Aug 26

Today’s News 26th August 2018

  • Yet Another US-Saudi Massacre In Yemen: UN Condemns Airstrike Killing 22 Children

    Just two weeks after a US-Saudi coalition airstrike on a school bus in Yemen killed some 40 children in an event which finally caught international media attention, there’s a new report that coalition jets have struck a camp for internally displaced people in the flashpoint region of Hodeidah.

    Pro-Houthi rebel outlets were the first to report the massacre, which was quickly picked up in international media. According to reports, at least 22 children and four women were killed. 

    Prior US-Saudi strikes on Yemen in 2017. Image source: Getty via The New Arab

    “[The victims were] dead children and women. [It was a] disgusting crime,” the Houthi-run Al Masirah TV network reported Thursday. Refugees were reportedly fleeing fighting in the area area when the airstrike occurred. 

    The BBC reports the following based on a United Nation official in the region: “The victims were fleeing fighting in the al-Durayhimi district, south of the port city of Hudaydah, when their vehicle was hit on Thursday. A separate air strike the same day killed four children, according to the UN’s humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock.”

    The UN quickly weighing in on the attack is significant, given both Saudi and United States recent statements indicating they do not deliberately target civilians or civilian infrastructure.

    Screengrab from Al Jazeera coverage showing the strike aftermath on Thursday.

    After the August 9th attack on a school bus in the north of the country, which killed scores of mostly children, the Saudi coalition spokesman defended its actions as “legitimate”.

    The BBC continues of the heightened scrutiny regarding US-Saudi coalition war crimes in Yemen: 

    Mr Lowcock’s statement on Friday confirmed that the victims had been fleeing violence around the rebel-held port city Hudaydah.

    He renewed calls for an impartial and independent investigation into air strikes. A report by Human Rights Watch the same day accused the Saudi-led coalition of failing to hold “credible” investigations into such incidents.

    The reported attack was condemned by Unicef, Save the Children and other international organisations.

    Earlier this month, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for an independent and prompt investigation into Saudi coalition airstrikes on civilian targets, including the August 9 school bus attack.

    UNICEF’s regional director in the Middle East and North Africa, had tweeted in the aftermath of the school bus massacre: “NO EXCUSES ANYMORE!!”

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    There’s further been rising bipartisan support in Congress for cutting off US intelligence support and weapons supplied to Saudi Arabia, especially after it was revealed the specific laser-guided bomb used on the school bus was a US-supplied Lockheed Martin manufactured weapon. The UAE also plays a lead role in air operations over Yemen as a regional US and Saudi ally.

    In subsequent statements a Pentagon official told Vox that the US is not going to investigate the origins of the bomb from the August 9th attack, saying, “We may never know if the munition [used] was one that the US sold to them.” However, a tracking number on the side of a bomb fragment confirms it was supplied by the US, as also recently confirmed by CNN. 

    The Pentagon has lately claimed to be heavily drawing down its assistance to the Saudi coalition fighting in Yemen. 

  • Chinese Naval Expansion Hits High Gear

    Submitted by SouthFront.org

    While there was much fanfare and attention given to the July 3rd launch of two Type 055 guided missile destroyers at the Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Co. (DISC) shipyard in Dalian, very little mention has been made of the many other warships that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has launched or commissioned since the beginning of the year. Although the Type 055 DDG is the PLAN’s most powerful surface combatant, and the largest such vessel constructed by an Asian nation since World War II, they are one component in a steadily growing naval force structure. While the addition of three Type 055 DDGs this year, added to the first vessel in class which rolled into the water from Dalian just over a year ago in June of 2017, showcase China’s growing capabilities not only in producing powerful and modern warships, they also illustrate the maturity and  stunning capacity of the Chinese ship building industry. This industry has launched and/or commissioned 15 modern warships in just the first seven months of 2018.

    Three More Type 055 Destroyers

    This year is proving to be a big year for the PLAN. Of the fifteen vessels built so far in 2018, three have been the newest and most powerful surface warfare vessel in the Chinese arsenal, the Type 055 DDG. The world was stunned when China was able to complete the first of this new class in June of 2017. Sections of a second in this class were clearly visible in satellite imagery at the time. That vessel was launched in May of this year, but two more Type 055 destroyers were launched simultaneously on July 3rd, just two months later. The 5th and 6th vessels in class are already in varying stages of construction.

    Although initial reports had suggested that a total of six vessels had been ordered, it has been hinted that this number has been increased to eight. This number will most likely grow to at least 12 vessels by 2025, when the PLAN will be looking to expand its aircraft carrier program with the introduction of at least one carrier of the Type 002 class. It has yet to be determined if this new carrier (CV-18) will employ steam or electromagnetic catapults, but it will definitely be a CATOBAR carrier. PLAN aviators continue to practice CATOBAR take-off and landings at the Huangdicun Airbase in southern China. Chinese naval engineers have had a great deal of success in developing an Electromagnetic Aircraft Launching System (EMALS) that requires much less energy than the system currently utilized aboard the U.S. Navy’s Gerald Ford Class carrier. It remains to be decided if the Type 002 will be conventionally powered, or will make use of a nuclear reactor.

    Regardless of the next generation carrier’s specific design specifications and capabilities, powerful surface warfare ships will be required to escort them in a larger aircraft carrier battle group formation. The Type 055 DDG will likely serve a similar role as the Ticonderoga Class CG of the U.S. Navy within the carrier strike groups (CSG), and will also be utilized as a command ship or heavy AAW and ASW platform in PLAN naval task forces or while supporting amphibious ready groups (ARG). The Type 055’s significant weapons payload, multifaceted offensive and defensive capabilities, and great range and endurance will aid Chinese efforts to protect and expand its maritime territories, protect its shipping lanes, and maintain its naval lines of communication.

    Type 052D DDG Continued Growth

    A number of photos that appeared both online and in the print media exhibiting the two newest Type 055 DDGs to be launched at the DISC shipyard in Dalian failed to mention that three brand new Type 052D destroyers also appeared in these same images. The Type 052D is a powerful guided missile destroyer in its own right, rivaling the U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke Class DDG. China launched the first Type 052D, the Kunming DDG-172 in 2014. There are currently 9 ships of the class in service, 2 undergoing sea trials, and a further two being fitted out. Three Type 052D DDGs have been commissioned in the first half of this year.

    No less than five destroyers in various stages of fitting out are docked at the Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Co. (DISC) shipyard on July 3rd; three Type 052D and two Type 055 DDGs.

    Although original rumors had hinted at 16 vessels being ordered, some inside sources now claim that the number has been increased significantly. It would seem reasonable that a total of 18 to 26 vessels may end up being built, dependent upon how ambitious the PLAN aircraft carrier program becomes. IHS Janes Defense Weekly reported on May 2nd of this year that satellite imagery appeared to show a Type 052D under construction at the Jiangnan Changxingdao shipyard in Shanghai that had approximately 4 meters (13.1ft) added to its LOA. The after flight deck may have been lengthened to accommodate larger helicopters which would aid the vessel in its ASW role.

    It remains to be seen if the above mentioned modification will enter serial production under a different designation, or will prove to be a concept testbed for fielding larger rotary wing assets at sea. It is important to note that China produced six Type052C Class DDGs from 2004 to 2015, and has produced thirteen of the much improved Type 052D Class DDGs in just four years, a six fold increase in annual production.

    A Type 055D DDG docking with the aid of a tug at a PLAN naval base. The deck gun and forward 32 cell VLS are clearly visible. Although bearing some similarity to the U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke Class DDG, the Type 052D is more streamlined and esthetically pleasing. Its good looks likely equate to a much smaller radar signature.

    More Frigates and Corvettes

    While smaller warships do not enjoy the limelight of their larger peers, they can teach the observer a great deal about a nation’s maritime defense posture and priorities. While the Chinese shipbuilding industry has constructed and launched nineteen Type 052 DDGs of both variants, and four Type 055 DDGs from 2014 to the present, they have also turned out fourteen Type 054A Class guided missile frigates (total of 32 of all variants) and a no less than twenty Type 056A Class corvettes (total of 42 in class of all variants) over the same period of time.

    The smaller warships traditionally perform a number of different roles in naval warfare. Firstly, they serve as coastal patrol craft. They are nimble and fast, heavily armed for their diminutive size, and are outfitted to be flexible enough to perform a multitude of different missions. Their small size equates to limited firepower and shorter range, but they are well suited to serve as picket ships and screening forces to task forces fielding larger and more powerful vessels when those fleets are operating within close range of home ports and naval facilities.

    Three Type 056A Class corvettes tied-up alongside one another. The vessel in the middle is conducting a crew muster on the aft flight deck. Approximately half of the 42 vessels in the Type 056 class are of the upgraded Type 056A variant.

    The Type 056A Class corvette is ideally suited to patrol China’s coasts, the maritime territories within China’s EEZ, as well as the island archipelagos of the Paracel and Spratly Islands. They will most likely begin patrol operations from the key island bases at Fiery Cross Reef, Subi Reef, and Mischief Reef as the maritime logistics facilities on these islands are improved.

    The Type 054A frigate is a well balance and powerful naval surface combatant for its size, and carries an ample arsenal of anti-aircraft, anti-ship, and anti-submarine weapons. It is an ideal escort vessel with a range of over 8,000 nautical miles. It is a traditional multi-purpose frigate, possessing the inherent ability to attack other surface ships, engage aircraft, and track and destroy submarines. It is this class of warship that the PLAN first sent to the Gulf of Aden in 2009 to serve in international anti-piracy duties. Eleven Type 05A frigates have served on anti-piracy duties in this region since that time.

    The Type 054A Class Frigate is a flexible, yet powerful surface warfare asset that possesses significant range and the ability to engage in a multitude of operations. It is equipped with an aft hangar and flight deck, and carries either a Ka-28 or Harbin Z-9 helicopter depending on mission requirements. Type 054A FFGs will likely be deployed as part of naval flotillas stationed on a rotational basis at the PLAN naval base in Djibouti, and eventually at Gwadar, Pakistan. They will also be used to police the long maritime supply lines to and from China to strategic waterways near the Horn of Africa and the Straits of Hormuz, as well as continuing patrols in the South China and East China Seas.

    Type 054A Yiyang, FFG-548. This vessel was constructed in 2010 and was the seventh vessel in class to be built. Note the 32 cell VLS forward of the superstructure, 76mm dual-purpose deck gun, and Type 87 anti-submarine rocket (ASROC) launchers just forward of the deck gun. Amidships are the twin 4 cell launchers for the C-803 anti-ship/land attack cruise missiles.

    New Nuclear Submarines

    Without a doubt one of the segments of Chinese defense strategy most shrouded in mystery are the attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines of the PLAN. They are very rarely a topic of discussion by government officials, either on or off the record. What is known is that the PLAN has a newer SSN and SSBN in service. China’s submarine technology has run behind that of both the United States and Russia for decades, but China has been rapidly closing the gap in recent years. It is no secret that Chinese espionage efforts to acquire U.S. submarine warfare technology have been very active, and quite successful over the past decade in particular.

    The most capable nuclear attack submarine (SSN) in service with the PLAN is the Type 093B. A notable improvement over the Type 093, it has the capability to fire submarine launched cruise missiles (SLCM) while submerged via a dorsal mounted VLS. Like its predecessor, the Type 093, it retains the ability to fire SLCMs from its bow torpedo tubes. This is accomplished by using a specifically designed torpedo tube missile canister. It is not known how many Type 093B SSNs are currently in service, but most analysts, including those at the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, put the number at six. Of greater interest is the newer SSN that is either currently being fitted out or is undergoing sea trials later this year, the Type 095.

    A pair of Type 093B SSNs. Of particular interest in this image are the improved hydrodynamics of the conning tower and the slight dorsal hump denoting the presence of a VLS for launching anti-ship and land attack cruise missiles.

    The Type 095 is an SSN, but reportedly has a sizeable VLS (12-16 cells) which can fire a multitude of PLAN missiles including anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM) and land attack cruise missiles (LACM). The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence has classified the Type 095 as a nuclear attack guided missile submarine (SSGN) due to its large missile capacity. The Type 095 is thought to utilize pump-jet propulsion, make use of noise reducing technologies, and a hybrid pressure hull design.

    The Type 095 is being constructed at the new Bohai Shipbuilding Heavy Industry Company (BSHIC) submarine manufacturing facility located in Huludao, in the Liaoning province. It is the largest submarine manufacturing facility in the world, with an assembly building measuring some 430,000 square feet (39,948 sq. meters). Completed in 2017, the main assembly hall can accommodate four submarines at any given time. The facility is totally enclosed, and operations cannot be viewed from the air or via satellite surveillance. This also allows manufacturing operations to continue year round regardless of weather conditions. The facility will be used to build all Type 095 SSN and Type 096 SSBN class submarines.

    A satellite image of the BSHIC submarine manufacturing facility in Huludao in the province of Liaoning, China.

    The Type 094 Jin Class nuclear ballistic missile submarine has also undergone a noticeable transformation, resulting in what has been renamed the Type 094A. Improvements to the new variant include a larger VLS aft of the conning tower, a more streamlined shape which produces less noise and cavitation while submerged, likely greater speed submerged (less hydrodynamic drag), and a new ballistic missile armament. The Type 094A is most likely equipped with the next generation JL-2A submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM). The JL-2A is based on the DF-31, and has an estimated maximum range of 11,200 kilometers (6,960 miles). The JL-2A is likely equipped with a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) warhead. The PLAN likely has between four and six Type 094/094A class SSBNs in service. These SSBNs serve as the third leg of the nuclear deterrent triad that China lacked for so many years, and the 094A offers China a viable second strike capability. The Type 096 SSBN currently being designed will offer notable improvements over the 094A SSBN, yet little is known about the project.

    This rare image shows not only a Type 094A Class SSBN in the foreground, but also a Type 093B Class SSN in the background. The improved hydrodynamics of both vessels can be seen, especially in the conning towers that now lack windows. The large dorsal hump of the Type 094A houses the powerful JL-2A submarine launched ballistic missiles that have a range in excess of 11,200 kilometers.

    The Sixth and Final Type 071 LPD?

    The final Type 071 Class LPD of the original order of six vessels was launched at the Hudong-Zhonghua shipyard on January 20th of this year. The fifth vessel was launched just 7 months prior. It remains unknown if the PLAN will decide to order additional LPDs of this class, or will concentrate instead on the larger Type 075 LHDs currently under construction at the same shipyard which constructed all six Type 071 LPDs.

    It is logical to conclude that China may decide to build additional Type 071 LPDs, but this will depend perhaps on how long it takes to construct, launch and commission the first of the new class of LHDs. With six LPDs in service, after the final two vessels are finally commissioned, the PLAN will always have at least two of them ready to deploy as the backbone of a small Amphibious Ready Group (ARG). A PLAN ARG would likely consist of at least one Type 071 LPD, 2 Type 072 LSTs and a surface warfare escort of a mix of DDGs and FFGs.

    These smaller amphibious warfare vessels lack the size and capability of bringing their own aviation strike element with them. The Type 071 can accommodate two helicopters on its large aft flight deck, and is equipped to house four helicopters in the adjacent hangar. The Type 072 LST can also accommodate one helicopter on its after flight deck. Lacking a VSTOL attack aircraft, the PLAN will most likely modify the Z-10 attack helicopter for naval use, with it serving a similar purpose as the U.S. Marine Corps AH-1Z Viper and Russian Ka-52k naval attack helicopters. China has already conducted take-off and landing tests with Z-10s on both the Type 071 LPD and 072A LST. The Type 075 LHD will undoubtedly have an attack element of at least eight to ten modified Z-10s.

    It is clear that a larger amphibious warfare platform is a requirement for the PLAN in the immediate future. If the time it took China to design, build, launch and fit-out its first indigenous aircraft carrier is an indicator, we are likely looking at the first Type 075 to be launched sometime in 2020. Fitting out and sea trails will take an additional two years before the first vessel is commissioned. The LHD is without a doubt the most flexible and capable of all amphibious warfare platforms and the PLAN will need these vessels to be able to field viable ARGs to respond to challenges within its maritime territories and to project power at greater ranges along the full length and breadth of the Maritime Silk Road.

    The All Important Support Vessels

    China signaled to the world that it fully intended to field aircraft carrier battle groups (CBG) in the near future when it launched the first Type 901 Fast Combat Support Ship in December of 2015. Built by Guangzhou Shipyard International Company Ltd. (GSI), the first vessel in this class Hulun Hu (hull # 965), commissioned in September of 2017 after successful sea trials and UNREP trails, bears the distinction of being the only fast combat support ship fielded by a nation other than the United States, which operates the Sacramento and Supply Class vessels. These massive underway replenishment ships are designed to be able to meet the logistics needs of fast moving carrier battle/strike groups.

    The Type 901 is a massive vessel, with a fully loaded displacement of 48,000 tons. It is equipped with five liquid bulk cargo transfer stations, three on the port side and two on the starboard side, and is also equipped for liquid transfers astern. They can refuel an aircraft carrier with fuel oil and aviation fuel to starboard while supplying fuel oil to surface warfare escorts to port. The disclosed cruising speed is in excess of 25 knots, which is likely understated. It is equipped with a large aircraft hangar and flight deck that can accommodate large Z-8 heavy transport helicopters which are well suited to aerial replenishment duties. A second Type 901 is currently in an advanced state of construction.

    The massive size of the Type 901 is clearly on display in this image. The vessel tied up alongside Hulun Hu is a Type 640 Class auxiliary tanker.

    The PLAN also operates the Type 903 and Type 903A Class fleet replenishment vessels. The Type 903 was greatly improved and took on the designation Type 903A with the first two examples commissioned in the summer of 2013. There are six Type 903A replenishment ships on active service, and a seventh currently in an advanced state of construction. These vessels have a fully loaded displacement of approximately 24,000 tons and can carry 10,500 tons of bunkers (fuel), 250 tons of potable water, and roughly 700 tons of dry cargo.

    Type 903A Honghu, commissioned in July of 2016. The PLAN should take delivery of the seventh such vessel sometime in the middle of 2019. The PLAN increased production of this class of vessel since the first was commissioned in 2013. Four were commissioned in a span of just 8 months from December 2015 to July 2016.

    Fleet replenishment vessels are a vital component of a blue water navy. They allow fleet task forces, carrier battle groups and amphibious ready groups to engage in complex missions thousands of miles from home ports and over extended periods of duration. They replenish fuel, food stores, fresh water and munitions to warships while underway, and can provide a rapid logistics solution to both naval and land forces deployed to far flung bases and garrisons. These vessels are indispensable to aircraft carrier battle groups engaged in long deployments.

    The Big Picture, PLAN 2025

    The rapid pace of warship construction by China is impressive from an engineering and manufacturing standpoint, but of greater interest is in understanding the motivation behind such an ambitious program. Why has the Chinese leadership decided that the PLAN must expand and acquire a full spectrum of naval warfare capabilities that it has previously lacked, and in such a short space of time? The answer to this question becomes clear after a short analysis of China’s geopolitical, economic and national security goals in the twenty-first century.

    In many ways, China is engaged in a concerted effort to redefine the economic realities that have established the way the world exchanges goods and services, and distributes the product of human endeavors globally. The New Silk Road/Maritime Silk Road project seeks to once again make China the center of the economic world. China is already the largest economy in the world in terms of economic production, and is on pace to usurp the U.S. as the world’s largest economic consumer as well. Continued growth and prosperity depend upon cheap and efficient movement of energy resources and raw materials to China, and the cheap and efficient movement of finished goods from China. The overwhelming majority of these influxes and outflows transit the international waterways of the world. Continued prosperity and stability depend upon the security of these maritime lanes of trade. In strategic terms, these naval lines of communication must remain open. In times of strife and natural or man-made disaster, China must have the capacity to secure these lines of communication and to keep them open. The great naval strategist Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, writing in 1893, then just a Captain, stated this concept very succinctly:

    “Let us start from the fundamental truth, warranted by history, that the control of the seas, and especially along the great lines drawn by national interest or national commerce, is the chief among the merely material elements in the power and prosperity of nations. It is so because the sea is the world’s great medium of circulation. From this necessarily follows the principal that, as subsidiary to such control, it is imperative to take possession, when it can be done righteously, of such maritime positions as contribute to secure command.”

    Although China has been the first and most determined nation to move in this direction, it is not alone. As China moves to build a new logistics system that aims to redirect the movement of information, energy, and economic goods that competes with the current established system dominated by the United States, the United States and its allies are determined to maintain the status quo. Some of these allies, such as India, are allies of necessity and are also attempting to maintain their independence. China has accepted the wisdom of long standing naval strategy, and has proven the most decisive in embracing these centuries old concepts.

    This map illustrates established and potential naval bases of rivals in the Indian Ocean, South China Sea and Asia Pacific regions. The U.S. bases were established through imperialist expansion, war and the long running U.S.-U.K. alliance. India has moved to leverage its own cooperative relationship with the U.S.-U.K. alliance and also maintain a level of independence. China has moved to secure the maritime lines of communication to and from Africa and the Middle East. Bases in Gwadar and Kyaukpyu will prove indispensable if either the Straits of Malacca or Aden become impassable.

    If China does not alter its current building projects by increasing or reducing orders, the PLAN will still be a highly transformed fighting force by 2025. The year 2025 will prove to be a milestone for the PLAN for many reasons. By 2025, China will likely be declaring its first Type 002 Class aircraft carrier operational. The Type 002 will be an EMALs assisted CATOBAR capable carrier that may likely be nuclear powered. At the same time, two other aircraft carriers, although recognized as developmental steps along the way to the Type 002, will also be in service. Based on the pace of pilot training and the procurement of aircraft over the past decade, the PLAN will have at least one more regiment of carrier strike aircraft in service, bringing the total to two regiments. China is already seeking to develop and field a carrier borne strike aircraft superior to the J-15, even though many of the J-15’s shortcoming will be rectified by the improved CATOBAR system of the new Type 002 carrier.

    Liaoning CV-16 with its air wing of J-15s and rotary wing ASW and support aircraft, and a Type 054A frigate escort. A modest yet impressive start in carrier borne naval aviation, and definitely just the beginning.

    The Plan will have 30 Type 054A Frigates, 18 Type 052D and 8 or more Type 055 Destroyers in service. Improvements upon the destroyers will likely occur in the intervening years. A total of 50 Type 056 Corvettes (28 of the Type 056A improved variant) will be policing the coastal waterways of China and its outlying island territories. These modern and capable surface warfare vessels will be supplemented by older vessels that China has been actively modernizing.

    The PLAN will be able to transport an enlarged PLA Marine Corps to battle in its first Amphibious Ready Group, albeit with limited capabilities. The First Type 075 LHD will be undergoing operational training to test the capabilities of the vessel and familiarize sailors, marines and airmen with amphibious and air assault missions from such a complex and powerful platform. There will be six Type 071 LPDs in service, as well as 15 Type 072A LSTs. The majority of an additional 17 Type 072 LSTs of an earlier, yet sound design will still be in service. The recently expanded PLAMC, numbering approximately 100,000 men, a five-fold increase from 2017, will finally have the modern amphibious sealift capacity that it currently lacks. PLAMC marines will serve in duties deployed at sea and stationed at a growing number of Chinese sovereign island bases, or abroad at naval bases in foreign countries such as Pakistan and Djibouti.

    By 2025, the PLAN will have a robust naval logistics arm available to support naval operations across the length and breadth of the Maritime Silk Road. Two Type 901 fast combat supports ships, and 9 Type 903A replenishment ships will be available at a minimum. Four Type 904 general stores issue vessels are currently in service to resupply island garrisons and offshore bases. This number may be increased in the intervening years.

    Of equal interest is the question of just how the U.S. Navy will look in 2015. It will still be the largest and most powerful navy in terms of global reach and power projection; however, it is a military branch that seems to be without focus or direction. The PLAN has increasingly invested in high tech, powerful and flexible conventional warships that are also cost effective when compared to the new designs pursued by the U.S. Navy. Even the Type 002 aircraft carrier is a conservative design, with a limited mission foreseen for it, one which will minimize its weaknesses and make use of its strengths. It is telling that China has built the largest surface warfare ship since the U.S. commissioned the last Ticonderoga Class cruiser Port Royal CG-73 in 1994. The U.S. has no plans to replace the 22 Ticonderoga Class cruisers anytime soon, nor is there a replacement design to consider. The Gerald R. Ford Class CVN-78 has proven to be a costly and disappointing investment so far. It will use the F-35 JSF and F-18 Super Hornet which lack the range to be a threat to peer adversaries. The Zumwalt Class DDG is a dead end failure and the troubled LCS program has proven to be less capable than the traditional multi-purpose frigate designs of other major navies.

    Ticonderoga Class cruiser USS Lake Champlain CG-57. Decommissioning of these vessels will begin in 2019, with no viable replacement. The U.S. Navy command has proposed keeping half of the 22 vessels in service. Despite the largest defense budget of any nation in the world, and larger than that of Russia and China combined, the U.S. Navy cited budget constraints as a key factor in being unable of replacing the vessels.

    While the U.S. has wasted its great wealth on failed designs, whose sole aim is to earn profits for a defense industry more interested in profit-generating waste than in producing weapons systems that balance capability, efficiency and cost effectiveness, China has done something quite different. China has produced cutting edge warships and aircraft for its navy that are largely improvements upon proven designs and technology. China has made major progress in missile technology, surpassing the U.S. in many respects. It has also reaped rewards from years of investment in research and development of advanced radar and even photon detection technologies. There is no doubt that China has gotten far more return on its investments in terms of its defense industry in comparison to the United States. For the military defense complex that rules the United States the goal is profit, not the defense and security of the nation.

    From 2001 to the present, the United States military has morphed into a force obsessed with counterinsurgency and occupation, leaving it woefully unprepared for a conventional conflict with peer adversaries, such as Russia or China. The U.S. Navy has transformed into a global police force meant to be used as a stick to bludgeon any small nation that dares to disobey the diktats of Washington. Its powerful aircraft carrier strike groups (CSG) lack the air wing capable of striking the shores of powerful adversaries, rendering these great symbols of U.S. power impotent against any capable foe in a major conflict. The U.S. Navy is powerless to change the strategic situation in the South China Sea through military means, as China has already “crossed the Rubicon”. Imperial hubris, corruption and arrogance have done greater damage to the U.S. military than any foreign adversary has over the past 17 years.

    The year 2025 will witness a PLAN in ascent and a U.S. Navy in decline. This is not to say that the U.S. Navy will not still be the preeminent naval power globally, but it will continue to be mired in a lack of strategic direction, focus and budgetary crisis. The PLAN will be guided by a clear strategic focus, increasing capabilities, and a robust shipbuilding and weapons acquisition program. There is no doubt that the PLAN will emerge as the second most powerful navy in the world, and will exert significant influence in both military and geostrategic terms.

  • "The Parallels Are Remarkable": Trump Is Using The Bill Clinton Playbook And It Just Might Work

    Authored by Joseph Moreno, op-ed via TheHill.com,

    The parallels are remarkable. Twenty years ago this month, a special prosecutor investigating the president was weeks away from releasing a report accusing the chief executive of illegal conduct unrelated to his official duties. Three months later, Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives on charges of lying and obstructing justice to hide a extramarital affair from his wife and the country. While this may have meant he lost a battle, there is no question that Clinton ultimately won the war against independent counsel Ken Starr by not only surviving but continuing on to complete an otherwise successful presidency.

    Today, President Trump is not only following Clinton’s playbook to a tee, he stands a good chance of winning his war of words against an opponent who remains unable to fight back. Just as we are seeing with the ongoing Russia probe, Starr’s original investigation started specific and broadened over time. In Starr’s case, his 1994 appointment was to investigate potential violations of criminal law relating to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the “Whitewater” land deal. Four years and $50 millionlater, Starr’s most impactful findings involved Clinton’s affair with a White House intern and his lying about it under oath.

    Robert Mueller’s original mandate was also narrow. He was appointed to find evidence of “any links and/or coordination” between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign. Fifteen months and more than $16 million later, it is impossible to know when and how the probe will conclude. However, the conviction of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and the guilty plea of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen on grounds entirely unrelated to Russia mirror how Starr’s investigation also morphed into altogether new areas.

    What is also being mirrored is how Trump is taking the fight with Mueller in the court of public opinion. At some point, Clinton decided that rather than wait until Starr completed his investigation, he would step up and fight on his own terms. Lacking the benefit of a Twitter account, Clinton used surrogates who repeatedly attacked Starr as a highly partisan Republican operative obsessed with bringing down Clinton. Starr was accused of being fixated on sex, and being a runaway Inspector Javert who spent years and millions of dollars on a wasted effort. In the reported words of a Clinton White House official, the attacks were “part of our continuing strategy to destroy Ken Starr.”

    Sound familiar? Trump’s initial legal team seemed content to remain under the radar and keep public comments to a minimum. All this changed with the hiring of Rudy Giuliani, who has relentlessly attacked the Russia investigation as a runaway train with no end in sight. Combine this with Trump’s constant tweets describing Mueller’s probe as a “witch hunt” staffed with Democratic partisans and tainted by Mueller’s own undefined conflicts of interest. Trump has also criticized how long the investigation is taking and how much it has cost.

    This is because Trump and his attorneys know that his fate will depend not on the legal intricacies of campaign finance laws or whether “collusion” constitutes a crime. This is a political battle that potentially leads to impeachment, and Trump is fighting not on the legal issues but over what it would take for Congress and his supporters to turn on him.

    After years of investigating President Clinton the best Starr could come up with was that he lied about a personal relationship. To anyone paying attention this did not come as a surprise. Allegations of marital infidelityhad swirled around Clinton prior to his first presidential run, yet voters twice elected him because he was considered a successful leader. Democrats in Congress uniformly voted against ousting Clinton because they felt Starr uncovered nothing that warranted removal. The fact that Starr had been damaged from years of pummeling ensured the Democrats would receive no repercussions for their votes.

