian method of social analysis. He had already proved how successful this method was in analyzing the static and dynamic problems of social “wholes” such as language communities, and he emphasized that the analysis of such wholes is the very point of theoretical social science. It was fallacious to believe that individual action could be understood out of its wider social context, just as it was false that the proper understanding of social wholes required that the social analysis itself be holistic.

    The utilitarian method alone was a truly scientific one because it traced all social phenomena back to facts of experience:

    The utilitarian social doctrine does not engage in metaphysics, but takes as its point of departure the established fact that all living beings affirm their will to live and grow. The higher productivity of labor performed in division of labor, when compared with isolated action, is ever more uniting individuals to association. Society is division and association of labor.

    Each person seeks to enhance his welfare, and cooperative labor is more productive than isolated labor. Therefore, insofar as the growth of a person’s welfare presupposes greater quantities of material goods, the person can best attain his ends by engaging in a division of labor. This is how society comes into being.

    All elements in this economic explanation of society are ascertainable facts. In contrast, the doctrines of individualism and collectivism do not lend themselves to any such causal explanation of the origin of society because they are based on postulates rather than on analysis of fact. And Mises proceeded to show that the same criticism also applied to the Marxist theory of proletarian class struggle. He did not deny that human history featured many group conflicts and that they often had great importance for the course of events. Rather, he argued that the fashionable struggle theories—of which the Marxist theory of class struggle was but one particular instance—purported to be much more than they really were. Group conflicts were not, and could not possibly be, the basic elements of human life. The real question was how any group could come into existence in the first place. One first had to explain the formation of groups before one could explain the struggle between them. But all struggle theorists, Marx included, failed on this front.

    The reason for this negligence is not difficult to detect. It is impossible to demonstrate a principle of association that exists within a collective group only, and that is inoperative beyond it. If war and strife are the driving forces of all social development, why should this be true for classes, races, and nations only, and not for war among all individuals? If we take this warfare sociology to its logical conclusion we arrive at no social doctrine at all, but at “a theory of unsociability.”

    Mises pointed out that Marx’s theory of class struggle even failed to give an empirical account of its most basic concept. What is a “class” in the Marxist sense? Marx had never defined it. “And it is significant that the posthumous manuscript of the third volume of Das Kapital halts abruptly at the very place that was to deal with classes.” Mises went on:

    Since his death more than forty years have passed, and the class struggle has become the cornerstone of modern German sociology. And yet we continue to await its scientific definition and delineation. No less vague are the concepts of class interests, class condition, and class war, and the ideas on the relationship between conditions, class interests, and class ideology.

    Werner Sombart, along with the great majority of German sociologists of whom he was the undisputed leader, had adopted the Marxist view that proletarian class struggle was the ultimate driving force in modern societies. He was now an opponent of Marxist ideology, but his analyses still remained Marxian. He merely refrained from drawing all the practical conclusions, which Marx and the Marxists had consistently deduced, from the theory of class struggle. He did not and could not provide an alternative to the Marxist scenario of social evolution. His only objection came in the form of a postulate: things should not happen as they would happen according to the theory of class struggle, therefore government should resist such developments. Yet with this admission, Sombart and the bulk of the German sociologists had again left the realm of science and entered that of religion and ethics. Sombart in fact championed a return to medieval forms of social organization—the guilds—just as Keynes in England proposed “a return, it may be said, towards medieval conceptions of separate autonomies.” Similarly, the few theorists who had thoroughly criticized Marx’s concept of class struggle, like Othmar Spann, marveled at the alleged blessings of national socialism in the middle ages.

    Mises concluded:

    for every scientific thinker the objectionable point of Marxism is its theory, which seems to cause no offence to the Anti-Marxist… The Anti-Marxist merely objects to the political symptoms of the Marxian system, not to its scientific content. He regrets the harm done by Marxian policies to the German people, but is blind to the harm done to German intellectual life by the platitudes and deficiencies of Marxian problems and solutions. Above all, he fails to perceive that political and economic troubles are consequences of this intellectual calamity. He does not appreciate the importance of science for everyday living, and, under the influence of Marxism, believes that “real” power instead of ideas is shaping history.

    “Anti-Marxism” caused outrage among the Marxists. What was Mises’s sin? First, he had dared criticize the great master with a penetrating analysis of the incurable shortcomings of Marx’s theory of class struggle. Second, he had again contended that from an economic point of view Marxist socialism was not essentially different from the various new brands of national socialism that had begun to spring up in the 1920s, mostly in reaction against Marxist movements. Thus a fraction of Italian socialists, who rejected the teachings of Marx and called themselves “Fascists,” rose to power under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. There was also a movement of non-Marxist “National Socialists” in Germany. The father of this movement was Friedrich Naumann who, by a strange coincidence, later came to be regarded as the godfather of twentieth-century German liberalism. The leader of the National Socialists from the 1920s until their bitter end was, of course, Adolf Hitler.

    Marxist socialists vociferously object to being classified under the same heading that includes Fascist Socialists and National Socialists. But as Mises showed, all distinctions between these groups are on the surface. Economically, they are united.

    *  *  *
    Excerpted with minor revision from Mises: Last Knight of Liberalism 

  • Mapping The Countries Shutting Down The Internet The Most

    With President Trump raising the threat rhetoric over conservative bias among the giant US megatech firms, it is worth remembering that when it comes to curbing dissent and freedom of expression, some governments take the drastic step of shutting down the internet.

    Across the world, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, internet shutdowns and deliberate slowdowns are becoming more common and they generally occur when someone (usually a government) intentionally disrupts the internet or mobile apps to control what people do or say.

    According to Access Now data reported by Vice News, India has the most shutdowns of any country by a huge distance – 154 between January 2016 and May 2018. By comparison, second-placed Pakistan only had 19 shutdowns during the same period.

    Infographic: The Countries Shutting Down The Internet The Most | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    In many countries, flicking the off switch on the internet is a preemptive or reactive measure in response to mass or potential unrest.

    Egypt’s 2011 revolution and the failed Turkish military coup of 2016 are prime examples.

    This is also true in India to a certain extent where internet access is cut off due to political turmoil, protests and military operations.

    Shutdowns are even known to occur in certain regions to prevent cheating during examinations. Recent cases include a 45-day internet shutdown in Darjeeling in West Bengal due to political demonstrations and protests from activists seeking a separate state while Nawada in Bihar experienced a 40-day shutdown due to communal clashes.

    Given how important the internet has become, limiting access to it can have financial consequences. In India, the huge number of shutdowns and their length, are getting very expensive. A report by The Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), found that 16,315 hours of intentional internet downtime between 2012 and 2017 has cost the Indian economy $3.04 billion.

  • Iran Sanctions, Emerging Markets, And The End Of Dollar Dominance

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

    The trade war is a rather strange and bewildering affair if you do not understand the underlying goal behind it. If you think that the goal is to balance the trade deficit and provide a more amicable deal for U.S. producers on the global market, then you are probably finding yourself either confused, or operating on blind faith that the details will work themselves out.

    Case in point, the latest reports that the U.S. trade deficit is now on track to hit 10-year highs, after a 7% increase in June. This is the exact opposite of what was supposed to happen when tariffs were initiated. In fact, I recall much talk in alternative media circles claiming that the mere threat of tariffs would frighten foreign exporters into balancing trade on their own. Obviously this has not been the case.

    Rumors of China committing to trade talks or “folding” under the pressure have been repeatedly proven false. Though stock markets seem to enjoy such headlines, tangible positive results are non-existent. While the world is mostly focused on China’s reactions, sanctions against other nations are continuing for reasons that are difficult to comprehend.

    Sanctions against Russia have been tightened in the wake of the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the UK, even though we still have yet to see any concrete evidence that Russia had anything to do with the attack.

    Sanctions against Iran have been reintroduced on the accusation that the Iranian government is engaged in secret nuclear weapons development. And again, we still haven’t seen any hard evidence that this is true.

    Such sanctions, based on hearsay, rumor and “classified” data that the public is never allowed to review, present what amounts to an economic fog of war. What appears to be a chaotic mess, however, could actually be a distraction from a greater scheme.

    I’m talking about what the IMF commonly refers to as the “global economic reset”. They tend to discuss it in vague fashion, but from what I have gathered from the IMF’s own documentation as well as what other major economic powers are calling for, this reset includes a path to de-dollarization. This means the end of the dollar as the world reserve currency, to be replaced with the SDR, a basket currency system controlled by the IMF.

    The Iran sanctions, in and of themselves, do not represent a trigger for a global dollar dump. Though, globalists within the IMF might prefer that the average person or economic analyst believe this possible. In this way, they avoid blame for the potential fiscal suffering that would result when the dollar is displaced and stagflationary consequences strike.

    A lot of dominoes have to be carefully and deliberately placed and knocked down in order for the dollar to lose its reserve status, but the process is well underway.

    The effects of sanctions on Iranian oil are a perfect example.

    Rather than creating a “multipolar world” as mainstream propaganda suggests, we are seeing even more global centralization in the face of the trade war. In recent news, five nations including Russia and Iran have signed an agreement on the Caspian Sea. The longtime dispute over the resource rich region has suddenly ended as tariffs disputed with the U.S. accelerate.

    Iran was initially reluctant to sign the deal, but its success now marks a milestone in Russia/Iran relations. To reiterate, two nations that have been sanctioned by the U.S. are now moving closer together for strategic and economic gain. But it doesn’t stop there.

    Europe has expressed a distaste for Iran sanctions and is slow to reduce its purchases of Iranian crude and natural gas. In the process, EU nations would lose one of their largest suppliers of energy.  Both France and Germany are considering the use of alternative payment systems in order to sidestep the US and continue trade with Iran.  This move falls in line with reports that Germany is moving away from the US dominated SWIFT payment network to the Chinese based CIPS.

    Natural gas is vital to Europe’s economy, including heating during winter months. Initially, before Iran’s export markets opened back up, the EU was heavily dependent on Russian natural gas and oil to meet its demand. With the threat of Iran sanctions set to return this November, guess which supplier is back in town.  Russia and Germany are set to sign an agreement on an oil pipeline called Nord Stream 2, which will increase Russian energy exports substantially. Donald Trump has attacked the proposal, claiming it makes Germany “a captive of the Russians”. This rhetoric, though, only seems to be hastening the process.

    I would note that sanctions against Iran are the likely cause of elevated support in Europe for closer economic ties to Russia. Once again, we see the world moving closer together in centralization while the U.S. is being systematically cut out.

    Iran has stated openly that it plans to defy U.S. sanctions and this defiance has been met with support not only from Russia, but also China. The Asian export and import powerhouse, already embroiled in a trade war with the U.S., has stated it will not cut Iranian crude imports, and has even suggested removing the dollar as the trade mechanism for oil purchases.

    The Iran issue is igniting at an interesting time.

    Emerging market economies are facing considerable pressure as the Federal Reserve continues its interest rate hikes and balance sheet cuts in the name of fiscal tightening to combat “inflation”. As I have mentioned in past articles, U.S. banks and corporations were not the only recipients of Fed bailouts, QE and overnight loans. According to the initial TARP bailout audit, which only gives us a small glimpse into the amount of fiat pumped into the global system by the Fed, trillions of dollars were injected into foreign banks and companies.

    Emerging market countries became addicted to Fed liquidity over the past decade, using no-cost loans and the weakened dollar to prop up stock markets, bonds and their own currencies. They were the first to see a stock market rebound after bailouts were launched, and now they are the first to see their stock markets plunge as the Fed removes the punch bowl. Emerging market equities have recently suffered an approximate 15% drop as dollar liquidity dries up.

    The trade wars have provided perfect cover, distracting the public from the fact that without constant and expanding money creation by the Federal Reserve, assets around the world are plunging in value.

    This imbalance in market declines has fooled mainstream analysts, who are claiming it as evidence that Trump’s trade war is “working” and that trade opponents will soon capitulate. In reality, the reverse is more likely true.

    As we have seen with Iranian oil, emerging economies are not rushing to placate the U.S. And even European nations like Germany are seeking alternatives that are out of line with U.S. wishes. India has complained openly that the Fed’s balance sheet cuts and interest rate hikes will cause severe economic instability. Though foreign banks still hold trillions in dollars overseas, dollar liquidity has become a major psychological factor.  Beyond this, it is the higher COST of dollar based loans due to rising interest rates which mainstream analysts seem to be ignoring.  Debt already accumulated by emerging market banks is set to become much more expensive, and this is likely the trigger behind stock volatility in much of the developing world at this time.  The more expensive debt is, the less international banks and foreign central banks will be borrowing in order to prop up stocks in those regions.

    When an addict is unable to get the drug he desires from his traditional source, he will look for alternative sources. Meaning, emerging markets are going to seek out other options to replace the dollar by necessity.

    One might wonder if the Fed is aware that they are creating the very conditions that will cause the demise of the dollar. And the answer is yes – they are perfectly aware. Jerome Powell admitted in October 2012 that tightening of QE and higher interest rates could cause severe fiscal crisis. Today, Powell is the Fed chairman, and he is pursuing the very actions he warned about in 2012. If this does not tell you that the Fed is a deliberate saboteur of our system, then I don’t know what does.

    We commonly focus on the consequences of Fed policies within America, but rarely consider how the Fed’s actions might hit foreign markets, and then circle around like a boomerang to hit the U.S.

    We know that higher interest rates will eventually crush corporate stock buybacks, which have kept U.S. stock markets in an artificial bull market for years.  August is known as the most aggressive month for stock buybacks and this is reflected so far in the recent market rally. But, corporations are already weighted with historic levels of debt not seen since the Lehman crisis, and higher rates will drag them down into even deeper waters. Though, with emerging markets, we see the threat of something far more damaging – the end of the dollar as world reserve.

    The consequences? It is possible, though perhaps unprecedented, that the dollar index will decline even while dollar liquidity is being cut. Meaning, severe price inflation as foreign holders of dollars dump them back into U.S. markets as they turn to a basket-based monetary system.

    This would likely lead to an explosion in gold prices, but beyond that, an explosion in most commodity prices for Americans. Global banks are more than happy to initiate their “reset” in this manner, as Trump’s trade wars can be used as the perfect cover for any pain that is felt during the transition.

    If prices do indeed spike and stocks plummet, tariffs will be blamed instead of the central bankers. When enough fear has been induced in the populace, the IMF and its banker patrons can “ride to the rescue” with the same SDR-based basket system that China and Russia have been calling for as a replacement for dollar hegemony.

    In this scenario, America is painted as the bumbling villain that gets what he deserves, while the world is saved from the edge of destruction by the very banking elites that created the catastrophe in the first place.

    *  *  *

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  • Sex Doll Brothel Craze Hits Toronto At $80 A Whack

    Canadian men who would prefer the non-alcoholic beer of whore houses will be able to dip their wicks at North America’s first sex-doll brothel in North America, so they claim. 

    Aura Dolls will open in a Toronto strip mall next month, advertising the “world’s most beautiful silicone ladies” which can help you explore “any fantasy or fetish you desire without judgement or shame bringing the ultimate sexual experience*.” 

    Will you choose Anna – their “Busty, Romantic and Spontaneous” doll, Erika – who’s “Young, Gorgeous and Sweet,” or Scarlett – the “Absolute American Dream”? And don’t worry, it’s not cheating if it’s an inanimate polymer-wrapped metal frame that’ll let you do “that thing” you’ve always wanted to try.  

    And for those concerned about sharing dick-space with thousands of other doll-johns, fear not – these girls are sanitized (though condoms are still recommended, possibly at the request of “housekeeping”). 

    Our dolls are thoroughly sanitized to meet our high expectations. We take our clients health and safety extremely serious and each sanitation staff has been trained excessively through our industry developed routine to ensure the maximum wellbeing of our clients. The use of condoms are still highly recommend.

    A 30-minute romp with the “girl” of your choice will set you back $80 Canadian, or $62 USD. Aura Dolls even offers two dolls for up to four hours for the low cost of  $960.00 ($742 USD). Imagine that. 

    Despite Aura’s claim to be the first sex-doll brothel in North America, Toronto’s “Kinky Dolls” says they’re actually the first – offering synthetic companions which are “ready for you in every position you would choose, They Lubed warm [sic] and ready to play.” For those seeking a bargain, however, you will be sadly disappointed. Just like Aura, Kinky Dolls is also $80 for 30 minutes of pure silicone ecstasy – though they do offer an outcall service for $250 an hour which we imagine includes some guy who waits in a van for you to have your way with their wares.

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    *Interracial midget enthusiasts may be sadly disappointed

  • Child Abuse Charges Dropped Against New Mexico "Jihadis" After Local DA Screws Up

    Thanks to an error by the Taos, New Mexico District Attorney’s office, 11 counts of felony child abuse charges against three of the five suspects who ran a New Mexico “Jihadi” compound where a dead child was found were dropped on Wednesday. 

    Photo: Allison Martinez

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    After Judge Sarah Backus recused herself from the case, District Judge Emilio Chavez was forced to drop the charges against Lucas Morton, Subhanna Wahhaj and Hujrah Wahhaj after the state failed to indict them within a 10-day window, forcing the frustrated judge to admonish the DA for placing him in such a position. 

    “The rule for dismissal without prejudice reads if the preliminary hearing is not held within the time of this rule, the court shall dismiss the case without prejudice and discharge the defendants,” Judge Emilio Chavez said. 

    Meanwhile, the DA didn’t even show up for the hearing. 

    Another Taos County judge called out the DA for failing to even schedule a preliminary hearing in the case. 

    “There was no excuse and no reason why the District Attorney’s office could not have requested these preliminary hearings. I don’t know if they are overworked or they don’t have enough people at their office. I don’t see the district attorney here or the chief deputy district attorney, but it is disturbing to me that the district attorney would put this court in that kind of a situation,” said Judge Jeff McCelroy.

    He added that the case was “a situation where the court is being caught between very public, very shocking information and a complete failure to follow proper procedures in prosecuting the case.”

    New charges filed

    While the original 11 counts were dropped, new child abuse charges were filed agains defendants Jany Leveille and Siraj Wahhaj – the son of a famous New York Imam, in connection with the death of 3-yaer-old Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj, according to Siraj Wahhaj’s attorney, Thomas Clark. The two will remain in jail until next week, when prosecutors will argue they should stay behind bars until trial, at which point the DA’s office can refile the child abuse charges against all five suspects for neglect of the eleven surviving children. 

    They face one count each of intentional abuse of a child resulting in death and conspiracy to commit intentional abuse of a child resulting in death (child under 12). Not-guilty pleas were entered by the court on each defendant’s behalf. –KTLA

    Police raided the compound on August 3 in search of Abdul-Ghani after his mother in Georgia said he had been kidnapped and missing for over eight months.  

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  • Coffin Homes To Industrial Squatting: Hong Kong's Insane Housing Prices Push Millennials To Break The Law

    Millennials in the world’s priciest home market are going to extremes to ensure a simple roof over their heads don’t eat up the entirety of their income. 

    With the average price of used homes in Hong Kong hitting record levels over the past year —  at $1.28 million in the first quarter of 2018 — and with the median home costing 19.4 times more than median annual pre-tax household income, millennials are increasingly willing to illegally squat in industrial buildings just to stay in one of the most population dense cosmopolitan centers on earth (one now-demolished neighborhood, for example, had a density of well over 1 million people per square kilometer). 

    A new report in Bloomberg chronicles just how far affordable home-seekers are willing to go: “The rents nowadays are very unreasonable,” 32-year-old photographer Wah Lee told Bloomberg. “There’s no way for me to afford those residential units.”

    Hong Kong apartments are on average the smallest and priciest in the world. 

    Lee is one of perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 or more people now living in an industrial building in order to afford living in the city (an estimated 12,000 people lived in industrial buildings in 2016, according to the Society for Community Organization, and that number has rapidly grown).

    The 32-year old told Bloomberg he pays HK$11,000 (or US$1,400) monthly, which is less than half what a typical residential unit in the area goes for.

    He shares the building with others renting in a legally ambiguous situation that the city would deem squatting, and has as neighbors a commercial meat roasting kitchen and an herbal-oil company.

    The risks and discomforts Lee and others are willing to face to save on rent include  “irritations such as rust-tainted water and intermittent blackouts, there’s one major drawback: Such living arrangements are illegal.”