    Today, if Mueller’s findings simply reinforce what voters already knew about Trump, such as that he is fast and loose with the truth, has surrounded himself with questionable characters, and openly invited Russians to find and release Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails, it likely will not be enough to turn public opinion against him. Trump’s team will thus continue to attack the prosecutors and attack the process in an effort to undermine whatever Mueller ultimately finds. The special counsel will be accused of bias, of mission creep, and of doing whatever it takes to reverse the results of the 2016 election.

    Meanwhile, the bar will keep getting raised as to what would justify removal of a president. Is it unseemly and highly inappropriate for a president to smear the prosecutors who have been duly tasked with investigating him? Sure. But it worked before with Bill Clinton, so it is not crazy to imagine that it just might work again.

  • Russia Sends Largest Naval Armada Of Syrian War Amidst New Chemical Attack Warnings

    We observed previously after John Bolton’s threat late this week of “greater military force” should chemical weapons allegations emerge against Damascus, that a familiar pattern has long been in play on Syria: just when it appears the jihadists are on the brink of final defeat, and as stability is returning after seven years of grinding war, something happens to bring things right back to the brink of global crisis and escalation. 

    Authored and submitted by Leith Aboufadel via Al Masdar News,

    Russia has built up its forces around the Mediterranean Sea in response to reports that the U.S., France, and Great Britain could be preparing to attack Syria after US National Security Advisor John Bolton informed Russia that America is prepared to respond with greater military force than it has used against Assad’s regime in the past, according to Bloomberg.

    According to Yoruk Isik of the Bosphorus Observer, the Russian Navy has sent another armada of ships towards Syria’s territorial waters in order to increase the strength of their forces around the country.

    Isik said that the powerful Russian warships, Admiral Grigorovich and Admiral Essen class frigate, were spotted transiting the Bosphorus Strait en route to the Port of Tartous.

    This latest move by the Russian Navy comes just 24 hours after they sent three ships en route to the Port of Tartous in western Syria.

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    The Turkish coast guard monitored the frigates as they passed through the Bosporus toward the Mediterranean, reportedly en route to Russia’s only major deep-water port in the region along the Syrian coast.

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    With the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) preparing to launch a large-scale offensive in northwest Syria, Russia fears that the jihadist rebels may fake a chemical weapons attack in order to get the U.S. and its allies to attack the government.

    Ships are also being deployed as Syrian and Russian forces prepare for what’s expected to be the final push to liberate all of Idlib province, which Russian forces are expected to play a central role in executing. 

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    Currently, the following Russian military vessels are stationed in the Mediterranean near the Syrian coast according to Naval military observers:

    • CG Marshal Ustinov
    • DDG Severomorsk
    • DDG Yaroslav Mudryy
    • FFG Admiral Grigorovich
    • FFG Admiral Essen
    • FFL Pytlivyy
    • FSG Vyshniy Volochek
    • FSG Grad Sviyazhsk
    • FSG Velikiy Ustyug
    • LST Orsk
    • LST Nikolay Fil’chenkov
    • MS Turbinist
    • MS Valentin Pikul
    • SS Kolpino
    • SS Velikiy Novgorod

    Those listed are featured in the following: 

    Per @Capt_Navy

    Meanwhile, in reference to reports that Washington could be preparing another round of attacks, the Russian MoD pointed out on Saturday that “the US Navy’s destroyer Sullivans with 56 cruise missiles on its board arrived in the Persian Gulf several days ago while a B-1B strategic bomber of the US Air Force armed with AGM-158 JASSM air-to-surface missiles was redeployed to the Al Udeid air base in Qatar,” according to TASS. 

  • Escobar: Sun Tzu And The Art Of Fighting A Trade War

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

    It will be long, it will be nasty and Trump would be foolish to underestimate Xi and the resolve of China…

    Imagine the Chinese leadership out of the public eye for nearly two weeks – virtually holed up, immersed in a secret debate. That is exactly what just happened at Beidaihe, the beach resort in eastern Hebei province.

    While there might be James Bond-ish conspiracy theories out there for this annual ritual, there are no doubts about the key theme of discussions: The US-China trade war.

    The second-largest world economy under President Xi Jinping is deep into the long march towards superpower status. The previous geopolitical and geoeconomic status quo is dead.

    Xi has made it abundantly clear that for China to just become a “responsible stakeholder” in the post-Cold War US-controlled liberal international order is not enough.

    It did not escape the notice of the senior leadership at Beidaihe of the change of direction by the US. President Donald Trump’s administration is taking a belligerent approach while the US National Security Strategy in December 2017 unmistakably labeled China a “revisionist power,” a strategic rival and for all practical purposes, from the Pentagon’s point of view, a top threat.

    Instead, what the Beijing leadership identifies is what we could define, in Chinese culture terminology, as the “three threats.”

    A threat to their foreign policy concept for the coming decades, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, and a threat to China’s own integration drive centered on the three strategic zones of the Greater Bay Area, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei corridor and the Yangtze river delta. And, of course, a threat to the Chinese stock market.

    State media is still grappling on how to deal with it. The People’s Daily has, politely, defined the Trump administration’s strategy as “engagement plus containment.”

    China Global Television Network (CGTN) has played the soft power card by addressing a sarcastic letter to Trump. The network thanked him for uniting the rest of the world while forcing China to make its economic environment more seductive to foreign investment. The CGTN video subsequently “disappeared” from YouTube and Twitter.

    So, even as the leadership consensus may be this is all about containing China’s irresistible rise, and even considering the fog surrounding major Beijing decisions, it’s still possible to detect some fascinating nuances.

    No mercy

    For Trump, on the record, “trade wars are good and easy to win.” That reflects his fascination with the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) ethos. Trump, in this case, is The Undertaker bent on taking Xi to the woodshed. Xi is no more Mr. Nice Guy, Trump’s former “good friend.”

    So, Xi cannot possibly believe that galvanizing the crowd like superhero The Rock will save the day. The WWE is not about “win-win” – that is for losers. Now, it is no holds barred. Trump accuses China of US election interference: “Fools that are so focused on looking only at Russia should start also looking in another direction, China.”

    China’s military “adventurism” allows the Pentagon to come up with a Space Force. China is also barred from investing in US industries related to national security.

    The US response to the reach of the Belt and Roaf Initiative is to invest in the fuzzy “Indo-Pacific” – by committing a paltry $113 million in energy, infrastructure, and digital commerce. “Made in China 2025” is qualified as an absolute threat to “America First.”

    And China is increasingly depicted as “malign” – the buzzword of choice that makes Trump, in this case, fully aligned with the industrial-military-security-think tank complex.

    So, how to fight a cage match with no referee? Enter Sun Tzu, China’s legendary military strategist who wrote The Art of War. The first rule is simple: “All warfare is based on deception.” As in Beijing gearing up to negotiate both as a partner and a threat.

    ‘Outside barbarians’

    It will be long, it will be nasty, it will be protracted, going way beyond the talks this week in the US, which importantly do not feature Vice-President Wang “Firefighter” Qishan, a key player and Xi’s trusted consigliere. He is more useful coordinating long-term strategy in Beijing.

    Here, a quick flashback to the British Empire is in order. In 1793, during the first diplomatic mission to Beijing, led by Lord Macartney and received by Emperor Qianlong, the Brits quickly identified how the teeming markets of China posed a “threat” to Europe and the contemporary world trade system.

    China was self-sufficient at the time and exported to Europe goods such as silk, tea, textiles, porcelain. In fact, all the trimmings of the luxury market in a web of silk routes or an earlier version of the Belt and Road.

    But what did they import? Not much, apart from Siberian furs, some exotic food and ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine. Here is Emperor Qianlong comments: “The Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is, therefore, no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own products.”

    We all know how that ended – gunboat diplomacy, the Opium Wars, Beijing being sacked in 1860, “unequal treaties” and the Chinese “century of humiliation.”

    All that still features deeply in the Chinese collective unconscious as much as the real roots of the current trade war. Deng Xiaoping’s brilliant strategy was to open China’s special economic zones or SEZs as unbeatable, low-cost production bases for Western and Asian multinationals.

    Deng offered the prime platform for the expansion of global capitalism. The inevitable consequence was a stampede of foreign direct investment (FDI), off-shoring and outsourcing.

    Now, compare it with key data supplied by China’s General Administration and Customs. In the first six months of this year, no less than 41.58% of China’s exports to the rest of the world came from American, European and Asian multinationals.

    There is no evidence corporate US – represented by multinational companies – is willing to sacrifice low production costs to “bring those jobs back.” Multinational companies also prize a devalued yuan because that keeps those low production costs down.

    Additionally, any Trump attack on “Made in China 2025” does not alter the fact that the world’s second-largest economy is relentlessly climbing up the manufacturing ladder. Eventually, it will overtake the US in technological innovation.

    As Zhigang Tao, director of the Institute for China and Global Development at Hong Kong University, pointed out, Beijing handed American capital the proverbial offer you can’t refuse – access to the Chinese market in exchange of technological transfer.

    “[In fact,] this technology-for-market-access strategy has worked extremely well, as evidenced by China’s rise in key industries including high-speed rail, aviation, automobiles and wind turbines,” Tao said.

    So, the next step should be an extension of the Tesla-in-Shanghai model.

    Class struggle?

    Seducing American capital to invest in China under more lenient rules may be only one aspect of a Sun Tzu maneuver for Beijing to defuse the trade war. Beidaihe certainly evaluated what might happen if this all goes wrong and becomes a hot trade war.

    A Hurricane Tariff would have the potential to devastate China’s employment and financial landscape and provoke high inflation and even a recession. Xi cannot possibly risk losing his de facto power base, which is not the Chinese proletariat, but the rising middle class on a frenetic consumption and global tourism binge.

    Add to that, the relentless working-class anger, already in full effect, according to the University of Utah’s Minqi Li. After all “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” is hardly Marx.

    Proverbial Western myopia has been riffing about a China collapse for years. Yes, there is a possible debt bomb. Yes, China’s dependency on foreign sources of oil and gas is a recurrent nightmare. And yes, US-China relations are now unmistakably in Cold War territory, even without considering the South China Sea and Taiwan.

    But underestimating a rising power capable of planning a concerted global strategy in detail up to 2049 is foolish. Xi and Trump will have the chance to have a serious face-off on Nov. 30 at the G20 summit in Argentina.

    Trump may even bill it as a “win”, as in his summits with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Sun Tzu, though, is waiting in the wings.

  • Trump: "I May Have To Get Involved" To Get To "Bottom Of Crooked Hillary Corruption"

    With his back against the well after longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg was granted immunity by US prosecutors one day after the National Enquirer’s David Packer received a similar deal, on Saturday morning Trump continued his attacks on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, accusing the former senator of not understanding “what is happening” at his Justice Department.

    In a pair of tweets Saturday morning, the president wrote that Sessions was allowing Mueller “and his gang of 17 Angry Dems” to have a “field day” at the Justice Department with his decision last year to recuse himself from the investigation into the Trump campaign.

    “Jeff Sessions said he wouldn’t allow politics to influence him only because he doesn’t understand what is happening underneath his command position. Highly conflicted Bob Mueller and his gang of 17 Angry Dems are having a field day as real corruption goes untouched. No Collusion!” the president wrote.

    Trump then quoted Sen. Lindsay Graham speaking about the possibility of a new attorney general, suggesting that the president may be considering Sessions’ firing.

    “Every President deserves an Attorney General they have confidence in. I believe every President has a right to their Cabinet, these are not lifetime appointments. You serve at the pleasure of the President,” Trump added, quoting Graham.

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    Trump’s criticism of Sessions had escalated in recent days after the guilty verdicts handed down in the trial of Paul Manafort and the guilty plea from Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen. In a rare statement on Thursday, Sessions appeared to rebuke Trump and pledged to remain untainted by political bias in his work at the agency. “While I am Attorney General, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations. I demand the highest standards, and where they are not met, I take action,” Sessions said.

    It is unclear if Trump will fire his Attorney General; some media reports are suggesting that Trump may certainly try to do so, although probably not before the midterm elections.

    Trump then continued the attack on Twitter, and referenced a recent report by investigative journalist Paul Sperry according to which FBI Director James Comey was incorrect when he told Congress that the bureau had “reviewed all of the communications” from top Clinton aide Huma Abedin on her disgraced husband, and in fact “a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information.”

    Citing Fox News, Trump tweeted that “The FBI only looked at 3000 of 675,000 Crooked Hillary Clinton Emails.” They purposely didn’t look at the disasters. This news is just out.“

    He then predicted that “we will soon be getting to the bottom of all of this corruption” involving “tens of thousands of Crooked Hillary Emails, many of which are REALLY BAD” and warned that “At some point I may have to get involved!”

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    “The FBI looked at less than 1%” of Crooked’s Emails!” Trump concluded.

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    With the Mueller probe getting a second wind, if not into Russian collusion then certainly into Trump’s allegedly illicit financial dealings, we expect that Trump will escalate his attempts at distraction; and with attacks on Syria no longer serving as a key distraction to the US population while Russian sanctions remain largely ignored, Trump may have no choice but to make good on his threat to “get involved” in cracking down on “crooked Hillary” and “getting to the bottom of all of the corruption” under his attorney Sessions.

    In either case, fireworks are assured.

  • Ebola Deaths In DRC Spike 21% In Four Days, Bordering Countries On High Alert

    The latest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DNC) has claimed 67 lives, up from 55, according to Robert Redfield, director of the CDC. On Friday the WHO said that the virus has spread to an area of “high security risk,” and that ongoing local conflicts have made finding and monitoring infected people extremely difficult.

    “Really, in two weeks, we’ve gone from 24 cases to 105 cases,” said Redfield, who just returned from the hot zone where an outbreak centered in North Kivu is responsible for 105 confirmed or suspected cases, according to the Washington Post. There are currently 77 confirmed cases, 28 probable cases in which biological samples are not available for laboratory testing, while 3,000 people have received an experimental Ebola vaccine. 

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    Source: World Health Organiztion (WHO)

    Redfield said the rapid spread of the disease was primarily because many health workers at a hospital in the town of Mangina, where the outbreak started, contracted the virus after treating early patients without recognizing that they had Ebola. The disease spreads through contact with the bodily fluids of victims, putting health workers and patients’ family members at greatest risk, notes the Post.

    “In the next couple of weeks, we’ll have greater clarity,” about the scope of the outbreak, said Redfield. 

    In response, neighboring Uganda has beefed up precautions at the border, making it more difficult for the roughly 19,000 people who travel from Congo’s North Kivu province across the border into the Ugandan town of Mpondwe to shop at an open-air market. 

    Source: World Health Organiztion (WHO)

    Uganda is determined to keep the deadly hemorrhagic fever from spreading to its side of the border. Before travelers are allowed through, they must step in small tubs of chlorinated water to disinfect their shoes, and their temperatures are taken with no-touch thermometer guns aimed at their temples.

    Uganda moved quickly, imposing the precautions a week after the latest outbreak was declared Aug. 1. It has found six suspected cases at this crossing, but laboratory tests cleared them all. –WaPo

    “So far, we have not gotten any case of Ebola,” Ithungu Honorata, a nurse who oversees the screening effort, said Friday. “But we don’t want it to come to Uganda.”

    One bit of good news; two of the first 10 patients to receive an experimental Ebola treatment have recovered and have been released from isolation. 

    The two people received the mAb114 treatment isolated from a survivor of an Ebola outbreak in 1995. It was the first of five experimental treatments Congo approved for use in the outbreak that was declared on Aug. 1. The others are ZMapp, Remdesivir, Favipiravir and Regn3450 – 3471 – 3479. –WaPo

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  • John McCain Dead At 81

    Senator John McCain has died at the age of 81, according to the New York Times. The Republican congressman and two-time presidential candidate passed at 4:28 p.m. at his Arizona home on Saturday. 

    According to a statement from his office, Mr. McCain died at 4:28 p.m. local time. He had suffered from a malignant brain tumor, called a glioblastoma, for which he had been treated periodically with radiation and chemotherapy since its discovery in 2017. –NYT

    McCain’s family announced on Friday that the Senator had chosen to discontinue medical treatment for an aggressive form of brain cancer, a year after the Vietnam War hero announced his prognosis. 

    “John has surpassed expectations for his survival,” the family said, adding that the disease’s progression and McCain’s age, 81, had led him to stop treatment for the “aggressive glioblastoma.” “With his usual strength of will, he has now chosen to discontinue medical treatment,” the family said.

    Full statement below:

    “Last summer, Senator John McCain shared with Americans the news our family already knew: he had been diagnosed with an aggressive glioblastoma, and the prognosis was serious. In the year since, John has surpassed expectations for his survival. But the progress of disease and the inexorable advance of age render their verdict. With his usual strength of will, he has now chosen to discontinue medical treatment. Our family is immensely grateful for the support and kindness of all his caregivers over the last year, and for the continuing outpouring of concern and affection from John’s many friends and associates, and the many thousands of people who are keeping him in their prayers. God bless and thank you all.”

    His daughter, Meghan McCain tweeted:

    My family is deeply appreciative of all the love and generosity you have shown us during this past year. Thank you for all your continued support and prayers. We could not have made it this far without you – you’ve given us strength to carry on.

    McCain, a harsh critic of President Trump who hand-delivered the controversial “Steele dossier” to FBI Director James Comey, returned to the Senate in July 2017 after emergency brain surgery to become the deciding vote that killed the GOP’s repeal of the Affordable Care Act. 

    McCain specifically requested that President Trump not attend his funeral, instead insisting that Vice President Mike Pence attend the service in Washington’s National Cathedral. 

    His intimates have informed the White House that their current plan for his funeral is for Vice President Mike Pence to attend the service to be held in Washington’s National Cathedral but not President Trump, with whom Mr. McCain has had a rocky relationship. –NYT

    Meanwhile, McCain associates have been quietly spreading the word that they want a “McCain person” to eventually fill his Senate seat – “a roster that includes his wife, Cindy.“

    The matter of succession for the McCain seat — a topic of such intense discussion that Republicans officials here joke that Washington lawyers know Arizona election law better than any attorney in the state — is officially verboten among party officials and the senator’s friends. They are determined to reward him with the same good ending that his friend Senator Edward M. Kennedy enjoyed before he succumbed to brain cancer in 2009.

    In May, Frank Bruni detailed in the NYT the Arizona Senator’s battles with President Trump – who McCain has criticized for his “half-baked, spurious nationalism.

    The son and grandson of four-star admirals, McCain was shot down over Hanoi during Vietnam, suffering broken limbs and enduring torture for approximately two years. 

    McCain lost the 2000 GOP nomination to George W. Bush and the 2008 US election to Barack Obama – admitting that he regretted picking Alaska Governor Sarah Palin over Joe Lieberman. 

    A lifelong war hawk, McCain strongly advocated for military action in several countries, including; Iraq, Syria, Kosovo, North Korea, Afghanistan and Iran. McCain supported the Al-Qaeda-aligned Free Syrian Army, calling for arming them with heavy weapons in order to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. 

    The New York Times has published a comprehensive eulogy / biography here.

    Several statements have been issued in response to McCain’s death: 

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    Via Axios: 

    Former Vice President Joe Biden said, “McCain will cast a long shadow. His impact on America hasn’t ended. Not even close. It will go on for many years to come.”

    Senator Lindsey Graham, one of McCain’s closest friends in the Senate, tweeted: “America and Freedom have lost one of her greatest champions ….And I’ve lost one of my dearest friends and mentor.”

    Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced he wants to rename one of the Senate office buildings after McCain:

    “Nothing will overcome the loss of Senator McCain, but so that generations remember him I will be introducing a resolution to rename the Russell building after him.”

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  • Andrew Cuomo & The Chronic Existential Anxiety Of The White Male Democrat

    Authored by John Derbyshire via Unz.com,

    Andrew Cuomo, Governor of my home state of New York, was speaking in Manhattan on Wednesday, signing a bill to make sex trafficking a felony in the state. He made a now-famous gaffe, which says a great deal about the state of the modern Democratic Party.

    But first, just a word about sex trafficking.

    Kidnapping vulnerable young girls and renting them out for sex is a flourishing business down among the urban underclass. The Pakistani pimps of Rotherham and other English cities are the best-known cases, but plenty of it goes on here in the U.S.A., too. As in England, it’s very much an ethnic affair here, although news reports tie themselves in pretzels trying to obscure the fact. [Inside New York’s silent sex trafficking epidemic, NYPost, April 17, 2018] There’s an immigration angle, too; a lot of the women being trafficked here are illegal aliens from Mexico, Central America, and Asia.

    It’s a problem in New York, and our legislators figured we need a new law to deal with it. I find it hard to believe that the laws we already have on kidnapping, prostitution, and abuse of minors are not adequate to deal with the issue; but hey, it’s an election year, Cuomo’s up for re-election as governor, and signing a new law is good show business.

    So there was Cuomo doing the soft-shoe shuffle. Our Governor is a sort of grandee of the Democratic Party: son of a former three-term Governor, ex-husband of a Kennedy gal.

    But I should say that the phrase “Democratic Party” in my last sentence refers to the oldDemocratic Party, the party of FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton and John Kerry. Andrew Cuomo, like those other names, is a white guy of European ancestry. Like other white guys in his party, Cuomo has the uncomfortable feeling that the ground is moving under his feet—that the Democratic Party is turning into something different from what it has been though his, and my, lifetime.

    As a result, the Governor is nursing some serious political insecurities. Is the Democratic Party still a party for him, for white guys? Or is it on its way to being a party for women, blacks, mestizos, and sexual eccentrics?

    Naturally the guy is nervous. He is, as I said, up for re-election in the fall; and before that, next month, he faces off in a Democratic primary against TV actress Cynthia Nixon.

    Nobody thinks Ms. Nixon has much of a chance of becoming the Democrat nominee for Governor in the fall, but that’s not really the point. The point is that in Andrew Cuomo’s eyes, and the eyes of old white male heterosexual Democrats like him, Cynthia Nixon looks like the future while he looks like the past. Ms. Nixon is female, homosexual, and wa-a-a-ay out on the political Left. She makes our poor governor feel like a relic.

    Don’t place any bets against Cuomo. He’s a skillful politician with the state party in his pocket. He’ll get the nomination, then he’ll win re-election in November. Our state is mostly Republican; but the wee bit that isn’t includes New York City, which has close to half the state’s population … enough said.

    Still the guy’s nervous. He was also a little rattled, earlier this week—before the Wednesday bill-signing event—he was a little rattled by President Trump having been in the state on Monday, at a fundraiser for the state Republican Party. At that event our President speculated that maybe Cuomo wants to run for President in 2020. “Please do it, please,” said the President mockingly. [Trump dares NY Gov. Cuomo to run against him in 2020, says ‘anybody that runs against Trump suffers’, By Alex Pappas, Fox News, August 13, 2018] The Governor doesn’t like to be mocked, any more than you or I do.

    So when Cuomo stepped up on Wednesday to sign this bill against sex trafficking, he was both suffering from chronic existential anxiety about the direction of his party andrattled by Trump’s Monday remark. Under those stresses, his self-control slipped, and he spoke unwisely.

    What he actually said was:

    We’re not going to make America great again. It was never that great. We have not reached greatness, we will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged, we will reach greatness when discrimination and stereotyping against women, 51 percent of our population, is gone and every woman’s full potential is realized and unleashed and every woman is making her full contribution.

    [Andrew Cuomo shocks crowd, says America ‘was never that great’, by Adam Shaw, August 1, 2018]

    Now, taken on face value, that’s gibberish. Men and women are biologically different; they are never going to exhibit identical profiles on every kind of behavior, achievement, or social outcome. As for “discrimination”: Well, someone should ask the governor why, if women are “51 percent of our population,” they are 56 percent of college students but less than seven percent of federal prison inmates.

    But that’s giving the Governor’s words more respect than they deserve. He’s not making observations about real things in the real world; he’s a politician sending out signals to likely voters. The signal there was:

    “I’m not a part of that rotten old patriarchy trying to keep women down. I am cool and up-to-date with the newDemocratic Party, which is absolutely not a party of straight old white guys.”

    But Cuomo just went a bit too far, saying that America “was never that great.” It’s a logical thing for a Progressive to think. American society in the past had imperfections and injustices; therefore we shouldn’t talk about it having been great; that’s the Progressive mentality.

    What it misses is, that all societies everywhere have imperfections and injustices, and this will always be so. The U.S.A. was, and is, great because it had, and has, fewer imperfections and injustices than other nations. That’s why so many people—so many millions, tens of millions of people—wanted, and want, to come and live here.

    I got to know the U.S.A. during its Golden Age—the third quarter of the 20th century—and mostly from outside: I grew up in England, didn’t actually get here until 1973. Boy, America was great! —free, rich, victorious, generous, creative…Britain was in imperial decline, half of Europe was under the Soviet yoke, Africa was sinking into post-colonial chaos, India and Pakistan were at loggerheads, South America was run by buffoons like Juan Perón, and in China tens of millions were starving to death under the crudest, cruellest kind of totalitarian dictatorship.

    America was great—with very restricted immigration and men mostly running things. We had imperfections, sure; but by comparison with any other country at that time…Well, there was no comparison. We were the greatest.

    The Progressive vision is narrow, provincial, and present-centric. The past, according to them, was bad; the present is just tolerable; the future will be radiant.

    That is no basis for policy. There are good reasons to think that if we don’t get a grip on mass immigration, America’s future will be Venezuela. There are good reasons to think that if the insulting and belittling of men under labels like “toxic masculinity” keeps going, the things that men do better than women—leadership, risk-taking, science, engineering—won’t get done, or will get done elsewhere, not in America.

    Whether Andrew Cuomo understands any of that, I don’t know. He has to pretend notto understand it because of the threat from his Left—from people like Cynthia Nixon, who surely don’t understand it.

    That is the dilemma of white men in the Democratic Party today. They deserve it.

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Aug 25

Today’s News 25th August 2018

  • Model-Turned-Escort Auctioning Off Virginity To "Buy House For Mum" 

    A 23-year-old, 5’9″ 110 lb. model from Azerbaijan is selling her virginity online in the hopes of buying a house for her mother and traveling the world. 

    Mahbuba “Maria” Mammadzada – one of Azerbaijan’s most successful models currently living in Turkey, wants to make her mother “proud” by selling her virginity. The minimum bid currently stands at €250,000 ($290,612). 

    The winner will receive a doctor’s certification that she is indeed a virgin, and will need to take Maria’s virginity in Germany “for legal reasons,” though the buyer can choose a hotel of his choice. The highest bidder can also bring their own doctor, or visit another doctor in Germany to verify virginity one day before the “event.”

    Her profile at Cinderella Escorts reads: 

    “I want to sell my virginity on Cindrella Escorts and because I want to have a house for me and for my mom, so finally we could live in our own place, and also to travel all over the world with Mom. I wanna live in Usa and continue my Modeling career there with one of the Top Modeling  Agencies, Worldwide. So my dream can come true. I love dogs, and I dream to open a shelter for dogs in my country. My mom did everything for me till now, and now its my turn, to make her proud of me.

    Go ahead, make her mum proud! 

  • Majority Of Young Americans Live In A Household Receiving Welfare

    New analysis from CNS News finds that the majority of Americans under 18 live in households that take “means-tested assistance” from the US government.

    The study, based on the most recently available data from the Census Bureau, leads with the question: Will they be called The Welfare Generation?

    The data presented by CNS editor Terrence Jeffrey shockingly reveals that in 2016 “there were approximately 73,586,000 people under 18 in the United States, and 38,365,000 of them — or 52.1 percent — resided in households in which one or more persons received benefits from a means-tested government program.”

    It’s a slim majority, but a majority which nonetheless presents an extremely worrisome trend regarding the number of young Americans and possibly young families who’ve experienced some level of government dependency.

    To put it in another, perhaps more alarming way, if you’re under 18 the data shows you are more likely that not to be living in a home that receives some form of taxpayer-financed largesse. 

    In terms of the country’s total population of 319.9 million Americans, the data finds that 114.8 million, or about 36 percent, lived as part of a household in which someone collected welfare.

    Jeffrey continued, “When examined by age bracket persons under 18 were the most likely to live in a household receiving means-tested government assistance (52.1 percent), while those 75 and older were least likely (18.8 percent).”

    To break the numbers down further according to age bracket, 44 is the magic thresh-hold: all age categories studied up to 44 were more likely to be living in a house on a government assistance program than the overall national rate of 35.9 percent.

    The brackets for welfare dependent groups over the age of 18 were presented by the Census Bureau were broken down into the following:

    • For those 18 to 24 years old, the rate was 40.1 percent
    • For those 25 to 34, it was 36.8 percent
    • For those 35 to 44, it was 37.4 percent

    Jeffrey observed again of the under 18 bracket: “But even when the Census Bureau excluded the school lunch program from its calculations, the percentage of those under 18 who lived in a household receiving means-tested assistance (44.8 percent) exceeded the percentage in any other age bracket.”

    Meanwhile, the study found that single parent households are more likely to be on means-tested assistance: “The Census Bureau data indicate that people living in intact families are less likely to be on government assistance than people living in broken families. Nonetheless, the government-dependency rate is still high for intact families that have children under 18.”

    And out of an estimated 192.8 million Americans living in married-couple families, some 56.7 million of these, or 29.4 percent, received welfare.

    However, Jeffrey’s analysis found that for kids under 18 a broken home consistently results in a much a greater likelihood a family is on welfare. Of young people under 18 where “a male householder was living without a spouse,” almost 65 percent percent were in households on some type of welfare.

    And the figure was 78 percent where the mother was head of the house, with the father out of the picture. For kids under age six raised only by mom, a stunning 82% were in a home that received assistance.

    Also shocking was that from 2013 through 2016 — four straight years — “a majority of those under 18 lived in a household taking means-tested benefits,” the study found.

    Jeffrey concluded his study of the alarming trend of young Americans on welfare and the potential causes, “America’s prosperity is ultimately and inextricably tied to America’s culture. If we want to see the former flourish, the latter must also.”

  • "Thank God This Is Happening" Russia Says Time Has Come To Ditch The Dollar

    With the US unveiling a new set of sanctions against Russia on Friday, Moscow said it would definitely respond to Washington’s latest sanctions and, in particular, it is accelerating efforts to abandon the American currency in trade transactions, said Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov.

    “The time has come when we need to go from words to actions, and get rid of the dollar as a means of mutual settlements, and look for other alternatives,” he said in an interview with International Affairs magazine, quoted by RT.

    “Thank God, this is happening, and we will speed up this work,” Ryabkov said, explaining the move would come in addition to other “retaliatory measures” as a response to a growing list of US sanctions.

    Previously, Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak said that a growing number of countries are interested in replacing the dollar as a medium in global oil trades and other transactions.

    “There is a common understanding that we need to move towards the use of national currencies in our settlements. There is a need for this, as well as the wish of the parties,” Novak said.

    According to the minister, it concerns both Turkey and Iran, with more countries likely to join the growing dedollarization wave.

    “We are considering an option of payment in national currencies with them. This requires certain adjustments in the financial, economic, and banking sectors” to accomplish. Last week, we reported that the Kremlin was interested in trading with Ankara using the Russian ruble and the Turkish lira. India has also vowed to pay for Iranian oil in rupees.

    Meanwhile, the world’s second-largest economy and Washington’s trade war nemesis, China, has been taking steps to challenge the greenback’s dominance with the launch of an oil futures contract backed by Chinese currency, the petro-yuan. China and Iran have already agreed to stop using the dollar in global trade as China has ramped up purchases of Iranian oil in defiance of US sanctions.

  • One Minute To Midnight: Latest US Sanctions Propel Nations Towards Risk Of War

    Authored by Martin Sieff via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The State Department’s announcement on August 8 that the US government was going to impose sweeping new economic sanctions on Russia over the still mysterious and unresolved Skripal Affair was a truly fateful one. The famous Doomsday Clock of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists should have immediately been moved forward to one minute to midnight on receipt of the news. (It already is set at only two minutes to the midnight that signifies catastrophic global thermonuclear war.)

    For the lesson of history is a clear one: Such sanctions do far worse than prevent constructive dialogue and efforts to settle major differences of policy and interest between great nations. When they are seen as an existential threat to the very existence of that nation, they drive the targeted country’s government to consider all-out war.

    That is exactly how the trans-oceanic total war between the United States and Japan – the very first and so far thankfully only war that has seen the use of nuclear weapons against cities and human populations – began. And it was the United States that triggered it.

    Japan had been remorselessly expanding into China and across the Pacific Theater for a decade and its ferocious war of conquest against China was already four years old and had claimed millions of lives by the summer of 1941.

    It was then that US code breakers learned of Japan’s plans also to occupy the French colonial territories of Indochina – today the nations of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

    In response therefore, and at the insistent urging of his assistant secretary of state for economic affairs Dean Acheson, President Franklin D. Roosevelt imposed a devastating embargo on the US export of raw materials that Japan could use for war.

    This left the governing classes of Japan and its military chieftains with the choice of either ending their policies of ferocious imperialist aggression or of accelerating them and seizing the resource –rich territories of the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands in Southeast Asia to sustain their war economy. They chose the path of continued and intensified aggression.

    That decision in turn led Tokyo’s war masters to adopt Combined Fleet Commander Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s daring plan to launch a surprise preemptive attack to destroy the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet at its base in Pearl Harbor. That strike launched the total war that destroyed Japan.

    Roosevelt clearly understood – and said so at the time – that the new economic embargo could lead directly to war with Japan. As talks to resolve the crisis between Washington and Tokyo went nowhere and clearly deadlocked over the following six months, US Navy and Army chiefs in Washington, with Roosevelt’s knowledge and approval warned their forces in the Pacific to be prepared for war.

    Nevertheless, the daring and effectiveness of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took all US policymakers entirely by surprise. The Japanese sank all eight battleships of the Pacific Fleet (Six of them, remarkably were salvaged of which five participated with devastating effect in the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf).

    Roosevelt ironically had been seeking to provoke a naval war with Nazi Germany in the Atlantic. He regarded the Nazis as a far greater strategic threat to the United States than the Japanese. But both Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill catastrophically underestimated the capabilities of the Japanese army, navy and naval air force. Had they not made that mistake, they would not have been so ready to carelessly provoke Tokyo into a full scale war.

    The lesson for all the armchair hawks who dominate the Republican and Democratic sides of both chambers of Congress today should be clear. US politicians and policymakers and pundits see their endless rounds of sanctions on Russia as a risk free, safe way to weaken, humiliate and eventually to undermine a country and economy whose capabilities they grossly underestimate and despise.

    They could not be more wrong. Up to now, Russia has thrived in the face of all the sanctions Washington can muster against it and this state of affairs could well continue.

    But if it does not, then Moscow policymakers and the Russian public will both look upon the sanctions as a deliberate attempt to re-inflict on them the collapse of society, chaos, corruption and suffering that followed the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

    President Vladimir Putin rescued the Russian people from that nightmare almost immediately on taking office first as prime minister in 1999 and then as president. But everyone over the age of 30 in Russia today remembers that awful decade of the 1990s all too well.

    I visited Russia often during those years, saw the suffering of the Russian people and ached for their plight.

    If the new, supposedly “super” sanctions to be imposed this November do threaten to plunge the Russian people back into that awful time of nightmare, they will therefore be seen as an existential threat to national survival.

    If that happens, the clueless poseurs and policymaking clowns in Washington will risk setting off a terminal catastrophe for their own people and the entire world.

  • 'Rich' Americans Have Never Been More Comfortable Relative To 'Poor'

    The last few months have seen a dramatic divergence between the ‘comfort’ of the haves and the have-notes.

    As Bloomberg notes, higher-income Americans are pulling ahead of those making less, and their moods reflect it.

    As the chart above shows, people making more than $50,000 a year were the most upbeat since 2001, lifting their confidence index to 76.8, according to the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort survey this week.

    However, the gauge for those earning less than $50,000 annually fell to a five-month low of 39.4, putting the sentiment gap at 37.4 points, the widest on record.

  • Society Is Made of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    In the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What they take to be reality is actually a computer program that has been jacked into their brains to keep them in a comatose state. They live their whole lives in that virtual simulation, without any way of knowing that what they appear to be experiencing with their senses is actually made of AI-generated code.

    Life in our current society is very much the same. The difference is that instead of AI, it’s psychopathic oligarchs who are keeping us asleep in the Matrix. And instead of code, it’s narrative.

    Society is made of narrative like the Matrix is made of code. Identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics, government, they’re all purely mental constructs which exist nowhere outside of the mental noises in our heads. If I asked you to point to your knee you could do so instantly and wordlessly, but if I asked you to point to the economy, for example, the closest you could come is using a bunch of linguistic symbols to point to a group of concepts. To show me the economy, you’d have to tell me a story.

    Anyone who has ever experienced a moment of mental stillness knows that without the chatter, none of those things are part of your actual present experience. There is no identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics or government in your experience without the mental chatter about those things. There’s not even a “you” anywhere to be found, because it turns out that that’s made of narrative, too.

    Without mental narrative, nothing is experienced but sensory impressions appearing to a subject with no clear shape or boundaries. The visual and auditory fields, the sensation of air going in and out of the respiratory system, the feeling of the feet on the ground or the bum in the chair. That’s it. That’s more or less the totality of life minus narrative.

    When you add in the mental chatter, however, none of those things tend to occupy a significant amount of interest or attention. Appearances in the visual and auditory field are suddenly divided up and labeled with language, with attention to them determined by whichever threatens or satisfies the various agendas, fears and desires of the conceptual identity construct known as “you”. You can go days, weeks, months or years without really noticing the feeling of your respiratory system or your feet on the ground as your interest and attention gets sucked up into a relationship with society that exists solely as narrative.

    “Am I good enough? Am I doing the right thing? Oh man, I hope what I’m trying to do works out. I need to make sure I get all my projects done. If I do that one thing first it might save me some time in the long run. Oh there’s Ashley, I hate that bitch. God I’m so fat and ugly. If I can just get the things that I want and accomplish my important goals I’ll feel okay. Taxes are due soon. What’s on TV? Oh it’s that idiot. How the hell did he get elected anyway? Everyone who made that happen is a Nazi. God I can’t wait for the weekend. I hope everything goes as planned between now and then.”

    On and on and on and on. Almost all of our mental energy goes into those mental narratives. They dominate our lives. And, for that reason, people who are able to control those narratives are able to control us.

    And they do.

    Most people try to exert some degree of control over those around them. They try to influence how those in their family, social and employment circles think of them by behaving and speaking in a certain way. Family members will spend their lives telling other family members over and over again that they’re not as smart/talented/good as they think they are to keep them from becoming too successful and moving away. Romantic partners will be persuaded that they can never leave because no one else will ever love them. To varying degrees, they manipulate the narratives of individuals.

    Then there are the people who’ve figured out that they can actually take their ability to influence the way people think about themselves and their world and turn it into personal profit. Cult leaders convince followers to turn over their entire lives in service to them. Advertisers convince consumers that they have a problem or deficiency that can only be solved with This Exciting New Product™. Ambitious rat race participants learn how to climb the corporate ladder by winning favor with the right people and inflicting small acts of sabotage against their competing peers. Ambitious journalists learn that they progress much further in their careers by advancing narratives that favor the establishment upon which the plutocrats who own the big media companies have built their kingdoms. They manipulate the narratives of groups.

    And then, there are the oligarchs. The master manipulators. These corporate kings of the modern world have learned the secret that every ruler since the dawn of civilization has known: whoever controls the narratives that are believed by a society is the controller of that society. Identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics, government: all mental constructs which only influence society to the extent that they are believed and subscribed to by a significant majority of the collective. If you have influence over the things that people believe about those mental constructs, you have influence over society. You rule it. The oligarchs manipulate the narratives of entire societies.

    This is why there have been book burnings, heretic burnings, and executions for mocking the emperor throughout history: ideas which differ from the dominant narratives about what power is, how money works, who should be in charge and so on are threatening to a ruler’s power in the exact same way that an assassin’s dagger is. At any time, in any kingdom, the people could have decided to take the crown off of their king’s head and place it upon the head of any common beggar and treat him as the new king. And, in every meaningful way, he would be the new king. The only thing preventing this from happening was dominant narratives subscribed to by the society at the time about Divine Right, fealty, loyalty, noble blood and so on. The only thing keeping the crown on a king’s head was narrative.

    The exact same thing remains true today; the only thing that has changed is the narratives the public subscribe to. Because of what they are taught in school and what the talking heads on their screens tell them about their nation and their government, most people believe that they live in a relatively free democracy where accountable, temporary power is placed in the hands of a select few based on a voting process informed by the unregulated debate of information and ideas. Completely separate from the government, they believe, is an economy whose behavior is determined by the supply and demand of consumers. In reality, economics, commerce and government are fully controlled by an elite class of plutocrats, who also happen to own the media corporations which broadcast the information about the world onto people’s screens.

    Control the narratives of economics and commerce, and you control economics and commerce. Control the narratives about politics and government, and you control politics and government. This control is used by the controllers to funnel power to the oligarchs, in this way effectively turning society into one giant energy farm for the elite class.

    But it is possible to wake up from that narrative Matrix.

    It isn’t easy, and it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes work. Inner work. And humility. Nobody likes acknowledging that they’ve been fooled, and the depth and extent to which we’ve all been fooled is so deeply pervasive it can be tempting to decide that the work is complete far before one is actually free. Mainstream American liberals think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by Fox and Donald Trump, and mainstream American conservatives think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by MSNBC and the Democrats, but the propaganda strings on both trace back to the same puppet master. And seeing that is just the beginning.

    But, through sincere, humble research and introspection, it is possible to break free of the Matrix and see the full extent to which you and everyone you know has been imprisoned by ideas which have been programmed into social consciousness by the powerful. Not just in our adult lives, but ever since our parents began teaching us how to speak, think and relate to the world. Not just in the modern world, but as far back as history stretches to when the power-serving belief systems of societal structure and religion were promoted by kings and queens of old. All of society, and all of ourselves, and indeed all of the thoughts in our heads, have been shaped by those in power to their benefit. This is the reality that we were born into, and our entire personality structure has been filtered through and shaped by it.

    For this reason, escaping from the power-serving propaganda Matrix necessarily means becoming a new creature altogether. The ideas, mental habits and ways of relating to the world which were formed in the Matrix are only useful for moving around inside of it. In order to relate to life outside of the power-promulgated narratives which comprise the very fabric of society, you’ve got to create a whole new operating system for yourself in order to move through life independently of the old programming designed to keep you asleep and controlled.

    So it’s hard work. You’ll make a lot of mistakes along the way, just like an infant slowly learning to walk. But, eventually, you get clear of the programming.

    And then you’re ready to fight.

    Because at some point in this process, you necessarily come upon a deep, howling rage within. Rage at the oligarchic manipulators of your species, yes, but also rage against manipulation in all its forms. Rage against everyone who has ever tried to manipulate your narrative, to make you believe things about yourself or make other people believe things about you. Rage against anyone who manipulates anyone else to any extent. When your eyes are clear manipulation stands out like a black fly on a white sheet of paper, and your entire system has nothing to offer it but revulsion and rejection.

    So you set to work. You set to work throwing all attempts to manipulate you as far away from yourself as possible, and expunging anyone from your life who refuses to stop trying to control your narrative. Advertising, mass media propaganda, establishment academia, everything gets purged from your life that wants to pull you back into the Matrix.

    And they will try to pull you back in. Because our narratives are so interwoven and interdependent with everyone else’s, and so inseparable from our sense of ourselves, your rejection of the narrative Matrix will present as an existential threat to many of your friends and loved ones. You will see many people you used to trust, many of them very close to you, suddenly transform into a bunch of Agent Smiths right in front of your eyes, and they will shame you, guilt you, throw every manipulation tool they have at you to get you to plug the jack back into your brain. But because your eyes are clear, you’ll see it all. You won’t be fooled.

    And then all you’ll want is to tear down the Matrix from its very foundations and plunge its controllers into irrelevance. You will set to work bringing down the propaganda prison that they have built up around your fellow humans in any way you can, bolt by bolt if you have to, because you know from your own experience that we are all capable of so much more than the puny gear-turning existence they’ve got everyone churning away at. You will despise the oligarchs for the obscene sacrilege that they have inflicted upon human majesty out of greed and insecurity, and you will make a mortal enemy of the entire machine that they have used to enslave our species.

    And, because their entire kingdom is built upon maintaining the illusion of freedom and democracy, all they will have to fight back against you is narrative. They’ll try to shame you into silence by calling you a conspiracy theorist, they’ll have their media goons and manipulators launch smear campaigns against you, but because your eyes are clear, none of that will work. They’ve got one weapon, and it doesn’t work on you.

    And you will set to work waking up humanity from the lie factory, using whatever skills you have, weakening trust in the mass media propaganda machine and opening eyes to new possibilities. And while doing so, you will naturally shine big and bright so the others can find you. And together, we’ll not only smash the narratives that imprison us like a human caterpillar swallowing the narrative bullshit and forcing it into the mouth of the next slave, but we’ll also create new narratives, better narratives, healthier narratives, for ourselves and for each other, about how the world is and what we want it to be.

    Because here’s the thing: since it’s all narrative, anything is possible. Those who see this have the ability to plunge toward health and human thriving without any regard for the made-up reasons why such a thing is impossible, and plant seeds of light which sprout in unprecedented directions that never could have been predicted by someone plugged into to establishment how-it-is stories. Together, we can determine how society will be. We can re-write the rules. We are re-writing the rules. It’s begun already.

    Out of the white noise of a failing propaganda machine, a new world is being born, one that respects the autonomy of the individual and their right to self-determination. One that respects our right to collaborate on large scales to create beautiful, healthy, helpful systems without the constant sabotage and disruption of a few power-hungry psychopaths who would rather rule than live. One that respects our right to channel human ingenuity into harmony and human thriving instead of warfare and greed. One that respects our right to take what we need, not just to survive but to thrive, and return it to the earth for renewal. One that respects the sovereign boundaries of not just ourselves and each other, but of the planet spaceship that we live in.

    Unjack your cortex fully from the fear-soaked narratives of insanity, and let the true beauty of our real world flood your senses. Let the grief of what we have unknowingly done send you crashing to your knees in sorrow. And when you’re ready, stand up. We have much work to do.

    *  *  *

    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 bookWoke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

     

  • Seismic Shocker: The Number Of Global Earthquakes Over The Last 30 Days Is Over 50% Above Normal

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The American Dram blog,

    Why is the number of earthquakes happening around the world increasing so dramatically? 

    In recent days, we have seen very large earthquakes in Venezuela, Fiji, Italy and elsewhere.  Here in North America, significant quakes have rattled Oregon, Alaska and the west coast of Mexico.  As I reported on all of these important seismic events, it sure seemed like the number of earthquakes was rising, but I wanted to be sure.  I once worked as an attorney, and I was trained to only come to conclusions that were warranted by the facts.  So I decided to pull up the numbers, and what I discovered was extremely alarming.  It turns out that the number of earthquakes that we have witnessed over the last 30 days is more than 50 percent above normal.  Of course the Earth is constantly being pummeled by quakes, but this is a huge deviation from the norm. 

    Could it be possible that we have entered a time when major Earth changes are going to start happening on a regular basis?  If so, what does that mean for the future of our society?

    If you go to Earthquake Track, you will find the latest data on all earthquakes that have happened all over the planet.

    According to their numbers, there have been 82,845 earthquakes of magnitude 1.5 or greater over the last 365 days.  That is an enormous number of earthquakes, but most of them are so small that they can’t really be felt.

    When you divide 82,845 earthquakes by 365 days, you get an average of about 227 earthquakes per day over the past year.

    And when you multiply 227 earthquakes by 30 days, you get an average of 6,810 earthquakes per 30 days over the last 12 months.

    But there have been a whole lot more than 6,810 earthquakes over the last 30 days.  In fact, Earthquake Track tells us that there have been 10,901 earthquakesover the last 30 days.

    That means that the number of earthquakes over the last 30 days is more than 50 percent above normal, and that is big news.  Unfortunately, the mainstream media in the United States is almost entirely ignoring this story because they are preoccupied with other things at the moment.

    Most of the earthquakes over the last 30 days have happened along the Ring of Fire, and a British news source tells us that over 90 percent of all quakes tend to happen along this seismic zone which roughly encircles the Pacific Ocean…

    The Pacific Ring of Fire is the most geologically active region in the world.

    More than 90 percent of earthquakes occur here, as well as 22 or the 25 biggest volcanic eruptions in history.

    The entire west coast of the continental United States and the entire southern coast of Alaska fall directly along the Ring of Fire.  Over the past several days Alaska has been hit by dozens of earthquakes, including a huge magnitude 6.3 shaker…

    The eruption, which occurred in the remote Andrean of Islands region of Alaska, happened at around 4.30am BST and had a depth of 27 miles.

    There has been a total of 35 earthquakes in Alaska in the last two days, ranging from 2.5 in magnitude to 6.3 according to the USGS.

    There have also been some quakes off the west coast of the U.S., but so far California itself has been largely unaffected.

    However, the experts assure us that California is “overdue” for a major earthquake…

    Richard Aster, Professor of Geophysics at Colorado State University, warned recently California is in an “earthquake drought” and overdue a 7.0 quake.

    He said: “Although many Californians can recount experiencing an earthquake, most have never personally experienced a strong one.

    “For major events, with magnitudes of seven or greater, California is actually in an earthquake drought.”

    The fact that there hasn’t been a very large quake in the region for a very long time may be a really bad sign, because tectonic stress along the Juan de Fuca plate is constantly building up.

    At some point that stress must be released, and that is when we will see “the Big One”…

    Geologist Erik Klemetti said: “The Big One will be generated by the stress built up as the Juan de Fuca plate off the coast of Oregon, Washington, California and British Columbia slides underneath North America.

    “The plates can stick, creating stress that is sometimes released as giant earthquakes – and many smaller ones.

    “The ‘snapping’ back of the plate can create tsunamis, just as we saw in 2004 off Indonesia and 2011 off Japan.”

    The west coast of the United States is the center of the global tech industry.  If the “Big One” were to hit, it would be absolutely crippling for the entire global economy.

    And I don’t know if this is related to seismic activity, but ocean temperatures off of the California coast have been hitting unprecedented record highs in recent weeks.  Experts are warning that millions of sea creatures are “in real peril” as temperatures rise to levels that may cause sea creatures to start dying off in massive numbers.

    This is yet another story that the mainstream news is “too busy” to talk about.

    Our planet is undergoing dramatic changes, and this is something that I have been writing about for a long time, but now those changes appear to be greatly accelerating.  Earthquake swarms come and go, but for the total number of global earthquakes in a 30 day period to be more than 50 percent above normal is definitely unusual.

    Hopefully all of this seismic activity will settle down in September, but what if it doesn’t?

    What if our planet continues to become even more unstable and unprecedented seismic events begin devastating major cities all over the globe?

    As I have previously warned, a dramatic rise in planetary instability could have very serious implications for the future of our society.  We are already teetering on the precipice of global systemic collapse, and it definitely wouldn’t take too much to push us over the edge.

  • Massive Russian-Chinese Joint War Games Will Feature Nuclear Exercises

    Over the past half year the West has increasingly taken note of the significantly heightened pace of both Chinese and Russian military spending and surprising leaps forward in terms defense tech advances.

    Even when Chinese or Russian systems fail, as with recent news of a nuclear-powered cruise missile touted by Putin as having “unlimited range” but now apparently lost at the bottom of the sea, Western press takes notice, and a number of Pentagon officials have also warned especially of rapidly advancing Chinese systems. 

    Increasingly, the two powers are cooperating more directly as with Russia’s upcoming military games, said to be the largest such exercise since the Soviet Union, where China is set to participate my sending a mass contingency of elite troops. 

    According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP) the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will participate by sending about 3,200 elite forces troops, along with 30 fix-wing aircraft and helicopters to the Russian-hosted exercises. 

    Russia’s biggest military games in 35 years, called the Vostok 2018 exercises, are set to begin at the Tsugol training range in Russia’s Far East Trans-Baikal region on September 11, and are scheduled to go through the 15th.

    Crucially, one major element to the games sure to attract the attention of Washington military planners is the inclusion of simulated nuclear weapons attacks. Both countries are among the world’s major longtime nuclear armed powers, and both happen to be in the midst of soaring tensions with the United States — Russia the target of sanctions and wide-ranging accusations of election meddling, and China in a trade war that sees no signs of abating. 

    The SCMP cites one Beijing based military expert, Zhou Chenming, to explain that the PLA is seeking to gain greater military experience as its last major combat theater stretches all the way back to the Vietnam War. 

    Additionally, Zhou told the SCMP, “China also wants to show its support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is facing various diplomatic challenges, especially criticism from the US Secretary of State [Mike Pompeo] over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.” The Chinese military expert further cited that the games’ site location was chosen carefully and deliberately with this in mind. 

    “Putin wants to use the Russian military’s war games with the PLA to show its military muscle, but he doesn’t want to irritate the United States too much and raise the possibility of a misjudgment by the Trump administration, so he chose the less sensitive Trans-Baikal region in the Far East, far from US allies in Europe,” Zhou said.

    In response to the impending Vostok-18 games Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon said, “We urge Russia to take steps to share information regarding its exercises and operations in Europe to clearly convey its intentions and minimize and potential misunderstanding.”

    The US defense official further indicated the games will be closely watched by U.S. intelligence agencies due to Russia’s willingness to simulate nuclear combat. “It’s their strategic messaging,” the Pentagon official said of both Russia and China.

    There’s also reports that both countries are experimenting with the development of smaller, tactical nuclear weapons, which of further concern for US defense preparedness. 

    Earlier this week Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu announced the exercises would be the largest since the Soviet Union conducted its Zapad-81 maneuvers, which saw the deployment of hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops and logistics staff.

    “This is the largest armed forces training event since the Zapad-81 maneuvers, it has acquired the status of an international exercise and is of unprecedented scale both in terms of spatial scope as well as the strength of military command and control entities, troops, and forces involved,” Shoygu said, while also announcing the Chinese PLA would participate, as well as auxiliary units from the Mongolian armed forces. 

  • Defections From Pax Americana Coming Louder And Faster

    Authored by Tom Luongo via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    It seems everyday I wake up and see another instance of defections coming from US allies over the behavior of some corner of the Trump Administration.

    Over the weekend Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte hit back strongly at US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Affairs Randall Schriver who told Duterte to “think very carefully” about acquiring a Russian submarine.

    Now if you know anything about Duterte he rarely thinks very carefully before opening his mouth. And this time was no different. He rightly told Schriver publicly to get stuffed and make his case why the Philippines shouldn’t pursue its best interests.

    Moreover, as always, Duterte invited Schriver to a face-to-face meeting over this.

    The US is applying the same pressure to India over buying S-400 missile defense systems from Russia. Turkey’s troubles with the US are all over the news with Pastor Brunson the public reason but it is Turkey’s working closely with Russia on important energy projects like the massive Turkish Stream pipeline, nuclear power plants as well as committing India’s sin of choosing the S-400 over the US Patriot system.

    A Patriot system, by the way, that has been proven in recent months by the Syrian Army to be very ineffective. Meanwhile Iran unveiled its first homegrown fighter jet in a clear act of independence which will not be tolerated.

    What started as small moments of defiance a few years ago are turning into full-throated shouts of opposition as the US pushes its leverage in financial markets to step on the necks of anyone who doesn’t toe the line.

    And Trump feeds off this by casting everyone as a leach who has been sucking off the US’s breast for decades. It doesn’t matter the issue, to Trump US economic fragility is a hammer and every trade and military partner a nail to be bashed over the head to pay their way.

    What we are seeing is the culmination of a long-term plan by global elites to tighten the financial noose around the world through overlapping trade and tariff structures and weaponizing the dollar’s position at the center of global financial interdependence.

    Trump is against that in principle, but not against the US maintaining as much of the empire as possible.

    So, everyday another round of sanctions makes the case against continuing to do business with the US stronger. Everyday another global player speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and makes contingency plans for a world without the dollar at the center of it all.

    The latest major one was with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. This meeting wasn’t expected to provide anything concrete, only vague assurances that projects like the Nordstream 2 pipeline goes through.

    But, no breakthroughs on Crimea or Ukraine were expected nor delivered. It was, however, an opportunity for both Putin and Merkel to be humanized in the European media. Between Putin’s attending Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl’s wedding as well as the garden party photo op background for their talk, this meeting between them was a bit of a ‘charm tour’ to assist Merkel in the polls while expanding on Putin’s humanity post World Cup and Helsinki.

    That said, however, the statement by Merkel’s Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, about the need for a new financial payment system which bypasses the US-dominated SWIFT system was the big bombshell.

    Maas openly accused the US of weaponizing the dollar and disrupting the very foundations of global trade, which is correct, to achieve its goals of regime change in Turkey and Iran. Maas mainly tied this to Trump’s pulling out of the JCPOA but the reality is far bigger than this.

    The Magnitsky Act and its progenitors around the world are a major evolution in the US’s ability to bring financial pain to anyone who it disapproves of. Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws also into this framework.

    While KYC and AML laws can at least have the appearance of validity in attempting to stop illegal activity, targeted sanctioning is simply Orwellian.

    It politicizes any and all economic activity the world over. Just look at the recent reasons for these sanctions – unproven allegations of chemical weapons usage and electioneering. Recent actions by the US have driven this point home to its ‘allies’ with stunning clarity.

    Why do you think Putin brought up Bill Browder’s name at the Helsinki press conference? He knows that Browder’s story is a lie and it’s a lie that has been used as the foundation for the type of political repression we’re seeing today.

    The US is blocking the simplest of transactions in the dollar now, claiming that any use of the dollar is a global privilege which it can revoke at a whim. Aside from the immorality of this, that somehow dollars you traded goods or services for on the open market are still somehow the property of the U.S to claw back whenever it is politically convenient, this undermines the validity of the dollar as a rational medium of exchange for trade.

    This is why after the first round of sanctions over the reunification with Crimea Putin ordered the development of a national electronic payment system. He rightly understood that Russia needed a means by which to conduct business that was independent of US political meddling.

    So, to me, if Heiko Maas is serious about the threat posed by continued use of the dollar in EU trade, he should look to Putin for guidance on building a system separate from SWIFT.

    Moreover, Maas’ statement didn’t go out to the world without Merkel’s approval. This tells me that this was likely the major topic of conversation between her and Putin over the weekend. Because a payment system that skirts the dollar is one the US can’t control.

    It took the Russians longer than they should have to develop MIR. Putin complained about how slow things went because too many within the Bank of Russia and the financial community could be thought of as fifth columnists for the West.

    It’s also why development of the crypto-ruble and Russia’s policy on cryptocurrencies has been so slow. It took Putin publicly ordering the work done by a certain time to get these tasks completed. In the end, it shouldn’t take the EU long to spin up a SWIFT-compliant internal alternative. It is, after all, just code.

    And that’s why so many of the US’s former satraps are now flexing their geopolitical muscle. The incentives aren’t there anymore to keep quiet and go along. Alternatives exist and will be utilized.

    I don’t expect the EU brass to do much about this issue, the threat may be all that is needed to call Trump’s bluff. But, if in the near future you see an announcement of MIR being accepted somewhere in the EU don’t be surprised.