    Residential use use of industrial buildings is officially banned and recently there’s been a proposal adding criminal sanctions for violators, something which in years past authorities have perhaps turned a blind eye to.

    However, the Bloomberg report notes that this changed after a recent tragedy: “Those risks were highlighted when a fire ripped through a unit in an industrial building in the New Territories in August last year, killing three people.” It was discovered the building had 17 illegal subdivided units on the floor where the fire occurred. 

    Image via Hong Kong Business

    Experts say that unlike New York or San Francisco, where high prices are due largely to a simple lack of building space and high demand, Hong Kong’s soaring prices are driven by outdated land use laws and horribly short-sighted management, as well as outside wealthy speculators and developers competing to outbid each other. 

    A recent Vox report describing the forces at play behind the ridiculously fast-surging land and property prices that keep 75.6 percent of non-built-up areas from being used.

    But while some experiment with “nano apartments” — which involves turning unlikely spaces like drainpipes into tiny living units — or 40 sq.ft. “cubicle” apartments and even what are dubbed “coffin homes”, squatting in an industrial building brings a level free movement and open-air unparalleled for the price. 

    The “Coffin Home” option which has been on the rise in Hong Kong. Via Boing Boing

    Bloomberg describes: “Along with a small kitchen and private bathroom, the 1,000-square-foot apartment features high ceilings and large windows, unusual by the standards of Hong Kong’s often poky apartments.”

    The government has ordered industrial building owners to push tenants out while at the same time currently reviewing 18 options  to increase land supply; however, legalizing living in industrial buildings isn’t one of the options. 

    While people out of desperation seek “coffin homes” on the one hand, and airy but riskier (safety-wise) industrial squatting units on the other, here’s the central irony as express recently in the Nikkei Asia Review: While real estate in Hong Kong accounts for nearly 20% of its gross domestic product, the combined market capitalization of the top four local real estate companies has increased by some $4.52 billion over the past year.

    So while thousands live in warehouses and sometimes literal cages, the trend remains that: Continuously rising property prices have shored up the Hong Kong economy and brought prosperity to the autonomous Chinese territory.

  • PCR: According To The New York Times, Putin Rules America

    Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

    When I first read this, I thought it was a caricature of fake news. Then I realized it was a New York Times article, and being fairly certain that the arrogant presstitute organization was not taking the piss out of itself, as it is one of the main purveyors of fake news, I found the conclusion unavoidable that Julian E. Barnes and Matthew Rosenberg were so tightly bound inside The Matrix that they might actually believe the nonsense that they wrote.

    Here is an overview of the fantasy that the two presstitutes have penned in the New York Times:

    US intelligence (sic) had “informants close to President Vladimir V. Putin and in the Kremlin” who provided “urgent and explicit warnings about Russia’s intentions to try to tip the [2016] American presidential election.”

    The NYT presstitutes do not say why nothing was done by US intelligence which had inside information from the Kremlin itself that Putin was about to steal for Trump the US election. Certainly CIA Director Brennan and FBI Director Comey, both of whom are Hillary’s allies, would not have approved of Putin stealing the election for Trump.

    But there is no criticism from the NY Times’ presstitutes for this massive intelligence failure to act to prevent Putin from stealing the election from Hillary. Brennan and Comey sat on their hands and permitted Putin to steal the election for Trump. So, who is really guilty of “Russiagate?”

    Obviously, this NY Times article is a hoax written by imbeciles. The claim that the Putin/Trump conspiracy was leaked to US intelligence from inside the Kremlin is an invention to help to provide a background history in an effort to boost the credibility of the Russiagate orchestation that is directed against President Trump. The presstitutes in their effort to boost Russiagate’s credibility inadvertently portrayed US intelligence as negligent in its duty.

    Barnes and Rosenberg say that Putin is continuing with his dirty tricks, but the Russian traitors inside the Kremlin within Putin’s close circles “have gone silent,” depriving us of information about how the Russians are going to steal the midterm elections. The presstitutes suggest that Washington’s informers inside Putin’s government have “gone to ground” to avoid being murdered “like the poisoning in March in Britain of a former Russian intelligence officer that utilized a rare Russian-made nerve agent.”

    It is difficult to know what to make of presstitutes like Barnes and Rosenberg and the NYTimes who refuse to acknowledge the fact that there has been zero evidence produced that supports the alleged attack on the Skirpals, both of whom suvived a “deadly nerve agent.” There is no evidence whatsoever that the alleged deadly nerve agent was made in Russia, and there is no explanation why the deadly nerve agent was not deadly. The only possible conclusion from the total absence of any evidence is that no such attack occurred. It is just another propaganda hoax against Russia.

    More proof that there was no such attack is provided by the refusal of the British government to share its investigation, if there actually was an investigation, with anyone, not even with the accused Russians. Accusations without a shred of evidence are not a good basis for a trusting relationship with a nuclear power.

    Barnes and Rosenberg suggest that the House Intelligence Committee, encouraged by President Trump, chilled intelligence collection by “outing an FBI informant,” leaving Washington in the dark about Putin’s precise intentions.

    No, this is not a conspiracy story from the National Inquirer, now a more reliable newspaper than the New York Times. This utter nonsense is published in the New York Times, “the newspaper of record.” What a false record historians are going to have.

    What are the NYTimes’ sources for this fantasy? The presstitute organization cannot tell us.

    “American intelligence agencies have not been able to say precisely what are Mr. Putin’s intentions: He could be trying to tilt the midterm elections, simply sow chaos or generally undermine trust in the democratic process.”

    But the NYTimes knows that Putin is up to something, because “senior intelligence officials, including Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, have warned that Russians are intent on subverting American democratic institutions.”

    So here we have Trump’s own appointment, Dan Coats, undermining Trump’s effort to normalize relations with Russia. Who among Trump’s advisors advised him to appoint a Russiaphobic moron like Dan Coats? If Trump had any sense, he would fire both of them.

    Washington routinely subverts democratic institutions in other countries, such as Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Iran, Ukraine, Indonesia. Read Stephen Kinser’s The Brothers for a number of examples.

    Washington finances opposition candidates who are bought and paid for by Washington and uses various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) financed by the National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros, the International Republican Institute, and many other front groups for subversion of countries “uncooperative with Washington” in order to install a Washington puppet. Washington even has NGOs operating in Russia where they are even permitted by the Russian government to own newspapers. All anti-Putin protests are organized by Washington using the NGOs that Washington funds.

    Russia, however, has no NGOs operating in the US, and, unlike Israel, does not own the US Congress and White House. So how exactly, Director of National Intelligence (sic) Dan Coats, are the Russians going to subvert “American democratic institutions?”

    Don’t expect an answer.

    Try to understand the insults to Trump voters of the charge that they are puppets at the end of Putin’s string: Trump voters are portrayed as morons who are not capable of thinking for themselves. If they were, they would have voted for Hillary so that America could demonstrate its escape from misogyny and male domination by electing its First Woman President on the heels of the First Half-Black President. Instead the minds of American voters were warped by Putin. The $100,000 dollars spent by a Russian Internet company trying to attract advertisers prevailed over the multi-billion dollars spent by the Democrats and Republicans and by American economic interests focused on capturing the government for their agendas. The Russian plot is so powerful that a dollar spent by Russia is thousands of times more powerful than a dollar spent by Wall Street, the military/security compex, George Soros, Sheldon Adelson, etc., and so on.

    In the official story, no American voted for Trump because his/her job was sent to Asia or Mexico by global US corporations pursuing high monetary rewards for executives and shareholders at the expense of the American work force. The “Trump Deplorables” voted for Trump because they were brainwashed by a few Russian Internet ads directed at maximizing clicks in order to attract advertisers.

    No one voted for Trump because their son and daughter, on whose education the family used up its savings, acquired student loan debts and possibly a second mortgage, can only find a job as a waitress and bartender because the jobs for which they prepared at great expense are handed over to lowly paid foreigners in order that shareholders can receive large capital gains and a handful of corporate executives can receive multimillion dollar bonuses for raising profits by closing down America’s vaunted “opportunity society. Today Americans have debts and no opportunities.

    Assuming you have some sense and some ability to think independently of the lies that are fed to you daily, can you possibly believe that Americans voted for Trump because Putin tricked them with Internet ads that are unlikely to have been seen by as many as one percent of voters?

    Can you possibly believe that the loss of Trump voters’ jobs, their prospects, their children’s prospects, their home, their declining living standards, the insults heaped upon Americans by Hillary’s Democratic Party – “Trump deplorables,” “white male oppressors,” “Russia’s Fifth Column,” “misogynists,” “racists,” “homophobic,” “gun nuts” – had no impact on why Americans voted for Trump? How could any sentient American believe that Putin is the source of their problems?

    The NY Times pressitutes report without any evidence alleged efforts of Russia to create chaos in America. I could not stop laughing. There is no Russian National Endowment for Democracy operating in the US. There is no Russian funded George Soros operating in America. There are no Russian funded Non-Governmental Organizations operating in America. Yet Russis is full of Washington-funded organizations doing everything in their power to sow chaos in Russia.

    Why isn’t this most obvious of all truths reported in the NY Times?

    The answer is that no truth whatsoever, not even a tiny morsel, fits the fabricated explanations in which the insouciant Western peoples live. Everywhere in the Western World people are shielded from reality by controlled explanations handed down to them by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, BBC, et. al, and the UK, EU, Canadian, and Australian newspapers, every one of which is a propagandist for American hegemony.

    A few years ago a famous philosopher concluded that the world lives in a constructed virtual reality. At the time I thought he was crazy, but I have learned that he is correct. The entire world—even the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians—live in a world shaped by American propaganda. The truth is that a country, the USA, which endorses freedom of determination, is in fact determined to control the world and smother all self-determination. Every country, whether Russia, China, Syria, Iran, India, Turkey, North Korea, Venezuela, that resists Washington’s hegemony is declared by Washington to be “a threat to the international order.”

    The “international order” is Washington’s order. The “International Order” is Washinton’s hegemony over the word. Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, and now Turkey and India are threats to “international order” because they do not accept Washington’s hegemony.

    Barnes and Rosenberg report that Coats is concerned about Russia’s effort to “weaken and divide the United States.” There is no sign of Russia doing any such thing, and there is no explanation of how Putin conducts “a broad chaos campaign to undermine faith in American democracy.” If the Director of National Intelligence is concerned about the forces of division in America, he should turn his attention to the divisive consequences of the Democratic Party’s Identity Politics, to ANTIFA, to the divisive consequences of the fabricated attack on President Trump by the military/security complex and presstitute media. Indeed, the constant drumbeat of lies from the New York Times alone has caused far move divisiveness than anything Russia is alleged to have done.

    Divisiveness is what happens when the military/security complex and its media pimps turn on a President for threatening their budget by proposing peace with the enemy that they have constructed in order to justify their power and profit. It is this divisiveness that the United States is experiencing.

  • China Unveils "Breakthrough" In Electromagnetic Rocket Technology

    Chinese state media has revealed a technological breakthrough in electromagnetic rocket design amid US regional security concerns in North Korea and the South China Sea. The new and more powerful electromagnetic rocket uses catapult rocket artillery technology rendering the weapon more powerful than any conventional artillery in the world.

    The Global Times reported that Han Junli, a research fellow at a Beijing-based research center under the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), had been spearheading the development of the novel electromagnetic rocket artillery, inspired by Ma Weiming, a research fellow of the Chinese Academy of Engineering dubbed “the father of the Chinese electromagnetic catapult.”

    According to rumors via The Manila Times, this technology could be mounted on future Chinese aircraft carriers to launch fighters and more massive fixed-wing planes.

    Han reportedly mentioned a military skirmish that occurred in the dangerous border region on a plateau in Southwest China, where he discussed the need with government officials for future deployment of the new rocket technology.

    “China has large plateau and mountainous areas where rocket artillery could destroy invading forces from hundreds of kilometers away without soldiers crossing mountains,” Han said.

    Song Zhongping, a military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times earlier this month that conventional artillery uses powder and does not perform well at high altitudes because of the lack of oxygen.

    “Artillery that uses an electromagnetic catapult will not need to face the same problem. This makes it very valuable in warfare on plateaus.”

    The military expert said electromagnetic rocket artillery could easily reach targets more than 200 kilometers (124 miles) away at a cheap cost per round.

    The Global Times said Han’s research had made a significant technological breakthrough in electromagnetic catapult technology that it is now becoming a reality.

    The use of electromagnetic catapult for rocket artillery is an unprecedented innovation and could be able to rival Western technology.

    “China needs to not only develop weapon concepts that are already available to the world but also explore new, not-yet-present weapons to lead the frontier of technology development,” Song added.

    Rocket artillery is not the only Chinese weaponry harnessing the power of electromagnetism. Earlier this year, China decided to mount a giant railgun onto a military vessel. PLA and the US Army are the only militaries to have successfully fired railguns in repetitive experiments.

    Railguns can fire metal projectiles at extreme high-speeds and are expected to be mounted on China’s next-generation 10,000-ton Type 055 missile cruiser in the next several years.

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Aug 29

Today’s News 29th August 2018

  • UAE Buys World's Largest Rocket Launcher "Jobaria" From Turkey

    One of the leading firms in the Turkish defense industry, Roketsan, set a record with world’s largest rocket artillery, capable of launching hundreds of rockets in 2 minutes from a single military vehicle, the company announced on Saturday.

    Jobaria, a Multiple Cradle Launcher (MCL), was developed by Roketsan for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has achieved legend status with Guinness World Records for the world’s largest rocket artillery in terms of the number of barrels, the company said in a statement sent to journalists.

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    The UAE requested the large rocket artillery battery on one vehicle since its military is phasing out the older, BM-21 Grads, a Soviet truck-mounted 122 mm multiple rocket launcher.

    The MCL has a significant advantage over the BM-21 Grads; it replaces the use of six launcher vehicles which require a team of over 30 troops, whereas the MCL only needs a group of three to operate and launch the same number of rockets (240).

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    The system has four rocket launchers attached to the trailer each carrying sixty 122mm rockets. It can fire 240 Roketsan 122mm T-122 Sakarya rockets fitted with a high-explosive warhead at targets with a maximum range of around 37 kilometers (23 miles). All missiles can be fired in under two minutes, making the rate of fire two rounds per second. After launching the rockets, a support team can reload the missile system in about 30 minutes.

    Established in 1988, Roketsan started production in 1992 under the program of the “Stinger European Joint Production Project.” In the last several decades, the firm has manufactured air defense systems, precision-guided missiles, ballistic protection solutions, and an array of turnkey land systems.

    While it is still unclear why the UAE would need the world’s most massive rocket launcher, perhaps, the missile system may find a new home in the Saudi-led alliance against Yemen. There is also another possibility the country is gearing up for conflict in the Strait of Hormuz, as Washington and Tehran bicker over who controls the strait between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. In any case, war is coming, and the world’s largest rocket launcher will be used.

  • The Other Side Of John McCain

    Authored by Max Blumenthal via Consortium News,

    If the paeans to McCain by diverse political climbers seems detached from reality, it’s because they reflect the elite view of U.S. military interventions as a chess game, with the millions killed by unprovoked aggression mere statistics.

    As the Cold War entered its final act in 1985, journalist Helena Cobban participated in an academic conference at an upscale resort near Tucson, Arizona, on U.S.-Soviet interactions in the Middle East. When she attended what was listed as the “Gala Dinner with keynote speech”, she quickly learned that the virtual theme of the evening was, “Adopt a Muj.”

    “I remember mingling with all of these wealthy Republican women from the Phoenix suburbs and being asked, ‘Have you adopted a muj?” Cobban told me. “Each one had pledged money to sponsor a member of the Afghan mujahedin in the name of beating the communists. Some were even seated at the event next to their personal ‘muj.’”

    The keynote speaker of the evening, according to Cobban, was a hard-charging freshman member of Congress named John McCain.

    During the Vietnam war, McCain had been captured by the North Vietnamese Army after being shot down on his way to bomb a civilian lightbulb factory. He spent two years in solitary confinement and underwent torture that left him with crippling injuries. McCain returned from the war with a deep, abiding loathing of his former captors, remarking as late as 2000, “I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.” After he was criticized for the racist remark, McCain refused to apologize. “I was referring to my prison guards,” he said, “and I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend some people because of the beating and torture of my friends.”

    ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison where McCain was tortured. (Wikimedia Commons)

    McCain’s visceral resentment informed his vocal support for the mujahedin as well as the right-wing contra death squads in Central America — any proxy group sworn to the destruction of communist governments.

    So committed was McCain to the anti-communist cause that in the mid-1980s he had joinedthe advisory board of the United States Council for World Freedom, the American affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, a former leader of WACL’s British chapter who had turned against the group in 1974, described the organization as “a collection of Nazis, fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists, and corrupt self-seekers. It has evolved into an anti-Semitic international.”

    Joining McCain in the organization were notables such as Jaroslav Stetsko, the Croatian Nazi collaborator who helped oversee the extermination of 7,000 Jews in 1941; the brutal Argentinian former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla; and Guatemalan death squad leader Mario Sandoval Alarcon. Then-President Ronald Reagan honored the group for playing“a leadership role in drawing attention to the gallant struggle now being waged by the true freedom fighters of our day.”

    Being Lauded as a Hero

    On the occasion of his death, McCain is being honored in much the same way — as a patriotic hero and freedom fighter for democracy. A stream of hagiographies is pouring forth from the Beltway press corps that he described as his true political base. Among McCain’s most enthusiastic groupies is CNN’s Jake Tapper, whom he chose as his personal stenographer for a 2000 trip to Vietnam. When the former CNN host Howard Kurtz asked Tapper in February, 2000, “When you’re on the [campaign] bus, do you make a conscious effort not to fall under the magical McCain spell?”

    “Oh, you can’t. You become like Patty Hearst when the SLA took her,” Tapper joked in reply.

    Ocasio-Cortez: Called McCain ‘an unparalleled example of human decency.’

    But the late senator has also been treated to gratuitous tributes from an array of prominent liberals, from George Soros to his soft power-pushing client, Ken Roth, along with three fellow directors of Human Rights Watch and “democratic socialist” celebrity Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who hailed McCain as “an unparalleled example of human decency.” Rep. John Lewis, the favorite civil rights symbol of the Beltway political class, weighed in as well to memorialize McCain as a “warrior for peace.”

    If the paeans to McCain by this diverse cast of political climbers and Davos denizens seemed detached from reality, that’s because they perfectly reflected the elite view of American military interventions as akin to a game of chess, and the millions of dead left in the wake of the West’s unprovoked aggression as mere statistics.

    There were few figures in recent American life who dedicated themselves so personally to the perpetuation of war and empire as McCain. But in Washington, the most defining aspect of his career was studiously overlooked, or waved away as the trivial idiosyncrasy of a noble servant who nonetheless deserved everyone’s reverence.

    McCain did not simply thunder for every major intervention of the post-Cold War era from the Senate floor, while pushing for sanctions and assorted campaigns of subterfuge on the side. He was uniquely ruthless when it came to advancing imperial goals, barnstorming from one conflict zones to another to personally recruit far-right fanatics as American proxies.

    In Libya and Syria, he cultivated affiliates of Al Qaeda as allies, and in Ukraine, McCain courted actual, sig-heiling neo-Nazis.

    While McCain’s Senate office functioned as a clubhouse for arms industry lobbyists and neocon operatives, his fascistic allies waged a campaign of human devastation that will continue until long after the flowers dry up on his grave.

    American media may have sought to bury this legacy with the senator’s body, but it is what much of the outside world will remember him for.

    ‘They are Not al-Qaeda’

    McCain with Abdelhakim Belhaj, leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a former Al Qaeda affiliate.

    When a violent insurgency swept through Libya in 2011, McCain parachuted into the country to meet with leaders of the main insurgent outfit, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), battling the government of Moamar Gaddafi. His goal was to make kosher this band of hardline Islamists in the eyes of the Obama administration, which was considering a military intervention at the time.

    What happened next is well documented, though it is scarcely discussed by a Washington political class that depended on the Benghazi charade to deflect from the real scandal of Libya’s societal destruction. Gaddafi’s motorcade was attacked by NATO jets, enabling a band of LIFG fighters to capture him, sodomize him with a bayonet, then murder him and leave his body to rot in a butcher shop in Misrata while rebel fanboys snapped cellphone selfies of his fetid corpse.