    Because what used to be a node of political stability and investor comfort is now a tool of chaos and abuse. And abusing your customers is never a winning business model in the long run. Customers of the dollar will remind the US of that before this is over.

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Aug 24

Today’s News 24th August 2018

  • The "Doom Loop" Exodus: Foreigners Liquidate Record Amounts Of Italian Bonds

    One month ago, we reported that in the aftermath of Italy’s political fireworks in May, which saw a record spike in Italian government bond yields, ECB data showed record buying of BTPs by Italian banks in May amounting to €28.4bn (chart below), a higher inflow than anything seen during the European sovereign debt crisis in 2012.

    And since local banks buying (to avoid a market crash with the backstop of the ECB), it meant foreign holders of Italian bonds were liquidating a record amount of bonds in the same period, and that Europe’s “doom loop” had just made a thunderous return.

    Or so we thought until we saw the June numbers.

    Because just one month later, we find that the exodus of foreign investors from Italy’s bond market accelerated, with net sales of Italian government debt climbing to a record level for the second month in a row. Specifically, holdings of Italian debt by foreign investors declined by a net €38bn in June, according to the latest ECB data, eclipsing the previous month’s net fall of €34bn, which was itself a record as the FT confirms.

    During this period, Italian bond yields remained elevated, with 10-year debt lingering near the peak it hit in May when the country’s two populist Eurosceptic political parties formed a coalition government. Incidentally, the selloff of Italian 10Y bonds has accelerated in recent weeks, with the 10Y reaching the May highs.

    Commenting on the June plunge, David Owen, chief European economist at Jefferies said that “we had suspected that net foreign selling of Italian debt securities had continued into June, but the June figure was still significantly more than we had expected.”

    Who bought this record amount of bonds sold in June? The same entity that stepped up in May: Italy’s banks. As the FT notes:

    “Italian banks were, to a large extent, on the other side of the deal: in the second quarter of 2018, domestic financial institutions increased their net holdings of the government’s debt by more than €40bn, the largest amount since the height of the eurozone debt crisis.“

    More narrowly as the following Citi excerpt reveals, Italy saw a record capital outflow of €76bn in the two months of May and June, larger than previous 2-month outflow record of €51bn hit in Jun-Jul 2011 and €56bn in Feb-Mar2012. These flows are shown in the charts below.

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

    What happens next and will the paniced liquidation continue?

    According to the FT, investors are currently mostly focused on the fiscal outlook for the eurozone’s third-largest economy, and the coalition’s debut budget, a draft of which is expected to be published by mid-October. The new government’s inclination to step up public spending could threaten to bust through Italy’s fiscal targets

    “Italy’s [economic] fundamentals are actually OK,” said Nick Gartside, international fixed income chief investment officer at JPMorgan Asset Management. “The budget flashpoint is what markets will focus on and when we are through that things should settle down a bit. A fair bit of volatility is now priced in.”

    Seaparetly, Allianz chief investment officer for fixed income, Mauro Vittorangeli, said Italian yields had “settled into” a “new range” and added that if the volatility of Italian yields steadies once the budget discussions are completed, then Italian retail investors and the nation’s banks will buy back into the market, which could help prices to bounce back somewhat.

    Of course, if the budget discussions disappoint and Italian bonds take another step lower, well then there’s always Italian banks to buy even more debt, knowing that they have the ECB to backstop them. The problem is that the ECB’s QE backstop runs out at the the end of the year.

    There are two more immediate threats: according to Vittorangeli, two key factors that markets would be watching are the eurozone’s growth outlook — because “Italian debt needs positive nominal growth” to be sustainable — and the continued presence in government of Giovanni Tria as finance minister.

    If Mr Tria departs, this could be read by investors as a confrontational move by the populist coalition, Mr Vittorangeli warned.

    The silver lining is that Italy’s woes, and the Italian sovereign bond liquidation have not spread to other eurozone markets, according to Mr Owen of Jefferies.

    “Net foreign buying of euro area equities resumed in June, after two consecutive months of declines, following what had been 17 straight months of purchases,” he said. “Arguably, this is because economic surprises for the region have turned positive again.”

    All that would take for that to change, however, is a few more month of record selling of Italian bonds before investors bail on Italy and – with the ECB set to end its QE in just over 4 months – reignite the European sovereign debt crisis.

  • Is Europe Making Plans For A New World Order?

    Authored by German foreign minister Heiko Maas, op-ed via Handelsblatt Global,

    Europe’s relationship with the US was changing even before Donald Trump and his provocative Tweets came along. Germany now sees the current trans-Atlantic antipathy as a historic opportunity to redefine the EU’s role…

    Henry Kissinger was recently asked if Donald Trump could not unintentionally become the force behind the birth of a new western order. His answer: It would be ironic but not impossible. Instead of narrowing our view across the Atlantic to the ever-changing whims of the American President, we should adopt the idea that this could be the start of something new. We can’t not hear what’s going on across the Atlantic every day via Twitter. But a tunnel view into the Oval Office distracts from the fact that America is more than Trump. “Checks and balances” work, as US courts and Congress demonstrate almost daily. The Americans are debating politics with new passion. That too is America in 2018.

    The fact that the Atlantic has widened politically is by no means solely due to Donald Trump. The US and Europe have been drifting apart for years. The overlapping of values and interests that shaped our relationship for two generations is decreasing. The binding force of the East-West conflict is history. These changes began well before Trump’s election — and will survive his presidency well into the future. That is why I am skeptical when some ardent trans-Atlanticist simply advises us to sit this presidency out.

    Since the end of the Second World War, the partnership with the US has brought Germany a unique phase of peace and security. America became a place of longing. For me too, when I traveled from New York to LA over a few months as a high-school graduate, with Paul Auster’s “New York Trilogy” in my pocket and Bruce Springsteen’s music in my ears. But looking back does not lead to the future. It is high time to reassess our partnership — not to leave it behind, but to renew and preserve it.

    Europe United

    Let’s use the idea of a balanced partnership as a blueprint, where we assume our equal share of responsibility. In which we form a counterweight when the US crosses the line. Where we put our weight when America retreats. And in which we can start a new conversation.

    If we go it alone, we will fail in this task. The outstanding aim of our foreign policy is to build a sovereign, strong Europe. Only by joining forces with France and other European nations can a balance with the US be achieved. The European Union must become a cornerstone of the international order, a partner for all those who are committed to it. She is predestined for this, because compromise and balance lie in her DNA.

    “Europe United” means this: We act with sovereignty at those points where nation-states alone cannot muster the level of power a united Europe can. We are not circling the wagons and keeping the rest of the world out. We are not demanding allegiance. Europe is building on the rule of law, respect for the weaker, and our experiences that show that international cooperation is not a zero-sum game.

    A balanced partnership means that we Europeans take an equal share of the responsibility. Nowhere is the trans-Atlantic link more indispensable to us than in terms of security. Whether as a partner in NATO, or in the fight against terrorism, we need the US. We must draw the right conclusions from this. It is in our own interest to strengthen the European part of the North Atlantic Alliance. Not because Donald Trump is always setting new percentage targets, but because we can no longer rely on Washington to the same extent. But the dialectic of the trans-Atlantic also means this: If we take on more responsibility, then Americans and Europeans can continue to rely on each other in the future.

    The German government is following this path. The turnaround in defense spending is a reality. Now it is important to build a European security and defense union step by step — as part of trans-Atlantic security and as a separate European project for the future. Increases in defense and security spending make sense from this perspective.

    Exposing fake news

    Another crucial point: Europe’s commitment must be part of a rationale based on diplomacy and civil crisis management. In the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and Africa’s Sahel areas, we are also using non-military means to combat the collapse of government structures. For me, these are examples of trans-Atlantic cooperation – and a blueprint for joint involvement in other crises elsewhere.

    And where the USA crosses the line, we Europeans must form a counterweight – as difficult as that can be. That is also what balance is about.

    It starts with us exposing fake news. Like this: If the current account balance of Europe and the US includes more than just trade in goods, then it is not the US that has a deficit, it’s Europe. One reason is the billions in profits that European subsidiaries of Internet giants such as Apple, Facebook and Google transfer to the US every year. So when we talk about fair rules, we must also talk about the fair taxation of profits like that.

    It is also important to correct fake news because it can quickly result in the wrong policies. As Europeans, we have made it clear to the Americans that we consider the withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran to be a mistake. Meanwhile, the first US sanctions have come back into force.

    In this situation, it is of strategic importance that we make it clear to Washington that we want to work together. But also: That we will not allow you to go over our heads, and at our expense. That is why it was right to protect European companies legally from sanctions. It is therefore essential that we strengthen European autonomy by establishing payment channels independent of the US, a European monetary fund and an independent SWIFT [payments] system. The devil is in thousands of details. But every day that the Iran agreement lasts, is better than the potentially explosive crisis that threatens the Middle East otherwise.

    A balanced partnership also means that, as Europeans, we bring more weight to bear when the US withdraws. We are concerned about Washington’s withdrawal of affection, in financial and other terms, from the UN — and not only because we will soon be on the Security Council. Of course we can’ t fill all the gaps. But together with others, we can cushion the most damaging consequences of the thinking that says success is measured in dollars saved. That is why we have increased funding for relief organizations working with Palestinian refugees and sought support from Arab states.

    We are striving for a multilateral alliance, a network of partners who, like us, are committed to sticking to the rules and to fair competition. I have made my first appointments with Japan, Canada and South Korea; more are to follow. This alliance is not a rigid, exclusive club for those with good intentions. What I have in mind is an association of states convinced of the benefits of multilateralism, who believe in international cooperation and the rule of the law. It is not directed against anyone, but sees itself as an alliance that supports and enhances a global, multilateral order. The door is wide open — above all to the US. The aim is to tackle the problems that none of us can tackle on our own, together — from climate change to fair trade.

    I have no illusions that such an alliance can solve all the world’s problems. But it is not enough just to complain about the destruction of the multilateral order. We have to fight for it, especially because of the current trans-Atlantic situation.

    Please, don’t abandon America

    One final point is elementary: We must begin a new dialogue with the people on the other side of the Atlantic. Not only in New York, Washington or LA, but also in middle America, where the coast is far away and Europe is even further away. Starting in October, we will be hosting a “German Year in the US” for the first time ever. Not to celebrate the German-American friendship as nostalgia but to enable encounters that make people feel that we are moved to ask similar questions, that we’re still close.

    Exchange creates new perspectives. I can’t let go of an encounter I had recently on one of my trips. A young US soldier used an unobserved moment to whisper to me: “Please, don’t abandon America.” An American soldier was asking a German politician not to let America down. The affection that lay in this request touched me deeply. Perhaps we now need to get used to the idea that Americans are going to say such things to us Europeans.

    Anyway, it would be a nice, historical irony if Henry Kissinger turned out to be right. If the White House’s tweets actually led to a balanced partnership, a sovereign Europe and a global alliance for multilateralism. We’re working hard on that to happen.

  • 15% Of Russians Think Putin Tried To Influence US Election

    Amid allegations that the Russian government disrupted the 2016 U.S. presidential election through tactics such as spreading disinformation on social media, a new poll has found that most Russians believe their government was not responsible.

    Infographic: Russians Say Putin Didn't Influence U.S. Election | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    The Pew Research Center found that 71 percent of Russians think their government did not try to influence the election with only 15 percent saying there was an attempt at interference.

  • In The New "Multipolar World" The Globalists Still Control All The Players

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

    The greatest tool at the disposal of globalists is the use of false paradigms to manipulate public perception and thus public action. The masses are led to believe that at the highest levels of geopolitical and financial power there is such a thing as “sides.” This is utter nonsense when we examine the facts at hand.

    We are told the-powers-that-be are divided by “Left” and “Right” politics, yet both sides actually support the same exact policy actions when it comes to the most important issues of the day and only seem to differ in terms of rhetoric, which is meaningless and cosmetic anyway.  That is to say, it’s nothing but Kabuki theater.

    We are told that corporate power must be balanced by government power and that government power must be balanced by “free markets,” when in reality corporations are chartered and protected by governments and free markets simply don’t exist in today’s economy. In the case of social media “censorship,” we are told that the solution is to use government power to enforce “fairness” instead of simply launching our own alternative platforms.  Yet, social media corporations exist in the form of monopolies exactly because of  government power and intervention in business. The abuses of one “side” are being used to push us into the arms of the other side, which is just as abusive.

    In terms of geopolitics, we are told that national powers stand “at cross-purposes;” that they have different interests and different goals, which has led to things like “trade wars” and sometimes shooting wars. Yet, when we look at the people actually pulling the strings in most of these countries, we find the same names and institutions. Whether you are in America, Russia China, the EU, etc., globalist think tanks and international banks are everywhere, and the leaders in all of these countries call for MORE power for such institutions, not less.

    These wars, no matter what form they take, are a circus for the public. They are engineered to create controlled chaos and manageable fear.  They are a means to influence us towards a particular end, and that end, in most cases, is more social and economic influence in the hands of a select few. In each instance, people are being convinced to believe that the world is being divided when it is actually being centralized.

    The key to any magic show is to get the audience to participate in the lie; to get them to focus on the distracting hand, to assume that what they are seeing is actually what is really happening – to suspend their skepticism.

    Make no mistake, what we are seeing in geopolitics today is indeed a magic show. The false East/West paradigm is as powerful if not more powerful than the false Left/Right paradigm. For some reason, the human mind is more comfortable believing in the ideas of division and chaos, and it often turns its nose up indignantly at the notion of “conspiracy.” But conspiracies and conspirators can be demonstrated as a fact of history. Organization among elitists is predictable.

    Globalists themselves are drawn together by an ideology. They have no common nation, they have no common political orientation, they have no common cultural background or religion, they herald from the East just as they herald from the West. They have no true loyalty to any mainstream cause or social movement.

    What do they have in common? They seem to exhibit many of the traits of high level narcissistic sociopaths, who make up a very small percentage of the human population. These people are predators, or to be more specific, they are parasites. They see themselves as naturally superior to others, but they often work together if there is the promise of mutual benefit.

    The closest thing I can relate narcissistic sociopaths (and thus globalists) to in mythology would be vampires. I have often wondered if the concept of “vampires” was created as a way for the peasants of the dark ages to explain the soulless and monstrous behavior of the elites of their time. The notion that any person is capable of that kind if evil, let alone organized evil in the form of a cabal, is hard for people to accept to this day.

    Vampires in mythology are usually depicted as elites, hiding in plain site as leaders of communities in the upper echelons of society. They seek out a village, insert themselves as upstanding patrons and aristocrats, then feed until that village is destroyed. Afterward, they move on to the next village.  This is what they are. This is what they do, and they do it in organized fashion to make the process more efficient.

    It takes a village to feed a vampire, or a narcissistic sociopath.

    I relate this metaphor because I think it’s important for the average person to understand what we are really dealing with here. When some people recoil at the notion of a syndicate at the highest levels of finance and politics working towards nefarious purposes, they should know that this is easily explained not only in terms of historic myths and archetypes, but in well documented psychological study.

    Analysts and activists within the liberty movement have proven impressively immune to many of the narratives and lies of conspiratorial globalists, which is why they are now the main target of multiple propaganda campaigns. Globalists don’t feel comfortable climbing into their coffins to sleep during the day while so many Van Helsings are lurking about exposing their activities.

    The latest propaganda effort I have seen is the narrative of the “multipolar world” developing in the wake of what the IMF refers to as the “global economic reset.” In fact, the term “multipolar world” is being used in alternative media circles a lot these days, and this is once again a ploy designed to con us into believing that centralization is no longer a threat and that the divisions we see are real rather than fabricated.

    Under the multipolar narrative, we are told that the shift away from the U.S. dollar as the world reserve is now happening and that this is being led by Eastern political powers seeking alternatives. This is true, to a point.

    The lies surrounding this development are many, though. We are told that Eastern political powers are at odds with globalists and globalism — this is false. We are told that BRICS nations are seeking a decentralized system to replace dollar hegemony — this is false. We are told that Eastern leaders like Putin and Xi are countering the globalist power grab and are being targeted by the elites as if they are “rebelling” against the empire — this is also false. We are told that the trade war is a means for Donald Trump to disrupt globalization and throw a monkey wrench into the globalists plans — this is fantasy.

    Liberty activists and analysts are particularly susceptible to the idea because it plays on our desire to see the longstanding dollar-based empire of the Federal Reserve fall into the oblivion it deserves.  The problem is that the narrative is based on the fraudulent assumption that the globalist empire is rooted in the “American empire.”

    Here are the facts:

    Globalist influences are hyper-present in eastern nations. For example, Vladimir Putin, who is often depicted as some kind of anti-globalist hero in liberty movement discussions, is not anti-globalist at all. Putin was “discovered” by vocal new world order proponent Henry Kissinger decades ago in the early 1990s before he took on the role as acting president of Russia. Putin relates his first meeting with Kissinger and their longstanding friendship in the book First Person, his autobiographical account of his early career.

    Contrary to popular belief in the liberty movement, Putin DID NOT kick out international banks or remove their power structures during his presidential rise. In fact, Rothschild banks still operate in Russia to this day, while Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan continue to act as the largest investment banks in the country.

    The globalist presence in Russia is perhaps why the nation developed such a close relationship with the IMF after the fall of the Soviet Union, why they continue their ties to the IMF an the Bank for International Settlements to this day and why the Kremlin has in the past called for a new global currency system controlled by the IMF.

    China has also called for the same new monetary system, not decentralized, but completely centralized under the IMF. China has been under the influence of the Rockefeller Foundationsince around 1915, when they opened a university in the country based on the University of Chicago.  China continues its ties to the globalists through the BIS and IMF, and Goldman Sachsis heavily involved in Chinese government activities and business arrangements. Only last year, Goldman established a $5 billion deal with an arm of the Chinese government to make it easier to purchase companies and assets within the United States. Donald Trump praised the deal as beneficial to the U.S., which is not surprising considering the number of Goldman Sachs alumni Trump has involved in his cabinet.

    Trump has also had extensive dealings with the globalists, including Rothschild connected banking elites for the past 25 years. Wilber Ross, an investment banker working for the Rothschilds, was the primary agent that bailed Trump out of his considerable debts surrounding his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. After Trump’s rise to the White House, he made Wilber Ross commerce secretary and Ross now heavily promotes the developing trade war.

    Clearly, there is no “division” between the world’s political leaders when it comes to who they are allied with. International banks  and globalist think tanks are involved with ALL of them. But what about the rest of the world in general? Isn’t the trade war causing division and decentralization among nations and economies? When you look at the very top of the pyramid, the divisions vanish.

    Consider Russia’s ongoing oil pipeline deal with Germany, or Russia’s latest deal to allow China to farm over 2.5 million acres of Russian land, helping directly combat U.S. sanctions. Or what about the Caspian Sea deal between Russia, Iran and multiple other countries to end the dispute over the region? And how about China’s defiance of sanctions on Iranian oil?  Or the EU’s growing protests over US interference in their oil trade with both Iran and Russia?

    These are just some of the latest examples of the rest of the world melding into a larger conglomerate in the wake of the trade war. The trade war is bringing all these supposedly disparate countries together in a way that is rather convenient for globalists. If we take into account the reality of globalist influence in all major economies, then we have to also take into account the possibility that the “global economic reset” is not about a “multipolar world,” but an even more centralized unipolar world. A world which sacrifices the U.S. model along with the dollar as world reserve and replaces it with something EVEN WORSE.

    In the meantime, liberty activists are lately being told that they should rally around the death of dollar and the global reset as if it is the end of globalism. In other words, we are supposed to stupidly believe that the shift to the new world order is “decentralization” simply because they call it “multipolar.” Just because the U.S. is no longer the face of the beast does not mean the beast is gone.

    *  *  *

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  • Australia PM Turnbull Ousted, To Be Replaced With Morrison; Aussie Dollar Spikes

    One day after Australia slumped into a leadership crisis, when prime minister Malcolm Turnbull found that his support has collapsed, moments ago Liberal party lawmakers voted to oust Malcolm Turnbull, deepening political instability that’s seen six changes of prime minister in little more than a decade, Sky News reported. Turnbull will be replaced with Treasurer Scott Morrison, a far more market-friendly alternative than the more right-wing Peter Dutton, who had been cited as Turnbull’s most likely replacement.

    Malcolm Turnbull

    Morrison won 45 votes to 40 over former Cabinet minister Peter Dutton in a closed-door meeting of lawmakers, Sky said. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop was eliminated in the first round of voting.

    As Bloomberg notes, Morrison’s victory represents a defeat for the party’s right-wing, which advocated conservative policies similar to those that led to the rise of U.S. President Donald Trump and the vote for Brexit. He has a narrow window to unite the party and make up ground against the main opposition Labor party, which has benefited from the government’s inability to enact coherent policies from taxation to energy.

    Scott Morrison, Australia’s new Prime Minister

    News of Morrison’s ascent to the prime minister chair send the Aussie dollar higher by 0.5% to 0.7290 from 0.7250 before the news. The AUD dropped 1.4% on Thursday, the steepest slump since May 2017, as the political turmoil damaged sentiment toward the nation’s currency.

    Annette Beacher, head of Asia-Pac research at TD Securities issued the following note:

    “PM Morrison is the most market-friendly option, having successfully negotiated through multiple portfolios such as Social Security, Border Security, and more recently presiding over a substantial improvement in the budget balance as Treasurer.”

    “Parliament and the markets will be closely watching post-vote polls to gauge if Morrison can even up the balance towards the Liberal-National coalition and away from the Labor Party under Bill Shorten. The skew towards the Labor Party at this stage ensures they they will form government at the next election.”

    According to Bloomberg, Morrison has a narrow window to unite the party and boost its poll ratings, which slumped as Turnbull failed to craft coherent policies from taxation to energy. The government is trailing the main opposition Labor party by such a wide margin that defeat seems inevitable in elections due by May.

    The rotation at the top will hardly come as a shock: the change in leadership extends 11 years of political turmoil in Australia, with no prime minister serving a full term since 2007 (Australia has been lucky not to fall into a recession for the duration of time since then). This week’s crisis has infected the nation’s financial markets and prompted a string of business leaders to demand the government provide policy certainty.

    Some background on Australia’s new prime minister:

    The 50-year-old Morrison entered parliament in 2007, at the election that ended the Liberal’s 11-year rule under John Howard. After the party returned to power in 2013, Morrison was appointed immigration minister and charged with enacting ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ aimed at stopping asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat.

    Morrison was promoted to Treasurer in 2015, one of the most high-profile and powerful roles in government. While he has overseen a hiring boom and managed to shrink the budget deficit, the government has received little credit as wages stagnate and housing prices soar beyond the reach of many Australians.

  • Pentagon Prepares 2020 Production Of Upgraded Nuclear Bomb, Releases Video Of Test-Drop

    The B61 nuclear gravity bomb, deployed at most U.S. Air Force and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military bases, has almost five decades of service, making it the oldest bomb in the US stockpile.

    Numerous programs have modified the B61 for safety, security, and reliability since it entered service in the late 1960s, including four B61 variants.

    However, the weapon system is quickly aging and has hit the upper extreme of its lifespan, as it seems the Pentagon is about to extend the life of the nuclear gravity bomb by another two decades.

    The upgraded, B61-12 LEP will replace all of the bomb’s nuclear and non‐nuclear components for another two decades, and improve the bomb’s safety, effectiveness, and security. This life extension program will address all age-related issues of the weapon, and enhance its reliability, field maintenance, safety, and use control.

    Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories are the design and engineering labs for the B61-12 LEP. In a recent presentation, the final design review will be conducted next month. Both firms indicated the first production unit would occur in FY 2020.

    In total, the bomb is 12 feet long and weigh approximately 825 pounds. The weapon will be air-delivered on current strategic (B-2A) and dual-capable aircraft (F-15E, F-16C/D & MLU, PA-200) as well as advanced aircraft platforms (F-35, B-21).

    An F-15E drops a B61-12 test unit during a development flight test (Source/ National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA))

    An F-15E conducts a vibration fly-around test with B61-12 bombs (Source/ NNSA) 

    Last week, Sandia National Laboratories released an unclassified five-minute video showing the entire preparation process and the actual drop of inert B61-3/4 tactical nuclear bombs at the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada back in July 2017. The data compiled from the test is expected to be submitted into a report for the final design review next month before the first production unit is manufactured sometime in 2020.

    F-15E Strike Eagle jet dropping the first inert B61-3/4 tactical nuclear bomb (Source/  Sandia National Labs YouTube)

    The ultra-high-definition video centered around two McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle jets deploying spin-stabilization rockets to drop B61-12 test bombs. A few seconds after the drop, parachutes open and the GPS-guided the dud slowly to the ground. The video shows a large team using sophisticated sensors to monitor the tests.

    A land-based sensor monitors bomb drop (Source/  Sandia National Labs YouTube)

    The video closes with ground crews retrieving one of the inert nuclear bombs. It also shows a bunker where three B61-12 test bombs appear to have recently been dropped, as the video only showed two. The bomb’s yield ranges from 0.3 to 50 kilotons. The first of the two nuclear weapons ever used, against the Japanese city of Hiroshima, had a 15-kiloton yield.

    The tests are part of a $7.6 billion life extension program of the B61s, which as we described above, aims to “refurbish, reuse, or replace all of the bomb’s nuclear and non‐nuclear components” and extend the service of the bomb by at least two decades. With the “first production unit” scheduled for completion in 2020, perhaps the Pentagon is preparing for future military conflict with Russia and or China.

  • "No Further Talks Scheduled": China-U.S. Trade Negotiations A Complete Bust

    When reports emerged last week of a low-level Chinese delegation coming to meet with members of the Treasury department ahead of what the WSJ described would be a November trade summit in the US, stocks spiked and yields ran up (they have since tumbled with the 2s10s yield curve collapsing to just 20 basis points) on hopes that the long-running trade feud between the US and China may finally be coming to an end.

    Skeptics laughed and said that after three rounds of failed trade talks, the fourth one would be no different.

    The skeptics were right because after the conclusion on Thursday of the second day of the closely watched trade talks between the U.S. and China, there was “no major progress” according to Bloomberg, with the stage once again set for further escalation of the trade war between the US and China.

    Worse, according to the Bloomberg source, not only are no further talks scheduled at this point but the Chinese officials have reportedly raised the possibility that no further negotiations could happen until after November’s mid-term elections in the U.S.

    The White House issued a statement which said the countries “exchanged views on how to achieve fairness, balance, and reciprocity in the economic relationship, including by addressing structural issues in China” identified by the U.S. in an investigation into Chinese intellectual-property practices. The Chinese commerce ministry was even more terse, stating that two nations had “constructive, candid” communication, and will keep in touch about the next steps.

    Translation: nobody was willing to compromise by even an inch.

    Here’s what happened according to the Bloomberg source:  the U.S. Treasury presented a revised version of the “provocative” list of demands presented by the Trump administration when the two sides had their first high-level meetings in May. The Chinese delegation, meanwhile, showed no signs of bringing any significant compromises to the table this week

    Even relative doves inside the Trump administration have begun pressing for China to make significant structural reforms by unwinding industrial subsidies and at least scaling back its “Made in China 2025” plan to lead the world in industries such as artificial intelligence and robotics.

    Yet the Chinese side has continued to offer only increased purchases of American commodities aimed at reducing the U.S. trade deficit, believing that is the best tactic to try and see off further U.S. tariffs, said the person familiar with the discussions.

    In other words, back to square one.

    The lack of any progress is understandable: as we reported earlier, Trump is convinced he is winning the trade war by simply observing the level of the stock market and the bear market in Chinese stocks.

    Meanwhile, for China “resistance” to Trump has become an issue of nationalistic pride with local media issuing increasingly more harsh and acerbic comments aimed at the White House; furthermore China may be observing the political fiascos engulfing the US president and may be growing more confident that it is only a matter of time before Trump is forced to fold. Beijing is also confident that after a humiliating – for Trump – midterm election outcome, the president will have no choice but to come to the negotiating table waving a white flag.

    Whatever the case, the Chinese came, saw, and nothing happened.

    The conclusion of the pointless two-day talks came just hours after Beijing and Washington rolled out their latest round of tit-for-tat tariffs on Thursday in which $16 billion in imports hit by each side took the total value of goods covered as a result of President Donald Trump’s trade war with China to $100 billion.

    And with no progress on trade war negotiations, the Trump administration is now set to enact a far larger tranche of tariffs covering some 6,000 products from China with an annual import value of $200 billion that are expected to take effect as early as next month.

    But while the US stock market has so far ignored the threat of a global economic slowdown as a result of relentless trade war escalation, this time it may be forced to pay attention:

    That move and the anticipated retaliation from the Chinese would mark the largest escalation so far of the trade war between the two economies and take it into new territory in terms of both scale and by starting to hit American consumers more directly.

    Clearly oblivious of any downside risk from further escalation, Trump on Thursday highlighted new tougher restrictions aimed at Chinese investment in the U.S. at a White House event and said he was committed to continuing his trade fight against China.

    “We can’t allow the things that were happening to happen,” Trump said during a meeting with legislators.

    Pouring fuel on the fire, Trump further accused Beijing of engaging in currency manipulation, long one of the most sensitive points of friction between the two countries.

    What are the immediate next steps?

    According to Bloomberg, U.S. officials will next meet in Washington on Friday with delegations from the European Union and Japan “to discuss joint efforts to confront China at the World Trade Organization over its industrial subsidies and the conduct of its state-owned enterprises.” How China will respond to the US trying to gang up on it is unclear, but it will hardly welcome the pivot.

    But of greater concern for risk assets is that trade hawks including US trade rep Robert Lighthizer are eager to move forward with plans to impose tariffs on the additional $200 billion in Chinese imports: the goods to be covered in the next round of tariffs range from chemicals, raw materials and seafood to vacuums, bicycles and furniture. The U.S. could impose the duties after a comment period ends Sept. 6.

    The next escalation round – which is now virtually assured – takes place even as US corporations are becoming increasingly vocal against the ongoing feud, amid concerns for their profitability: in hearings this week in Washington, U.S. companies and industry lobbyists have been offering their mostly negative feedback on the proposed additional duties of as much as 25 percent.

    “This is a political game being played with my company as the game piece,” Ross Bishop, president of BrightLine Bags Inc., testified on Monday. The California-based company makes nylon gear bags for pilots and other customers, and Bishop pleaded with the trade panel to “help me keep my company alive.”

    All of that is irrelevant, however, as long as the US stock market keeps rising, which it will: recall that August is the peak month for buybacks…

    … while Chinese stocks drop further into bear territory and the yuan resumes it slide to 7.00 and beyond: a number, which based on the latest price action – despite the recent interventions by the PBOC aimed at crippling the shorts – should be hit in very short notice.

  • Whitehead On 'Battlefield America': The Ongoing War On The American People

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rurtherford Institute,

    “A government which will turn its tanks upon its people, for any reason, is a government with a taste of blood and a thirst for power and must either be smartly rebuked, or blindly obeyed in deadly fear.”—John Salter

    Police in a small Georgia town tasered a 5-foot-2, 87-year-old woman who was using a kitchen knife to cut dandelions for use in a recipe. Police claim they had no choice but to taser the old woman, who does not speak English but was smiling at police to indicate she was friendly, because she failed to comply with orders to put down the knife.

    Police in California are being sued for using excessive force against a deaf 76-year-old woman who was allegedly jaywalking and failed to halt when police yelled at her. According to the lawsuit, police searched the woman and her grocery bags. She was then slammed to the ground, had a foot or knee placed behind her neck or back, handcuffed, arrested and cited for jaywalking and resisting arrest.

    In Alabama, police first tasered then shot and killed an unarmed man who refused to show his driver’s license after attempting to turn in a stray dog he’d found to the local dog shelter. The man’s girlfriend and their three children, all under the age of 10, witnessed the shooting.

    In New York, Customs and Border Protection officers have come under fire for subjecting female travelers (including minors) to random body searches that include strip searches while menstruating, genital probing, and forced pelvic exams, X-rays and intravenous drugs at area hospitals.

    At a California gas station, ICE agents surrounded a man who was taking his pregnant wife to the hospital to deliver their baby, demanding that he show identification. Having forgotten his documents at home in the rush to get to the hospital, the husband offered to go get them. Refusing to allow him to do so, ICE agents handcuffed and arrested the man for not having an ID with him, leaving his wife to find her way alone to the hospital. The father of five, including the newborn, has lived and worked in the U.S. for 12 years with his wife.

    These are not isolated incidents.

    These cases are legion.

    This is what a state of undeclared martial law looks like, when you can be arrested, tasered, shot, brutalized and in some cases killed merely for not complying with a government agent’s order or not complying fast enough.

    This isn’t just happening in crime-ridden inner cities.

    It’s happening all across the country.

    America has been locked down.

    This is what it’s like to be a citizen of the American police state.

    This is what it’s like to be an enemy combatant in your own country.

    This is what it feels like to be a conquered people.

    This is what it feels like to be an occupied nation.

    This is what it feels like to live in fear of armed men crashing through your door in the middle of the night, or to be accused of doing something you never even knew was a crime, or to be watched all the time, your movements tracked, your motives questioned.

    This is what it feels like to have your homeland transformed into a battlefield.

    Mind you, in a war zone, there are no police – only soldiers. Thus, there is no more Posse Comitatus prohibiting the government from using the military in a law enforcement capacity. Not when the local police have, for all intents and purposes, already become the military.

    In a war zone, the soldiers shoot to kill, as American police have now been trained to do. Whether the perceived “threat” is armed or unarmed no longer matters when police are authorized to shoot first and ask questions later.

    In a war zone, even the youngest members of the community learn at an early age to accept and fear the soldier in their midst. Thanks to funding from the government, more schools are hiring armed police officers—some equipped with semi-automatic AR-15 rifles—to “secure” their campuses.

    In a war zone, you have no rights. When you are staring down the end of a police rifle, there can be no free speech. When you’re being held at bay by a militarized, weaponized mine-resistant tank, there can be no freedom of assembly. When you’re being surveilled with thermal imaging devices, facial recognition software and full-body scanners and the like, there can be no privacy. When you’re charged with disorderly conduct simply for daring to question or photograph or document the injustices you see, with the blessing of the courts no less, there can be no freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

    And when you’re a prisoner in your own town, unable to move freely, kept off the streets, issued a curfew at night, there can be no mistaking the prison walls closing in.

    This is happening and will happen anywhere and everywhere else in this country where law enforcement officials are given carte blanche to do what they like, when they like, how they like, with immunity from their superiors, the legislatures, and the courts.

    You see, what Americans have failed to comprehend, living as they do in a TV-induced, drug-like haze of fabricated realities, narcissistic denial, and partisan politics, is that we’ve not only brought the military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan home to be used against the American people.

    We’ve also brought the very spirit of the war home.

    “We the people” have now come full circle, from being held captive by the British police state to being held captive by the American police state.

    In between, we have charted a course from revolutionaries fighting for our independence and a free people establishing a new nation to pioneers and explorers, braving the wilderness and expanding into new territories. 

    Where we went wrong, however, was in allowing ourselves to become enthralled with and then held hostage by a military empire in bondage to a corporate state (the very definition of fascism). 

    No longer does America hold the moral high ground as a champion of freedom and human rights. Instead, in the pursuit of profit, our overlords have transformed the American landscape into a battlefield, complete with military personnel, tactics and weaponry.

    To our dismay, we now find ourselves scrambling for a foothold as our once rock-solid constitutional foundation crumbles beneath us. And no longer can we rely on the president, Congress, the courts, or the police to protect us from wrongdoing. 

    Indeed, the president, Congress, the courts, and the police have come to embody all that is wrong with America.

    For instance, how does a man who is relatively healthy when taken into custody by police lapse into a coma and die while under their supervision?

    What kind of twisted logic allows a police officer to use a police car to run down an American citizen and justifies it in the name of permissible deadly force?

    And what country are we living in where the police can beat, shoot, choke, taser and tackle American citizens, all with the protection of the courts?

    Certainly, the Constitution’s safeguards against police abuse means nothing when government agents can crash through your door, terrorize your children, shoot your dogs, and jail you on any number of trumped of charges, and you have little say in the matter. For instance, San Diego police, responding to a domestic disturbance call on a Sunday morning, showed up at the wrong address, only to shoot the homeowner’s 6-year-old service dog in the head.

    Rubbing salt in the wound, it’s often the unlucky victim of excessive police force who ends up being charged with wrongdoing. Although 16-year-old Thai Gurule was charged with resisting arrest and strangling and assaulting police officers, a circuit judge found that it was actually the three officers who unlawfully stopped, tackled, punched, kneed, tasered and yanked his hair who were at fault. Thankfully, bystander cell phone videos undermined police accounts, which were described as “works of fiction.”

    Not even our children are being spared the blowback from a growing police presence.

    As one juvenile court judge noted in testimony to Congress, although having police on public school campuses did not make the schools any safer, it did result in large numbers of students being arrested for misdemeanors such as school fights and disorderly conduct. One 11-year-old autistic Virginia student was charged with disorderly conduct and felony assault after kicking a trashcan and resisting a police officer’s attempt to handcuff him. A 14-year-old student was tasered by police, suspended and charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and trespassing after he failed to obey a teacher’s order to be the last student to exit the classroom.

    There is no end to the government’s unmitigated gall in riding roughshod over the rights of the citizenry, whether in matters of excessive police powers, militarized police, domestic training drills, SWAT team raids, surveillance, property rights, overcriminalization, roadside strip searches, profit-driven fines and prison sentences, etc.

    The president can now direct the military to detain, arrest and secretly execute American citizens. These are the powers of an imperial dictator, not an elected official bound by the rule of law. This mantle is worn by whomever occupies the Oval Office now and in the future.

    A representative government means nothing when the average citizen has little to no access to their elected officials, while corporate lobbyists enjoy a revolving door relationship with everyone from the President on down. Indeed, while members of Congress hardly work for the taxpayer, they work hard at being wooed by corporations, which spend more to lobby our elected representatives than we spend on their collective salaries. For that matter, getting elected is no longer the high point it used to be. As one congressman noted, for many elected officials, “Congress is no longer a destination but a journey… [to a] more lucrative job as a K Street lobbyist… It’s become routine to see members of Congress drop their seat in Congress like a hot rock when a particularly lush vacancy opens up.”

    As for the courts, they have long since ceased being courts of justice. Instead, they have become courts of order, largely marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates, all the while helping to increase the largesse of government coffers. It’s called for-profit justice, and it runs the gamut of all manner of financial incentives in which the courts become cash cows for communities looking to make an extra buck. As journalist Chris Albin-Lackey details, “They deploy a crushing array of fines, court costs, and other fees to harvest revenues from minor offenders that these communities cannot or do not want to raise through taxation.” In this way, says Albin-Lackey, “A resident of Montgomery, Alabama who commits a simple noise violation faces only a $20 fine—but also awhopping $257 in court costs and user fees should they seek to have their day in court.”

    As for the rest—the schools, the churches, private businesses, service providers, nonprofits and your fellow citizens—many are also marching in lockstep with the police state.

    This is what is commonly referred to as community policing.

    After all, the police can’t be everywhere. So how do you police a nation when your population outnumbers your army of soldiers? How do you carry out surveillance on a nation when there aren’t enough cameras, let alone viewers, to monitor every square inch of the country 24/7? How do you not only track but analyze the transactions, interactions and movements of every person within the United States?

    The answer is simpler than it seems: You persuade the citizenry to be your eyes and ears.

    It’s a brilliant ploy, with the added bonus that while the citizenry remains focused on and distrustful of each other, they’re incapable of focusing on more definable threats that fall closer to home—namely, the government and its militarized police. 

    In this way, we’re seeing a rise in the incidence of Americans being reported for growing vegetables in their front yard, keeping chickens in their back yard, letting their kids walk to the playground alone, and voicing anti-government sentiments. For example, after Shona Banda’s son defended the use of medical marijuana during a presentation at school, school officials alerted the police and social services, and the 11-year-old was interrogated, taken into custody by social workers, had his home raided by police and his mother arrested.

    Now it may be that we have nothing to worry about.

    Perhaps the government really does have our best interests at heart.

    Perhaps covert domestic military training drills really are just benign exercises to make sure our military is prepared for any contingency. 

    Then again, while I don’t believe in worrying over nothing, it’s safe to say that the government has not exactly shown itself to be friendly in recent years, nor have its agents shown themselves to be cognizant of the fact that they are civilians who answer to the citizenry, rather than the other way around.

    As Aldous Huxley warned in Brave New World Revisited, “Liberty cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.”

    Whether or not the government plans to impose some more overt form of martial law in the future remains to be seen, but there can be no denying that we’re being accustomed to life in a military state. 

    The malls may be open for business, the baseball stadiums may be packed, and the news anchors may be twittering nonsense about the latest celebrity foofa, but those are just distractions from what is really taking place: the transformation of America into a war zone.

    As I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if it looks like a battlefield (armored tanks on the streets, militarized police in metro stations, surveillance cameras everywhere), sounds like a battlefield (SWAT team raids nightly, sound cannons to break up large assemblies of citizens), and acts like a battlefield (police shooting first and asking questions later, intimidation tactics, and involuntary detentions), it’s a battlefield.

    Indeed, what happened in Ocala, Florida, is a good metaphor for what’s happening across the country: Sheriff’s deputies, dressed in special ops uniforms and riding in an armored tank on a public road, pulled a 23-year-old man over and issued a warning violation to him after he gave them the finger. The man, Lucas Jewell, defended his actions as a free speech expression of his distaste for militarized police.

    Translation: “We the people” are being hijacked on the highway by government agents with little knowledge of or regard for the Constitution, who are hyped up on the power of their badge, outfitted for war, eager for combat, and taking a joy ride—on taxpayer time and money—in a military tank that has no business being on American soil.

    Rest assured, unless we slam on the brakes, this runaway tank will soon be charting a new course through terrain that bears no resemblance to land of our forefathers, where freedom meant more than just the freedom to exist and consume what the corporate powers dish out.

    Rod Serling, one of my longtime heroes and the creator of The Twilight Zone, understood all too well the danger of turning a blind eye to evil in our midst, the “things that scream for a response.” As Serling warned, “if we don’t listen to that scream – and if we don’t respond to it – we may well wind up sitting amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us – or the bomb that pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that destroyed the dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our own name.”

    If you haven’t managed to read the writing on the wall yet, the war has begun.

  • More Americans Forced to Drop Traditional Health Insurance In Favor Of Cheaper Alternatives

    More and more cash-strapped Americans are reportedly seeking “alternative” ways to cover themselves with cheaper healthcare, as an exodus from traditional health insurance plans continues.

    Traditional health plans are now pricing people out of the market and consumers are looking closely at alternatives. Many consumers are finding cost relief in alternatives like healthcare-sharing ministries, which are cost sharing plans usually rooted in local religious communities. A Bloomberg report found that the number of people joining these sharing ministries was up 74% from 2014 to 2016. More than 1 million people are participants in these programs.

    The report details the story of one family, the Bergevins, who realized that they had to make some big changes in their healthcare when they were charged $7,000 in out-of-pocket expenses that their insurance didn’t cover after their son was born. Two years after the birth of their son, the couple ditched their health insurance plan, a move that helped them pay off the $7,000 debt.

    As the couple prepares to have their second child, they have since decided not to go back to traditional coverage and instead to use a combination of a religious group and a primary care doctor that they can pay monthly. “I was so jaded with the whole health-care insurance situation,” the mother, Lindsie, told Bloomberg.

    These monthly payment-style primary care clinics are also popping up more often. There are now almost 900 of them, up from “just a handful” in the early 2000‘s.

    The sea change in plans for Americans comes at the same time that the number of people without traditional insurance is expected to increase as a result of the Trump administration‘s latest modification of the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”). Eliminating the penalty for those who go without insurance, combined with pushing for shorter term healthcare products, have both acted as catalyst for people to leave their traditional plans.

    Even though the ACA expanded coverage to 19 million Americans, 28 million people still remain uninsured.

    The Bergevins utilized a calculator provided by insurer Aetna, prior to the birth of their first son, to estimate costs. They were initially informed that it would probably cost $3,000-$4,000 out-of-pocket. The actual bills wound up being almost double that. The couple then had another hardship in 2016, when Lindsie needed to have surgery of her own, tacking on several thousand dollars more in bills. The couple put these bills on a credit card that they are paying $300 a month toward.

    There finally came a breaking point where the couple just couldn’t reconcile maintaining their traditional coverage:

    “I couldn’t justify it,” she says. The cheapest policy she could find through the Affordable Care Act, she recalls, was $547 a month—more than half the family’s $875 monthly rent at the time. It had a high deductible that could leave them with out-of-pocket costs of more than $10,000.

    “If something were to happen to us, we would have been in trouble,” she acknowledges. To hedge, the couple bought an inexpensive accident policy from Aflac that would cover some costs from an injury if, for example, Chris hurt himself working.

    The couple instead enlisted the help of a small primary care clinic that was local to them. The doctor at the clinic, Julie Gunther, had also grown tired of the traditional healthcare system. Gunther was tired of working for a large hospital system and didn’t like the fact that she was paid based on the volume of her patients and services billed. The 15 minute appointment times made her feel “like a factory worker“ and she eventually got tired of apologizing to her patients for not having enough time for them.

    “I was saying ‘I’m sorry’ all the time,” Gunther, 42, recalls. “I’m sorry I’m late, I’m sorry this didn’t get called in, I’m sorry this got forgotten, I’m sorry they didn’t give me the message.”

    Gunther eventually quit her job and started her own practice, where the Bergevin and family wound up. Gunther cares for about 600 patients, which is about 30% to 50% of the workload that a normal primary care physician cares for. Families like the Bergevins like the increased time that the doctor can spend with them as a result. “It was amazing. She sat down with me for an hour and talked about everything,” Lindsie told Bloomberg.

    And while the Gunther isn’t able to deal with severe injuries…

    Gunther tells her patients that belonging to her practice is not a replacement for having health insurance.

    “There’s a whole bunch of things I can’t take care of,” Gunther says. “If you’re not standing upright, or bleeding doesn’t stop, do not call me.”

    …something as simple as an ear infection was dealt with quickly and on the cheap when it became an issue for the Bergevin family last year:

    Last year, Lindsie Bergevin had a bad fever and what she described as “the worst pain I think I ever had in my head.” She called Gunther at 9:30 p.m. on a Saturday. Gunther met her at the clinic 15 minutes later. “She’s like, ‘Girl, you have a double ear infection, and the worst I’ve ever seen.’”

    Bergevin walked out with an antibiotic and says that if Gunther hadn’t seen her, she would’ve gone to the emergency room, which could have resulted in a bill for hundreds or thousands of dollars.

    But religious-based non-profits like Liberty HealthShare, the organization that the Bergevins joined, also come with their own sets of caveats. For instance, they won’t cover medical expenses from behaviors that they deem immoral, like drunk driving car crashes. They also won’t pay for contraception. In addition, they also limit coverage of pre-existing conditions for up to three years. Despite this, their deductible of $2,250 was found to be “a ton cheaper than a typical deductible“ by the family. Liberty also caps reimbursements at $1 million, while traditional insurers are not allowed to set such limits.

    With the government obviously unable to provide the best course of action for everybody given their unique sets of circumstances, stories like the Bergevins seem to lend credence to the argument that each individual and each family should “buy their own” and do what they deem best for their own personal situations. 

    “You have to find something that’s going to work for you,” Lindsie told Bloomberg.

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Aug 23

Today’s News 23rd August 2018

  • 72% Of Spaniards Support Government Interference With Business

    Countries are divided by the role government plays in regulating businesses.

    As Statista’s Sarah Feldman notes, Western Europe, as a region, falls more in favor of governments regulating businesses for the good of society, while the American public is divided on whether government regulation is beneficial for society at large.

    Infographic: Countries Split Over Business Regulations | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Small business owners in America cite government regulations as the single biggest issue facing their businesses 14 percent of the time, with quality of labor and taxes preceding it.

    Governments’ role in business is a major rallying point for the two main political parties in America, both historically and contemporarily.

  • Russia, Central Africa Sign New Military Cooperation Agreement

    Authored by Alex Gorka via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Russia and the Central African Republic (CAR) signed a military cooperation agreement on August 21. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu and his CAR counterpart Marie-Noelle Koyara met on the sidelines of the Army 2018 defense expo outside of Moscow to finalize that agreement. According to the Russian defense chief, Central Africa “is a promising partner on the African continent.” The document covers arms shipments and personnel training. Central African officers will undergo training courses at Russian military academies and colleges. This year, Russia has already sent light arms, rocket launchers, and anti-aircraft guns for two battalions. It has 175 military and civilian instructors deployed in that country to train the personnel.

    In mid-December, the United Nations granted Russia an exemption to the arms embargo on the CAR, paving the way for deliveries of weapons to that war-torn country that is still immersed in an internal conflict. The embargo is effective until Jan. 31, 2019.

    The UN ranks the CAR as the least-developed country in the world despite its minerals reserves. Fourteen thousand UN peacekeepers are stationed within its borders, but the government, led by President Faustin-Archange Touadera, believes that that operation is ineffective. He has relied more on Russia’s help.

    This agreement is part of that trend. Russia’s regional influence is increasing. The Democratic Republic of Congo has recently decided to revive its 1999 agreement on military cooperation with Russia. In April, Mozambique agreed to open its ports to Russian naval vessels. It was recently reported that Niger is interested in purchasing Russian helicopters and firearms, including grenade launchers. Russia and Guinea are working on a military agreement, which would include free access for Russian military ships to the country’s ports, training, and other security-related issues. Russia exports Mil Mi-8/17 and Mi-24/35 helicopters to Angola, Mali, Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda, and Rwanda.

    The Russian Federation has military partnerships with Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nigeria, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Uganda, South Sudan, Mozambique, and Angola. In 2017, Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir asked Russia to protect his country “from the aggressive acts of the United States.” All in all, Russia is responsible for 30% of all arms supplies to the region.

    The military cooperation goes hand-in-hand with progress in other areas. In March, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went on a five-day African tour to visit Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. He signed trade agreements with Angola and Mozambique and also strengthened diplomatic ties with Zimbabwe’s new government.

    Russian companies are exploring the Darwendale platinum deposit, one of the largest in the world. Russia’s Alrosa is present in Angola, a country rich in diamonds. Moscow and Luanda are engaged in talks over cooperation in hydrocarbon production. Last October, Russia signeda $20 billion agreement to construct two nuclear power plants in Nigeria.It recently established a special relationship with Rwanda toreconnect Russia with the East African community.

    Benin, Ethiopia, Guinea, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia, among others, have all been recipients of Russian debt relief over the past decade. Russia is working with Zimbabwe’s and Guinea’s mining industries and also cooperates on nuclear power with Sudan.

    Russia and the African Union (AU) are currently in the process of drafting a conceptual framework cooperation agreement. Moscow can offer its growingability to support peacekeeping operations and training for the African Union personnel, as well as the sharing of intelligence data about foreign terrorists with the African International data bank. The Russian Federation contributes to the UN peacekeeping operations in Western Sahara, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Liberia, Sudan, and South Sudan.

    Russiashowcased African business at the 2018 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. It is set to host a Russian-African Union forum in 2019. According to Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov, the forum will roll out a comprehensive, strategic road map for more economic cooperation and a wide range of investment possibilities, plus effective ways of addressing regional security issues and improving public diplomacy in Africa.

    Russia’s relationship with the Southern African Development Community is also on the rise.

    The states of the region are seeking to diversify their foreign relationships. Moscow is helping them to achieve this goal, as it enjoys a reputation as a reliable and pragmatic partner that is able to weigh in on regional matters both diplomatically and militarily. It maintains good relations with everyone in the region, making Russia the right choice when seeking a partner for a peacekeeping operation. Russia’s burgeoning influence in sub-Saharan Africa is a part of broader picture, as its clout has grown immensely in the Middle East and North Africa.

  • Corporation Building Spy-Grid In China Also Creating Drivers Licenses In The US

    Authored by Daniel Taylor via ActivistPost.com,

    Company that helps manufacture U.S. citizens drivers licenses brags of “building and managing databases of entire populations” across the globe.

    Big Tech has gathered unprecedented amounts of personal data from millions of people. At the same time, a system of total surveillance has been constructed: Facial recognition, biometric scanning, cell phone surveillance and more have amassed a huge amount of information.

    We see the stories about the growing surveillance state, but we don’t hear about the gigantic multinational corporation that is helping to build the physical infrastructure supporting it.

    Idemia (formerly Morpho), is a billion dollar multinational corporation. It is responsible for building a significant portion of the world’s biometric surveillance and security systems, operating in about 70 countries. Some American clients of the company include the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and the FBI.

    The company website says that Morpho has been “…building and managing databases of entire populations…” for many years.

    From the company site:

    Morpho has been building and managing databases of entire populations for governments, law enforcement agencies and other government bodies around the world, whether for national ID, health cards, bank cards or even driver license programs.

    In the United States, Idemia is involved in the making of state issued drivers licenses in 42 states.

    The company is now pushing digital license trials in the U.S. Delaware and Iowa are among five states involved in the trials this year. With the mobile license, law enforcement will be able to wirelessly “ping” a drivers smartphone for their license. The move is part of a wider trend toward cashless payment.

    Idemia is assisting China and India with building surveillance and ID systems, trafficking in huge amounts of biometric data across the world.

    In China, Idemia has helped build the massive biometric scanning and surveillance system that is used to keep Chinese citizens under a tyrannical boot.

    The company has provided biometric payment and authentication systems to the country.

    The company website says:

    “With a sales office in Hong Kong, Morpho offers services and solutions in the field of digital identity and smart transactions. The world leader in multibiometric identification technologies, Morpho supplies biometric identification systems to Chinese police forces and government immigration agencies.

    Morpho has also provided facial recognition systems to police agencies in Shanghai, Tianjin, Heilongjiang, Jilin, Jiangxi, Guangzhou and Wenzhou.”

    In India, the controversial Aadhaar national ID card system is also enjoying the support of Idemia through Safran Identity & Security, now part of Idemia. The company states that it is “in charge of all technological aspects of Aadhaar”.

    Morpho is one of the companies chosen to take part in an unprecedented program called Aadhaar to count everyone residing in India and then assign each person a unique identification number. Morpho is in charge of all technological aspects of Aadhaar.

    Several court cases have gone to India’s supreme court on grounds of privacy violations from Aadhaar. The ID system has had serious security breaches, with access to a billion identities being sold for less than $10 through WhatsApp.

    The social credit trap

    One of the court filings (Mathew Thomas vs Union of India) details the rise of China’s social credit system, comparing the Indian Aadhaar initiative to the Chinese program.

    The Chinese government initially permitted corporations to aggregate personal data of their customers and built algorithms that could then rate the worth of these customers. As such applications began to get integrated and large technology companies began to dominate every aspect of citizen lives, the ‘Social Credit Rating Systems’ that these companies ran became all the more pervasive.

    Once this system had taken hold of the entire country, the State Council of the Central Government in China released an Outline of the Social Credit System Construction Plan(2014-2020), which specifies that such Social Credit Rating Systems would be integrated into their governance by 2020. This represents the integration of such infrastructure into the central architecture of the State, and would ensure a devastating amount of State control over its citizens.

    A disturbingly similar pattern is being followed in the United States. Big Tech (Google, Apple, Facebook) has already gathered most of our personal data. It has also absorbed around 90% of Internet traffic, and is now openly allying with communist Chinese policies.

    Facebook has begun rating users “trustworthiness” on the platform. At the same time, other major tech companies like Apple are removing content at the request of the Chinese government.

    Between Idemia issuing digital drivers licenses to U.S. citizens and Big Tech’s data collection, we are inches away from a fully integrated national ID system and an accompanying social credit score.

    At the moment, the United States does not have a government-backed program like the Chinese. However, if gone unchecked, a de facto social credit system could still take hold due to the pervasiveness of big tech influence.

    Idemia is building the infrastructure of the massive world-wide biometric surveillance grid. Demand for “convenience” with wireless, cardless, cashless payment and shopping is driving us right into their hands.

  • "It Was Stupid Of Me" – 'Mrs.Watanabe' Battered By Turkey's Meltdown

    It was not just Barclays bankers that took on the chin from Turkey’s turmoil, Japan’s infamous ‘mom-and-pop’ investors who snapped up high-yielding lira-denominated bonds “because of the yield” have been destroyed.

    Thanks to the ever-present foot of the Bank of Japan on the throat of yields in Japan, small investors “reached for yield” around the world in an effort to ‘safely’ invest their hard-earned yen for a ‘decent’ return.

    As The Wall Street Journal reports, Individuals have snapped up so-called Uridashi, high-yielding bonds marketed to households that are frequently denominated in foreign currencies like the lira, Brazilian real and South African rand. These aren’t highly leveraged instruments, but usually regular bonds. However, they offer juicy returns thanks to elevated interest rates in emerging markets.

    The appeal is obvious after years of rock-bottom rates. A recent online offer from Rakuten Securities touted a 23.1% yield on lira debt issued by the European Investment Bank. That echoes the 10-year yield on Turkish government bonds of 20.9%, and is far above the yields available on benchmark Japanese government debt.

    That army of punters often dubbed “Mrs. Watanabe,” after the stereotypical Japanese homemaker, piled $7.6 billion worth into Turkey… and that has become a bloodbath of paper (or realized losses) for those JPY-based investors as bond prices collapsed along with the Lira relative to the yen…

    Retail traders using margin made roughly 1.45 trillion yen ($13.1 billion) of Turkish lira-yen trades in July, according to Financial Futures Association of Japan data. That sum is less than 1% of yen-dollar trading volumes, but has more than tripled in a year. But as The Wall Street Journal reports, many of those involved in these lucrative-for-your-broker trades, have lost fortunes.

    Yasuyuki Tokue, a 49-year-old legal professional who lives near Osaka, said he bought lira bonds with a face value of 7.5 million yen ($67,500) between 2015 and 2017.

    “I was attracted by the high interest rate,” Mr. Tokue said. However, he said he ended up losing 1.2 million yen when he sold some bonds back to his broker in April, and his outstanding holdings have fallen in value.

    ”I made a mistake,” in failing to hedge currency risk, Mr. Tokue said.

    We suspect few of them realized (or cared) that there is no market for trading Uridashi, brokers can buy them back at face value in the local currency for a fee, and sell them back to the underwriter or to another investor. In Mr. Tokue’s case, he said he paid fees equal to between 3.2% and 8% of the total on the different bonds he sold.

    Another investor in Yokohama said he had lost about 300,000 yen on lira bonds bought in 2012, or about 65% of his original outlay including commissions.

    “I’ve learned a lesson,” said this investor, who declined to be named. “It was stupid of me to invest in a single emerging-market bond.”

    Of course, when all else is lost, there’s always hope… Mr. Tokue said the damage to his overall portfolio wasn’t that serious and his remaining position could regain some value.

    “You never know – the lira may not be that cheap in the distant future,” he said.

    We wonder if Mr.Tokue would be interested in some Tesla bonds, we here they are offering great yield advantage and upside potential.

  • How A Free Market Inevitably Produces Dictatorship

    Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Who rules the land?