    A slaughter of Black citizens of Libya by the racist sectarian militias recruited by McCain immediately followed the killing of the pan-African leader. ISIS took over Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte while Belhaj’s militia took control of Tripoli, and a war of the warlords began. Just as Gaddafi had warned, the ruined country became a staging ground for migrant smugglers on the Mediterranean, fueling the rise of the far-right across Europe and enabling the return of slavery to Africa.

    Many might describe Libya as a failed state, but it also represents a successful realization of the vision McCain and his allies have advanced on the global stage.

    Following the NATO-orchestrated murder of Libya’s leader, McCain tweeted, “Qaddafi on his way out, Bashar al Assad is next.”

    McCain’s Syrian Boondoggle

    Like Libya, Syria had resisted aligning with the West and was suddenly confronted with a Salafi-jihadi insurgency armed by the CIA. Once again, McCain made it his personal duty to market Islamist insurgents to America as a cross between the Minutemen and the Freedom Riders of the civil rights era. To do so, he took under his wing a youthful DC-based Syria-American operative named Mouaz Moustafa who had been a consultant to the Libyan Transitional Council during the run-up to the NATO invasion.

    In May 2013, Moustafa convinced McCain to take an illegal trip across the Syrian border and meet some freedom fighters. An Israeli millionaire named Moti Kahana who coordinated efforts between the Syrian opposition and the Israeli military through his NGO, Amaliah, claimed to have “financed the opposition group which took senator John McCain to visit war-torn Syria.”

    “This could be like his Benghazi moment,” Moustafa remarked excitedly in a scene from a documentary, “Red Lines,” that depicted his efforts for regime change. “[McCain] went to Benghazi, he came back, we bombed.”

    During his brief excursion into Syria, McCain met with a group of CIA-backed insurgents and blessed their struggle. “The senator wanted to assure the Free Syrian Army that the American people support their cry for freedom, support their revolution,” Moustafa said in an interview with CNN. McCain’s office promptly released a photo showing the senatorposing beside a beaming Moustafa and two grim-looking gunmen.

    Days later, the men were named by the Lebanese Daily Star as Mohammad Nour and Abu Ibrahim. Both had been implicated in the kidnapping a year prior of 11 Shia pilgrims, and were identified by one of the survivors. McCain and Moustafa returned to the U.S. the targets of mockery from Daily Show host John Stewart and the subject of harshly critical reports from across the media spectrum. At a town hall in Arizona, McCain was berated by constituents, including Jumana Hadid, a Syrian Christian woman who warned that the sectarian militants he had cozied up to threatened her community with genocide.

    McCain with then-FSA commander Salam Idriss, an insurgent later exposed for kidnapping Shia pilgrims.

    But McCain pressed ahead anyway. On Capitol Hill, he introduced another shady young operative into his interventionist theater. Named Elizabeth O’Bagy, she was a fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, an arms industry-funded think tank directed by Kimberly Kagan of the neoconservative Kagan clan. Behind the scenes, O’Bagy was consulting for Moustafa at his Syrian Emergency Task Force, a clear conflict of interest that her top Senate patron was well aware of. Before the Senate, McCain cited a Wall Street Journal editorial by O’Bagy to support his assessment of the Syrian rebels as predominately “moderate,” and potentially Western-friendly.

    Days later, O’Bagy was exposed for faking her PhD in Arabic studies. As soon as the humiliated Kagan fired O’Bagy, the academic fraudster took another pass through the Beltway’s revolving door, striding into the halls of Congress as McCain’s newest foreign policy aide.

    McCain ultimately failed to see the Islamist “revolutionaries” he glad handled take control of Damascus. Syria’s government held on thanks to help from his mortal enemies in Tehran and Moscow, but not before a billion dollar CIA arm-and-equip operation helped spawn one of the worst refugee crises in post-war history. Luckily for McCain, there were other intrigues seeking his attention, and new bands of fanatical rogues in need of his blessing. Months after his Syrian boondoggle, the ornery militarist turned his attention to Ukraine, then in the throes of an upheaval stimulated by U.S. and EU-funded soft power NGO’s.

    Coddling the Neo-Nazis of Ukraine

    On December 14, 2013, McCain materialized in Kiev for a meeting with Oleh Tyanhbok, an unreconstructed fascist who had emerged as a top opposition leader. Tyanhbok had co-founded the fascist Social-National Party, a far-right political outfit that touted itself as the “last hope of the white race, of humankind as such.” No fan of Jews, he had complained that a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” had taken control of his country, and had been photographed throwing up a sieg heil Nazi salute during a speech.

    None of this apparently mattered to McCain. Nor did the scene of Right Sector neo-Nazis filling up Kiev’s Maidan Square while he appeared on stage to egg them on.

    “Ukraine will make Europe better and Europe will make Ukraine better!” McCain proclaimed to cheering throngs while Tyanhbok stood by his side. The only issue that mattered to him at the time was the refusal of Ukraine’s elected president to sign a European Union austerity plan, opting instead for an economic deal with Moscow.

    McCain met with Social-National Party co-founder Oleh Tyanhbok.

    McCain was so committed to replacing an independent-minded government with a NATO vassal that he even mulled a military assault on Kiev. “I do not see a military option and that is tragic,” McCain lamented in an interview about the crisis. Fortunately for him, regime change arrived soon after his appearance on the Maidan, and Tyanhbok’s allies rushed in to fill the void.

    By the end of the year, the Ukrainian military had become bogged down in a bloody trench war with pro-Russian, anti-coup separatists in the country’s east. A militia affiliated with the new government in Kiev called Dnipro-1 was accused by Amnesty International observers of blocking humanitarian aid into a separatist-held area, including food and clothing for the war torn population.

    Six months later, McCain appeared at Dnipro-1’s training base alongside Sen.’s Tom Cotton and John Barasso. “The people of my country are proud of your fight and your courage,” McCain told an assembly of soldiers from the militia. When he completed his remarks, the fighters belted out a World War II-era salute made famous by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators: “Glory to Ukraine!”

    Today, far-right nationalists occupy key posts in Ukraine’s pro-Western government. The speaker of its parliament isAndriy Parubiy, a co-founder with Tyanhbok of the Social-National Party and leader of the movement to honor World World Two-era Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera. On the cover of his 1998 manifesto, “View From The Right,” Parubiy appeared in a Nazi-style brown shirt with a pistol strapped to his waist. In June 2017, McCain and Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan welcomed Parubiy on Capitol Hill for what McCain called a “good meeting.” It was a shot in the arm for the fascist forces sweeping across Ukraine.

    McCain with Dnipro-1 militants on June 20, 2015

    The past months in Ukraine have seen a state sponsored neo-Nazi militia called C14 carrying out a pogromist rampage against Ukraine’s Roma population, the country’s parliament erecting an exhibition honoring Nazi collaborators, and the Ukrainian military formally approving the pro-Nazi “Glory to Ukraine” greeting as its own official salute.

    Ukraine is now the sick man of Europe, a perpetual aid case bogged down in an endless war in its east. In a testament to the country’s demise since its so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” the deeply unpopular President Petro Poroshenko has promised White House National Security Advisor John Bolton that his country — once a plentiful source of coal on par with Pennsylvania — will now purchase coal from the U.S. Once again, a regime change operation that generated a failing, fascistic state stands as one of McCain’s greatest triumphs.

    McCain’s history conjures up memory of one of the most inflammatory statements by Sarah Palin, another cretinous fanatic he foisted onto the world stage. During a characteristically rambling stump speech in October 2008, Palin accusedBarack Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” The line was dismissed as ridiculous and borderline slander, as it should have been. But looking back at McCain’s career, the accusation seems richly ironic.

    By any objective standard, it was McCain who had palled around with terrorists, and who wrested as much resources as he could from the American taxpayer to maximize their mayhem. Here’s hoping that the societies shattered by McCain’s proxies will someday rest in peace.

  • Visualizing World Arms Sales: US Vs Russia, 1950-Present

    Via MishTalk,

    Excellent video presentation by Will Geary, @wgeary, on US and Russia arms sales to the rest of the world.

    The U.S. and Russia are the world’s largest weapons dealers. Geary mapped the flows of arms exports leaving the U.S. and USSR/Russia from 1950 to 2017 to produce the fascinating video…

    Arms Sales: USA vs Russia from Will Geary on Vimeo.

    The underlying data comes from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Arms Transfers Database. Units are expressed in trend indicator values (TIV). Each dot on the map = one TIV. Visualization by Will Geary (@wgeary).

    This won’t end well.

  • As MSM & Hollywood Distract, US Government Quietly Prepares For Nuclear War

    Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com,

    The MSM (Mainstream Media) and Hollywood forms a conglomerated consortium of Marxists, Socialists, creepy-refugee professors from Woodstock, and wanna-be left-wing revolutionaries. They have two different paths. The MSM forces non-news down the throat of the public while decrying the true news in the alternative media.  Hollywood is shaping the formation of the public consciousness and forcing a paradigm shift (Overton window principle), a shift to the left through popular culture, film, television, and the music industry. Both of them have one end objective in mind: the dissolution of the United States, and the destruction of its borders, language, religions, culture, and society as a whole in all of its forms.

    You don’t receive news anymore from reporters or journalists. It is a collage of sensationalism coupled with reality TV shows, all sans morals or any form or semblance of decency. This has been repeated throughout history. The Visigoths were at the gates of Rome, yet her citizens would not drag themselves away from the chariot races to man the walls and the battlements. Now is the same, merely fast-forwarded. In all this, if you have not noticed, the U.S. is quietly assuming the same footing they did during the Cold War, and more.

    On 8/24/18, BuzzFeed News published an article by Dan Vergano entitled “The US Government is Updating its Nuclear Disaster Plans and They are Truly Terrifying.” I strongly recommend reading it.

    The article begins with this:

    “Amid concerns over North Korea, federal emergency managers are updating disaster plans to account for large nuclear detonations over the 60 largest US cities, according to a US Federal Emergency Management Agency official.  The shift away from planning for small nuclear devices that could be deployed by terrorists toward thermonuclear blasts arranged by “state actors” was discussed on [8/23/18]…”

    “The North Koreans have really changed the calculus…we really have to look at thermonuclear now.”

    “In response to an audience question, [FEMA Chief of Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Branch] said the agency has also considered scenarios where a nuclear bomb, a cyberattack, a coordinated electromagnetic pulse, and biological weapons all hit the US at the same time.”

    I have written numerous articles on the threat posed by North Korea, especially with regard to an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) strike against the United States. I did not arrive upon these assertions without research and study: the conclusions of such notables as Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, Former Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), and others of the (now-disbanded) Committee to Assess EMP Threat against the United States… their research provided a great deal for the basis of my assertions. I stand by what I wrote.

    We are in a difficult time currently in the world situational arena. Russia and China are strengthening their militaries, economies, and influence, and the reformative acts by President Trump may be too little and too late. The midterms may turn him into a tiger without the teeth to enable the passage of any laws. Even with the teeth…and current Republican control of the Senate and House, it has proven to be a battle between a combination of turncoats and fifth columnists that has slowed down the reforms considerably.

    Now the “conga line” of communists follows after smear tactics such as “Russiagate” and election conspiracy accusations, the endless “witch hunt” by Mueller, and the Stormy Daniels nonsense. All of these actions are taken to derail the President and deny a turnaround for the country after 8 years of Obama.

    With all of this in consideration, though, the threat of a nuclear war is real, and (as I’ve mentioned in the past) a first strike would be precipitated by an EMP attack. North Korea is the perfect source as an individual “aspirant” or with the prompting of the “state actors,” singly or in unison. The last sentence in the referenced article summarizes it simply yet eloquently: an attack would be multifaceted and simultaneous.

    The summit with North Korea was one of those George Bush Jr. moments, where he declared victory in Iraq a decade before the U.S. withdrew its forces. Everyone made fun of North Korea and said the game was over with the summit because Kim Jong-Un and the President shook hands.

    With the reassessment: nothing has changed, except North Korea has now gained time to prepare that it did not have before.

    The Russians and the Chinese have a major joint military exercise scheduled to commence on 9/11/18, in which for the first time drills will be conducted to include responses to nuclear attack. In addition, many nations are dumping their holdings in U.S. debt and there is a lot of volatility in the world, such as the Brexit actions, the trade status of Britain with the EU after it occurs, NATO instability, and the continuing influx of Muslims into Europe.

    Trouble usually arises in the midst of confusion or where one side assesses that the other is ripe to attack. The President was elected and the leadership redefined, but the country has not been extricated from the quagmire that Obama and his cronies (including such as McCain and Graham) placed it in. At such times and when beset by difficulties and a looming midterm election, a lack of policy is potentially worse than bad policy. The information from the referenced article is serious. Threats have not reemerged: in fact, they never left. The Potemkins of the MSM and Hollywood managed to screen them, yet the U.S. government is altering assessments and plans to address those threats, and the potential for a nuclear war is still very real.

  • Drone Wars Unleashed In Idlib Province?

    Authored by Sophie Mangal via Oriental Review,

    The current situation in the Syrian province of Idlib continues to alarm.

    Although the green buses brought to Idlib hundreds of militants from Aleppo, Deir-Ezzor, Eastern Ghouta, and other areas of the country, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) will be extremely difficult to resist the battle-hardened Assad’s Government army.

    In this regard, the radicals are trying to line up the entire population of the Idlib Governorate and take under control all the terror groups inside the province that are now at turf war among themselves. Also, terrorists learn the ropes of intimidation of the enemy trying to inflict damage without contact and entering a battle.

    Speaking of the population in the besieged province everything is more or less understandable. The civilians in Idlib do not belong to the militant families are robbed, raped, used as slaves, killed or forced to join terrorists. But as to some quarreling field commanders disagreeing with their policies, Jabhat al-Nusra launched a large-scale war.

    Thus, one of the leaders resisting HTS, Khalid al-Wazir, was killed in a drone attack recently. Not even the fact of the elimination, but the way draws attention. Apparently, the al-Nusra militants run in the tactics of the fight using combat UAVs and the experience of the Taliban’s leaders elimination in Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, their indiscriminate attacks against other radicals could be a threat to the suppressed locals.

    But the field commanders who are in terror of their life for being opposed to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, they are not the single purpose. Inside Syria Media Center military sources report that such a tactic has also been actively used against the Syrian Arab army (SAA). Only during last week, the SAA in Idlib province shot down eleven unmanned aerial vehicles launched by radicals. UAV’s were launched from the territory controlled by the jihadists to the position of government troops near the western outskirts of Abu-Dalib, Kafr Zayta in the south of Idlib and Jisr al-Shughur in the southeast.

    It has been affirmed that all the drones were knocked down. The representatives from the Government troops inspected the drones’ fragments said that the drone-attacks are marked by an increase in the past few decades.

    They also claimed most of the UAV’s were made by the skilled practitioners or western-made.

    By all accounts, HTS understand that they are too weak to organize effective armed resistance. So, they try to maintain their strength and defense by using drones. Still, their tactics do not confuse the Syrian army. But for peaceful residents of Idlib, the inevitable drones’ strikes will become another of many endless threats to life.

  • STDs Hit Record Highs As Antibiotic Resistant Gonorrhea Concern Emerges: CDC

    The US saw record numbers of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in 2017 – as nearly 2.3 million cases of gonorrhea, chlamidya and syphilis were reported, marking the fourth straight year of sharp increases, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). 

    What’s more – the CDC is now warning that antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea is now spreading, while prevention efforts have stagnated as people use condoms less frequently. 

    Via the CDC: 

    • Gonorrhea diagnoses increased 67 percent overall (from 333,004 to 555,608 cases according to preliminary 2017 data) and nearly doubled among men (from 169,130 to 322,169). Increases in diagnoses among women — and the speed with which they are increasing — are also concerning, with cases going up for the third year in a row (from 197,499 to 232,587).
    • Primary and secondary syphilis diagnoses increased 76 percent (from 17,375 to 30,644 cases). Gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (MSM) made up almost 70 percent of primary and secondary syphilis cases where the gender of the sex partner is known in 2017. Primary and secondary syphilis are the most infectious stages of the disease.
    • Chlamydia remained the most common condition reported to CDC. More than 1.7 million cases were diagnosed in 2017, with 45 percent among 15- to 24-year-old females.

    “We are sliding backward,” said Jonathan Mermin, director of the agency’s national STD center. “It is evident the systems that identify, treat and ultimately prevent STDs are strained to near-breaking point.”

    According to the CDC, while most cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis are curable with antibiotics, most cases go undiagnosed and untreated, increasing the risks of infertility, stillbirth, and an increased risk of contracting HIV. 

    Treatment options for gonorrhea are now limited to the antibiotic ceftriaxone – as the diseas has become resistant to nearly every other class of antibiotic. Doctors will usually prescribe a single shot of ceftriaxone with an oral dose of azithromycin, another antibiotic. Call it a benefit to big pharma thanks to the “sharing economy.” 

    “We expect gonorrhea will eventually wear down our last highly effective antibiotic, and additional treatment options are urgently needed,” said Gail Bolan, director of CDC’s Division of STD Prevention.

  • Asymmetric Financial War And Radical US Leverage – What Will It Bring?

    Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    It seems that the Chinese leadership has concluded that the Trump Administration is determined to use its full spectrum radical leverage to hobble China as a rival, and to resurrect its own global domination – Xi seems to foresee a long struggle for position in the global future: one that will be played out geo-politically (in the jostling in the South China Sea, over North Korea, Taiwan and the BRI), as much as in the economic domain. If this is so, there is real risk of the ‘jostling’ spontaneously escalating into a military clash, whether limited and contained, or not.

    Xi is essentially correct. Until recently, Washington subscribed to the western cultural conviction of the linear itinerary of historical ‘progress’ – that is to say, that the introduction of the western-style economic liberal market, under Deng Xiaoping, constituted part of an inevitable Chinese journey towards ever greater economic and political liberty (i.e. they would become like ‘us’). 

    But Washington DC had its ‘tipping point’. It slid across, into a very different understanding. This was that China’s liberal economic reforms were all about restoring China’s former global economic primacy and power – and never about ‘empowering the individual’ in the western mode of thinking. In that context, China remaining compliant and well-behaved within the global order made sense for China – so long as it remained on course to become the global Number One, by 2049 (the CCP Centenary Year).

    But, like all ‘Road to Damascus’ late converts, US foreign policy élites now have become fervent proselytisers for the Chinese ‘threat’ meme. So, the question arises: does it make sense any more for China to pursue its instinctive policy of not confronting the US, especially if Trump is known for keeping up the pressure, never backing off, and always doubling down? How can China too, stick with its ‘quietist’ posture if Trump ups the pressure in the South China Sea, or in North Korea, or decides to adopt Taiwan as a ‘democracy cause’? Xi can’t.

    Russia, on the other hand, is witnessing an extremely defensive US President – a longstanding believer in good relations with Russia, but whose persistent vulnerability to the ‘Russiagate’ hysteria is pushing him to polish his anti-Russian credentials to the extent that he is now becoming holier than the Pope (more ‘hard-on-Russia’ than the Russophobes); more neocon, than the neocons. With rafts of crushing sanctions against Russia already in the Congressional pipeline (over which the US President has minimal ability to limit their implementation), Russia too must prepare for a long period of economic attrition. The depth of the American crisis is such that President Putin (like everyone) cannot guess how it may all turn out.

    For Europe, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Venezuela, the outlook is similar: It will be a period in which the US weaponises all the leverage it has at its command to restore the US global primacy – and to bring all into line with the wider US agenda. Trump is escalating – intent, it would seem, on having the first capitulation, or political fissure to burst apart, by November. But what if that doesn’t happen?

    The ‘market’ (with a few exceptions) take the view of America’s victory in the trade war as certain: the US is easily the predominant consumer market and concomitantly, it hurts US trade partners the more to be shut out from it – which is also to say, that retaliatory tariffs imposed by others will hurt US exporters the less (because US outwards exports are the lesser, in most cases).