    A deeper and truer version of this question is: What rules the land? Is it the money (the aristocracy), or is it the people (the public, the residents on that land)? (For the interest of paleoconservatives, the issue of residents’ citizenship will come later here, as “immigrants” instead of as “citizenship”; but our basic focus is not ethnicity/nationality; it’s class: the money, versus the voters; not the natives, versus the foreigners.)

    In a democracy, the public rule — the people do — and it’s on authentically a one-person-one-vote basis, and anyone who is a resident in that land can easily vote, just like anyone else who lives there, because only the residents there, during the specific time-period of the voting, are the ultimate decision-makers, over that land, and over its laws. This is what a democracy is: it’s one-person-one-vote, and, in the political sense, it’s total equality-of-rights and total equality-of-obligations — real and total equality-by-law: equal rights, and equal obligations, for all residents. A democracy applies the same requirements to everyone.

    This does not mean that individuals are equal in their abilities and in their needs, and so it’s not a statement about the economy; it is purely a statement about the government — a political question. The economy is a separate matter, though it’s highly dependent upon the government — the laws that are in place and enforced. Many people confuse these two fields, and mistakenly think that the economy is basic to the government.

    So: the economy is dependent upon the government; the government determines the economy, which, in any land, is highly dependent upon the laws that are in place and that are enforced — the government.

    That’s only “natural persons” who control a democracy — no collectives of any type, corporate or otherwise, can vote, because, if it were otherwise, it would be an easy way to establish a dictatorship there: persons with the financial means could create any number of “artificial persons” who could vote, or could buy votes (such as by purchasing news-media to slant ‘reality’ selling politicians and political positions to the voters), and this money could produce a country controlled more by dollars, than by owners (i.e., than by actual persons, voters — not by artificial “persons” such as the wealth-collections that are known as corporations). If wealth-collections could vote, that would invite control over the land to be by wealth (the number of dollars) instead of by actual residents (the number of persons). It could even produce control by foreign wealth. Foreigners could end up controlling the country if the number of dollars is a bigger determinant of who rules than is the number of voters.

    Obviously, no democracy will allow foreigners to control the land. Imperialism is inconsistent with democracy; any empire is dictatorial, by its very nature. It entails dictatorship over the residents in its colonies, even if not necessarily over the residents in the imperial land that had conquered the colonial area.

    Empire is consistent with a free market, but it is inconsistent with democracy. No empire is democratic, because each colony is ruled by non-residents. (If the colony were ruled by its residents, it wouldn’t be a colony, and there wouldn’t be an empire.)

    A federation is not an empire. The difference between them is that, whereas in a federation, the right of self-determination of peoples takes precedence over the federation’s interest in maintaining the status-quo; in an empire, there is no such right — an empire is a dictatorship.

    The propaganda for a free market is funded very heavily by billionaires such as the Koch brothers and George Soros, because control over countries naturally devolves into control by wealth, instead of into control by people (and certainly not by residents), if a free-market economy exists there. Billionaires do whatever increases their power; and, beyond around $100,000-per-year of income, any additional wealth buys no additional happiness or satisfaction, but only additional status, which, for individuals who are in such brackets, is derived from increases in their power, because, at that stage of wealth, money itself is no longer an object, only status is, and additional status can be derived only from additional power. All of the empirical findings in the social sciences are consistent with this; and, whereas the income-point in most of those studies, beyond which additional dollars produce no additional happiness for the owner, has been $75,000 per year, there has been inflation since those studies were performed, and one might more accurately say today that $100,000-per-year is the income-point beyond which only status is increased by additional income; happiness or satisfaction is not increased by income above that point. This is a statement about nature; it is the reality in which any market — free or otherwise — exists. It is “human nature,” and that’s basic to all of the social sciences which pertain to humans, including political science, and economics.

    In economic theory, the phrase that has been traditionally used to refer to this reality, even before recent empirical studies showed the reality to be this way, was “the declining marginal utility of money.” Beyond around $100,000/year, additional “bucks” are for status, not for happiness. Anyone who has no addiction to status, doesn’t care about having more money coming in beyond that amount. Beyond that amount, the additional marginal utility of each dollar received is actually zero. The wealth-addict might cravemore, but it won’t do him-or-her any actual good; it won’t make the person happier. That’s the reality, now proven in numerous empirical studies. 

    This reality has major political consequences. One is that a country with highly concentrated wealth (the bottom 50% own almost nothing) is serving the addictions of a few, not the needs of the many — and therefore concentrated wealth cannot be sustained in a democracy, but only in a dictatorship: a dictatorship of wealth, where what determines power isn’t the voters but the dollars.

    An important philosophical champion of free markets is the libertarian philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe. In 2001, Hoppe published his DEMOCRACY: The God that Failed, which was considered a libertarian masterpiece. Hoppe unapologetically argued there that libertarianism and conservatism are one and the same — and that he wanted it, passionately: he hated democracy. Unlike many libertarians, who falsely allege that democracy is impossible without there first being libertarianism (a free market), Hoppe acknowledged and argued for the mutual inconsistency between libertarianism and democracy. Although I don’t share his preference for a rule by the wealth instead of a rule by the residents, and thus he is an ideological opponent — the opposite of a supporter of my own position, as it’s being set forth here (and far more briefly than his tome) — I consider him to be the fullest and most internally consistent libertarian philosopher, and perhaps the most significant libertarian political philosopher in this Century, thus far. Whereas lots of people call themselves “libertarian,” he actually is — fully — that. Of course, some libertarians don’t agree with Hoppe’s view; but, on 30 August 2011, Michael Lind at salon.com headlined “Why Libertarians Apologize for Autocracy: The experience of every democratic nation-state proves that libertarianism is incompatible with democracy,” and he empirically found that Hoppe was correct about this incompatibility.

    Hoppe argues not only for an aristocracy, but for a hereditary one, and he even opposes immigration; so, if he were a democrat, at all, then he’d be excluding immigrants from voting. But he’s not even that much of a democrat. And he especially approves of hereditary monarchy. His reason for that preference is traditional libertarianism, which favors the private over the public: “Hereditary monarchies represent the historical example of privately owned governments, and democratic republics that of publicly owned governments.” Libertarianism opposes public ownership, favors private.

    Like any philosopher, Hoppe has ignored crucial issues in order to sell his case (after all, it’s a philosophical, not a scientific, case; it is ideological propaganda alleging that libertarianism is good — instead of being anything scientific); and the most interesting thing that he has avoided discussing in it is anti-trust, anti-monopoly, anti-oligopoly — the issues about concentration of power. He ignores those issues. For example, whenever he uses the term “monopoly,” he is referring solely to “government,” never to the economy (he assumes that in a free market there can’t be any oligopolies or monopolies). He is, after all, a crank (a free-market political theorist and therefore someone who implicitly denies that government is basic to an economy, and who assumes the converse, that the government is instead built upon the economy), though he’s an erudite one and thus acceptable to his fellow-scholars. Erudition doesn’t mean, nor necessarily include, being scientific. And the scientific reality is that the political issue isn’t ‘the government’s monopoly on power’, but instead it’s simply any concentrations of power — both monopolies and oligopolies — which unequalize both rights and obligations in the society, such that whereas a few people (the aristocracy) have many rights and few (if any) obligations, most people (the public) have few rights and many obligations. The latter type of society is called a “dictatorship.” The more that it exists, the more that it comes to exist — and, consequently, the less that there can exist democracy.

    The basic issue in political science is not “freedom” versus “slavery” (two concepts in economics); it is “democracy” versus “dictatorship” (two concepts in politics).

    Power precedes the economy; it directs the economy, if and where an economy even exists.

    Democracy is natural where wealth is nearly-evenly distributed. Dictatorship is natural where wealth is extremely-unevenly distributed. The latter is true because no nation can maintain a democracy if the wealth is highly unequal. If the wealth is highly equal, then the possibility for democracy to emerge is substantial. But if the wealth is highly unequal, then the possibility for democracy even to exist to any extent, is low. All of the extremely wealthy people would have to be honest in order for them to tolerate rule by the majority. Otherwise, they’d simply be using their news-media to deceive instead of to inform the public: that’s what the ‘news’-people would be paid to do, cover-up real problems, and manufacture ‘reality’ — manipulate the public, instead of inform the public. If the distribution of wealth is highly unequal, the ‘news’people will be paid to deceive the public, instead of to inform the public. This (and it includes the ‘charitable’ foundations) is why the majority of the public have come to believe the profoudly false assertion that “having a rich class is a benefit” to the public. They’ve been deceived.

    Most of the world is dictatorial. That’s because, almost everywhere, wealth, and even income, is extremely unevenly distributed. The laws and their enforcement determine the distribution of wealth and of income. The natural tendency is toward dictatorship, because a free market produces increased economic concentration. Democracy is not natural. Dictatorship is natural. What’s natural for a body-politic is to fulfill addictions, not to fulfill needs. 

    As inequality of wealth increases, corruption also increases. Empirical studies find that successful people tend to be bad: it’s natural for the scum and not the cream to rise to the top in organizations. So, the wealthier a person is, the worse the person tends to be. And it’s not just that, but success itself tends to make a person worse than the person was before the success. So, it’s natural that at the very top, tend to be the very worst people. Good government is not natural; bad government is natural. Good government is unnatural.

    Corruption is rule by deceit. An example of how that works at the federal-government level is here. An example of that in more detail is here. Another such detailed example, but at the state-or-local government level, is here. And an example of it within academia, and at the federal regulatory agencies, is here. So, in a country that has extreme wealth-inequality, the way in which the public’s ‘consent’, to the billionaires’ rule, is manufactured, is by means of deceit — a rot that’s throughout the entire body-politic and society. This is how an extreme inequality of wealth is produced. It cannot be done honestly. Transparency International has reported that corruption and “social exclusion” or bigotry tend to go together, but has ignored the possible relationship between corruption and the economic distribution of either wealth or income. Perhaps the billionaires who fund TI don’t want such correlations to be pointed out, if they exist; so TI doesn’t investigate this. 

    The reason why a free market inevitably increases dictatorship, is that dictatorship is natural, just as a free market itself is natural, and power pre-exists everywhere to upset and overturn any equality that might exist in either sphere. Power is natural. No economy exists but that power pre-exists. The political sphere pre-exists the economic sphere. The basic reality, in any society, is power.

    Thus, the question has always been: What rules? Is it the wealth? Or is it the people? The natural condition is for wealth to rule, because money (especially all excess money, all income above $100,000 per year, and certainly all income above $1,000,000 per year — what can truthfully be called 100% political money, because it can be ‘given away’ with no real loss to the current owner) is power. Although wealth isn’t the only source of power, it is a major source of power. (It can even be the major source of power.) And power rules everywhere. By definition, power rules in politics; and, by nature, the wealthy tend to rule not only in the economy, but also in the government. 

    That’s what’s natural. Democracy isn’t natural, but a free market, and an aristocratic government, are both natural. And the political reality determines the economic reality.

    PS: You have just read here an online book. This article, including all of its sources that are linked to, and the sources that are linked to in those sources, constitute more than an ordinary book. The complete case and its documentation are fully presented in it. To anyone who finds this book valuable, I would recommend, as follow-up, a book of the traditional sort: Marjorie Kelly’s masterpiece, The Divine Right of Capital.

  • Rand Slumps As Trump Questions "South Africa Land Expropriations" From White Farmers

    Just days after the first ‘Zimbabwe-fication’ actions of South African President Ramaphosa’s plan to confiscate white farmers’ land with no compensation and hand them to the black population begins, President Trump – seemingly following a story by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson – has asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations” raising concerns that the U.S. might target South Africa with possible sanctions next.

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    The reaction was swift in the Rand…

    Here is the Tucker Carlson segment that appears to have triggered President Trump.

    *  *  *

    By way of background, we have written extensively on South Africa’s ‘Zimbabwe-fication’ plans, most recently here.

    South Africa’s white farmers have been desperately trying to sell their lands at record pace ahead of planned government land seizures, according to a local farmer’s union. However, there are no buyers.

    As Ryan Martinez writes for PlanertFreeWill.com, tensions among the country’s white farming community have been rising since the election of Cyril Ramaphosa who assumed office earlier this year and committed his African National Congress (ANC) to land expropriation.

    ANC chairman Gwede Mantashe sparked panic last week when he said:

    “You shouldn’t own more than 25,000 acres of land. Therefore, if you own more it should be taken without compensation.”

    “People who are privileged never give away privilege as a matter of a gift,” he continued.  “And that is why we say, to give you the tools, revisit the constitution so that you have a legal tool to do it.”

    Mantashe comments were condemned by both white and black farmers, with unions predicting such a move would lead to job losses and a situation in which South Africa may no longer be able to feed itself.

    Omri van Zyl, head of the Agri SA union, which represents mainly white commercial farmers, said:

    “The mood among our members is very solemn. They are confused about the lack of any apparent strategy from the government and many are panicking.

    So many farms are up for sale, more than we’ve ever had, but no one is buying.”

    “Why would you buy a farm to know the government’s going to take it?”

    The National African Farmers’ Union (Nafu), which represents the country’s black farmers, said the scheme would lead to job losses.

    Nafu president Motsepe Matlala said:

    “From a practical and economical point of view it will not work.”

    “Land will be a central issue in the looming 2019 election year, and rhetoric is always easier than transformative action.”

    AfriForum, an influential lobby group, recently warned the government its plans would be “catastrophic”.  Ian Cameron, the group’s spokesman, said: “We’re really heading for a state of anarchy if something doesn’t change drastically.”

    Local newspaper City Press is reporting that two game farms in the northern province of Limpopo were the first to be targeted for unilateral seizure after negotiations with the owners to purchase the properties stalled.

    Analysts warn the move could undermine property rights and deter investment.

    In Zimbabwe, violent land seizures which were authorized by Robert Mugabe in the 1990s which sent the country into a spiral of decline from which it has never recovered.

    “Markets are sensitive to anything perceived to be ‘Zimbabwe-fication’ on the land-reform front,” market analyst Henrik Gullberg noted.

    Agri SA states 20% of South Africa’s farms produce 80% of the food that feeds millions of people in southern Africa, and many of those properties would be affected by a 25,000-acre cap.

  • Are 'Petroyuan' Futures Still A "High-Risk Endeavor"?

    Authored by Irina Slav via Oilprice.com,

    When the long-awaited yuan-denominated oil futures launched earlier this year, opinions were split: one camp argued with passion that the days of the petrodollar were numbered, its demise a certainty. The other camp argued with just as much passion the yuan has yet to catch up with the dollar as an international currency, and the Chinese futures had basically as much of a chance as a snowflake in Hell.

    Now, six months later, opinions remain split, but now the two camps have some facts and figures in their arsenal. For example, a figure for the pro-petroyuan camp was the record surge in trading volume in June, to 137.5 million tons of crude for delivery in September. This translates into 137,503 lots, compared to a combined 2.6 million lots for Brent and WTI together, though, so the yuan contract still has a way to go to catch up.

    [ZH: the following chart shows absolute contract volume diff – not straight comparison of actual crude volume]

    The anti-petroyuan camp, however, seems to have a bit more going for it after six months of trade. Bloomberg cites traders as saying that the exchange rate of the yuan coupled with storage costs make the Chinese oil contract still a high-risk endeavor.

    The yuan has been falling in recent months on the back of slowing economic growth and the tariff spat with the United States. There is a lot of space for surprises, however, and unpredictability is not something low-risk traders like, so exchange rates are one thing that could put them off the yuan contract.

    Storage costs in China are another problem. They are much higher than elsewhere: US$0.95 per barrel per month in the Shanghai International Energy Exchange compared with US$0.05 per barrel per month at the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, Bloomberg reports. The reason for the higher cost is limited storage capacity availability and the requirement that the cargo be stored at a specific storage facility rather than at any available.

    So, in light of these unpleasant facts, what does the yuan-denominated futures contract have going for them?

    Well, apparently, they could make sellers richer than if they choose to trade Middle East grades. The yuan contract last week traded at a considerable premium to all other oil futures, with the premium to the Middle East benchmark at US$3.35 per barrel.

    That makes a profit of US$6.7 million for a cargo, according to Bloomberg calculations – certainly not a small sum. But is it worth all the risks?

    Perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t, but it looks like it is still too early to say. The seriousness of the risks, after all, is relative. This was evidenced in the record-high trading interest in yuan futures in early June that some observers, quoted by S&P Global Platts, attributed to the heightened price volatility in the Brent and WTI benchmarks. On the other hand, storage costs are a fixed problem that is not about to go away. It’s a risk that traders have probably already learned to factor into their calculations. Exchange rates are another cesspool of volatility, but volatility is a double-edged sword. Economic data from China may still surprise positively as it has before, despite the tariffs.

    Ultimately, however, the question of whether the petrodollar will be replaced by the petroyuan is moot. The reason for this is simple: the dollar is the international reserve currency because most oil is traded in dollars, says international relations professor and China expert Douglas Bulloch. It is the international reserve currency because of the size and nature of the U.S. economy. Therefore, the only way for China to succeed in having its currency stand a fighting chance against the greenback is to continue opening up its economy. Oil trading is only part of that.

  • Over The Last 7 Days Our Planet Has Been Violently Shaken By 144 Major Earthquakes

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The American Dream blog,

    Within the past few days, we have seen an enormous magnitude 7.3 earthquake hit Venezuela and a giant magnitude 8.2 earthquake hit Fiji.  Where will the next one strike? 

    To many of us, it is becoming exceedingly clear that something very unusual is happening to our planet.  I went and looked it up, and I was astounded to learn that the crust of the Earth has been shaken by 144 major earthquakes over the last 7 days, and that includes more than 50 on Sunday alone. 

    And remember, these are not small earthquakes.  The USGS considers any earthquake that is at least magnitude 4.5 to be “significant”, and they are happening so rapidly right now that it is difficult to keep up with them.

    Source: USGS

    Usually, only earthquakes that cause death and destruction get attention from the mainstream media, and that was definitely the case with the huge quake that hit the northern coast of Venezuela on Tuesday…

    A major earthquake of magnitude 7.3 struck the northern coast of Venezuela on Tuesday and shook buildings as far away as the capital, Caracas, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

    The quake was centered near the town of Carupano, an area of poor fishing communities and was felt as far away as neighboring Colombia to the east and nearby island nations like Trinidad and Tobago, and St. Lucia, to the west and north.

    This is certainly the last thing that the people of Venezuela need at the moment.  Their currency was just devalued again, and at this point it is so worthless that people are literally throwing it into dumpsters.

    According to media reports, the quake lasted for approximately two minutes, and it really shook people up.  The following comes from Reuters…

    “I feel like I’m about to faint. I’m shaking. It was long,” said telemarketing worker Sheny Fuentes, 22, speaking outside her work building in eastern Caracas. “I’m relieved that it doesn’t seem like damage was that bad. We would have been even more affected (given Venezuela’s economic crisis) – there are already people eating from the garbage and buildings aren’t well made,” she told Reuters.

    The other day I noted that the magnitude 8.2 quake that just hit Fiji was the second largest “deep focus” earthquake ever recorded, and this quake in Venezuela was highly unusual as well.

    In fact, seismologist Stephen Hicks says that it was one of “the largest ever recorded” in that entire region…

    M7.3 earthquake today along the northern coast of Venezuela is one of the largest ever recorded earthquakes along the boundary between the Caribbean & South American plates. There was an M7.7 quake to the west in 1900 but this will have preceded detailed instrumental recordings

    And this earthquake came right on the heels of an extremely active 48 hours for global seismic activity.

    According to the Daily Mail,  the “Ring of Fire” was shaken by a total of 69 major earthquakes on Sunday and Monday…

    Sixty nine major earthquakes have hit Earth’s most active geological disaster zone in the space of just 48 hours.

    Sixteen ‘significant’ tremors – those at magnitude 4.5 or above – shook the Pacific ‘Ring of Fire’ on Monday, following a spate of 53 that hit the region Sunday.

    The vast majority of the earthquakes that shake our planet take place along the Ring of Fire.  It roughly encircles the Pacific Ocean, and it runs right up the west coast of the United States.

    As the Ring of Fire has become more seismically active over the past several months, it has increased concerns that “the Big One” may soon be coming to California.  Just check out this excerpt from a Daily Mail article that was just published…

    The tremors have raised concerns that California’s ‘Big One’ – a destructive earthquake of magnitude 8 or greater – may be looming.

    Scientists have previously warned that Ring of Fire activity may trigger a domino effect that sets off earthquakes and volcanic eruptions elsewhere in the region.

    Scientists assure us that it is only a matter of time before the west coast is hit by major seismic events, and I even included a major seismic event on the west coast in my apocalyptic novel about the future of America.  We are seeing earthquakes increase in frequency and intensity all over the planet, and they are starting to happen in places that we don’t normally expect.  For instance, just check out what happened in Italy last week…

    A number of earthquakes struck the region of Molise on the nights of August 15th and August 16th and the morning of August 17th. An earthquake was also felt in Le Marche near the port city of Ancona.

    A magnitude 5.2 earthquake struck four kilometres from the southeastern town of Montecilfone, a village of 1,348 people, in the region of Molise, on the night of August 16th just after 8pm, according to Italy’s National Institute for Geophysics and Vulcanology (INGV), which monitors seismic activity.

    But until major shaking starts happening in the continental United States, most Americans are not going to pay attention.

    It simply is not “normal” for 144 major earthquakes to happen in just one week.  In addition, dozens of volcanoes are currently erupting all over the globe.  We appear to have entered a time when the crust of our planet is going to become increasingly unstable, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is going to have very serious implications for the future of our society.

  • Australia Leadership Crisis: Aussie Dollar Tumbles After PM Turnbull Loses Cabinet Support To Populist Leader

    In the latest populist crisis to strike a G-10 nation (it has not been blamed on Vladimir Putin yet), Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull – who narrowly survived a leadership challenge earlier this week – suffered what appeared to be a fatal blow to his leadership on Thursday after three key Cabinet ministers – including the Finance Minister – resigned, calling for an immediate meeting of the party and pledging support for right-wing populist Peter Dutton, Bloomberg reports.

    Malcolm Turnbull

    After telling Turnbull that he should resign, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, Communications Minister Mitch Fifield and Jobs Minister Michaelia Cash held a news conference to announce their resignations and demand a special meeting of Liberal Party lawmakers so a leadership ballot in which could be held.

    he resignations “mean it’s game over for him and Australia will have a new leader by the end of day,” said Haydon Manning, an associate professor of politics and public policy at Flinders University. “My money would be on Dutton but you can’t rule out another candidate giving it a go.”

    Dutton, who narrowly failed to unseat the prime minister earlier in the week, said on Thursday he had the party’s support and demanded that Turnbull call another leadership vote. Treasurer Scott Morrison – a Turnbull ally – is preparing to run against Dutton if a ballot is held on Thursday, Sky News reported, without saying where it got the information.

    According to ABC, Malcolm Turnbull was told he has lost the support of the Liberal party room and should step down as Prime Minister, while Labor leader Bill Shorten said Australia no longer has a functioning Government.

    “It is not the Parliament that has failed, it is the Turnbull Liberal Government that has failed,” Mr Shorten told the chamber.

    “This is the ultimate admission of surrender.”

    Australia’s latest political upheaval has been driven by infighting between moderates and conservatives in the ruling Liberal party as its poll numbers fall ahead of an election due by May. The main opposition Labor party led by 10 percentage points in a poll released on Monday.

    Today’s shock move came after senior Liberals said they believed Peter Dutton had enough support to become leader. Cormann, a key Liberal powerbroker, said he believed Mr Dutton was the best person to lead the country to the next election.  “It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that we went to see the PM yesterday afternoon to advise him that in our judgement, he no longer enjoyed the majority of support of Liberal members,” he said.

    Turnbull, a former Goldman Sachs employee, came to power in 2015 in a party coup before winning an election the next year with a razor-thin majority. According to Bloomberg, amid internal party dissent, he abandoned signature policies this week designed to restore energy security and give tax relief to big businesses.

    Cue another populist leader.

    Dutton, a 47-year-old former policeman, has used a raft of television and radio interviews this week to outline a populist policy manifesto, including removing a tax on electricity bills for families and pensioners, a wide-ranging investigation into energy companies blamed for spiraling prices, and cuts to immigration.

    The father-of-three is seen as a leader of the party’s right wing, and as the minister in charge of immigration rose to prominence as a staunch supporter of the government’s hard-line policy of detaining asylum seekers in offshore camps.

    Human rights activists have accused Dutton of stoking racial division by urging a crackdown on “African gang violence” in Victoria state. He also criticized Alan Joyce for using his position as chief executive officer of Qantas Airways Ltd. to advocate for legalizing same-sex marriage.

    Shortly after the news of Turnbull’s imminent exit emerged, Australia’s parliament was suspended as the Liberal leadership struggle descends into chaos. With key ministers deserting Malcolm Turnbull, Treasurer Scott Morrison looks set to run against Peter Dutton if another spill is called.

    MPs filing out of the House of Reps

    Australia’s dollar sank as much as 0.7% to 0.7287 U.S. cents, while 10-year government bond yields dropped 1 basis point to 2.528 percent.

    The news pressured US equities in thin trading.

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Aug 22

Today’s News 22nd August 2018

  • Russia Prepares For New Batch Of Stealth Fighter Jets

    In a series of reports from the Russian News Agency TASS, Russia’s fifth-generation Su-57 stealth fighter jet could be entering service sometime in 2019. The aircraft has huge potential to modernize the Russian military for at least “fifty years,” exclaimeda senior Russian lawmaker, as it has proven its worth during the combat missions in Syria.

    It is possible that Moscow will deploy these stealth fighters in the Eurasia region to ensure a geopolitical power shift away from Washington to defend the economic development projects currently underway.

    Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) President Yuri Slyusar told Deistvuyushchiye Litsa (Political Actors) program on the Rossiya-1 television channel that a major contract with the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation would be finalized by the end of summer for the first batch of Su-57 fighters.

    “By the end of the summer, I think probably at the Patriot Park (in Moscow’s region, the venue for the 2018 Army forum on August 21-26 – TASS), we will sign contracts for the first batch with the defense ministry. Regular supplies will start next year”.

    In a separate interview, Viktor Bondarev, chairman of the defense and security committee of Russia’s Federation Council upper parliament house, explained to TASS Sunday that the stealth jets had performed exceptionally well during its combat deployment in Syria.

    Video: Russia Deploys Two Brand New Su-57 Stealth Fighters To Syria

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

    “The Su-57 has successfully accomplished the first stage of state trials and proved all of its designated flight characteristics. It proved its worth not only on testing grounds but also in real combat operations,” Bondarev told TASS.

    He said that Su-57 pilot prototypes were delivered to Russia’s Hmeymim airbase in Syria in the first half of the year for live fire testing.

    The jet “has a huge potential for modernization that will be enough for fifty years,” he said, adding that the plane’s onboard radionics is built on the principles of open architecture.

    “As a matter of fact, this fighter jet has everything necessary to be later developed into a fully automatic unmanned warplane,” Bondarev said.

    “The Russian fifth-generation Su-57 fighter jet features stealth technology with the broad use of composite materials, is capable of maintaining supersonic cruising speed and is furnished with the most advanced onboard radio-electronic equipment, including a powerful onboard computer (the so-called electronic second pilot), the radar system spread across its body and some other innovations, in particular, armament placed inside its fuselage. The plane’s onboard control system is capable of following up to 60 targets and opening fire at 16 of them concurrently. These planes are expected to arrive for the troops in 2019. The pilot batch will comprise 12 Su-57 planes,” said TASS.

    In the decades ahead, the reports did not mention what Russia wanted to defend with these advanced jets. However, it is becoming quite evident that they will be used as a new deterrence system against Washington’s advanced aircraft to protect and keep peace in the Eurasian region as the Belt and Road Initiative comes online and challenges America’s dollar system.

  • Craig Murray Rages At Britain's "Gangster State"

    Authored by Craig Murray,

    Max Weber defined a key attribute of a state as holding the monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence within a given territory. For anybody other than the state to use substantive physical force against you or to imprison you is regarded as an extremely serious crime. The state itself may however constrain you, beat you, imprison you and even kill you. That link is on deaths in police custody. I might also quote the state murder of 12 year old British child Jojo Jones, deliberately executed by drone strike by the USA with prior approval from the British government.

    That is but one example of the British state’s decreasing reticence over the use of extreme violence. The shameless promotion of Cressida Dick to head the Metropolitan Police as reward for orchestrating the cold-blooded murder of an innocent and unresisting Jean Charles de Menezes is another example. So is Savid Javid’s positive encouragement of the US to employ the death penalty against British men stripped of citizenship.

    There are a class of states where the central government does not have sufficient control over its territories to preserve its monopoly of violence. That may include violence in opposition to the state. But one further aspect of that is state sanctioned violence in pursuit of state aims by non state actors, done with a nod and a wink from the government – death squads and private militias, often CIA supplied, in South America have often acted this way, and so occasionally does the British state, for example in the murder of Pat Finucane. In some instances, a state might properly be described as a gangster state, where violent groups acting for personal gain act in concert with state authorities, with motives of personal financial profit involved on both sides.

    It appears to me in this sense it is fair to call Britain a gangster state. It has contracted out the exercise of state violence, including in some instances to the point of death, against prisoners and immigration detainees to companies including G4S, who exercise that violence purely for the making of profit from it. It is a great moral abomination that violence should be exercised against humans for profit – and it should be clear that in even in most “humane” conditions the deprivation of physical liberty of any person is an extreme and chronic exercise of violence against them. I do not deny the necessity of such action on occasion to protect others, but that the state shares out its monopoly of violence, so that business interests with which the political class are closely associated can turn a profit, is a matter of extreme moral repugnance.