    With states such as China, its exports to the US are at least double the value of US exports to the US, therefore the US owns the leverage (in the White House view) – because there are twice as many possibilities for US to impose import tariffs as China has to impose export tariffs. Additionally, the US uses the US dollar hegemony (i.e. currency war) to create an artificially strong dollar – which weakens emerging markets, and concomitantly weakens their leverage (as their US dollar-denominated debt and interest payments, become toxically elevated, in relation to their domestic currencies).

    This ‘market’ view of trade war somehow is a mirror of America’s military zeitgeist. The US has the biggest military by far; it can outgun everyone (except Russia), so anyone challenging the US is bound to be ‘a loser’ (it is assumed). Indeed, the US can, and does, begin its wars with a slick show of destructive capability that pummels the adversary. But what then? Then, the US military doesn’t seem to have answers to the subsequent phases: It bogs down, and then finds itself losing to asymmetric retaliation. Its only answer is the ‘forever’ wars.

    Alastair Macleod of the Mises Institute suggests that such market sanguinity is wrong:

    “Comments that China is in trouble from trade tariffs and being undermined by a strong dollar, are wide of the mark. Geopolitics dominates here. America’s occasional successes in attacking the rouble and yuan are no more that transient pyrrhic victories. She is not winning the currency war against China and Russia. China is not being deflected from her strategic goals to become, in partnership with Russia, the Eurasian super-power, beyond the reach of American hegemony.”

    Russia and China are intent on playing – and winning – the long game. Both states, presently are sounding out Washington (prior to November) as to whether, in the words of Putin’s spokesman, there is any “common ground, trying to understand if it is possible at all – and if the other party is willing at all.” Beijing too is exploring whether Trump is ready to compromise on some sort of a face-saving, PR trade deal – ahead of the November midterms – or, not. This ‘scenting the wind’ should not be misinterpreted for weakness, or a readiness to capitulate. These states are simply doing ‘due diligence’ before events take them to the next stage of the conflict – in which the risks will be graver.

    What is less noticed – because there has been no ‘shout out’ occurrence – is how much the preparations for the next phase have been incrementally unfolding (since some time). Small steps, perhaps, but of great significance nonetheless. Because the platforms for countering US financial bullying are being put into place at an accelerating pace – particularly since Trump started to sanction ‘the world’.

    And this old axiom is the first point to grasp: ‘Every crisis is also an opportunity’. And Trump’s lambasting and sanctioning of ‘the world’ is catalyzing a powerful push-back. When America sanctions ‘the world’ it is an easy ‘sell’ for China and Russia to push others towards de-dollarisation, and to trading in local (non-dollar) currencies. And this is happening. It is almost ‘done’ in respect to oil. The advent of Shanghai Futures Exchange symbolically marked the beginning of the upending of the Bretton Woods world (with Gulf States likely to succumb to the inevitable, in due course).

    The ‘market’ sees the selling of US government debt (US Treasuries) by the PBOC as China’s Damocles Sword hanging over the US; but at the same time, ‘the market’ believes that China will never do such a thing – as it would lower the value of its holdings. It would be counter to China’s own interest. (It is never asked however, why China should want these holdings – at all – if China is debarred, by the US, from purchasing dollar-denominated assets with its US dollars).

    China has always been wary of disrupting markets – that is true. But, it maybe that the ‘market’ is misreading China’s ‘war-plan’. The expectation might be that China’s only resort is to sell US Treasuries (as Russia has just done). But, as usual, that would be the ‘market’ looking to the short-term view of China’s possibilities. China however, clearly is playing the long game. Recall what Maj. Gen. Qiau Liang said in 2016: “The US needs a large ‘capital return’ to support the daily life of the Americans, and the US economy. Under such circumstances, [any nation that] blocks the return of capital to the US is the enemy of the US. We must understand this matter clearly … To effectively contain the United States, other countries shall think more about how to cut off the capital flow to the United States while formulating their strategies”. 

    And what China can – and is – doing with those US dollar assets, is to deploy them in another important way. It is not selling them, but rather is using them – without fanfare – to support its key allies, whose currencies are under periodic, concerted, Wall Street ‘short’ selling raids on their currencies: that is to say, China is supporting quietly Turkey and Iran (more through the purchase of its crude, in the latter case). So China is quietly subverting, and undermining Trump’s strong dollar card that is intended to force Turkey and Iran to capitulate. This is asymmetric financial war for the long game.

    Both these states (together with Pakistan) are key hubs of the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative; but more than that, they are directly strategically significant components to the national security of China. China is very concerned by the Muslim, Turkic, Uighurs of Xinjiang province, thousands of whom already fight as jihadists in Syria. China does not want the latter returned, nor does it want Muslims to be radicalised in China, or in the states to the West of China. 

    President Erdogan has been significantly instrumental in their radicalisation. They want Erdogan to stop his game with the ethnic Turkic populations, in and near to China, in return for which, China is helping with the Lira. Equally, China’s economy is vulnerable to America closing the Malacca Strait. To offset that vulnerability, China needs Pakistan, and its ‘corridor’, down to the port at Gwadar. And Iran is absolutely central to both China’s and Russia’s national security.

    What we see therefore is China and Russia quietly sewing together the fabric of a de-dollarised, currency-swap equipped, and credit-supplied, belt across Central Asia – in opposition to America’s attempt to break it up. Russia, which largely already has de-dollarised its economy, has the particular role of ensuring that Europe is not lost as a market for the Belt and Road to Trump’s leveraged bullying, and that his aim to reacquire energy dominance remains no more than ‘an aspiration’.

    Taken in aggregate, all these quantitatively, mini-steps, represent a qualitatively significant diminution of the use of the dollar, outside of the US domestic sphere. Its depth, beyond the US homeland, is being salami-sliced away. The import of this should not be underestimated — the US enjoys the high standard of living that it has because it can buy cheap goods, paid for, in paper (fiat) US debt, that others are obliged to hold, for purposes of trading in the global reserve currency. Americans’ standard of living is, in effect, subsidised by the rest of the world.

    It can only afford the military it has because it can – unlike any other state – run budget deficits to pay for its outsized military, whimsically, and without concern, since foreigners (until now), simply go on filling the budget gap.

    America has radical financial leverage at this moment precisely because of the ‘strong dollar’. Make no mistake. This is not just the result of Fed hiking rates: Trump well understands that: “Money is pouring into our cherished DOLLAR like rarely before.” Donald Trump tweeted, on 16 August. It is, of course, all about leverage.

    With a strong dollar, trading partners’ currencies devalue, their interest and capital payments soar – and, traditionally, they are pushed to the IMF for a dose of austerity and the sale of their national assets. This is the ‘play’ which Russia and China intend to end. They have set up alternatives to the Word Bank and to the IMF to which Turkey may have recourse – instead of being forced into an IMF programme.

    Alasdair Macleod notes the dichotomy between Trump’s ‘short game’ and China and Russia’s ‘long game’:

    “For now, and probably for only a few months ahead of the US mid-term elections in November, President Trump is forcing currency difficulties on his enemies by aggressive trade policies, including sanctions, and by weaponising the dollar. It is a trick that has been used by successive American administrations for a considerable time…

    President Trump’s actions over trade… are driving countries away from her sphere of influence. Ultimately this will prove counterproductive. Speculators buying into Trump’s short-termism and the Fed’s normalization policies are, for the moment, driving the dollar higher … This seems certain to lead to the dollar’s downfall [in the longer term].

    The dollar is rising only on short-term considerations, driven by nothing more substantial than speculative flows. Once these abate, the longer-term prospects for the dollar will reassert themselves, including the escalating budget and trade deficits… and rising prices fueled by a combination of earlier monetary expansion, and the extra taxes of trade tariffs.”

    This may well be Russia and China’s ‘long game’. For now, the strong dollar (and geo-political fear), is causing a safe-haven flight into easily marketable, US assets. The recent US Tax Bill has deepened this flow of dollars ‘returning home’ (through its amnesty for returning, corporate, off-shore, cash holdings). The financial leverage presently lies with the US. All looks well: the stock market is up; traders think the trade war will be an easy ‘win’; and economic indicators, the Federal Reserve says, are ‘strong’.

    But Russia and China can be patient. Those overseas dollars “pouring in [to America], as rarely before” – are sucking out the oxygen, (i.e. dollar-liquidity) from everywhere. It will either soon exhaust itself, or will result in a contagious credit crisis (with Europe likely the prime victim), triggered precisely by the liquidity-drought engineered to give Trump more leverage.

    At this point, the relative strengths between the US and Russia-China invert, and leverage flips to the latter’s advantage.

  • Will Trump's New NAFTA Deal End Up Doing More Harm Than Good

    Throughout his campaign, President Trump relied heavily on the promise that he would create more balanced trade for the United States, which would then result in more domestic manufacturing and more domestic jobs. Unfortunately, the details of NAFTA 2.0 could do just the opposite according to various industry insiders.

    Tangentially, many of the newly proposed automobile industry provisions – the crux of the deal – come at the same time that automobile industry is suffering its worst slowdown since the financial crisis, as reported earlier.

    There are other nuances: as Bloomberg notes, the new agreement still needs to be approved by Congress and already has critics from both sides of the aisle. Mickey Kantor, who helped usher in NAFTA in under Bill Clinton as his trade representative told Bloomberg “It will cost us jobs,” arguing that Trump was doing it “mainly to fulfill a political philosophy rather than create jobs.”

    In a separate analysis, looking at the financial impact of the proposed NAFTA overhaul, Goldman Sachs wrote in a report last night that they “…do not expect the revised terms to have substantial macroeconomic effects in the U.S. if they do take effect.”

    Arguing the other side, Kevin Hassett, the head of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, disagrees with Goldman:

    Kevin Hassett, the head of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, says that the White House’s own modeling shows that when the new Nafta goes into effect it will create “many, many thousands of manufacturing jobs” and reduce a trade deficit with Mexico that in goods was worth about $70 billion last year.

    “Any way an economist would model this you end up with a big positive shock to manufacturing jobs in the U.S.,” he said in an interview, predicting a flood of capital spending on new plants.

    Meanwhile, Trump insists that he is rebuilding the country with his proposed “very special” and “incredible” deal. It’s notable that Trump’s plans are heavily reliant on the automobile industry – where the administration would hope to see a majority of the plan’s rubber hit the road.

    A lot of Trump’s proposed changes are to encourage automobile manufacturers to purchase and produce more in the United States.

    The main reason to believe that, administration officials say, is the new package of auto content rules that are designed to encourage companies to locate more plants in the U.S. and source more parts from within North America rather than places like China and Thailand.

    The new rules will within three years raise the percentage of a car that has to be produced in North America to enjoy its duty-free benefits to 75 percent from the existing 62.5 percent.

    The key innovation included is a requirement that 40 percent to 45 percent of that content be made by workers earning at least $16 per hour.

    The counterpoint to the automobile industry changes is that, as Bloomberg notes, the plan moves the goal posts for the parts of the new car it applies to. For instance, the 75% of the vehicle that needs to be produced in the US now can come from the entire vehicle, instead of just a specific list of parts. Also, companies are going to be allowed to include their research and development spending and certain SG&A-type costs related to their headquarters into the mix.

    Some could argue that Trump’s proposed change are not nearly enough: Kristin Dziczek, from the Center for Automotive Research, told Bloomberg that many cars that are already being manufactured in North America – such as the Honda Civic – already exceed the new requirements and new wage floor, with 70 percent of its content originating in the U.S. or Canada let alone Mexico.

    “I don’t think it shifts things a whole lot right now.”

    The situation is similar in Mexico, where Economy Minister Guajardohas stated that 70% of Mexican auto exports to the US already meet requirements.

    Trump’s critics take the argument further, and claim that the “new NAFTA” will have the opposite of its intended effect. They argue not only that it will raise the cost of cars for consumers, but also that it will act as motivation for people to not produce vehicles in the United States.

    Business leaders – who noted that Canada needs to be a part of any new deal – showed a tepid, at best, reception to the new deal. The Trump administration plans on trying to get the backing of automobile labor unions, which they believe can help them secure support from the Democrats in Congress. So far, labor leaders have stated that “more work needs to be done” while remaining on the sidelines.

    Collective labor is likewise skeptical: Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute, who works closely with labor unions said that “there are a lot of people who have been working very hard on the renegotiation of Nafta, but I don’t think that’s going to bring jobs home in vast numbers. I just don’t see it.” In a statement Monday labor leaders declared there is “more work that needs to be done” on Nafta and people close to the unions are still wary.

    “There are a lot of people who have been working very hard on the renegotiation of Nafta,” said Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think-tank that draws some of its funding from labor unions. “But I don’t think that’s going to bring jobs home in vast numbers. I just don’t see it.”

    All of the above could be moot if the Republicans lose control of the House: Congressional politics for trade deals are especially difficult, as they have been since Nafta first was ratified in 1993. If Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives in November’s mid-term elections – as they most likely will – would the party’s leaders really be ready to bring the new deal to a floor vote and give Trump a win?

    The potential political pushback has not daunted Robert Lighthizer, who as Trump’s U.S. trade representative has been leading the negotiations, and pitched the Nafta efforts as a way to rebalance the politics of trade and build a grand coalition to back not just Nafta but other future trade pacts as well. And, for the time being, that effort is on track as far as Lighthizer is concerned.

    “I’m not going to worry about the votes at this point,” he told reporters on Monday. But “my expectation is that it will pass overwhelmingly.”

    Of course, it could all be just a negotiating ploy by Trump, to show the world that multilateral trade agreements can be done one nation at a time: as we discussed yesterday, the heat is already on Canada – devoid of bargaining capital after Mexico “defected” in the game theoretical negotiation – to reach a quick and amicable deal. Even if this particular attempt to rebuild Nafta fails to achieve what is meant to do, should Trump succeed in getting all participants to sign on the dotted line, it will serve as a framework for all of Trump’s future trade deals. Assuming, of course, that Mueller doesn’t get to Trump first.

  • The Death Of Hope And Why It Is Crucial For An American Awakening

    Authored by Elizabeth Lea Vos, via Disobedient Media,

    The death of hope can push us into a very dark place, but that darkness is the birth canal of real change…

    The Dream 

    For some people, hope came in the form of a red hat, with stenciled letters embracing their foreheads promising to Make America Great Again. My hopes were pinned instead on Bernie Sanders: my idealistic, naive trust was uniquely attached to the blue and white of the Bernie sticker I placed on the bumper of my car. Words can’t adequately describe the innocent hope I attached to those colors. As Jared Beck writes in his book, What Happened To Bernie Sanders:

    “In 2016, the dream was shared by over twelve million Democratic primary voters, as well as nearly 2.5 million campaign donors, that for the first time in forty-four years, a genuinely progressive candidate might run for President of the United States as a major party candidate… In seeking the explanation for how the dreams of millions of Americans came to be shattered in this manner, I have found it necessary to come to terms with the potential demise of my own dreamscape – one that has propelled my life path since my middle school days in a small suburban community outside Albany, New York.”

    Jared Beck and his wife Elizabeth Lee Beck are attorneys for the plaintiffs in the DNC Fraud lawsuit. What Happened To Bernie Sanders diagrams the reasoning behind Beck’s disillusionment with the efficacy of both the legal system and the Democratic Party. Ultimately, Beck concludes that the DNC is beyond saving and has successfully engineered the nomination process to such an extent that, in his opinion, there is no way in which an anti-establishment progressive could hope to be nominated as a Democratic Party Presidential candidate. He concludes that the only way for progressive ideals to germinate lies outside the DNC.

    Like many others, I believed that Bernie Sanders intended to create a grassroots movement that served all of us, in contrast with Hillary Clinton’s overtly self-centered “I’m with her” campaign slogan. I thought Sanders would spearhead a challenge to the corrupt political establishment. This was the Sanders that inspired me. When he spoke about a movement that was made up of the people, not centered on the person who led it, I believed him.

    In September 2015, my week was made infinitely better when a fellow Bernie supporter left the above note anonymously on my windshield. For me, this was an example of a fellowship among those who supported Sanders: one based on positivity, inclusiveness and genuine hope.

    Such goodwill was epitomized by the famous incident in spring 2016 when a small bird landed on Sanders’s podium as he spoke to a packed rally in Oregon. The event inspired viral memes and articles almost instantaneously. Like so many others, my emotions and hopes were tied up in what I felt Sanders’s campaign represented: a movement driven by all of us, and that together we could make changes that were beautiful and real. The finch-on-the-podium embodied that emotion.

    The near-biblical overtone of the finch landing on Sanders’ podium did not go unnoticed. Local press at the time reported Sanders’s remarks: “I think there’s some symbolism here, I know it may not look like it, but that bird is really a dove asking us for world peace.” There is nothing like a little divine intervention to inspire the emotions of a crowd, and that is exactly what the bird-on-the-podium moment did.

    The Death Of The Dream

    Faith keeps many of us in situations we might otherwise walk away from, whether in our personal lives, our professional spheres or on a national level. As a small-scale example, hope and a treasured ideal in relationship allows a person to ignore the cheating or violence of their partner, in hopes that next time they really mean it when they say they love you, and that they are telling the truth when they claim that whatever variety of betrayal won’t happen again. The death of that dream – the realization that the relationship will never change and that there is no hope for a different future with that person – is what finally frees one to leave the situation.

    As Caitlin Johnstone puts it:

    In a larger sense, the only way we can begin to tangibly change an unacceptable national reality is to begin by facing it head on: hope allows us to continue to live in unacceptable conditions. To run from the death of dreams, then, is to run from the death of an illusion that prevents change.

    As a Sanders supporter, the dream didn’t die when he was cheated out of the Democratic nomination in the spring of 2016. It finally burned out only when Sanders refused to confront the rigging of the election by the DNC, and again when he endorsed the neo-Mccarthyist agenda engineered to deflect from the election rigging that stole the nomination from him. This represented a betrayal of the millions of people who spent their food and rent money to raise more than $200 million in support of his campaign.

    Sanders didn’t stop at quietly allowing lies to circulate, he actively participated in perpetuating and endorsing them. Even as Clintonite trolls and hack jobs continued to blame him and his supporters for Clinton’s loss, spewing hatred at the same people they rigged an election to cheat, Sanders did not stand up for those who voted for him. Instead, he validated the lies used to silence them.

    In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Sanders said: 

    “We have a major government, the Russian government, led by Mr. Putin, actively interfering in our elections, determining, trying to do everything that they could to make sure that Mr. Trump won the election,” Sanders said. “Now, there may not yet be any evidence of direct collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign… Perhaps today we do not know, but clearly, this is an issue of enormous consequence.”

    In response to the farcical Mueller indictments, USA Today reported Sanders’s sentiments: 

    “It has been clear to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and intends to be involved in 2018… It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the Russian oligarchs… It is absolutely imperative that the Mueller investigation be allowed to go forward without obstruction from the Trump administration or Congress.” 

    Again: Sanders had the gall to state that it is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, while duplicitously ignoring the interference in that process that robbed his supporters of their democratic voice and ensured a Trump victory.

    Sanders’ stance was not a simple betrayal of some abstract concept we label truth or justice. It represents a deep stab in the back of every person who donated to his cause, who believed in him and reflected that trust in their contribution and vote. It was a validation of the very corrupt forces Sanders spent his entire campaign railing against.

    His 180-degree turn was one that ran so deeply counter to the courage of the Sanders I supported in 2015 and early 2016, that there was no possible way to reconcile the two. It was at this moment that the dream inspired by his campaign had to die, because it wasn’t based on reality.

    No matter how painful, this is the challenge facing all of us as we move forward – or refuse to – in a world that is continually lying to us and hooking into our emotions to do so. This is the case, whether in terms of Sanders, Trump, Qanon, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or anyone else who promises to buck the establishment while fully endorsing its harmful narratives.

    The focus on Sanders in this article is entirely based on the fact that his campaign and his response to it being undermined by the DNC served as the specific impetus for this writer’s current understanding of the dangerous nature of misplaced hope. However, the basic premise is the same no matter who your savior is.

    Unfortunately, the more intensely we feel we cannot survive without the dreams we hold dearest, the more likely we are to refuse to let such hopes go when they fail to conform with reality as it is. The deeper the suffering we seek to hold at bay with misplaced hopes, the more cognitive dissonance is provoked when evidence challenges such dreams.

    The incomparable Caitlin Johnstone has written eloquently about the way in which manipulators have harnessed our most cherished dreams in order to abuse us. As Johnstone points out, we must recognize that our ability to feel is viewed by the sociopathic and psychopathic among us as a weakness to be harnessed and exploited.

    As the plutocracy tightens its grip on the throat of the US public, demanding that people work themselves to death while barely able to avoid homelessness and hunger, justified misery will result in escalating desperation to find hope whether in an 8chan-based-persona or in opioid addiction. Hope that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Hope that if we wait a little longer, the ‘storm will come‘ and the corrupt unelected power structure will be swept away. Hope that even for a short time we can escape reality.

    This article is not intended to demean anyone who feels this way: much of it is focused on my experience as a Sanders supporter to emphasize that this is something I’ve experienced, and is not meant to ‘look down on’ anyone.

    The collective pain driving the need for respite from reality among the American working-class is near-unimaginable, with suicide rates increasing drastically across the country between 1999 and 2016. The Huffington Post reports that the experience of the United States’s working-poor is ‘pure hell.’

    As Chris Hedges recently wrote: 

    “We live in a new feudalism. We have been stripped of political power. Workers are trapped in menial jobs, forced into crippling debt and paid stagnant or declining wages. Chronic poverty and exploitative working conditions in many parts of the world, and increasingly in the United States, replicate the hell endured by industrial workers at the end of the 19th century. The complete capture of ruling institutions by corporations and their oligarchic elites, including the two dominant political parties, the courts and the press, means there is no mechanism left by which we can reform the system or protect ourselves from mounting abuse.”

    The deeper we sink into such unfathomable misery, the more desperate the public will be to believe in the promises of false saviors, no matter how obvious the sham is. The establishment is fully aware in that the more devastated we are by striving to make end meets, the more vulnerable we are to manipulation and the less likely we are to fight back against them.

    Thus the betrayal by Bernie Sanders of the same public who he sold the dream of grassroots-change is doubly poisonous.

    Moving Forward

    This opinion is not a call for nihilism. It is intended to advocate that each of us realize our own power rather than handing it over to others. You, the reader – yes I am referring specifically to you as a unique individual – are the only one that can change a single thing about the world around you. You are powerful, and your choices have meaning and impact.

    This is the same exhortation I’ve expressed multiple times during the Unity4J online vigils. You the reader are the ones who must act; you cannot merely watch a vigil, read an article, vote for a candidate or read Qanon posts and hope that reality will change thanks to someone else’s action.Fully realizing your own power is the ultimate goal and outcome of letting go of hollow dreams.

    When we stop using false hopes to beat back the all-consuming darkness we sense around us, we are empowered to respond in a tangible way to the pain and suffering that exists. Only when we face reality as it is, is it possible for real change to start to unfold. It does not grow on its own – it is reliant on each of our individual choices.

    Intentionally dousing a proverbial false light – no matter how reassuring – might seem ludicrous. Everything in our bodies screams at us that if we lose this source of comfort, we will be alone in the wilderness: however, it is only when we extinguish the flame, that our eyes can adjust enough to see what is actually around us. Our sincere, dearly-held hopes and misplaced dreams figuratively blinded us to our real surroundings.

    Once we let go of the symbolic fire that we believed crucial to our survival, our adjusted vision enables us to become truly empowered as opposed to pacified. To find our own direction instead of interpreting the shadows on the wall thrown by the flame, to reference Plato’s cave allegory.

    As in the prior comparison between the death of a dream and the birth of tangible change, after the cessation of a misleading light we are enveloped by pitch-black starless night for a moment, the space of a breath, as our eyes adjust.

    In summation: it is only when we let go of our heroes that we can begin to save ourselves.

    *  *  *

    Support Elizabeth Vos’s independent journalism on Patreon!

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Aug 28

Today’s News 28th August 2018

  • Ireland's Dwindling Catholic Masses

    Over the weekend, Pope Francis visited Ireland, the country’s first papal visit since John Paul II’s memorable trip in 1979.

    The Ireland Francis visited is a very different place compared to 1979 with the Irish Catholic church rocked by scandals including sexual abuse, illegal adoptions, cover-ups and the exploitation of women in mother-and-baby homes.

    The 36-hour trip ended with the Argentine Pope begging for forgiveness for the church’s crimes across the country.

    Pope Francis in 2018

    That was in stark contrast to the papal visit in 1979 when Pope John Paul II uttered the famous words “young people of Ireland, I love you”, to rapturous applause.

    Pope John Paull II in 1979

    His mass in the Phoenix Park in Dublin is estimated to have been the largest gathering of Irish people in history with an estimated 1.25 million attending the event, nearly a third of the country’s population.

    Infographic: Ireland's Dwindling Catholic Masses | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    In the “new Ireland”, an estimated 130,000 attended Pope Francis’ mass in the same spot, illustrating the extent of the Catholic church’s decline in Ireland over the past four decades.

    Less than half the people holding tickets turned up at the event, with weather, travel restrictions and acts of protest all thought to have caused the low turnout.

  • How Macedonia Could Push NATO Into A War

    Authored by R=Ted Galen Carpenter via The National Interest,

    Macedonia’s tenuous relationships with its neighbor states make it a liability for the alliance.

    When Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked Donald Trump last month why he should send his son to die defending Montenegro, NATO’s newest member, the president seemed to repudiate his own administration’s policy. He indicated that Americans shouldn’t be willing to sacrifice their lives for such a trivial ally. Furthermore, he warned that Montenegro “has very aggressive people. They may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War III.” As Cato Institute senior fellow Doug Bandow pointed out, Trump’s comment was odd on two counts.

    First, the Senate approved the admission of Montenegro on his watch in March 2017. If he thought that latest episode of adding a useless microstate to the Alliance was unwise, he could have withdrawn the treaty from consideration before the Senate vote.

    Second, as Bandow notes archly, that while “it is theoretically possible that the vast, aggressive, powerful Montenegrin legions might launch themselves towards Moscow,” it isn’t too likely, because Montenegrin leaders “do not appear to have entirely lost their minds.”

    Indeed, the scenario that a small Balkan NATO partner might trigger a war that entangles the United States is unlikely to entail a direct provocation of Russia. That reality has made it easy for Trump’s critics, here and abroad, to mock his comment about Montenegro triggering a world war.

    A far greater risk is that the tripwire would be a conflict in which an alliance member became embroiled with one of its regional neighbors. Montenegro actually is less of a danger in that respect than NATO’s latest invitee, Macedonia. Montenegro seems on relatively good terms with neighboring states, although it has been involved in an extended border dispute with Kosovo that was resolved just recently when the Kosovo parliament passed bitterly resisted legislation approving a settlement of the controversy.

    Macedonia is on much worse terms with Kosovo and that country’s ethnic brethren in Albania. Officials and the populations of both countries have long pursued a “Greater Albania” agenda that lays claim to swaths of territory in Serbia, Montenegro, and especially Macedonia. The NATO-assisted severing of Kosovo from Serbia in 1999 was the first major triumph for that agenda, and Greater Albanian expansionists wasted no time in trying to follow up on their victory. Within months, portions of Macedonia in which ethnic Albanians constituted a majority (or in some cases, just a plurality) of the population sought to destabilize that country, demanding extensive autonomy for those provinces. Both the United States and its NATO allies put intense pressure on Macedonia’s government to grant the demanded concessions, and Skopje reluctantly complied.

    Tensions then subsided for a while, but Albanian separatist sentiments continued to fester and grow. In the past few years, a new crisis has emerged, with Albanian activistsleading large anti-government demonstrations. Skopje’s relations with both Albania and Kosovo are deteriorating markedly. In April 2017, Macedonia’s foreign ministry formally accused Albania of interfering in the country’s internal political affairs. A month earlier Macedonia’s president charged that the demands of the Albanian minority was the biggest threat to his nation’s sovereignty and unity.

    Washington and other Western capitals continue to press the Macedonian government to make concessions to the country’s Albanian minority beyond those granted under outside pressure during the 2001 crisis. That pressure is creating major splits within the Macedonian ethnic majority. An especially ugly confrontation between Macedonian nationalists and more accommodating elements erupted in the spring of 2017. Pieter Feith, a former European Union envoy to Skopje, warned the nationalists that they were “playing with fire” if they continued to resist relinquishing power to a moderate successor government. Soon thereafter, the nationalists gave way.

    Divisive issues continue to roil the country, however. The demands of the Albanian faction for ever-greater autonomy keep escalating, and that has caused the president and other officials to balk at making further concessions. President Gjorge Ivanov has dug in his heels on one key issue, repeatedly refusing to sign a language law that would formally recognize Albanian as the primary language in certain regions of the country. He and his supporters fear that such a new concession would simply whet the appetite of Albanian secessionists

    The drive for a Greater Albania is gaining new momentum, and that creates major problems for a prospective NATO member. The parallels to events leading up to Kosovo’s secessionist war against Serbia in the 1990s and NATO’s military intervention are more than a little unsettling. What happens once Macedonia joins NATO, if the Albanian secessionist drive does not ease but accelerates and Skopje takes action against Albania and/or Kosovo to prevent outside assistance to the rebellion, claiming that those countries have committed aggression? It is hardly a remote possibility that the United States as NATO’s leader could be drawn into such a nasty conflict.

    That possibility underscores the folly of America pushing to add strategically and economically irrelevant microstates to the alliance. They are not strategic assets in any reasonable definition of the term. Instead, they are strategic liabilities and potential snares. Granted, members like Macedonia and Montenegro are not likely to involve the United States in a world war—unlike the three Baltic republics, which could certainly do so, given their frosty relations with Russia. The situation in the Balkans is not akin to the one that existed on the eve of World War I and plunged Europe (and ultimately America) into that catastrophe. But a needless entanglement even in a petty, limited armed conflict is one entanglement too many. President Trump should act on the instincts he displayed during his interview with Tucker Carlson and make it clear that the United States will not approve NATO membership for Macedonia or any other applicant.

  • Libya Erupting Into New Civil War As Rival Factions Battle On Streets Of Tripoli

    Long forgotten in Western mainstream media, Libya has suddenly come back into headlines as a small civil war is erupting within areas under control of the UN-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli. 

    Scores of people have been killed and wounded amidst intensifying clashes in the Libyan capital as rival factions vie for control of the city.

    Notably, the clashes have involved the shelling of residential areas in southern sections of Tripoli, street-to-street fighting, and tanks in the streets, reminiscent of the 2011 war which eventually led to a NATO air campaign and forcible removal and assassination of Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi.

    Social media photo of the clashes Monday via Libyan Express

    Al-Jazeera reports Monday’s escalating violence which began over the weekend, and which has resulted in a declared state of emergency being throughout the capital: 

    At least four people have been killed and seven others wounded in clashes that broke out between rival armed groups in Libya’s capital, Tripoli, as they attempt to take control of the city.

    The health ministry declared a state of emergency on Monday, according to local media, after the Sunday evening clashes continued to escalate.

    The fighting erupted between local militias and al-Kani tribal fighters from Tarhouna, southeast of Tripoli, who are sending reinforcements to the country’s north. 

    Local and international reports confirm that both sides of the fighting are loyal to the UN and internationally backed GNA. 

    Tanks are in the streets of the Libyan capital, via Alwasat Cairo news

    By the end of the day, the Associated Press reported at least 27 people wounded, according the Libyan Health Ministry.

    And further according to the AP: The United Nations Support Mission in Libya has voiced concerns over “the use of indiscriminate fire and heavy weapons in densely populated residential areas.”

    Footage of ongoing clashes in Tripoli published by The Libyan Observer on Monday:

    The English language UK-based Libyan Express described the scene of Monday’s fighting based on eyewitnesses: 

    Heavy weapons, including artillery, have been used in the fighting, according to witnesses. Residential areas have been hit by what seems to be random shelling and several families have had to evacuate their homes.

    Roads were blocked, while tanks and armoured vehicles were seen at several places across the city.

    Since the NATO-backed overthrow of Gaddafi in 2011, Libya has remained split between rival parliaments and governments in the east and west, with militias and tribes lining up behind each, resulting in fierce periodic clashes. 

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

    Perhaps the most significant of these warring militias is Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army, which controls much of eastern Libya.

    Haftar is reportedly poised to make a move on Libya’s vital “oil crescent region” while bolstering his forces with Chadian mercenaries, according to local reports.

    ISIS also maintains a scattered presence in various parts of the country, claiming responsibility for a deadly attack on a security checkpoint as recently as this weekend in the western part of the country. Six soldiers loyal to the GNA were reportedly killed in that attack. 

    Meanwhile the GNA is trying to bring its own factions to heel after days of violence increasingly impacting densely populated residential areas, yet seems helpless to act. 

    “We warn these gangs and outlawed groups that have terrorised civilians and residents; there is no space for such lawlessness and chaos,” the GNA’s Presidential Council said in a statement. “We have given orders to the interior ministry to counter these attacks,” the statement said. 

    Though the recently “liberated” Libya has remained conflict-prone after NATO and US forces promised an “Arab Spring”-style “blossoming of democracy” — things have clearly only gone from worse to worse as the capital now inches toward full blown civil war.

    Welcome to the “new” Libya… where the US and UN recognized government is at war with itself. 

  • Meadows: "We've Learned NEW Information" Suggesting FBI/DOJ Leaked To Press, Used Articles To Obtain FISA Warrants

    Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-NC) dropped a late-night bombshell on Monday suggesting there’s evidence that the FBI and DOJ rigged their own FISA spy warrants by leaking information to the press, then using the resultant articles to obtain court authorization to surveil targets. 

    “We’ve learned NEW information suggesting our suspicions are true: FBI/DOJ have previously leaked info to the press, and then used those same press stories as a separate source to justify FISA’s,” tweeted Meadows. 

    Until now, we’ve known that the creator of the so-called Steele Dossier, former UK spy Christopher Steele, leaked information directly to Yahoo! News journalist Michael Isikoff – whose article became a supporting piece of evidence in the FBI’s FISA warrant application and subsequent renewals for Trump adviser Carter Page. 

    So while we’ve known that Steele seeded Isikoff with information from his dubious dossier, and that the FBI then used both Steele’s dossier and Isikoff’s Steele-inspired article to game the FISA system, Rep. Mark Meadows now says that the FBI/DOJ directly leaked information to the press, which they then used for the same type of FISA scheme.

    Strong evidence was discovered in January suggesting that former FBI employee Lisa Page leaked privileged information to Devlin Barrett, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and now with the Washington Post. Whether any of Barrett’s reporting was subsequently used to obtain a FISA warrant is unknown. 

    Meanwhile, Rep. Meadows’s Monday night tweet comes hours before twice-demoted DOJ employee Bruce Ohr is set to give closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committee. Ohr was caught lying about his involvement with opposition research firm Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson – who employed Steele. Ohr’s CIA-linked wife, Nellie, was also  employed by Fusion as part of the firm’s anti-Trump efforts, and had ongoing communications with the ex-UK spy, Christopher Steele as well. 

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    Based on new emails recently turned over to Congressional investigators, Ohr was revealed to have been feeding information to the FBI from Steele, long after the FBI had officially cut Steele off for inappropriate leaks to the press. 

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

    Ohr’s role as a conduit between Steele and the FBI continued for months and resulted in 12 separate FBI interviews, including several after Trump’s inauguration. According to Ohr’s then-supervisor, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Ohr worked on the Russia probe without his permission and without his knowledge. –The Federalist

    House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy vowed that Tuesday’s Ohr testimony would “get to the bottom of what he did, why he did it, who he did it in concert with, whether he had the permission of the supervisors at the Department of Justice.” 

    Last week, President Trump called for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire Ohr after his and Nellie’s relationship with Simpson emerged. Trump tweeted: “Will Bruce Ohr, whose family received big money for helping to create the phony, dirty and discredited Dossier, ever be fired from the Jeff Sessions  ‘Justice’ Department? A total joke!”

    Earlier in August, Trump called Ohr a “disgrace,” and warned that he may be pulling his security clearance “very quickly.” 

    Trump’s threat came one day after two tweets about Ohr, noting a connection to former FBI agent Peter Strzok, as well as a text sent by Ohr after former FBI Director James Comey was fired in which Ohr says “afraid they will be exposed.” 

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    More Ohr questions remain. For example, why did Nellie Ohr obtain a Ham Radio license right in May, 2016? As Ham enthusiast George Parry wondered in The Federalist in March, was it to avoid detection while working on the anti-Trump effort? 

    So, was Nellie Ohr’s late-in-life foray into ham radio an effort to evade the Rogers-led NSA detecting her participation in compiling the Russian-sourced Steele dossier? Just as her husband’s omissions on his DOJ ethics forms raise an inference of improper motive, any competent prosecutor could use the circumstantial evidence of her taking up ham radio while digging for dirt on Trump to prove her consciousness of guilt and intention to conceal illegal activities. –The Federalist

    And since none of this apparently justifies the appointment of a second special counsel by the DOJ, perhaps Bruce can offer up some answers during Tuesday’s session? Of course, we’ll never know what he said unless someone leaks.

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  • Why US Imperialism Loves Afghan Quagmire

    Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    It may seem paradoxical that any American interest would seek to deliberately prolong the Afghan quagmire. Costing trillions of dollars to the national debt, one would think that US planners are anxious to wind down the war and cut their immense losses. Not so, it seems.

    Like the classic 1960s satire film, Dr Strangelove, and how he came to “love the A-bomb”, there are present-day elements in the US military-security apparatus that seem to be just fine about being wedded to the mayhem in Afghanistan.

    That war is officially the longest-ever war fought by US forces overseas, outlasting the Vietnam war (1964-75) by six years – and still counting.

    After GW Bush launched the operation in October 2001, the war is now under the purview of its third consecutive president. What’s more, the 17-year campaign to date is unlikely to end for several more years to come, after President Donald Trump last year gave the Pentagon control over its conduct.

    This week saw two developments which show that powerful elements within the US state have very different calculations concerning the Afghan war compared with most ordinary citizens.

    First there was the rejection by Washington of an offer extended by Russia to join a peace summit scheduled for next month. The purpose of the Moscow conference is to bring together participants in the war, including the US-backed Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani, as well as the Taliban militants who have been fighting against American military occupation.

    Washington and its Afghan surrogate administration in Kabul said they would not be participating because, in their view, such a dialogue would be futile.

    The US refusal to attend the Moscow event, after previously showing an apparent interest, drew an angry response from Russia. Russia’s foreign ministry said the “refusal to attend the Moscow meeting on Afghanistan shows Washington has no interest in launching a peace process.”

    One suspects that US reluctance is partly due to not wanting to give Moscow any additional international standing since Russia’s successful military intervention in Syria and its leading role in mediating for peace there.

    It also seems incongruous that only last week the US-backed Ghani administration offered to call a ceasefire with the Taliban to mark the Muslim religious festivities of Eid al-Arafat. If President Ghani can see fit to call a truce with the militants, then what is so objectionable about sitting down with them in Moscow?

    Another, more sinister, development was the disclosure this week by the Russian foreign ministry that it had tracked large-scale weapons supplies to militant groups in Afghanistan’s northern region. The foreign ministry said the weapons were dropped off by unidentified military helicopters.

    What’s more, the helicopters were apparently given flight clearance by the US military forces and their Afghan national army charges. There can be only one conclusion: the Pentagon or the CIA are complicit in arming insurgents whom they are supposed to be trying to defeat. This is not the first time that such clandestine trafficking of weapons by US forces in Afghanistan has been reported by the Russian foreign ministry.

    Similar skulduggery involving US military with terror groups in Syria has also been documented.

    Recall too an interview given at the end of last year by former Afghan President Hamid Karzai who said categorically that US military commanders were responsible for cultivating Islamic State (IS, ISIS or Daesh) terrorist networks in his country. These groups seem to be separate in intent from the Taliban factions.

    Ironically, US commanders have recently accused Russia of supplying weapons to Taliban fighters. Moscow and the Taliban have both separately denied any such link.

    Such claims by Washington seem more plausibly an attempt by the Pentagon to muddy the waters of their own complicity in arming illegal militant groups in Afghanistan.

    The question is: why would US forces want to aid and abet militants and prolong a war that has cost the American taxpayer trillions of dollars? Why would Washington spurn an opportunity to participate in the Moscow-convened summit scheduled for September 4, which is aimed at finding a peaceful settlement to the conflict?