    Rory Stewart appeared on Sky News this morning and the very first point he saw fit to make was a piece of impassioned shilling on behalf of G4S. That this was the first reaction of the Prisons Minister to a question on the collapse of order at Birmingham Prison due to G4S’ abject performance, shows both the Tories’ ideological commitment to privatisation in all circumstances, especially where it has demonstrably failed, and shows also the extent to which they are in the pockets of financial interests – and not in the least concerned about the public interest.

    I should add to this that Tories here includes Blairites. Blair and Brown were gung-ho for prison privatisation, and even keen to extend the contracting out of state violence for profit to the military sector by the deployment of mercenary soldiers, which New Labour itself consciously rebranded as “private military companies”. Iraq was a major exercise in this with British government contracted mercenaries often outnumbering actual British troops.

    The reason for the state to have the monopoly of violence in any society is supposed to be in order to ensure that violence is only ever exercised with caution, with regret and in proportion, solely in unavoidable circumstances. It is the most profound duty of a state to ensure that this is so. The contracting out of state violence for private profit ought to be unthinkable to any decent person.

  • Visualizing The Social Media Universe In 2018

    Billions of people around the world grew up during the age of social media, and mankind is slowly marching toward a future where nearly everyone will be a digital native.

    And as Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routlery points out, for the one-third of humanity that now uses a smartphone, messaging and status updates are often more natural than having a live conversation. In a world where social interactions are peppered with emojis and funneled through a front-facing camera, the platforms we use become more than mere service providers; they are the connective tissue of our society.

    What services are people using to communicate?

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

    Monthly active users (MAUs) is a metric commonly used to evaluate how many people are using a service regularly. Here are the world’s top social and messaging platforms by MAUs:

    Let’s take a closer look at these massive platforms.

    THE FACEBOOK EMPIRE

    On its own, Facebook is a behemoth, but adding in the other platforms run by Mark Zuckerberg paints a clear picture of who controls the social media in 2018.

    During its growth spurt in the late aughts, Facebook emerged as the first truly global social networks, hitting one billion monthly active users and essentially popularizing the idea of social media. These days, Facebook appears to be hitting engagement and growth plateaus, but acquisitions such as Instagram and WhatsApp are fueling growth for the company, with the former accounting for over a third of revenue.

    WECHAT

    In China, WeChat isn’t just a typical messenger app.

    This “super app” – which facilitates everything from point-of-sale purchases to accessing public services – is likely the template that other social platforms around the world will emulate as they strive for more thorough integration with their users’ lives.

    Because WeChat is typically also used for work, the average user spends about an hour in-app each day. That is a level of engagement most platforms can only dream of.

    REDDIT

    The “Front Page of the Internet” has grown up.

    The oft controversial message board – created in 2005 – is now worth an estimated $1.8 billion, and is contemplating an IPO in the near future. While the company does make money from advertising, a unique membership feature called Reddit Gold is helping bring in funding directly from the community.

    TWITTER

    When people have something to say publicly or look to debate big issues in the news cycle, more often than not, they use Twitter. Tweets from world leaders and CEOs can have far-reaching consequences, and hashtagged social movements have united more people than ever to affect change. For better or worse, Twitter fills an important role in modern society.

    Unfortunately for Twitter, great responsibility has translated into greater scrutiny rather than strong revenue growth. The company has faced high profile controversies over harassment, bots, and fake news, and has struggled to match the sky-high growth expectations set when the “microblogging” platform went public in 2013. Twitter is still experimenting with new ways to monetize its 300+ million active user base.

    SNAPCHAT

    In 2015, Snapchat, having already thoroughly conquered the under-18 market, looked set to disrupt the social media landscape. What came next was a tragedy in two acts.

    First, Instagram released its Story feature that same year, effectively cloning Snapchat’s features and layout within their app. Many users, who had only recently began using novel new platform, flocked back to Instagram where they already had a developed following.

    Secondly, a redesign of the Snapchat interface was widely criticized by high profile users, speeding up an exodus to Instagram.

    Snapchat, which has since gone public, still has a quarter of billion MAUs, but questions remain about whether the platform can recapture the magic of their earlier years.

  • To The US Media, A "Regime" Is Any Government At Odds With The US Empire

    Authored by Gregory Shupak via ‘Fariness & Accuracy In Reporting’,

    In the aftermath of the assassination attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, an article in the Miami Herald (8/5/18) reported that “a clandestine group formed by Venezuelan military members opposed to the regime of Nicolás Maduro claimed responsibility.” A New York Times op-ed (8/10/18) mused, “No one knows whether the Maduro regime will last decades or days.” AFP(8/12/18) reported that “Trump has harshly criticized Maduro’s leftist regime.”

    The word “regime” implies that the government to which the label is applied is undemocratic, even tyrannical, so it’s peculiar that the term is used in Venezuela’s case, since the country’s leftist government has repeatedly won free and fair elections (London Review of Books, 6/29/17).

    One could argue that, strictly speaking, “regime” can simply mean a system, and in some specific, infrequent contexts, that may be how it’s used. But broadly the word “regime” suggests a government that is unrepresentative, repressive,  corrupt, aggressive—without the need to offer any evidence of these traits.

    Interestingly, the US itself meets many of the criteria for being a “regime”: It can be seen as an oligarchy rather than a democracy, imprisons people at a higher rate than any other country, has grotesque levels of inequality and bombs another country every 12 minutes. Yet there’s no widespread tendency for the corporate media to describe the US state as a “regime.”

    The function of “regime” is to construct the ideological scaffolding for the United States and its partners to attack whatever country has a government described in this manner.

    According to the mainstream media, the democratically elected government of Nicaragua is a “regime” (Washington Post, 7/11/18). Cuba also has a “regime” (Washington Post, 7/25/18). Iraq and Libya used to have “regimes”—before the United States implemented “regime change.” North Korea most definitely has one (New York Times, 7/26/18), as do China (Washington Post, 8/3/18) and Russia (Wall Street Journal, 7/15/18).

    When, for the media, does a government become a “regime”? The answer, broadly speaking: A country’s political leaders are likely to be called a “regime” when they do not follow US dictates, and are less likely to be categorized as such if they cooperate with the empire.

    ‘Regimes’ in Latin America

    A search run with the media aggregator Factiva finds that in the nearly 20 years since Venezuela first elected a Chavista government, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have used the phrase “Venezuelan regime” 74 times, “regime in Venezuela” 30 times, “Chávez regime” 68 times, “Maduro regime” 168 times and “regime in Caracas” five times. All of these governments have been democratically elected, but have sinned by trying to carve out a path independent of US control.

    Consider, by contrast, coverage of Honduras. The country is hardly lacking in characteristics associated with a “regime.” On June 28, 2009, a US-backed military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya, replacing it with a US-friendly administration. Since then, Honduras has become the most dangerous place for journalists in the Americas; labor leadersand environmental activists have also been regularly targeted for assassination.

    According to a Factiva search, the phrase “Honduran regime” has never appeared in the Times, Journal and Post in the years following the coup, and collectively they used the phrase “regime in Honduras” once: It appeared in a Washington Post article (3/31/16) about the assassinations of Honduran indigenous leader Berta Cáceres and other environmentalists in the region, in a quote by a professor critical of US support for Latin American dictatorships.

    While Honduras’s three post-coup presidents have governed a country where “impunity for human rights abuses remains the norm,” according to Human Rights Watch, these leaders have almost never been described as running a “regime.” A Post editorial (9/5/09) included the only appearance of “Micheletti regime” in any of the three papers. “Lobo regime” returns zero search results. The New York Times (2/16/16) has used “Hernández regime” once, but Factiva indicates that the Post and Journal never have. Searches for “regime in Tegucigalpa” or “Tegucigalpa regime” produced zero results.

    Middle Eastern ‘Regimes’

    (Wall Street Journal, 7/12/18)

    Since the war in Syria ignited on March 15, 2011, “Syrian regime” has been used 5,355 times, “Assad regime” 7,853 times, “regime in Syria” 836 times, and “regime in Damascus” 282 times in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

    Washington’s economic and military partner Saudi Arabia is described as having a “regime” far less often than is Syria, despite its rather “regime”-like qualities: Its unelected government represses dissidents, including advocates for women and its Shia minority, and carries out executions at an extraordinary clip, including of people accused of adultery, apostasy and witchcraft. Saudi Arabia crushed an uprising in neighboring Bahrain in 2011, and with its US and UK partners, is carrying out an almost apocalyptic war in Yemen.

    In the same period examined in the Syrian case, the phrase “Saudi regime” was used 145 times by the same papers, while “regime in Saudi Arabia” registers four hits and “regime in Riyadh” can be found once, in the Post (11/29/17).

    Saudi leaders can rest assured that their names are unlikely to be associated with running a “regime”: Factiva indicates that the three publications never used the phrase “Abdullah regime” in the relevant period, while “Salman regime” pops up only once, in a Post editorial (5/3/15).

    The Iranian Revolution culminated on February 11, 1979, and the US ruling class has seen Iran’s government as an arch-enemy ever since. Factiva searches of the intervening years turn  up 3,201 references to “Iranian regime,” in the Times, Journal and Post, as well as 326 to “regime in Iran,” 502 to “regime in Tehran,” 258 to “Khomeini regime,” 31 to “Ahmadinejad regime” and five to “Rouhani regime.”

    The case of stalwart US ally Israel offers an illuminating counterpoint. Even though Israel violently rules over 2.5 Palestinians in the West Bank and keeps 2 million under siege in Gaza, and even though Palestinians living as citizens of Israel face institutional discrimination, the Israeli government is almost never described as a “regime” in a way that carries the negative connotations discussed above.

    (New York Times, 9/24/16)

    A New York Times article (8/2/91) on the Gulf War used the phrase “the obdurate Israeli regime” to describe Israeli conduct in regional negotiations. In 1992, a Washington Post op-ed (3/11/92) called for America to accept Jewish people from the just-collapsed Soviet Union in part because “elements in the Israeli regime are quite ready to place the [Jewish people who moved to Israel from the USSR] in harm’s way,” a reference to the idea that Palestinians are a threat to them. A Wall Street Journal article (7/12/99) employed the term “Israeli regime” in 1999 to describe Ehud Barak’s administration as taking over from “the previous Israeli regime” of Benjamin Netanyahu, and a piece in the Washington Post (10/1/96) used the phrase in the same way.

    Otherwise, “Israeli regime” appears in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Washington Post when the phrase is attributed to critics of Israel (e.g., Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saying, “Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken”—New York Times, 5/12/08), or is part of a compound referring to a country other than Israel, as when Egypt is described as having a “pro-Israeli regime,” or Syria is called an “anti-Israeli regime.”

    “Sharon regime” yields four results. There are no results for “Olmert regime.” Since Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, Factiva shows, the only use of “Netanyahu regime” in any of these papers was a Washington Postarticle (3/1/15);  there are three instances of the phrase in these papers from his first go-round (1996–99). The New York Times referred to Israel as the “regime in Jerusalem” once in 1981 (3/2/81) and again in 1994 (1/6/94). “Regime in Tel Aviv” only appears when it’s part of a quote from someone criticizing Israel.

    Calling a government a “regime” suggests a lack of legitimacy, with the implication that its ousting (by whatever means) would serve humanitarian and democratic ends; it’s no accident that the phrase is “regime change,” not “government change” or “administration change.” The obverse is also true: The authority of a “government” is more apt to be seen as legitimate,  with resistance to it or defense against it frequently depicted as criminal or terroristic. Thus corporate media help instruct the population that the enemies of the US ruling class need to be eliminated, while its friends deserve protection.

  • Paging Robocop: Russia's Got A Kalashnikov-Designed 4.5 Ton "Soldier Suit" Mech

    Russia has unveiled a menacing 4.5 ton bulletproof robot suit with giant claws that can walk and hold weapons. No word on how long it gives you to comply, but we assume the standard 20-second rule applies. 

    Uh oh, looks like Putin’s gone full mech warrior: 

    And in a galaxy far, far away: 

    Paging Robocop? 

    Of course, Russia’s also got this nightmare-inducing piece of hardware as well – a humanoid robot developed by the Russian Foundation for Advanced Research Proijects which can use tools, drive a car and murder you.

    Maybe Bezos can save us?

  • Snyder: Read Between The Lines & Global Leaders Are Telling Us Exactly What Is Coming

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

    Sometimes, a strongly-worded denial is the most damning evidence of all that something is seriously wrong. 

    And when things start to really get crazy, “the spin” is often the exact opposite of the truth.  In recent days we have seen a lot of troubling headlines and a lot of chaos in the global financial marketplace, but authorities continue to assure us that everything is going to be just fine. 

    Of course we witnessed precisely the same thing just prior to the great financial crisis of 2008.  Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke insisted that a recession was not coming, and we proceeded to plunge into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.  Is our society experiencing a similar state of denial about what is ahead of us here in 2018?

    Let me give you a few examples of some recent things that global economic leaders have said, and what they really meant…

    –Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk: “We are definitely not going bankrupt.”

    Translation: “We are definitely going bankrupt.”

    Tesla is a company that is supposedly worth 51 billion dollars, but the reality is that they are going to zero.  They have been bleeding massive amounts of cash for years, and now a day of reckoning has finally arrived.  A severe liquidity crunch has forced the company to delay payments or to ask for enormous discounts from suppliers, and many of those suppliers are now concerned that Tesla is on the verge of collapse…

    Specifically, a recent survey sent privately by a well-regarded automotive supplier association to top executives, and seen by the WS , found that 18 of 22 respondents believe that Tesla is now a financial risk to their companies.

    Meanwhile, confirming last month’s report that Tesla is increasingly relying on net working capital, and specifically accounts payable to window dress its liquidity, several suppliers said Tesla has tried to stretch out payments or asked for significant cash back. And in some cases, public records show, small suppliers over the past several months have claimed they failed to get paid for services supplied to Tesla.

    –Shark Tank billionaire Mark Cuban: “I’ve got a whole lot of cash on the sidelines.”

    Translation: “I believe that the stock market is about to crash.”

    Mark Cuban is not stupid.  Like Warren Buffett, he is sitting on giant piles of cash as he waits for stock valuations to return to their long-term averages.  And when “something happens”, Cuban insists that he is “ready, willing and able” to make some bold moves…

    Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban told CNBC on Monday that he’s holding much more cash than he normally does because he’s concerned about the stock market and U.S debt levels.

    “I’m down to maybe four dividend-owning stocks, two shorts, and Amazon and Netflix. I’ve got a whole lot of cash on the sidelines,” Cuban said on “Fast Money Halftime Report.” “[I’m] ready, willing and able if something happens” to invest.

    –Deutsche Bank: We need our employees to “take every opportunity to restrict non-essential travel” in order to cut costs.

    Translation: We are on the verge of collapse, and we have got to save every single penny that we can right now.

    If you follow my work on a regular basis, you already know that I have been extremely hard on Deutsche Bank.  The biggest bank in Europe is teetering on the brink, and this latest move is more evidence that their days are numbered…

    Forget the days of traveling first class to meet clients: Deutsche Bank, which following major management upheaval in the past year, is telling its employees to take the bus whenever possible.

    In the latest indignity to befall the bank’s employees, in a memo sent by Deutsche Bank CFO James von Moltke, the biggest European bank – if certainly not by market cap – urged employees to “take every opportunity to restrict non-essential travel” until the end of the year adding that “with your help, we will meet our cost-reduction targets.”

    –Italian Cabinet Undersecretary Giancarlo Giorgetti: “I hope that the quantitative easing program will go forward.”

    Translation: If the ECB does not buy our bonds, the Italian financial system is toast.

    Italy will almost certainly be the fulcrum of the next European financial crisis, and the truth is that the EU will not have enough money to bail Italy out once it collapses.

    So the Italians desperately need the ECB to continue buying their bonds, and the new Italian government seems to understand this very well…

    Italian Cabinet Undersecretary Giancarlo Giorgetti said he hopes the European Central Bank’s quantitative easing program will be extended to help protect the country from financial speculators.

    Italy also needs to be credible to help shield itself, Giorgetti said in an interview with newspaper Il Messaggero. After the Genoa bridge disaster, the country may boost its extra spending request to the European Union, he said.

    Signs of trouble continue to erupt in the United States as well.  The trade war is taking a huge toll on businesses of all sizes, and sometimes it is rural America that is being hurt the most.

    For instance, the looming closure of the Element Electronics factory in Winnsboro, South Carolina would be absolutely crippling for that community…

    TVs at the plant are made out of components that are imported from China, and the tariffs make assembling the TVs here a losing proposition, the company has said. The company is fighting for a waiver but is bracing for shutdown.

    Winnsboro is the seat of Fairfield County, where a third of the population lives in poverty. Unemployment among its nearly 23,000 residents is second highest in the state, and, despite periodic rebounds, the population has fallen steadily over the past century.

    “This is going to be a ghost town,” Winnsboro resident Herbert Workman said.

    In this day and age, we are trained to be optimistic, and that can be a good thing.

    But there comes a point when blind optimism causes us to lose touch with reality, and many believe that we have already crossed that threshold.

  • Russian Nuclear-Powered Missile "Lost At Sea" – Recovery Efforts Underway, Says US Intelligence

    A bombshell CNBC report says that Russia is seeking to recover an advanced nuclear-powered missile that was “lost at sea” after a failed flight test which occurred in late 2017. 

    Unnamed US officials made the astounding claim while citing a classified intelligence report detailing the Russian operation. 

    CNBC explains based on its intelligence sources: 

    Crews will attempt to recover a missile that was test launched in November and landed in the Barents Sea, which is located north of Norway and Russia. The operation will include three vessels, one of which is equipped to handle radioactive material from the weapon’s nuclear core. There is no timeline for the mission, according to the people with knowledge of the report.

    The U.S. intelligence report did not mention any potential health or environmental risks posed by possible damage to the missile’s nuclear reactor.

    Russian nuclear-powered cruise missile launch, via RU-RTR Russian Television/AP

    Russian President Vladimir Putin had previously boasted of the missile’s capabilities, claiming during a March 2018 speech, “The low-flying, stealth cruise missile with a nuclear warhead with a practically unlimited range, unpredictable flight path and the ability to bypass interception lines is invulnerable to all existing and future missile defense and air defense systems.” He added that, “No one in the world has anything like it.”

    However US officials say the missile has thus far been a failure after multiple tests, which Putin was apparently fully aware of when he boasted of the weapon’s capabilities in March. CNBC previously cited unnamed anonymous sources privy to the intelligence that said the missile’s nuclear-powered system which would allow for unheard of flight range while carrying a nuclear warhead had failed to initiate. 

    In four tests between November 2017 and February 2018, the intercontinental ballistic missile crashed, according to US sources, which further said the longest test flight lasted just over two minutes at a mere 22 miles in range before it crashed. 

    Putin’s March speech was the first time Russia officially recognized the nuclear-powered cruise missile program, which garnered global media attention as Putin bragged the system had “unlimited range”. 

    * * *

    Recent Russian-produced video featuring brief test footage spliced with imagined computer generated sequence of the missile’s projected capabilities…

    Official Russian footage of the nuclear cruise missile’s assembly location released through Russia’s Defense Ministry last month:

    One nuclear weapons systems engineer, Hans Kristensen, who serves as director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told CNBC  there remains the potential for unknown levels of nuclear radiation pollution: “It goes without saying that if you fire a missile with a nuclear engine or energy source, that nuclear material will end up wherever that missile ends up,” he said.

    “If this missile was lost at sea and recovered in full, then you might hypothetically be able to do it without pollution, I would have my doubts about that because it’s a very forceful impact when the missile crashes. I would suspect you would have leaks from it,” Kristensen added.

    The weapon has reportedly been under development by Russia since the early 2000s and is thought to initiate take-off through a conventionally fueled engine, after which it is designed to switch to nuclear-power for “unlimited” range.

    The missile was one of six ‘hypersonic weapons’ which Russia first announced last March, and released military video profiles of in mid-July, touting their capabilities.

    CNBC notes further of the recovery efforts, which have an undisclosed timeline:

    If the Russians are able to regain possession of the missile, U.S. intelligence analysts expect Moscow will use the procedure as a blueprint for future recovery operations. It is unclear whether the other missiles are missing at sea, too.

    Previously, the online military magazine Defense Blog noted of the system that “Russia’s next-generation nuclear-powered cruise missiles are capable of hitting targets throughout the United States” and cited Russia’s Defense Ministry as boasting that the missiles have “unlimited range and unlimited ability to maneuver”.

    Defense Blog said of the high range for the developing missile system, which is purported to have nuclear warhead delivery capability:

    The main purpose of the new cruise missiles is the suppression of the operational bases of the probable enemy and the destruction of interceptor-based missile defenсe systems or group of ships with Aegis Ballistic Missile Defenсe System.

    The missile has an intercontinental range in excess of 10,000+ kilometers (probably close to 20,000 kilometers) and may be equipped with a nuclear warhead.

    After the new Russian weapons were first made public, the commander of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), Gen. Lori Robinson, expressed growing “concern” before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

    “Russia has prioritized the development of advanced cruise missiles capable of holding targets within North America at risk from distances not previously seen. These systems present an increasing threat to North America due to their long range, low radar cross section, and the limited indications and warnings likely to be seen prior to a combat launch,” Gen. Robinson said.

    The general stated further while arguing for more investment in advanced sensors and missile defense systems to protect the US mainland: “I have confidence in the layered approach provided by US overlapping air defense systems. However, I am concerned about the potential for those advanced cruise missiles, which can be launched from bombers or submarines at much greater ranges than the previous systems“. 

    However, if current reports of the advanced nuclear-powered Russian missile being “lost at sea” are true, it appears that United States military planners have much less to worry about than what they previously thought. 

    At the very least, the US may now have much more time to erect similarly advanced systems to defend against Russian hypersonic weapons. 

  • Turkey's Financial Crisis Raises Questions About China's Debt-Driven Development Model

    Authored by James Dorsey via MidEast Soccer blog,

    Financial injections by Qatar and possibly China may resolve Turkey’s immediate economic crisis, aggravated by a politics-driven trade war with the United States, but are unlikely to resolve the country’s structural problems, fuelled by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s counterintuitive interest rate theories.

    The latest crisis in Turkey’s boom-bust economy raises questions about a development model in which countries like China and Turkey witness moves towards populist rule of one man who encourages massive borrowing to drive economic growth.

    It’s a model minus the one-man rule that could be repeated in Pakistan as newly sworn-in prime minister Imran Khan, confronted with a financial crisis, decides whether to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or rely on China and Saudi Arabia for relief.

    Pakistan, like Turkey, has over the years frequently knocked on the IMF’s doors, failing to have turned crisis into an opportunity for sustained restructuring and reform of the economy. Pakistan could in the next weeks be turning to the IMF for the 13th time, Turkey, another serial returnee, has been there 18 times.

    In Turkey and China, the debt-driven approach sparked remarkable economic growth with living standards being significantly boosted and huge numbers of people being lifted out of poverty. Yet, both countries with Turkey more exposed, given its greater vulnerability to the swings and sensitivities of international financial markets, are witnessing the limitations of the approach.

    So are, countries along China’s Belt and Road, including Pakistan, that leaped head over shoulder into the funding opportunities made available to them and now see themselves locked into debt traps that in the case of Sri Lanka and Djibouti have forced them to effectively turn over to China control of critical national infrastructure or like Laos that have become almost wholly dependent on China because it owns the bulk of their unsustainable debt.

    The fact that China may be more prepared to deal with the downside of debt-driven development does little to make its model sustainable or for that matter one that other countries would want to emulate unabridged and has sent some like Malaysia and Myanmar scrambling to resolve or avert an economic crisis.

    Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is in China after suspending US$20 billion worth of Beijing-linked infrastructure contracts, including a high-speed rail line to Singapore, concluded by his predecessor, Najib Razak, who is fighting corruption charges.

    Mr. Mahathir won elections in May on a campaign that asserted that Mr. Razak had ceded sovereignty to China by agreeing to Chinese investments that failed to benefit the country and threaten to drown it in debt.

    Myanmar is negotiating a significant scaling back of a Chinese-funded port project on the Bay of Bengal from one that would cost US$ 7.3 billion to a more modest development that would cost US$1.3 billion in a bid to avoid shouldering an unsustainable debt.

    Debt-driven growth could also prove to be a double-edged sword for China itself even if it is far less dependent than others on imports, does not run a chronic trade deficit, and doesn’t have to borrow heavily in dollars.

    With more than half the increase in global debt over the past decade having been issued as domestic loans in China, China’s risk, said Ruchir Sharma, Morgan Stanley’s Chief Global Strategist and head of Emerging Markets Equity, is capital fleeing to benefit from higher interest rates abroad.

    “Right now Chinese can earn the same interest rates in the United States for a lot less risk, so the motivation to flee is high, and will grow more intense as the Fed raises rates further,” Mr. Sharma said referring to the US Federal Reserve.

    Mr. Erdogan has charged that the United States abetted by traitors and foreigners are waging economic warfare against Turkey, using a strong dollar as ”the bullets, cannonballs and missiles.”

    Rejecting economic theory and wisdom, Mr. Erdogan has sought for years to fight an alleged ‘interest rate lobby’ that includes an ever-expanding number of financiers and foreign powers seeking to drive Turkish interest rates artificially high to damage the economy by insisting that low interest rates and borrowing costs would contain price hikes.

    In doing so, he is harking back to an approach that was popular in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s that may not be wholly wrong but similarly may also not be universally applicable.

    The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) warned late last year that Turkey’s “gross external financing needs to cover the current account deficit and external debt repayments due within a year are estimated at around 25 per cent of GDP in 2017, leaving the country exposed to global liquidity conditions.”

    With two international credit rating agencies reducing Turkish debt to junk status in the wake of Turkey’s economically fought disputes with the United States, the government risks its access to foreign credits being curtailed, which could force it to extract more money from ordinary Turks through increased taxes. That in turn would raise the spectre of recession.

    “Turkey’s troubles are homegrown, and the economic war against it is a figment of Mr. Erdogan’s conspiratorial imagination. But he does have a point about the impact of a surging dollar, which has a long history of inflicting damage on developing nations,” Mr. Sharma said.

    Nevertheless, as The Wall Street Journal concluded, the vulnerability of Turkey’s debt-driven growth  was such that it only took two tweets by US President Donald J. Trump announcing sanctions against two Turkish ministers and the doubling of some tariffs to accelerate the Turkish lira’s tailspin.

    Mr. Erdogan may not immediately draw the same conclusion, but it is certainly one that is likely to serve as a cautionary note for countries that see debt, whether domestic or associated with China’s infrastructure-driven Belt and Road initiative, as a main driver of growth.

  • Peso, Loonie Jump On Reports US-Mexico NAFTA "Handshake Deal" To Be Announced Thursday

    One could be forgiven for thinking this sudden ‘coming to the table’ could be related to today’s Trump-related tumult, but away from that cynicism, Politico reports that the Trump administration is planning to announce Thursday that it has reached a breakthrough in NAFTA talks with Mexico.

    The Mexican Peso popped to two-week highs on the news…

    Citing three unidentified people close to the talks, Politico notes that this “handshake” deal announcement on Thursday, would clear the way for Canada to rejoin negotiations to revise the free trade pact.

    And the Loonie jumped…

    Away from the positive news-cycle distraction this may be for President Trump, Mexico has for weeks been pressing to wrap up at least a preliminary deal by Aug. 25 in order for current President Enrique Peña Nieto to have time to sign it before he leaves office Dec. 1.

    However, even if Pena Nieto signs the Nafta deal, it will be up to a Mexican Senate controlled by AMLO’s allies to pass it, and to AMLO to implement it. That requires a deal that both can accept.

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Aug 21

Today’s News 21st August 2018

  • As Lira Collapses, Turks Are Piling Into Cryptocurrency

    The hype is dead, long live the hype.

    2017 was a breakthrough year for cryptocurrency. Its combined market cap soared to unprecedented heights, leading to lots of media attention and celebrity endorsements, such as Paris Hilton and Floyd Mayweather, for Bitcoin and other similar currencies.

    In 2018, however, the skyrocketing ascent began to turn around. In December 2017, one Bitcoin was valued at almost 20,000 U.S. dollars. By the the end of July 2018, the digital currency’s price was just above 8,000 U.S. dollars. Now, in the middle of August, the blockchain-driven coin is worth around 6,500 U.S. dollars.

    However, as Statista’s Raynor de Best notes, this price drop could present new investors with an opportunity to enter the market. The latest results of the ING International Survey show that relatively few consumers have invested in Bitcoin or other virtual currencies.

    Infographic: How Many Consumers Own Cryptocurrency? | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Nine percent of European consumers indicate they own a type of cryptocurrency in 2018, compared to eight percent in the United States and seven percent in Australia.

    According to the source, many respondents worry about the risks in investing in the currencies. In the Netherlands, the leading reason not to own cryptocurrencies was that people were not interested in it.

    Luxembourg and Belgium reached the lowest percentage within Europe, whereas 18 percent in Turkey say they own a digital currency… and as the Lira collapses, we suspect even more.

  • The Swedish Welfare State Leads To Poor Immigrant Assimilation

    Authored by José Niño via The Mises Institute,

    Are cracks emerging in the Swedish welfare state?

    Leftist experts routinely praise the country for its generous welfare state, and cast shame on countries in the Anglo sphere, such as the United States, for not adopting Nordic style welfare systems.

    Although Scandinavian countries feature sizeable welfare states, they are far from socialist. However, the presence of welfare mechanisms in an economy can still be problematic.

    At the moment, Sweden is experiencing trouble in assimilating its immigrant population. Recent reports reveal a rising number of violent crimes in immigrant suburbs. Although Sweden’s overall crime rates are low, the country is experiencing increasing levels of gang violence and shootings, and the emergence of immigrant ghettoes.

    This is not exclusive to Sweden, as other European countries like France, have had numerous issues with immigrant assimilation. Such troubles from new arrivals has spurred a populist uprising across Europe, with Sweden joining in the mix. In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigration party, has gained steam campaigning on immigration.