    In short, what US interests are there in prolonging this appalling war?

    While the occupation of Afghanistan by US troops is a deadweight for the American national economy and citizen-taxpayers – adding up to $5 trillion to the country’s total debt load of $21 trillion – we have to bear in mind that for weapons manufacturers and suppliers, the war is a boon. It keeps the military-industrial complex humming with super profitable business. Companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, which are among the top lobbyists to Congress, using a coldly rational logic would not want this war to stop. Ever. Their corporate interests are starkly divergent from ordinary US citizens and foot-soldiers on the ground. So what if the nation is $21 trillion in debt when mega profits are being scooped up by executives and shareholders of the weapons companies?

    It is also well-documented that the CIA depends on lawlessness in Afghanistan to run its trillion-dollar opium drugs racket. As with the notorious Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war, the CIA uses global drugs trafficking as a way to fund its “black operations” in others parts of the world, finances that are kept hidden from political oversight by Congressional lawmakers.

    A third incentive for American imperial planners to keep Afghanistan in turmoil is that it allows the US to mobilize and weaponize proxy armies for the purpose of harrying Russia and Iran. Afghanistan has a border with Iran to its west and it is a spearhead into Russia’s southern flank. For the US, having a base for militants with which to penetrate and destabilize either Iran or Russia is a strategic asset, not at all a strategic loss. Especially now given that Iran and Russia have succeeded in routing the US-backed jihadist bases in Syria.

    Indeed, Russia has already explicitly expressed the concern that a lawless Afghanistan presents a direct security threat to its national interests.

    So, yes, by any normal reckoning, Afghanistan has been a catastrophe for US citizens, as well as of course for millions of Afghanis who have lost loved ones, homes, jobs, and livelihoods only to eke a subsistence in grinding poverty.

    But in a more sinister reckoning, there are powerful American interests which view the suffering and calamity of Afghanistan as a lucrative, strategic venture that must be kept going.

    Afghanistan may be a seething swamp of suffering. But it’s a swamp that is at the same time spawning immense advantages for a select few overseeing US imperialist interests. That makes the tragedy of the country more poignant. Heinously, crucial incentives are not to stop the war, but to keep it going.

  • Visualizing U.S. Millionaires By State Of Residence

    There are literally millions of millionaires in the United States.

    In fact, as VisualCapitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, there are 7.1 million households in the country that have investible assets of $1 million or more.

    Impressively, this gives the U.S. a higher total population of millionaires than any other country in the world, even though China’s rapidly rising wealth is also quite notable.

    MILLIONAIRES BY STATE

    Today’s visualization comes to us from HowMuch.net, and it breaks down U.S. millionaires by state.

    Source: HowMuch.net

    Here are the states with the highest millionaire populations, in absolute terms:

    Not surprisingly, states like California, Texas, New York, and Florida dominate this list. They all have high millionaire populations, but they are also the four most populous states in general.

    MILLIONAIRE CONCENTRATION

    When looking at millionaires per capita, aforementioned states like New York, Texas, and Florida all fall off the Top 10 list altogether.

    The state of California, however, remains clinging on to the #10 spot:

    As you can see, the states surrounding hubs like New York City and D.C. shoot up the rankings when looking at the data this way.

    New Jersey and Connecticut are in two of the top three spots – and of course New York City is home to well over 300,000 millionaires itself.

    Meanwhile, Maryland walks away with the title of most millionaires per capita. It may be surprising, but this is the seventh year in a row that Maryland has ranked number one in the country for this metric.

  • "China's Uber" Murderer Had Loans From 51 Lenders, Borrowed Heavily From P2P

    Submitted by Investing in Chinese Stocks

    China’s Uber, Didi Chuxing, has suspended service after a driver raped and murdered a young woman. The story is hitting many hot button topics in China these days including P2P lending. Investigators have learned the driver had borrowed from at least 51 lending institutions.

    The killing of a 20-year-old passenger who rode in the Didi vehicle on Friday in the eastern city of Wenzhou is the second such incident since May, denting the image of the Beijing-based company, which is the world’s largest ride-hailing firm by number of rides and is expanding globally.

    Police said a 27-year-old driver named Zhong was detained at about 4 a.m. on Saturday and confessed to raping and killing the passenger, who had used the Hitch service to book her trip. Her body was dumped over a guardrail and down a cliff, police said.

    The latest attack triggered severe criticism of Didi on social media and prompted regulators to warn of industry-wide action.

    “If a company is not compliant and self-disciplined, and takes its passengers’ lives as a game, the public will vote with their feet and the government will not just stand by,” the transport ministry said in a commentary on its website.

    Some more details from the local press:

    SCMP: Didi stops hitching service in China after second murder – and admits it was warned about accused driver

    Didi Chuxing, China’s largest taxi hailing service provider, has said it will suspend its hitching service on Monday, after the second murder of a woman passenger in three months – and admitted it failed to investigate an earlier complaint from another woman about the driver accused of the killing.

    ..Its reaction came a day after police in Yueqing, in China’s eastern Zhejiang province, said they had found the body of a 20-year-old woman surnamed Zhao and arrested a Didi driver who had allegedly confessed to her rape and murder on Friday.

    According to the police’s official microblog, Zhao had entered a Didi carpool vehicle at 1pm on Friday, and sent a message asking a friend for help at around 2pm before losing contact.

    Many netizens were left wondering how the driver passed basic screening tests such as a credit check. One site reported he had borrowed from 51 lenders and was overdue on many loans.

    From iFeng: 滴滴杀人疑犯信用调查：曾向51家机构借款 多笔逾期已失信

    According to the latest news from the police, the girl in the murder case of the Yueqing drip rider was forced to transfer more than 9,000 yuan to the driver Zhongmou WeChat before being killed.

    Tim Seng Finance (micro-signal: tsfinance) found in the investigation that Zhong had previously borrowed from 51 institutions and had too many overdue. When Didi is reviewing its eligibility, whether to use its personal credit as an indicator of investigation is a question left to us to think about.

    …The investigation found that Zhong, the driver of the Yueqing Drip and Windmill driver murder case, had borrowed from 51 institutions; he also applied for loans from four platforms within one week before the accident. Specifically, 51 lending institutions include car rental, consumer staging platforms, consumer finance companies, credit cards, microfinance companies, and P2P online lending. From traditional financial institutions to emerging online lending institutions, it can be said that Zhong has borrowed from almost every type of institution that can lend.

    …The main borrowing institution of Zhong is P2P online lending institutions and consumer finance companies. The survey of Tiansheng Finance (micro-signal: tsfinance) found that the general borrowing rate of the P2P online lending industry is as high as 30% per year. There are also low interest rates, but the requirements for borrowers are very high. Generally, they are not required to use real estate mortgages, or they require borrowers to work in government and public institutions . These conditions are not available to Zhong.

    …It is worth mentioning that there have been many overdue loans in the history of Zhong, and there were overdue records on November 13, 2017 and January 13, 2018. In the third-party inquiry system, Zhong’s personal credit evaluation results are displayed as “recommended rejection”.

    …This is not the first time that Zhong has driven for Didi. According to his relatives, two or three years ago Zhong spent tens of thousands of yuan to buy the current car to drive for Didi, and has driven in the town and other places. After the Spring Festival this year, he went to Wenzhou with his parents. .

    Is it true that people like Zhongmou, who are often untrustworthy, are suitable to serve as the Didi driver for the public? Can they be responsible for the safety of passengers? Do you use your personal credit as an indicator when reviewing their qualifications? Leave us thinking about the problem.

    Didi said the suspect had no criminal record, had provided authentic documentation and passed a facial recognition test before starting work. However, it also said it failed to act on a complaint made against the driver on Thursday by a passenger who alleged the driver took her to a remote place and followed her after she got out of the car.

  • "Exuberance Is Back:" Investing In Ferraris Better Bet Than Stocks

    As US stocks hit record highs, a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO offered by RM Sotheby’s sold in Monterey, California on Saturday for a record $48.4 million – the highest price ever fetched at auction, and 25% higher than the previous record set in 2014 when a 1963 model sold for $38.1 million (a 1963 250 GTO reportedly sold in October 2013 for $52 million in a private transaction, however). 

    The seller, early Microsoft employee Greg Whitten, bought the car in 2000 when similar Ferraris were selling for around $10 million, according to Bloomberg. Whitten made out like a bandit. 

    Photos: Sotheby’s

    And while markets are hitting record highs after a decade of taxpayer-fueled economic recovery, investors with the means and wherewithal to sink their money into Ferraris instead of the S&P 500 did far better, according to the Hagerty Ferrari price index which reveals that the majority of gains occurred between 2013 and 2015. 

    Even with dividends reinvested, Ferraris commanded a faster increase in value than listed U.S. companies since the end of 2009. Gains on the iconic car, though, have largely petered out over the last three years and U.S. stocks have outperformed. –Bloomberg

    Making the case that high-end buyers are still willing to pony up in a frothy market, Bloomberg highlights the December 2017 sale of a Leonardo Da Vinci painting for $450 million (bought by Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, as it turns out), the most ever for a piece of fine art. 

    Their takeaway? Watch out: 

    It all shows market watchers should probably be getting worried, says Shane Oliver, a Sydney-based investment strategist at AMP Capital Investors Ltd., who wrote his PhD thesis on efficiency in markets and asset bubbles. –Bloomberg

    “Exuberance is back in a big way,” Oliver said. “The fact that people are paying record amounts for Ferraris and paintings and share markets are at record highs causes me to be a little bit more cautious” 

    Since most people can’t exactly afford to invest in a $48.4 million Ferrari, much less insure it and god forbid even drive it – here are some more pictures of the recent sale via RM Sotheby’s. 

    And just in case Ferraris aren’t your thing, there’s always a gold lambo!

  • Retired Green Beret: Was Congo's Ebola 'Bungle-In-The-Jungle' A Planned Mishap?

    Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com,

    Malthusian theory holds that depopulation (or zero population growth) is a necessity to control a species (namely humanity) that reproduces and consumes natural resources without limits. This is a “New Age” mantra adopted early on by Communists as far back as Marx and Lenin. The ball has been carried successively by Edward House and Woodrow Wilson, and further exacerbated by such “gems” as Kissinger, Bill Gates, Al Gore, and so forth. Much of the public and almost all of the youth (a recent poll taken showed young people prefer Socialism to Capitalism) have fallen for this mantra.

    The “problem” for them is how to push it along quickly: war is one answer, and disease is another.

    There has been another outbreak of Ebola in the Congo, with WHO (World Health Organization) estimates as many as 1,500 people have been exposed to it. The Daily Mail has a good article on this that was posted on 8/17/18, titled to that effect. It is a good read, as it summarizes with brevity the parameters of the disease itself.

    This is how they’re “setting the stage” for this planned “mishap” tied in to the recent outbreak. Read this excerpt very carefully to see the hidden agenda:

    The World Health Organization said on Friday [8/17/18] that at least 1,500 people had potentially been exposed to the deadly Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu region, where fear of local militia is preventing aid workers from reaching some areas. But it is expected more people to become infected and could not be sure that it had identified all chains by which the virus is spreading in the eastern part of the country beset by militia violence. The region is haunted in particular by the Allied Defence Forces, a Ugandan Islamist rebel group blamed for hundreds of civilian deaths over the past four years.

    Now this is setting the script: the valiant doctors and aid workers are unable to break the flow and transmission of the disease because of those pesky Islamic rebels… the militia, to be specific. In addition, don’t forget to expect “more people to become infected!” We have had more than a few scares over the past couple of years with elaborate precautions to transport Ebola-infected patients into the U.S. for treatment: a preposterous action considering the potential for a release into this country.

    When those patients were here, do you think that Ft. Detrick, Maryland, where the U.S.’s primary biological weapons research facility is located…do you think they received any blood samples from these patients?

    You bet your bottom dollar they did. Read “The Hot Zone” and “Devil in the Freezer,” works that chronicle events with diseases such as Ebola, and Anthrax respectively regarding accidental releases and protocols of nations regarding biological warfare. A few years ago they resurrected frozen viruses in the Arctic region, amidst the protest of several scientists who (prior to being “muzzled”) argued about the potential lethality of these viruses even if not weaponized. No matter. Smallpox has been eradicated except by governments and their laboratory storage facilities: biological warfare and all of its associated researches, treatments, testing, and drugs (backed by pharmaceutical firms) is big business.

    Regarding Ebola, a documentary was released in 1996 by NOVA, entitled “Ebola: The Plague Fighters.” This graphic but excellently made film shows an outbreak of Ebola in Zaire in May of 1995 and the almost nonexistent medical conditions in the country, coupled with the ineffective actions of foreign doctors and aid-workers. Such squalid, primitive conditions, lack of facilities, and ineffective treatment exist in Congo today virtually unchanged from twenty years ago as shown in the documentary in Zaire.

    If a government is going to release it, the disease (in this case Ebola) is still not as lethal as they need it to be. Rest assured, they’re all working on ironing out these “glitches” in order to follow the plan that originated with Thomas Malthus. We are seeing a controlled laboratory experiment proceeding in China regarding surveillance there: a total surveillance system that will be tested on their citizens and then adopted (and adapted) by other nations for use on their own citizens.

    Conditions are perfect for this type of “lab,” as China is a controlled Communist country and the technology is high enough to be perfected as the society is already compliant and under complete governmental control. This kind of “lab” would not be feasible in African nations where power and running water alone are in short supply and cannot sustain all of the infrastructure needed for the surveillance grid-state in China.

    For testing of biological weaponry, however, African nations (especially those such as Congo and Zaire) are perfect for the release of created viruses and other tailor-made bio weapons. Sound farfetched? Consider the releases of Bacillus subtilis by the U.S. government to “test” the spread of microorganisms in civilian mass-transit facilities such as subways and buses just a few years ago. Consider all of the times the government has tested nuclear and biological weapons on soldiers and civilians.

    Africa is perfect for them to take existing diseases and structure them for even more lethality. When the time is right, quarantines could be ineffective and permit passengers that are infected to board aircraft and spread the disease in the course of travel. Or they could simply transport an infected patient and allow the disease to escape from quarantine and controlled lockdown.

    If you doubt this potential, you have only to read about Bill Gates and his lovely wife’s belief in depopulation as a means of “fixing” the planet. This is the same Bill Gates, by the way, who (with a consortium of investment firms and tech start-ups) plans on placing 500 satellites into orbit to enable real-time monitoring of every inch of the surface of the globe…sometime next summer.

    Ebola is a serious disease, but what is even more deadly and more serious is the group of people and moneyed interests that wish to form a global government. They have the political connections, the money, and the alliances to effectively alter every facet of a nation and even to destroy it militarily. No heinous action is outside of their reach.  Ironically, all of these people…all of them…believe that depopulation is the only way to accomplish this “utopian” global governance effectively.

    These oligarchs and controllers view those not in their company and of their ilk as less than insects to be crushed, and at the most to be their slaves and servants. Depopulation is their goal, and a deadly disease would enable it without culpability. This Ebola outbreak is more likely a “planned mishap” in a laboratory with human beings as the test subjects. The results of these experiments may eventually be used against unsuspecting populations to reach the end-state of global rule, minus a few billion lives or so.

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Aug 27

Today’s News 27th August 2018

  • "Not Commercially Viable" – British Airways, Air France, KLM Axe Flights To Iran

    British Airways announced Thursday it plans to stop service to Tehran after its last scheduled flight on September 22. 

    A British Airways (BA) spokesperson announced the move, which comes after the latest round US sanctions went into effect against Iran this month: “We are suspending our London to Tehran service as the operation is currently not commercially viable.”

    Tehran, Iran. Via Business Traveler

    “We are sorry for any disruption this may cause to our customers’ travel plans and we are in discussions with our partner airlines to offer customers rebooking options,” the airline said further. “Alternatively, they will be offered a full refund or the opportunity to bring their flights forward,” the BA representative said. 

    BA London to Tehran service was re-launched in September 2016 after a four-year absence due to worsening British-Iran relations, and now with the return of tensions over Washington’s pullout of the Iran nuclear deal last May, it appears the airline’s forward bookings have taken a significant hit. 

    Earlier this month the US warned Britain that it must back the Trump White House’s tough stance on Iran or “face serious trade consequences”. 

    Meanwhile Air France and KLM have also announced the cancellation all flights to Tehran, with the last Air France flight on Sept. 18. Air France had already drastically cut its operations to Iran as it transferred all connections to its low-cost airline Joon this summer, and was down to one flight per week from the prior usual of three. 

    And Dutch airline KLM had previously announced last month the suspension of all flights from Amsterdam, set to also take place in September. 

    They join a growing list of other major firms that have recently curbed or halted business in Iran include French energy giant Total, Germany’s Siemens, French and German automotive manufacturers PSA and Daimler, the world’s largest shipping firm Maersk, French aircraft manufacturer Airbus, Germany’s engineering and rail consortium Deutsche Bank, as well as the German insurer Allianz..

    * * *

    On August 7 the US imposed Phase 1 of a series of sanctions against Iran.

    At a glance, these cover:

    • Auto industry: Carmakers who also operate in the US market must pull out of Iran, currently the world’s 12th-largest car market.

    • Gold and precious metals: Ban on selling these substances to Iran, which will cause difficulty for the country’s investors looking to safeguard their wealth against the falling rial.

    • US banknotes: Stepping up pressure on Iran’s central bank as it attempts to stabilise its currency.

    • Aviation: Cancellation of US sales of civil aviation planes and parts to upgrade Iran’s ageing commercial fleet.

    • Other key industries: Ban on US imports of Iranian carpets, pistachios and farmed caviar.

    And on November 7th phase 2 takes effect, mainly targeting Iran’s oil exports, which could prove the final death blow to Iran’s already downward spiraling economy.

  • Russian Grand Strategy Revisited

    Authored by Andrei Martyanov via Unz.com,

    We live in the world of models, all kinds of them. Some models are simple, others – very complex. The main task of those models is to predict how things, those models describe, will behave depending on the circumstances. Some of those models work brilliantly, others fail miserably. Worst models in terms of reliability are those dealing with geopolitics. A record of dismal failures of Western in general, and American in particular, geopolitical models to predict anything right is widely available for everyone to see. Time after time those models and predictions turned out to be wrong. In terms of “predicting” anything in regards to Russia, those predictions were not only wrong, they were downright dangerous.

    No better demonstration exists of a complete breakdown in the process of predicting anything than evolution of Russian military and economic power. As late as 2016, claims that Russia remained nothing more than, in the words of John McCain, a gas station masquerading as a country continued to pour in by all kinds of “experts”, who, despite a huge collection of facts to the contrary, continued to believe that these are only Russia’s nuclear forces which keep Russia as some secondary factor in the international relations. There are even some Russian experts who shared this point of view. Their models and predictions turned out to be wrong. They lacked the most important predictor of them all.

    Fast forward to March 1 this year to Putin’s speech to Federal Assembly – the loud echo from this speech is still being heard today, half-a-year later. It is still loud. In fact, the volume increases. It was the day majority of models of international relations and balance of power, all those matrices, differential equations, arrays of information became completely irrelevant, because military power and full ability to wage both nuclear and, what is most important, conventional war, and win in it, not some abstract financial or cooked military “rankings” data, is what defines geopolitical status of the nation. Any serious military analyst knew already in 2014 that neither US, nor NATO as a whole, could defeat Russia in conventional war near Russia’s borders.

    On March 1 it became clear that Russia can strike any targets, including within the US, conventionally with US not being able to do anything about it. Today Russia can also sink any NATO navy, or combination thereof, without nuclear weapons and the list of what is possible is long. In what seemed to a layman as one day (in reality it was 10 years in the making) Russia not only obtained a full right to speak at the formation of the new world order, Russia became a main driver behind this new order of things globally. Cutting edge military power translates into geopolitical benefits extremely well. Real military power, assessed within proper strategic, operational and technological framework, was and is this predictor. In other words—only world-class, superpower, economies are capable of producing the state-of-the-art weaponry or, in general, military power. Russia fits this definition today perfectly. I will quote myself:

    Military power in humanity’s conflict-ridden history mattered, matters and will continue to matter as one of the main, if not themain, pillars on which national power rests. It remains the case that, in the modern world, first rate military power is a function of a first rate nation-state which possesses the wherewithal to have such military power. Great military power by definition is a continuation of a greatly developed, economically strong nation-state.

    Fast forward to today. Next state of Russia’s existence, yet again lost in all those modelling and prognosticating methodologies. Russian GosKomStat (main statistics agency) reports that industry, specifically manufacturing and processing, grew in 7 months of 2018 an impressive 4.1%, the consumption of energy—one of the main indicators of real economy growth—grew 1.9%. These are stunning numbers for the country which lives under sanctions non-stop since 2014, in reality much longer than that. One is forced to ask the question—how is this growth even possible, despite some undeniable Russia’s structural economic problems?

    The answer is in Russia’s grand strategy which was formulated more than hundred years ago by a man, who played one of the crucial roles in unleashing revolutionary processes in Russia, namely Tsar Nicholas II former prime-minister of Russia Pyotr Stolypin.

    His strategic dictum was simple to grasp:

    “Give Russia 20 years of internal and external peace and quiet and it will change beyond recognition.” Vladimir Putin and his team follow this dictum to the letter.

    Obviously, many in Western world immediately tried to assign to Putin, who quoted Stolypin not for once, all features of a “liberal” without, as always, paying any attention to a gigantic difference of Stolypin’s and Putin’s Russia. Stolypin wanted to change Russia’s peasantry and its centuries’ old commune by means of his namesake reforms, and through it, Russia herself. He tried to do so in most brutal manner. He was assassinated. Putin needs to stop “liberal” economic experimentation in Russia and, unlike Stolypin 100 years before him, he has an overwhelming support of his nation to do so. He has still massive industrial, technological and scientific heritage left from the Soviet Union. He is also doing this in evolutionary manner.

    This combined Putin (by this I mean him and people who support him in the top echelons of political power) is trying to achieve precisely Stolypin’s goal of 20 or even more years of internal and external peace and quiet but he knows that the only way to provide these conditions are through strength and in Russian geopolitical, cultural, historic conditions this means a completely new quality of strength. This is the quality which requires rejection of the liberal economic dogma. And it is being done.

    As influential Russian economist and journalist Alexander Rogers states in his latest piece (in Russian) titled The State Will Get Everything Back the second, since 2014, wave of re-nationalization of Russia’s strategic assets and Rogers is spot on in his analysis. Apart from returning Russian State where overwhelming majority of Russians want it to be, in charge of Russia’s real national treasure and wealth—national resources and strategic industries—this transformation also requires new professional elites. Those are being prepared as I type this. But why such a long introduction?

    The answer to this introduction is really very simple: to explain to very many real and fake Western (I will omit here Russian ones) supporters of Russia WHY Russia doesn’t act in a kneejerk manner each time combined West does something ultimately stupid and self-defeating against her. Russia plays a very long game whose main objective is to provide Russia with those Stolypin’s, now Putin’s, 20 or more, years of peaceful development. Under these conditions, Russia, as our very own Anon from Tennessee, succinctly observed in one of the discussion threads, will “negotiate with the devil himself if need be”. This is what Russia is doing while continuing to demonstrate her increasing military and economic clout. Russia is playing for time, for a relatively peaceful time that is, because today in Russia time means growth.

    The correctness of this approach has been proven today by the overwhelming empirical evidence of mounting achievements in many spheres among which real economy, not some virtual financial markets, is most important. Today, when one reviews industrial projects Russia is implementing domestically and abroad, one cannot fail to be struck by a massive scale of those, be that development in Arctic, aerospace, radio-electronics, shipbuilding or transport infrastructure. Russia is building her own independent internet through massive Sfera (Sphere) Project, which in itself is a massive space exploration project. In parallel, increasingly fast de-dollarization is taking place.

    Thus the warranted, in fact irresistible, question must be asked – would Russia of August 2018 be possible should Russia of March 2014 have followed all kneejerk advices on part of all those “supporters”, “patriots” and “experts” (many of whom are not experts at all, nor are real patriots) who every day, since the return of Crimea home, never relented on, in their opinion for a good reason, accusing Russia of being weak, cowardly, not tough enough, timid, not hitting back… you can easily add to this list. Yet, here we are in August 2018 with Russia not only not collapsing but every single day she defies grim, doom spelling forecasts. There are still many of those around.

    It is obvious today that should have Russia involved herself in Ukraine in 2014 by means of full blown invasion, everything positive what today increasingly manifests itself would have failed to materialize because Russia, no matter how good it would have made some of her so called “patriots” (and ignorant “experts”) feel for a moment, would have lost time–the most important strategic asset, which Russia used for the last 5 years impressively well to prepare the country for a breakthrough the beginning of which we all observe today, some with joy, others with hateful desperation. The list of Russia’s accomplishments in the last 5 years is, indeed, for the lack of better word, stunning.

    Most important of those achievements is Russia’s increasing independence from the West in some of the most crucial scientific and technological fields and, of course, her military-technological transformation which changed the balance of power globally. And here is the main point for those who still think that Russia should launch an all out war on the combined West which continues to insult, attack and accuse Russia of most despicable things–they desperately want Russia to respond emotionally and, hopefully for them, irrationally. Truly powerful and confident nations do not behave themselves in a kneejerk, instant gratification manner.

    Russia will not do that precisely for the reasons of Russia being militarily, and increasingly economically, secure. So who is really a weak party in this setup? Certainly, not Russia but hysterical and self-defeating West which sees its geopolitical designs collapse in front of its very own eyes. The fact that West, or at least some very influential people here, begin to understand this dynamics made even US mainstream media news when on July 3 Republican Senator from Alabama, a chair of an immensely powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, Richard Shelby was explicit in summarizing new 2018 geopolitical reality in his impromptu interview to the media on the stairs of Russia’s Foreign Ministry building:

    “US Must View Russia as Superpower”

    This is the place where those proverbial “experts” should start reacting as the devil would react to a spray of a holy water. This, or maybe spend some time learning about Russia, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. But for those who want to really learn – you want to know what the real economic might and geopolitical weight of the nation are, look no further than what its military can do realistically, not in CGI animation. This is the most reliable predictor of them all in the last 100 years. Always was, always will be and that is why dogs always bark but caravan passes on.

  • Paul Craig Roberts: Watching America Collapse

    Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

    In the 1950s and 1960s the United States was a vibrant society. Upward mobility was strong, and the middle class expanded. During the 1970s the internal contradiction in Keynesian demand management resulted in stagflation. Reagan’s supply-side economic policy cured that. With a sound economy under him, Reagan was able to pressure the Soviet government, which was unable to solve its economic problem, to negotiate the end of the cold war.

    This happy development was not welcomed by powerful forces, both in the US and Soviet Union.

    In the US the powerful military/security complex was unhappy about losing the Soviet Threat, under the auspices of which its budget and power had soared. Right-wing superpatriot conservatives accused Reagan of selling out America by trusting the Soviets. The American rightwing portrayed President Reagan as the grade-two movie actor dupe of “cunning communists.”

    In the Soviet government Gorbachev faced a larger problem. With trust established between the two nuclear powers, Gorbachev released the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe. Hardline elements in the Soviet Communist Party saw too much change too rapidly and concluded that Gorbachev had sold out the Soviet Union to Washington. This conclusion resulted in Gorbachev’s arrest, and the consequence of his arrest was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party.

    With communism departed, the Russians forgot all of Marx’s lessons about capitalism and naively concluded that we were all now friends. The Yeltsin government opened to American advice and, by naively accepting American advice, Russia was looted and reduced to penury. Russia under Yeltsin became an American puppet state, and the Russian people paid for it with a great reduction in their living standard.

    The collapse of the Soviet Union is usually attributed to Reagan and represented as one of his victories. This is a fabrication. I was in Reagan’s government, both as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and afterward as a member of a secret Presidential Committee with subpeona power over the CIA. Reagan told us many times that his purpose was not to win the Cold War but to end it.

    He told everyone involved that all respect had to be shown to the Soviets as the purpose was to end the threat of nuclear war, not to have an insulting triumphal victory.

    Unfortunately, the trust Reagan established with the Russians was betrayed by the corrupt and criminal Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes. Because of these utterly corrupt regimes, today the distrust between the US and Russia is far higher than ever existed during the long decades of the Cold War. What the criminal Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes did was to resurrect the possibility of nuclear war that Reagan and Gorbachev had terminated.

    As I have explained at length and as all available evidence supports, the attack on Trump rests on an orchestration called “Russiagate,” for which no evidence exists. It is an orchestration concocted by John Brennan, James Comey, Clapper, Rod Rosenstein, Mueller, and the Democratic National Committee. The transparent lies on which “Russiagate” is based are repeated continually by the presstitute media in an effort to create in the public mind a case for the removal of Trump from the Oval Office.

    Mueller is part of the plot against Trump as is Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who appointed Mueller special prosecutor. Both are guilty of sedition as they are active participants in an organized coup to overthrow the President of the United States. But Trump is too powerless to have them arrested and put on trial for the conspiracy against democracy that they are conducting. President Trump is making a terminable mistake in trusting to facts and truth, neither of which is respected in the scant remains of Western Civilization.

    Once there was hope that information available on the Internet would serve as a countervailing power to the lies told by the Western print, TV, and NPR presstitutes. But this was a vain hope. There are some good and reliable websites, increasingly being closed down by the ruling elite. The ruling elites have most of the money and can finance most of the online voices, all of which are employed for the purpose of contradicting truth.

    I received today an email from RootsAction urging me to donate money to speed Trump’s impeachment. The website has even prepared the Articles of Impeachment and proclaims that “Trump’s Fixer Says the President Engaged in a Criminal Conspiracy to Sway the 2016 Election.”

    This accusation comes from one of Trump’s former lawyers, Michael Cohen. They are allegations that most defense attorneys understand is Michael Cohen’s effort to gain a light sentence for his income tax evasion by “composing,” to use the term of Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, evidence against the man Mueller really wants—President Trump.

    I will be unequivocal. RootsAction, as is the NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and the rest of the media whores, is lying. To pay off two women, who might have been paid by the military/security complex, or Hillary & Bill Clinton, or the Democratic National Committee, to bring such charges or who simply saw an opportunity to collect a bunch of dollars from Donald Trump, is most certainly, most definitely not, as RootsAction claims, “the high crime and misdemeanor of attempting to fraudulently influence the outcome of a US presidential election. This is an impeahable offense warranting removal from office.”

    Whoever advises RootsAction is a totally incompetent attorney. Moreover, to show the utter stupidity of RootsAction’s ignorant assertion, a “misdemeanor” cannot be a “high crime.” A “high crime” is a “felony.”

    I have posted on my website statements from legal experts that there is nothing unlawful about paying off claimants. Corporations do it continually. It is much cheaper to pay off a false claim than to finance a court case to refute it. There is no reason whatsoever for a political candidate competing for a party’s nomination for the presidency to be distracted by fighting court cases brought to extort money from him.

    Moreover, considering the dire straits in which the American population between the two coasts has been left by decades of jobs offshoring, the government’s inability to provide assistance to those millions of Americans whose living standard is dissolving because the military/security complex appropriates $1,000 billion annually from America’s resources, and the Trump public’s awareness that provoking Russia into war is in no one’s interest, RootsAction and the rest of the imbeciles have to be crazy beyond all belief to think that that anyone who voted for Trump cared if he had sexual encounters with two women. Considering the dire straits of Americans, the last thing they would do is to vote against their champion because he had sex with two women, assuming that he did.

    Yet, an unsubstantiated claim by a lawyer who did not pay his income tax, a claim made for the purpose of a light sentence in exchange for providing false evidence against the President of the United States, is now, according to RootsAction, the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, etc., and so on, grounds for impeaching the President of the United States who hopes to defuse the extremely dangerous tensions between Washington and Russia.

    The military/security complex wants to impeach Trump because he wants peace with Russia, thus taking away the essential enemy that justifies their budget and power.

    Are Americans too stupid to notice that there is not a shred of evidence of the “Russiagate” accusations? What we have in their place is income tax evasion charges, not against Trump, but against an attorney and a Republian campaign manager. More convincing charges could be brought against Democrats, but have not. The Hillary crowd of criminals has proven immune to prosecution.

    No one has to approve of Trump in order to have the intelligence to see that Trump’s intention to normalize relations with Russia is the world’s main hope of continued existence. Once nuclear weapons go off, global warming will take on new meaning.

    After three eight-year terms of US presidents, relations between the US and Russia stand at a far more dangerous level than ever existed during the Cold War. I know this for a fact, as I was directly involved in the Cold War.

    The security that insouciant Americans find in the belief that only the US is a superpower is ignorant beyond all belief. A new book by Andrei Martyanov published by Clarity Press proves that, at best, the US is a second rate military power that can be utterly destroyed at will by Russia along with the entirety of the stupid NATO countries, every one of which is militarily impotent. In the present correlation of forces, nothing whatsoever can be done to save a square inch of the Western world if Russia ever has enough of the absurd accusations, absurd threats, absurd postering of a totally inferior military power drunk on its own ignorant hubris.

    Americans are too insouciant to know it, but they are living day by day only at the mercy of Russia.

  • US Inmates Demand 'Living Wage' Amid Largest Prison Strike In History

    On Tuesday, inmates across the United States began a 19-day campaign to protest the dehumanizing conditions of the American prison system, one of the potentially largest prison strikes in American history.

    As Statista’s Sarah Feldman notes, the organized dissent is planned to take the form of hunger strikes, sit-ins, boycotts of prison payment streams like collect calls, along with slow to no labor by the 2.3 million people currently serving time in the United States.

    The prisoners have a series of demands: improve prison conditions, end to life without parole and solitary confinement, increase funding for rehabilitation services, and grant voting rights for people convicted of a felony.

    One of the biggest demands for the strikers is an immediate end to compulsory and imposed labor for little to no pay.

    Infographic: Little to No Pay for Prisoners in the U.S. | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Able bodied imprisoned people are put to work in correctional facilities doing cooking, cleaning, and grounds keeping along with possible labor outside of prisons, which is often dangerous, like in the case of prisoners fighting wildfires in California.

    Currently around 800,000 prisoners work daily for meager wages that are often docked for court-assessed fines, family support, and discharge money.

    States like Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas offer no compensation for work performed while in prison. Even for the highest paying states, the low end of compensation only outperforms states like Texas by around two quarters and a dime.

  • Raul Ilargi Meijer: Forget McCain; It's About The Children, Stupid!

    Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

    Bathwater

    Let’s try a different angle. How about the world through the eyes of children’s? I don’t want to dwell on John McCain, too many people already do today, but I would suggest that your thoughts and prayers are with the souls of the hundreds of thousands of children that died because McCain advocated bombing them. Or, indeed, 50-odd years ago, were bombed by him personally. I wanted to leave him be altogether, don’t kick a man when he’s down, but I can’t get the image out of my head of him singing “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran”.

    To remember that, perhaps the most vile and infamous thing he’s ever done (it’s in the top ten), and then see someone like Ocasio-Cortez say he was an “unparalleled example of human decency”, it’s almost comedy.

    But not as funny as when in the 2008 campaign the woman in the red dress asked him if Obama was an Arab, and he responded:

    “No, ma’am. No, ma’am. He’s a decent, family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign is all about”.

    That is full-blown hilarious. And hardly a soul caught it, which makes it many times worse. It made him a decent man in the eyes of Americans to defend Obama by declaring that Arabs are per definition neither decent nor family men. Yeah, well, you might as well bomb them all then.

    But enough about McCain: it’s about the children, and their souls, not his.

    The Pope is visiting Ireland this weekend.

    There is really just one subject on people’s minds, even though the ‘leaders’ say this is one of Ireland’s biggest events in 40 years. What’s on their minds is -child- sex abuse by Catholic clergy. And it’s been -and probably still is- rampant in the country. Like it’s been everywhere the Catholic church is an important force. Which is in many countries, there are 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide. The man claimed he was begging for God’s forgiveness. Not sure that will do it, there, Francis.

    The Roman Catholic religion, and the Church, are fronts for the world’s biggest business empire, a multinational at least 1500 years older than the next one, Holland’s VOC -which existed maybe 100 years-. It has played power politics for longer than anyone else, all over the world. Its real estate portfolio alone is worth more than many a country. For that matter, it effectively owns many a country.

    There would have to be a huge outcry over the child abuse before there could ever be an investigation. Multiple popes have promised exactly such investigations, and nothing has happened. It would upset the business model too much. And most faithful still believe their priests are decent men, anyway. Yes, there’s that word again, ‘decent’.

    If a priest can no longer be maintained in a specific church because he’s been too obvious, too perverted and too greedy, he simply gets transferred to another parish. They’ve been doing this for 1,500 years, they got it down. And when things heat up, they beg god for forgiveness. While the Church gets ever richer.

    At a 2% annual growth rate, wealth doubles every 34-35 years. The Catholic Church has been at it for 1,500. Do your math. Or look at it this way: real estate prices have been surging over the past few decades. And that’s the Vatican’s main industry. Anyone want to venture a guess at how much money they have made?

    The Vatican is a facade hiding behind a facade hiding behind… Francis Ford Coppola tried tackling the topic in The Godfather III, but he was only mildly successful and not many people believed his portrayal. But, again, this is not about the Pope playing Kabuki theater like all his predecessors, it’s about the children.

    In the US, some 500 children are still separated from their parents, if they’re still in the country.

    Haven’t heard much from Judge Dana Sabraw, according to whose ruling they should have been reunited weeks ago. Where is the Judge? Where are the children?

    At the same time, we learn that about 52% of Americans under 18 -i.e. children, some 40 million of them- live in households that depend on some form of welfare. And Americans want to chide European nations for being ‘socialist’. That’s humor too.

    But again, it’s about the children. How can they ever reach their potential if there’s a constant cloud of financial worry hanging over their heads, if many of them still don’t enough to eat, if much of what they eat is junk food, which is full of glyphosate to boot, and if it takes $100,000 or so in debt just to get a degree?

    And that’s just the kids at home. Abroad, Americans treat children even a lot worse than they do their own. With the shining example of John McCain in mind, they have supplied the Saudi’s with much of the weaponry needed to murder many thousands more children in Yemen. 1.2 million human beings are estimated to have died in Iraq alone. Thanks John. That’s what, half a million children there alone?

    In Greece, numbers came out this week that said the number of refugees on the islands is presently 16,000, vs 10,000 a year ago. And yes, many of them are children.

    Still in overcrowded camps, nothing has changed. It’s like the Catholic Church’s promising investigations. Nothing ever happens. Nobody cares. Well, nobody who has the power to make things happen.

    The politicians all think about their careers. If it helps them in the next election to help refugees, children, countries, they will. If not, not. In the case of Greece, people are waking up to what actually happened to this country. Just too late. Matthew Klein wrote in Barron’s:

    There was no political will in 2010 to spend hundreds of billions of euros to bail out Dutch, French, and German banks. To Greece’s eternal misfortune, however, there was enough “solidarity” to launder that Northern European bank bailout through the Greek government.

    What does that have to do with children? Apart from the thousands of refugee children stranded on Greek islands and the mainland, Greek children themselves often no longer have access to sufficient food, healthcare, education, no matter how hard parents and others try. But at least Germany and Holland et al can boast about their growing economies.

    We’re getting this wrong, we’re getting it all upside down.

    Children are not objects to treat and use to further political and corporate agendas. They are the future. Abuse them, maim them, kill them, under-feed them, under-educate them, and you end up with a screwed-up, abusive, underfed and under-educated world.

    In that report about US children living in welfare dependent households there’s an interesting number: while 52.1% of under-18’s live in such a household, only 18.8% of over 75’s do. In other words, wealth is heavily skewed towards baby boomers and older. And that is somewhat defensible, since people need money for retirement, but it’s not if it means condemning others to food stamps.

    This paints the portrait of a broken society, and -predictably- the weakest are the victims. Children. But the most heartbreaking, even if that is a hard point to make when we’ve already seen how many have been bombed, comes from Nauru, Australia’s ‘private’ prison island for refugees. As Australians think about how much their property has surged in price this week, their government(s) are responsible -in their name- for this:

    ‘Begging To Die’: Succession Of Critically Ill Children Moved Off Nauru

    A girl suffering “resignation syndrome” and who is refusing all food and water has been ordered off Nauru by an Australian court, as a succession of critically ill children are brought from the island. At least three children have left the island since Thursday, and reports from island sources say at least three more children, as young as 12, are “on FFR” – food and fluid refusal.

    The current crisis on the island is overwhelming medical staff, who are referring dozens of children for transfer off the island, only to have their decisions rebuffed by Australian Border Force officials on the island or department of home affairs bureaucrats in Canberra. Two children were moved off the island with their families on Thursday.

    Early on Friday morning, a 14-year-old refugee boy suffering a major depressive disorder and severe muscle wastage after not getting out of bed for four months, was flown directly from Nauru to Brisbane with his family. There are concerns, doctors say, he may never be able to walk normally again.

    Later on Friday, in the federal court, Justice Tom Thawley ordered another girl – given the designation EIV18 by the court – to be moved to Australia for urgent medical treatment. Court orders prevent publication of the girl’s age – other than the fact she is a child – her name or country of origin. [..] The girl has been inside the supported accommodation area of the regional processing centre for three weeks, and has been refusing food and water for much of that time.

    Before she, too, fell into acute depression and “resignation syndrome”, and refused to eat or drink anything, she had been one of the brightest and most articulate of the refugee children on Nauru. “Before she got sick, she was the best-performing student,” a source familiar with the girl and her condition told the Guardian. “She had a dream to be a doctor in Australia and to help others. Now, she is on food-and-fluid refusal and begging to die as death is better than Nauru.”

    Can you be a worse human being than John McCain was? It’s not easy. But some people are still trying. Hard to fathom how Australians can be so silent about this. Where are the protests in the streets of Melbourne and Sydney?

    Caring only about your own children while throwing the rest away with the bathwater is neither feasible nor viable. You’re bringing up children destined to fight and hate each other. For no reason that I can see at all. Do you enjoy the world of John McCain, where children were bombed for 50 years in two dozen or so countries? Or do you think that’s not such a good idea?

    McCain could succeed only because his country, and the world around him, failed. Don’t set up your children, and all children, to fail in the same way he did.

  • NOAA Issues Geomagnetic Storm Warning: "A Crack Opened In Earth's Magnetic Field & Plasma Started Pouring In"

    According to NOAA Space Weather forecasters, a powerful G3-class geomagnetic storm is in progress on August 26th as Earth passes through the wake of a coronal mass ejection (CME) that arrived with little notice approximately 24 hours ago. Strong magnetic fields in the CME’s wake have cracked into Earth’s magnetosphere, allowing solar wind to enter. So far auroras have been sighted in Scandinavia, Canada, and northern-tier US states such as Michigan and New York.

    “The geomagnetic field is expected to be at active to G3 (Strong) geomagnetic storm levels on day one (26 Aug) due to continued influence from the 20 Aug CME. Quiet to active conditions, with a slight chance for G1 (Minor) storm conditions, are likely on day two (27 Aug) with quiet to unsettled levels likely on day three (28 Aug) as CME effects gradually wane,” said the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, NOAA, Space Weather Prediction Center.

    Steven Herman, the White House bureau chief of Voice of America (VOA News), reported the strong geomagnetic storm on earlier Sunday morning. He shared a note listing the potential impacts of the storm, which included power systems, spacecraft, satellite communication networks, and even radio disruptions.

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    The K-index, a chart that measures the earth’s magnetic field with an integer in the range 0–9 with 1 being calm and 5 or more indicating a geomagnetic storm, hit the 4 threshold was reached at 21:43 UTC on August 25, followed by K-index of 5 (G1 Minor) at 01:54 UTC on August 26, K-index of 6 (G2 Moderate) at 02:57 and K-index of 7 (G3 Strong) at 05:59 and 07:38 UTC.

    G3 Strong geomagnetic storm potential impacts:

    Area of impact primarily poleward of 50 degrees Geomagnetic Latitude.

    Induced Currents – Power system voltage irregularities possible, false alarms may be triggered on some protection devices.

    Spacecraft – Systems may experience surface charging; increased drag on low Earth-orbit satellites and orientation problems may occur.

    Navigation – Intermittent satellite navigation (GPS) problems, including loss-of-lock and increased range error may occur.

    Radio – HF (high frequency) radio may be intermittent. Aurora – Aurora may be seen as low as Pennsylvania to Iowa to Oregon.

    Dr. Tamitha Skov, a space weather forecaster, warned “this solar storm may have a predictable magnetic field, so for emergency responders to Hurricane Lane, I offer this worst case. We will likely reach solar storm conditions (Kp5-Kp6) for the next 6-8 hours at least. Expect mid-latitude aurora, & poor ham radio!”

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    What did people around the world see? 

    Taken by John McKinnon on August 26, 2018 @ Four Mile Lake, Alberta, Canada (Source/ SpaceWeather.com)

    The light from the full moon didn’t stop the aurora from being seen in Southern New Hampshire (the “marshmallow field” in Rollinsford) but those clouds were a real heartbreaker on August 26, 2018  (Source/ @RobWrightImage) 

    Full moon G3 Aurora captured over the Range Lighthouse where the #SaugeenRiver meets LakeHuron in Southampton Ontario Canada August 26, 2018 (Source/ @scottrockphoto) 

    The aurora was out early this morning over Decker, Montana. A green band was faintly visible for hours despite the smoke and bright moonlight (Source/ @krp234)

    “A Crack Opened In Earth’s Magnetic Field And Plasma Started Pouring in last night,” said Ben Davidson, the founder of Mobile Observatory Project, ObservatoryProject.com.

    He also said, “over the next 24-hours, we are in an elevated cardiac and psychological risk, and will be looking for large disruption into electronics, especially in large-scale power, communications, and transportation industries.”

    *  *  *

    Ben Davidson warned early Sunday about significant power system failures because of the geomagnetic storm. Moments ago, New York metro train number 7 had just lost power (unconfirmed).

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    While everyone was blaming the Russians last year about US power grid failures, we pointed out that a geomagnetic stormcould have been the reason why power disruption in San Fransisco, New York, and Los Angeles occurred all at once.

  • How Elon Musk Sabotaged His Own Going Private Transaction

    The soap opera over Tesla’s going private deal may be over, but the autopsy of just what happened, how and why the “deal” collapsed in well under a month from its “funding secured” announcement lingers.  And, as it turns out, Elon Musk has nobody but himself to blame for what may otherwise have been a possible deal, despite the staggering odds.

    Recall that as part of Musk’s “funding secured” assurance, the most widely mentioned name was that of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund (PIF): after all, few other institutions had the capacity – and eccentricity – to pull off such a feat. However, as we discussed several days after Musk’s fateful Aug.7 tweet, Saudi Arabia would likely get cold feet – in similar fashion to its withdrawal of the Aramco IPO – as the world’s attention focused on its strategic planning and its dwindling finances – the fund is currently engaging in a back door funding deal involving Sabic as well as grandiose plans that include a massive new city in the desert – just days after it had already acquired a minority, 5% stake. There was also the issue of SoftBank granting the Saudi fund permission to engage in a transaction of this magnitude. 

    Well, as we now know, after the Tesla CEO abruptly called the deal off just before Midnight Eastern Time on Friday, and just days after Goldman and Morgan Stanley were retained, Musk was “sorely mistaken” – as Bloomberg politely puts it – when he tweeted “funding secured” and later told the world “investor support is confirmed,” based on his belief that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund was eager to back his venture.

    Two things to note here:

    First, following Musk’s seemingly manipulative, potentially fraudulent tweet, the SEC is now investigating his tweets and blog posts, which triggered the stock gyrations throughout August. It’s always why investors now must brace for another bout of volatility when trading in the stock – which really trades like an option on the credibility of the Musk narrative – opens Monday morning, “while regulators and lawyers autopsy what happened to a deal potentially valued at $82 billion and Tesla’s board is left with a brilliant but exhausted and erratic CEO.”

    Second, and far more important, is the realization that as we suggested two weeks ago, Musk appears to have sabotaged his own deal. Bloomberg explains:

    Musk’s vocal ambitions stirred unease among Saudi officials about the publicity surrounding their potential role, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified. The Saudis were unhappy about Musk detailing his talks with the Kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund in an Aug. 13 blog post, where the CEO justified his earlier tweet about “funding secured” on their interest, the people said. On top of that, there were concerns about potential fallout from shareholder lawsuits and the SEC investigation, the people said.

    Worse, it was Musk’s eagerness to “burn the shorts” without delay, that soured the Saudi interest: as Bloomberg adds, “Musk and the Saudis hadn’t yet reached an agreement on the terms or structure of their participation before he pulled the plug.” That, in addition to the PIF’s interest Tesla competitor, aspiring U.S. electric-car maker, Lucid Motors Inc., is what appears to have crushed any hope of the Saudis becoming an anchor investor in any Tesla going private deal, even though there may well have been some hope before Musk decided to spill the beans on twitter and on the Tesla blog.

    The WSJ confirms as much in a Sunday night article:

    Musk cited Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund as the source of his secured funding: “Obviously, the Saudi sovereign fund has more than enough capital needed to execute on such a transaction.”

    That rankled some senior officials in the kingdom, according to people familiar with the matter. Prince Mohammed bin Salman has big ideas to turn his petrostate into a technology and solar-power hub as part of his plans to develop its economy. And he was interested enough in Tesla to consider being part of a take-private transaction; the Saudis had already bought a near 5% stake in Tesla in the public market. But the Saudis never made a formal proposal. A Saudi government official and an adviser familiar with the talks said the country’s senior leadership was divided.

    Mr. Musk’s tweets and the blog post didn’t help. The government official said his behavior worried some officials about his health as well as the role he would play in the company.

    All of this left Tesla’s advisors including Goldman, Morgan Stanley and Silver Lake scratching their collective heads what was going on:

    … discussions about how a deal might proceed were still at a very early stage when [Musk] decided to call off the plan, according to people familiar with the matter. Banks had at most just a couple of weeks to assess the situation, after being brought in to advise only after Musk’s initial tweet, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the details aren’t public.

    It’s not even clear if Tesla’s retainer to Goldman and MS had cleared: the banks may want to check if the company – whose liquidity remains precarious – didn’t put a stop payment on it now that Musk has grown bored with the whole affair.

    But wait, there’s more, because according to the WSJ, Musk actually did manage to line up the money thanks to his banks, and while we doubt this particular narrative, this is what allegedly happened last week:

    On Monday and Tuesday, advisers from Goldman and Silver Lake plowed ahead on a deal that might work. By Wednesday evening, they had a presentation for Mr. Musk, proposing a roster of deep-pocketed investors, including Volkswagen and Silver Lake itself, that had agreed to contribute as much as $30 billion, people familiar with the matter said.

    However, these weren’t the kind of investors Musk had in mind, who appeared hung up on the Saudi being the anchor investor. He was, in the WSJ’s words, also deeply suspicious of rival car companies, believing they wanted to piggyback on what he called the “Tesla halo.” He also was lamenting a loss of small investors, who had been his most vocal champions.

    Finally, the deal team advised him, the money would likely come with strings attached: The new investors would want a lot of say in the company, and each would likely want to hammer out terms of their own.

    The following day, Thursday, the board meeting convened at the Tesla factory conference room, where Musk had told some board members earlier in the day that he had doubts about the proposal.

    The advisers said they were confident it could be done, and then left.

    Then Mr. Musk spoke. Based on the latest information I have, he said, I’m withdrawing the proposal.

    “Woohoo,” one board member let out.

    What happens next is unclear. Musk’s decision to scrap his plan leaves even more questions open about where he and the electric-car maker go from here. As Bloomberg points out, leaving ownership as is puts the scrutiny back on Musk’s all-consuming work style, the company’s tricky cash position, its ability to meet mass-market production goals, and the independence and oversight of Tesla’s board.

    The next measure of how Tesla bounces back may come in early October, when it will report third-quarter production and deliveries. The company has said it expects to make 50,000 to 55,000 Model 3s in the quarter, which averages to roughly 4,200 vehicles a week at the higher end of the guidance

    This may be a major problem, because as some independent observers have noticed, there suddenly appears to be a “significant production problem at Fremont”, perhaps the true catalyst behind Musk’s catastrophic approach to disclosing his going private intentions.

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    Even perpetual Tesla cheerleader Gene Munster appeared concerned: “Eventually this will blow over, but it’s going to take at least six months. This is not a situation where we can just forget about it. It’s created a new layer of questions for investors. And now Tesla needs to get back to basics, which is ramping Model 3 production and profitability.”

    But perhaps the biggest risk factor of all, is also the reason why Tesla’s stock price is as high as it is (if not for much longer): Musk himself:

    The SEC investigation and investor lawsuits related to the whipsawing stock will at minimum continue to divert management’s time from operations, Joel Levington, a senior credit analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, said in a note Saturday. Musk’s exhaustion, which the CEO described in a New York Times interview, is the “most critical near-term concern.”

    And while Musk’s creative talent and visionary brilliance are widely recognized, the CEO will soon be able to add one more notch to his list of firsts: a Harvard case study of how to spectacularly blow up a going private transaction in less than three weeks, while putting yourself at risk of incarceration.

  • A Robot Is Making $6 Burgers For Broke Millennials In San Francisco

    Creator, a culinary robotics company designed around a transparent 14-foot-long “culinary instrument” that cooks and assembles burgers to order in under 5 minutes, is set to open in San Francisco’s South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood in September.

    The assembly line in the robot kitchen of Creator, San Francisco. (Source/ Creator)

    San Francisco is the epicenter of start-up culture. It comes as no surprise that technology and food have been blended to create robot-made hamburgers. In the last several years, California has seen an explosion of robots entering the culinary world, as it has become apparent, new advances in tech are attempting to eliminate low skilled workers from the kitchen.

    The robot consists of 20 computers, 350 sensors and 50 actuators that form a robotic assembly line. After the customer places an order with a human, the machine slices buns, tomatoes and onions, grills and grinds meat, adds condiments, sears buns and produces a gourmet hamburger in less than five minutes without any human intervention. The human staff then prepares the order for the customer, adding fries and coleslaw to the plate as they keep an eye on the robot. As shown below, the burger is sent along a conveyor belt, where it gets additional toppings that are all custom ordered.

    Pickles, tomatoes, and onions are sliced by the robot kitchen of Creator, San Francisco (Source/ Creator)

    From start to finish, the entire process takes less than 5 minutes and costs only $6. Maybe this is an attempt to make food affordable to the heavily indebted millennial in California.

    Creator’s founder 33-year-old Alex Vardakostas, said in a city of pricey boba drinks and marked up avocado toast, the company’s mission is to enhance food quality and make it affordable. Burgers are $6. “We want everyone to be able to partake,” he said to NPR.

    A Creator Burger fresh out of the robot that toasted the buns, sliced the produce, shredded the cheese, and cooked the beef (Source/ Saroyan Humphrey)

    The 2200 sq ft. restaurant looks like an ultra-modern hipster bar with geometric forms in a flowing, open-concept space that emphasizes simplicity and function in the design. Per Selvaag, a lead designer for BMW, was involved with the design of the layout.

    Bookshelves filled with design and cookbooks (Source/Creator)

    Transparency is key and the open kitchen can be viewed from the restaurant with a display glass case highlights every ingredient that goes in or on the burger.

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    When TechCrunch interviewed Vardakostas in June, the topic of discussion was the the coming collision of automation in the kitchen, as it could displace a lot of low wage workers.

    Karen Harris, Managing Director of Bain & Company’s Macro Trends Group, has spent a great deal of time analyzing a range of technologies at or near commercialization, including humanoid service robots, collaborative robots (cobots), drones, artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms.

    She warns that the business environment of the 2020s will be more volatile as automation may eliminate as many as 20 percent to 25 percent of current jobs—equivalent to 40 million displaced workers—and depress wage growth for many more workers.

    She said benefits of automation would likely flow to about 20 percent of workers—primarily highly compensated, highly skilled workers—as well as to the owners of capital. The growing scarcity of highly skilled workers may push their incomes even higher relative to lesser-skilled workers. As a result, automation has the potential to significantly increase income inequality and, by extension, wealth inequality.

    As for the $6 robot made burgers in SoMa, well, it is great for the broke millennial partaking in the tech bubble but could be devastating for kitchen staff. The collision of automation in the kitchen is here. There will be severe consequences.

  • More Evidence The Economy Is Deteriorating

    Authored by Dave Kranzler via Investment Research Dynamics,

    “Financial-market and economic prospects remain far shy of the hype and headlines, amidst tanking consumer optimism and negative revisions to recent reporting.” – John Williams, Shadowstats.com

    The economy may seem like it’s doing well if you are part of the upper 10% demographic. Though, in reality, for most of the upper 10%, doing “well” has been a function of having easy access to credit. NASA Federal Credit Union is offering 0% down, 0% mortgage insurance for mortgages up to $2.5 million.

    Someone I know suggested the tax cut stimulus had run its course. But the narrative that the tax cuts would stimulate economic activity was pure propaganda. The tax cuts stimulated $1 trillion in expected share buybacks and put more money in the pockets of corporate insiders and billionaires. The average middle class household spent its tax cut money on more expensive gasoline and food. Since the tax cut took effect, auto sales and home sales have declined. Retail sales have been mixed. However, it’s difficult to distinguish between statistical manipulation and inflation. I would argue that, net of real inflation and Census Bureau statistical games, real retail sales have been declining.

    As an example, last week Black Box Intelligence released July restaurant sales. While comparable store sales were up 0.54% over July 2017, comparable restaurant traffic was down 1.8%. On a rolling three months, comp sales are up 0.46% but comparable traffic is down nearly 2%. With traffic declining, especially a faster rate relative to the small increase in sales, it means the sales “growth” is entirely a function of price inflation. If Black Box Intelligence could control it’s data for price increases, it would show that there is no question that real sales are declining. I have been loathe to recommend shorting restaurant stocks because, for some reason, the hedge funds love them.

    On Wednesday last week, the Government reported July retail sales, which were “up” 0.5% vs June. However, June’s 0.5% “gain” was revised sharply lower to 0.2%. Revising the previous month lower to make the headline number for the reported month appear higher is a mathematical gimmick that the Government uses frequently. As an example of the questionable quality of the retail sales report, the Government reports that sales at motor-vehicle and parts dealers rose 0.2% from June to July. But the auto industry itself reported a 4% decline in sales from June to July. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which report is more reliable…

    Housing starts for July, reported last Thursday, showed an 8% decline from June’s number. June’s number was revised lower from the original number reported. No surprise there, at least for me. The report missed the Wall Street brain trust’s expectations by a wide margin for the second month in row. The downward revision to June makes the report even worse. Additionally, housing starts are now down year-over-year for the second month in a row.

    This report followed last Wednesday’s mortgage applications report which showed a decline in purchase applications for the 5th week in a row. The housing starts number continues to throw cold water on the “low inventory” narrative. While there still may some areas of housing market strength in the $500,000 and below price bucket, the mortgage purchase applications data has been mostly negative since April, which reflects deteriorating home sales. This reality is “magnified” by the fact that home sales have declining during what should be the strongest seasonal period of the year for home sales.

    Lending Tree, Zillow Group and Redfin are “derivatives” of housing market activity. They reflect web searches, foot traffic and sales associated with mortgages and home sales. Lending Tree stock is down nearly 42% late January. Zillow stock is down 26% since mid-June. Redfin is down 39.5% since the beginning of the year, including an 18.5% plunge two weeks ago. unequivocally, these three stocks reflect the popping of the housing bubble. The Short Seller Journalrecommended shorting all three of these stocks before their big declines.

    Normally I’m hesitant to discuss the regional Fed economic surveys because they are skewed by their expectations/outlook (hope/sentiment) components. However, the Philly Fed survey for August was notable because it reinforced my view that the economy and the “hope” for a better economy is fading quickly. The overall index crashed to 11.9 from 25.7 in July. This is lower than just before the Trump election, when “hope” soared. Wall Street was expecting a 22.5 reading on the index. The new orders, work week and employment components plunged. Shipments dropped, inventories rose and prices paid fell. This report reflects the view that economy is much weaker than is conveyed by the political propaganda coming form DC.

    I don’t know what it will take to cause a plunge in the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq but, as we’ve seen with homebuilder stocks, there’s a lot of opportunity to make money on economic reality in the lesser-followed sectors of the stock market.

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