    The topic of immigration is nuanced, and both sides of the debate (closed vs. open borders) raise valid concerns. But there might be something more to this immigration assimilation conundrum than meets the eye.

    Sweden Is not so Exceptional

    Sweden’s vaunted welfare state could be the very culprit behind the recent wave of immigrant unrest. Since the publication of Nina Sanandaji’s Scandinavian Unexceptionalism, a growing number of intellectuals have started to remove the magical aura of the Scandinavian welfare model.

    Scandinavian Unexceptionalism sheds light, however, on one overlooked development – immigration and assimilation. Sanandaji argues that the welfare state has impaired immigrants’ when it comes to integrating into, and contributing to, the Swedish economy.

    Providing a balanced approach to the topic, Sanandaji offers a positive portrayal of immigration trends in the mid-twentieth century, highlighting how “the rate of employment for foreign-born residents was 20 per cent higher than that for the average citizen” in 1950s.

    But as Sweden’s welfare state grew and its labor policies tightened, Sweden’s once rosy immigration story started to produce several worrisome trends, which Sanandaji covers in detail:

    By 2000, however, the rate of employment was 30 per cent lower for the foreign-born residents. Another comparison shows that, in 1968, foreign-born individuals had 22 per cent higher income from work compared with those born in Sweden. In 1999, the average income of foreign-born residents was 45 per cent lower than that of those born in Sweden.

    Middle Eastern immigrants, in particular, have bared the brunt of this integration dilemma.

    Since the 1970s, Sweden has attracted immigrants from Middle Eastern countries such as Iraq, Iran, and Turkey — the author of Scandinavian Unexceptionialism himself is a Swede of Iranian origin. Initially, these immigrants were able to assimilate without issue.

    However, in present times, Middle Eastern immigrants in Sweden are not reaping the same benefits as their counterparts in more labor-friendly countries such as the United States. Sanandaji’s shares how Iranian and Turkish immigrants’ work income stacks up against native Swedes:

    Between 1993 and 2000, the income from work for the average Iranian immigrant was only 61 per cent, and for the average Turkish immigrant 74 per cent, of the average income of a native Swede.

    In contrast, Iranian and Turkish immigrants to the United States have fared better:

    According to the US Census for 2000, those born in Iran had an income that was 136 per cent of the average for native-born US residents. Those born in Turkey had an income of 114 per cent of the average for native-born residents.

    Sanandaji concedes that differences exist between Iranian and Turkish migrants to the United States and those who migrated to Sweden. Nevertheless, Sanandaji contends that the differences alone cannot explain the huge gap in economic outcomes between the immigrant groups, since “many of those who left for Sweden had belonged to the Turkish or Iranian middle classes.”

    Coming to Grips with the Toxicity of the Welfare State

    So there may be overlooked institutional factors at play when analyzing Sweden’s immigrant dilemma. This is part of a systemic problem sweeping across Europe since bureaucratic entities like the European Commission have sponsored generous refugee programs.

    These programs’ perverse incentives have created a form of “asylum shopping” where refugees bounce from one country that grants them asylum to another one with more generous welfare benefits.

    A more sensible solution to this problem would be for private organizations to sponsor immigrants and refugees without having the state involved in any form of welfare provision. Ideally, there would be free movement of people to whichever location aligns with their interests.

    But due to the welfare state creating distortions and questionable incentives, an open border system, as currently constructed, would not send out accurate market signals of economic opportunity.

    It may be time for mainstream pundits to admit that the Nordic model of generous welfare states comes with significant costs. Although Nordic countries still enjoy high levels of economic freedom, their creeping levels of welfare socialism can still present problems.

    Government’s natural tendency to grow and the presence of welfare states allow for politicians to buy votes and pursue myopic policies for the sake of political expediency. But like all government intervention, welfare policies comes with a cost — both economically and socially.

    Recognizing this uncomfortable truth will bring us closer to understanding that free markets are the solution to the current problems. Flirting with another variant of statism — social democracy in this case — needs to be completely discarded just like other statist systems that have come before it.

  • World Population Growth Visualized (1950-2100)

    In any large set of data, there are bound to be some interesting outliers.

    Today’s data visualization comes to us from Reddit user /r/mythicquale and it shows the population growth of every country using data and projections from the United Nations population division.

    The graph is on a logarithmic scale, which ultimately groups together most growth rates even though they would be much further apart on a linear scale. This means the places outside of the middle range are the true outliers, gaining or losing many multiples of their original populations.

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

    Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desrjardins details the stories that are worth looking at in more depth.

    WORLD POPULATION GROWTH OUTLIERS

    How the population grows in any particular country is a function of fertility, mortality, and migration rates, and these outliers each have something anomalous happening at least one of these factors.

    Montserrat

    In 1995, a previously dormant volcano erupted in this British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean, destroying the island’s capital city of Plymouth. People evacuated, mostly fleeing to the United Kingdom, and the population of the island dropped by two-thirds over the period of five years.

    Interestingly, Plymouth is still listed as the territory’s capital city today, making it the only capital city of a political jurisdiction that is completely abandoned.

    U.A.E.

    Dubai was once a fishing village, but now it’s an international real estate hub. Abu Dhabi had just 25,000 people in 1960, and today it’s a metropolis of almost 2 million people.

    Oil wealth and significant investment is one side of the story, but the influx of foreign workers is an even bigger one. In fact, U.A.E. citizens only make up 11.5% of the population, and the rest (88.5%) is made of workers mostly from South Asia.

    It’s also worth mentioning that immigrant labor in the U.A.E. has been the subject of scrutiny internationally, as there have been instances of human rights violations and accusations of forced labor.

    Qatar

    Qatar is another Middle Eastern country that has shot up in population, and it carries a similar story to the United Arab Emirates. Only about 12% of the population is Qatari, and the rest consists of migrant works mostly from South Asia. Qatar, which has the highest GDP per capita in the world, also has faced similar allegations as the U.A.E. regarding the use of forced labor.

    Back in 1950, Qatar’s population was just 50,000, but today the country boasts 2.6 million people.

  • Former MI6 Spy Alastair Crooke: The Metaphysics To Our Present Global Anguish

    Authored by former MI6 spy and EU diplomat Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    James Jatras, a former US diplomat poses a highly pertinent question in his piece Lenin Updated: Firstly, he says, President Trump meets with President Putin and appears to make some progress in easing bilateral tensions. “Immediately all hell breaks loose: Trump is called a traitor. The ‘sanctions bill from hell’ is introduced in the Senate, and Trump is forced onto the defensive”.

    Next, Senator Rand Paul goes to meet with Putin in Moscow, Jatras notes. Paul hands over a letter from the US President proposing moderate steps towards détente. Rand Paul then meets with, and invites Russian Senators to Washington, to continue the dialogue: “Immediately all hell breaks loose. Paul is called a traitor. The state Department ‘finds’ the Russians guilty of using illegal chemical weapons (in UK) … and imposes sanctions. Trump is forced even more on the defensive.”

    Clearly, from the very outset, Trump has been “perceived by the globalist neo-liberal order as a mortal danger to the system which has enriched them” Jatras observes. The big question that Jatras poses in the wake of these events, is how could such collective hysteria have blossomed in to such visceral hostility, that parts of the ‘Anglo’ establishment are ready to intensify hostilities toward Russia – even to the point of risking “a catastrophic, uncontainable [nuclear] conflict”. How is it that the élite’s passion ‘to save globalism’ is so completely overwhelming that it demands their risking human extinction? Jatras suggests that we are dealing here with hugely powerful psychic impulses.

    Image source: Getty via Foreign Policy

    Jatras answers by evoking the zeitgeist of Lenin, when, in 1915, he made his infamous turn towards civil war inside Russia. That is, a war versus ‘Russia’ – in and of itself – its history, its culture, its religion, and its intellectual and political legacy. With up to 10 million Russians left dead by his cleansing, Lenin said “I spit on Russia. [The slaughter is but] only one stage we have to pass through, on our way to world revolution [i.e. to his vision of a universal Communism].

    Professor John Gray, writing in his book, Black Mass, notes that “the world in which we find ourselves … is littered with the debris of utopian projects which – though they were framed in secular terms that denied the truth of religion – were in fact, vehicles for religious myth”. The Jacobin revolutionaries launched the Terror as a violent retribution for élite repression – inspired by Rousseau’s Enlightenment humanism; the Trotskyite Bolsheviks murdered millions in the name of reforming humanity through Scientific Empiricism; the Nazis did similar, in the name of pursuing ‘Scientific (Darwinian) Racism’.

    All these utopian, (murderous) projects effectively flowed from a style of mechanical, single-track, thinking that had evolved in Europe, over the centuries, and which seated the unshakeable sense of one’s own certainty and conviction — in the West European thinker, at least.

    These supposedly empirically-arrived-at certitudes — seated now in the human ego  — triggered a re-awakening precisely to those early Judeo-Christian, apocalyptic notions: That history, somehow, was on a convergent course towards some human transformation, and an ‘End’, with fearful retribution for the corrupt, and a radically, redeemed, new world, for the elect. No longer (in today’s world), triggered through an act of God, but ‘engineered’ by the act of Enlightenment man.

    World redemption from its state of corruption was to be brought into being through Enlightenment principles of rationality and science. Peace was expected to ensue, after the End Time.

    These millenarian revolutionaries – exponents of the new Scientism, who hoped to force a shattering discontinuity in history (through which the flaws of human society would be excised from the body politic) – were, in the last resort, nothing other than secular representatives of the apocalyptic Judaic and Christian myth.

    The American millenarian ‘myth’, then and now, was (and is), rooted in the fervent belief in the Manifest Destiny of the United States, ‘the New Jerusalem’, to represent humanity’s best hope for a utopian future. This belief in a special destiny has been reflected in a conviction that the United States must lead – or more properly, has the duty to coerce – mankind toward that future.

    Some might argue, however, that early Enlightenment ‘liberal’ humanism, with its ‘good intentions’, has no connection to Jacobinism or Trotskyite Bolshevism. But, in practice, both are crucially similar: They are secular versions of progress towards a utopian, redemption of a flawed humanity: One strand aims to reclaim humanity through the revolutionary destruction of the irredeemable parts of society. And the other strand roots its redemption in a teleological process of ‘melting’ away cultural identity. It also seeks to weaken the sense of linkage through shared ‘blood’ and territory (place) – in order to create a tabula rasa on which a new homogenised non-national, cosmopolitan identity can be writ, that will be both peaceful and democratic.

    The aim is a global, cosmopolitan society disembarrassed of religion, national culture and community, gender and social class. Processes of toleration that, formerly, were construed as essential to freedom have undergone an Orwellian metamorphosis to emerge as their antonyms: as instruments, rather, of repression. Any national leader standing against this project, any contrary national culture, or national pride displayed in a nation’s achievements, plainly constitutes an obstacle to this prospective universal realm – and must be destroyed. In other words, today’s millenarians may eschew the guillotine, but they are explicitly coercive – albeit, in a different manner – through the progressive ‘capture’ of narrative, and of state institutions.

    Image via Strategic Culture Foundation

    In short, a global space is being sought that would recognize only an international global humanity — much as the Trotskyites wanted. 

    So, how is it, precisely, that Russia and Mr Putin has come to constitute the antithesis to the utopian project, and the trigger to such fear and hysteria amongst the globalist élites?

    It springs, I suggest, from a percolating awareness amongst western élites that formal (Latin) Judeo-Christian monotheism – which gave western Europe its insistence on singularity of meaning, its linear itinerary, and its partner ideology of secular millenarianism – both find themselves increasingly questioned, and in decline.

    Henry Kissinger says the mistake the West (and NATO) is making “is to think that there is a sort of historic evolution that will march across Eurasia – and not to understand that somewhere on that march it will encounter something – very different to a Westphalian [western idea of a liberal democratic and market orientated state] entity.” It is time to relinquish ‘old pretenses’, Kissinger emphasizes – for, “we are in a very, very grave period for the world”.

    No doubt linked to this alienation from both revealed religion, and its secular utopian counterpart, is the general collapse in the optimistic certitudes connected with the idea of linear ‘progress’ – in which many (particularly the young), no longer believe (seeing the evidence of the world about them).

    But what really riles the globalists is the contemporary trend, manifested most particularly, by Russia, towards a pluralism which privileges one’s culture, history, religiosity and ties of blood, land and language – and which sees in this re-appropriation of traditional values, the path to the re-sovereigntisation of a particular people. The Russian ‘Eurasian’ notion is one of different cultures, autonomous, and sovereign, which, at least implicitly, constitutes a rejection of the Latin theology of equality, and reductive universalism (i.e. achieved through Redemption.)

    The idea rather, is of a grouping of ‘nations’, each reaching back to its primordial cultures and identities – i.e. Russia being ‘Russian’ in its own ‘Russian cultural way’ – and not permitting itself to be coerced into mimicking the westernisation impulse. What makes a wider grouping of Eurasian nations feasible is that cultural identities are complex and storied: It escapes the prevailing obsession to reduce every nation to a singularity in value, and to a singularity of ‘meaning’. The ground for collaboration and conversation thus widens beyond ‘the either-or’, to the differing strata of complex identities – and interests.

    Why should this seem so ‘diabolical’ to the western global élites? Why all the hysteria? Well … they ‘scent’ in Russian Eurasianism (and so-called populism, more generally) a stealth reversion to the old, pre-Socratic values: For the Ancients, as just one example, the very notion of ‘man’, in that way, did not exist. There were only men: Greeks, Romans, barbarians, Syrians, and so on. This stands in obvious opposition to universal, cosmopolitan ‘man’.

    Once the Roman Empire took over Christianity as a ‘westernised’ dissident form of Judaism, neither Europe nor Christianity conformed any longer to their origins, or somehow to their own ‘natures’. Absolute monotheism, in its dualistic form, was profoundly foreign to the European mind. Latin Christianity first tried (not very successfully) to repress the Ancient values, before deciding it was better to try to assimilate them into Christianity. Russian Orthodoxy however managed to retain its itinerary: whereas the Latin Church suffered multiple crises – not the least being that of the Enlightenment and the Protestant dissidence flooding across western Europe.

    The fearful élites, in fact, are right: The disappearance in modernity of any external norm, beyond civic conformity, which might guide the individual in his or her life and actions, and the enforced eviction of the individual from any form of structure (social classes, Church, family, society and gender), has made a ‘turning back’ to what was always latent, if half forgotten, somehow inevitable.

    Author Alistair Crook, founder of Conflicts Forum and former MI6 officer and EU diplomat. Image via Valdai Discussion Club

    It represents a ‘reaching back’ to an old ‘storehouse’ of values – a silent religiosity; a ‘turn back’ to being again ‘in, and of’ the world. A storehouse that has in fact remained unchanged (albeit clothed in Christianity), with its foundational myths, and notion of cosmic ‘order’ (maat) still swirling in the deeper levels of the collective unconscious. Of course, ‘the Ancient’ cannot be an ad integrum return. It cannot be the simple restoration of what once was. It has to be brought forward as if ‘youth’ come back again – the eternal return – out of our own decomposition.

    Henri Corbin, the scholar of Islam, once noting a panel in Iran in which the shapes of vases of various shapes were cut out from wooden back panel of a cupboard, suggested that, as with these vases whose solid forms no longer existed, somehow the space that that they once occupied still remains – if only as a void, marked by outline. So too, old notions and values somehow have left behind their outlines, too. And this, maybe, is what is driving the globalist élite to their medications: 500 years ago, the Enlightenment crushed the brief impulse from the Ancient world in Europe, known as the Renaissance. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and it is the world of today’s élites which is imploding. What had been imagined as defeated, beyond recovery, is cautiously arising out from our crumbled ruins. The wheel of time turns, and comes around, again. It may all fare badly – the mode of linear one-track thinking implanted in the West does have an inbuilt propensity towards totalitarianism. We shall see. 

    Just as then, when the tide of the Enlightenment bulldozed through old beliefs, hauling everything that was Delphic and unfathomable, out into the laser gaze of radical scepticism – causing terrible psychic tensions (more than 10,000 Europeans were burnt alive during the Great Witch hysteria) – so, today, we have a wave of still inchoate ‘otherness’ emerging from the deepest levels of human psyche to hurl itself onto the rocks of Enlightenment self-certainty. The tensions and the hysteria, follow in a similar way.

    Its ‘return’ is driving men and woman literally mad – mad enough, even to risk a catastrophic war, rather than to relinquish the myth of America’s Manifest Destiny, or even to acknowledge the flaws to their radically disjunctive way of thinking about a world that must be brought to some global convergence.

  • Majority Americans Want Diplomacy With Russia Over Sanctions: Gallup

    A Monday Gallup poll reveals that most Americans feel it is more important for the United States to work towards improving relations with Russia, as opposed to sanctions. 

    Of those surveyed, 58% say it’s “more important to improve relations with Russia,” while 36% say “strong diplomatic steps against Russia” are a priority. 

    The poll, which took place between Aug. 1-12, comes after nearly two years of constant media bombardment over Russian hacking, invasive DOJ investigations which Trump refers to as a “witch hunt,” and an admission by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that alleged hacking and social media influence campaigns by Russia had no effect on the 2016 US election. 

    That said, 75% of those surveyed by Gallup believe Russia interfered in the election, while 16% say they did not. Of those who say Russia interfered, 36% said it didn’t change the outcome, while 39% say it did. 

    Opionions over whether Russia actually influenced the election were also highly partisan – with 78% if Democrats saying that Russian interference affected the outcome of the election, and just 9% of Republicans who believe that Russia both hacked – and changed the outcome, of the election. The vast majority of Republicans (58%) think Russia did interfere, but it didn’t affect the outcome. 

    Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced a new round of sanctions against Russia in response to allegations that the Kremlin was behind an attack against former Russia double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. 

    Gallup’s conclusion: “Although U.S.-Russian tensions continue to simmer, more Americans are inclined to believe the U.S. is better off trying to improve relations with Russia. Americans are largely convinced that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election but are divided, largely along party lines, as to whether that country’s involvement changed the outcome.”

  • Geoengineering Could Lead To Lower Crop Yields: New Study

    Authored by Derrick Broze via The Conscious Resistance,

    A new study has determined that spraying the skies with chemicals to combat global warming will likely come with the unintended side-effect of reducing crop yields.

    Researchers with the University of California, Berkeley, have published a new study which calls into question the scientific efforts to block sunlight via climate engineering, also known as geoengineering. Geoengineering is the deliberate and large-scale manipulation of the weather and climate using a variety of technologies. One popular form of geoengineering being explored by scientists is known as Solar Radiation Management (SRM), a process which involves spraying aerosols from planes equipped with particulates designed to reflect sunlight in an effort to combat “anthropogenic global warming.”

    However, the UC Berkeley team has found new evidence that sun-blocking material will likely also reduce the yields of certain crops. The researchers came to this conclusion by studying previous volcanic eruptions in Mexico and the Philippines. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines and El Chichon in Mexico in 1982 caused a decrease in wheat, soy, and rice production due to the volcanic ash blocking sun light.

    “Here we use the volcanic eruptions that inspired modern solar radiation management proposals as natural experiments to provide the first estimates, to our knowledge, of how the stratospheric sulfate aerosols created by the eruptions of El Chichón and Mount Pinatubo altered the quantity and quality of global sunlight, and how these changes in sunlight affected global crop yields,” the researchers wrote.

    The researchers concluded that “projected mid-twenty-first century damages due to scattering sunlight caused by solar radiation management are roughly equal in magnitude to benefits from cooling”. The team calls for more studies on the effects of solar radiation management on other global systems, including human health. The research team published their study, Estimating global agricultural effects of geoengineering using volcanic eruptions,  in the journal Nature.

    “If we think of geoengineering as an experimental surgery, our findings suggest that the side effects of the treatment are just as bad as the original disease,” author Jonathan Proctor of the University of California, Berkeley, told Reuters UK during a telephone news conference.

    Unfortunately, the UC Berkeley study is only the latest in a long line of research pointing to the dangerous outcomes involved with the implementation of geoengineering technology.

    On April 6, Janos Pasztor, former United Nations assistant secretary-general on climate change, spoke at Arizona State University regarding the dangers of solar geoengineering and the need for international rules to regulate the controversial technology. During his speech Pasztor discussed the potential dangers of geoengineering, including the upcoming experiment being conducted by Harvard University in Arizona.

    “Some time within the next year, we may see the world’s first outdoor experiment on stratospheric aerosol injection take place here in the skies above Arizona, yet for the most part governments are not aware of, nor addressing, the profound governance issues this poses,” Mr Pasztor said. “We urgently need an open, inclusive discussion on how the world will research and govern solar geoengineering. Otherwise we could be in danger of events overtaking society’s capacity to respond prudently and effectively.”

    Pasztor is referencing Harvard engineer (and consistent proponent of climate engineering) David Keith and his plan for a new project, SCoPEx (Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment), which will assess the risks and benefits of deploying geoengineering on a large public scale. Keith and fellow engineer, Frank Keutsch, will research the benefits and risks by spraying particles such as sulfur dioxide, alumina, or calcium carbonate from a high-altitude balloon over Arizona during 2018.

    Pasztor currently serves as the head of the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative (C2G2), an initiative launched by the Carnegie Council in order to “bring the profoundly complex issues of geoengineering governance and ethics to a much wider audience.” The Carnegie Council has previously called for global governance structures to regulate the use of geoengineering.

    In late January, researchers with Yale University, Rutgers University and the University of Maryland offered a warning against the sudden starting or stopping of controversial geoengineering programs. The researchers warn that efforts to inject aerosols into the atmosphere to combat climate change may end up causing more harm to wildlife, the environment, and humanity. The study, “Potentially dangerous consequences for biodiversity of solar geoengineering implementation and termination,” was published in the journal Nature.

    This study is not the first one to draw attention to the dangers of beginning geoengineering programs. According to a 2013 study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, if geoengineering programs were started and then suddenly halted, the planet could see an immediate rise in temperatures, particularly over land. Another study published in February 2015 by an international committee of scientists stated that geoengineering techniques are not a viable alternative to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to combat the effects of climate change. The committee report called for further research and understanding of various geoengineering techniques, including carbon dioxide removal schemes and solar-radiation management before implementation. The scientists found that SRM techniques are likely to present “serious known and possible unknown environmental, social, and political risks, including the possibility of being deployed unilaterally.”

    In addition, in late October 2016, the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity released a report examining the problems of geoengineering and whether or not humanity will be forced to employ the practice in an attempt to halt climate change. The report, Update On Climate Geoengineering In relation to the Convention on Biological Diversity: Potential Impacts and Regulatory Framework, found that geoengineering “would reduce the impacts of climate change on biodiversity at the global level,” but also cause unpredictable rain and temperature distribution on the local level.

    In addition, back in January a leaked draft report from the U.N. panel of climate experts called geoengineering “economically, socially and institutionally infeasible.” The U.N. once again recognized that geoengineering could disrupt weather patterns.

    With all of this evidence indicating disruption of global weather patterns, loss of blue skies, and reduction in crop yields, one has to ask, why is the scientific establishment still pushing such a dangerous idea?

  • Chinese Oil Imports From Iran Surge As Beijing Shifts To Iran Tankers To Bypass Sanctions

    One month ago, when discussing the shift in Iran’s oil customer base as a result of Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Nuclear treaty and the potential blowback from China, we noted that in a harbinger of what’s to come, an executive from China’s Dongming Petrochemical Group, an independent refiner from Shandong province, said his refinery had already cancelled U.S. crude orders. “We expect the Chinese government to impose tariffs on (U.S.) crude,” the unnamed executive said. “We will switch to either Middle East or West African supplies,” he said. We also said that China may even replace most if not all American oil with crude from Iran: “Chinese importers are not going to be intimidated, or swayed by U.S. sanctions.”

    And sure enough, today Reuters reported that Chinese buyers of Iranian oil are starting to shift their cargoes to vessels owned by National Iranian Tanker Co (NITC) for nearly all of their imports to keep supply flowing amid the re-imposition of economic sanctions by the United States.

    To safeguard their supplies, state oil trader Zhuhai Zhenrong Corp and Sinopec Group, Asia’s biggest refiner, have activated a clause in its long-term supply agreements with National Iranian Oil Corp (NIOC) that allows them to use NITC-operated tankers, according to four sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

    The expected shift demonstrates that China – Iran’s biggest oil customer with India and the EU in 2nd and 3rd spot –  will keep buying Iranian crude despite the US sanctions .

    It also means that NITC will be shipping the oil to Chinese shores direct, keeping its customers’ information secret to avoid US retaliation although it would be pretty simple to track where the bulk of Iran’s tanker fleet is going. It was the same tactic used by China before the sanctions on Iran were lifted in 2016.

    According to the report, in July all 17 tankers chartered to carry oil from Iran to China are operated by NITC. In June, 8 of 19 vessels chartered were Chinese operated.

    Furthermore, China appears to also be importing more product: in July, those tankers were loaded about 23.8 million barrels of crude oil and condensate destined for China, or about 767,000 barrels per day (bpd) a 20% surge  from June, when the loadings were a more modest 19.8 million barrels, or 660,000 bpd. Both month were higher than China’s 2017 numbers when it imported an average of 623,000 bpd from Iran.

    With the new shipping arrangement, Iranian oil cargoes to China are expected to stay at recent levels through October, said Reuters sources.

    However, there is a problem: insurers, which are mainly U.S. or European based, and which are complying with the US sanctions, have already begun winding down their Iranian business to comply with the sanctions. This is also why the price for the oil under the long-term deals was changed to a delivered ex-ship basis from the previous free-on-board terms, meaning that Iran will cover all the costs and risks of delivering the crude as well as handling the insurance, the sources said.

    But, as Reuters notes, it was not immediately clear how Iran would provide insurance for the Chinese oil purchases, worth some $1.5 billion a month. Insurance usually includes cover for the oil cargoes, third-party liability and pollution.

    “This is not the first time companies exercised the option… Whenever there is a need the buyers can use that,” said a Reuters source, a senior Beijing-based oil executive.

    As for where Iran will get the money, it simply has no choice, unless it is willing to risk losing its biggest customer. This leaves another option: China may simply front the funding needs to Iran in the way it arranged oil deliveries from Venezuela: by arranging a vendor financing in which China gets a steep discount, or is paid in kind, which would mean that even more of Iran’s oil production will be meant for China.

    Finally, there is the question of how the US will respond when Beijing is once again openly flouting – as it did during the last Iran sanctions – Trump’s threats to all Iranian oil customers, and whether China’s oil imports from Iran will be a sensitive issue in the upcoming China-US trade talks.

  • "We Are Not Going Bankrupt" Musk Vows As Tesla Suppliers Panic Over Stopped Payments

    Less than a month after the WSJ reported first that Tesla was quietly asking suppliers for “cash back” on existing and future projects, describing the request as “essential to Tesla’s continued operation” and characterizing it as an investment in the car company, investors quickly sold off the stock sending it back under $300, amid growing fears of a liquidity crisis at the electric automaker.

    And while those fears were forgotten after the company’s “strong earnings” a few days later, and then forgotten even more after the tragicomedy involving the Saudi investment, Elon Musk’s take private tweet (with “funding secured” which we now know it wasn’t), the biggest problem facing Tesla’s ongoing profitability, viability and existence, has been liquidity, or the lack thereof.

    That problem has also just made a triumphal comeback when in a follow up article, the WSJ reports that some of Tesla’s suppliers are increasingly concerned “about the auto maker’s financial strength after production of the Model 3 car drained some of its cash.”

    Specifically, a recent survey sent privately by a well-regarded automotive supplier association to top executives, and seen by the WS , found that 18 of 22 respondents believe that Tesla is now a financial risk to their companies.

    Meanwhile, confirming last month’s report that Tesla is increasingly relying on net working capital, and specifically accounts payable to window dress its liquidity, several suppliers said Tesla has tried to stretch out payments or asked for significant cash back. And in some cases, public records show, small suppliers over the past several months have claimed they failed to get paid for services supplied to Tesla.

    In an interview with the WSJ on Friday, Elon Musk said that “we’re not behind because we can’t pay them. It is just because we’re arguing whether the parts are right.”

    Still, while the universe of affected suppliers is small in the context of the entire Tesla supply chain, taken together, the survey, interviews and documents show some suppliers are anxious about Tesla’s ability to pay them back.

    Meanwhile, vendors have finally learned that if Tesla goes bankrupt, their claims will be dumped alongside everyone else in the pre-petition file. And they are not happy.

    “Regarding Tesla, any time there is uncertainty in the marketplace, it causes concerns for suppliers,“ said Julie Fream, the chief executive of the Original Equipment Suppliers Association, which sent the survey in the past few weeks—a period that encompassed Tesla’s second-quarter earnings and Mr. Musk’s announcement on Twitter that Tesla had secured funding for a plan to go private. “The current dialogue about Tesla ’going private,’ the well-publicized Model 3 manufacturing ramp-up challenges, as well as recently reported contentious purchasing tactics raise concerns for our members.”

    In an attempt to regain control of the discussion, and to steer it away far from Tesla’s liquifity, Musk and CFO Deepak Ahuja told the WSJ said Tesla’s financial strength is improving and it remains on track to be cash-flow positive and profitable in the current quarter. They said relations with its suppliers are good.

    “If there was any doubt in our suppliers in the first place that should definitely be strongly extinguished, with our commentary and our results and the ramp-up of our production,” Mr. Ahuja said.

    But what perhaps is most interesting in the article is the update on Tesla’s current cash pile: as a reminder, on June 30, Tesla reported cash of $2.24 billion, down from $3.37 billion at the start of the year. This number has fallen further, and as of August 12, the company now had just $1.69 billion in cash and equivalents, mostly due to repaying $500 million of a revolving credit line in July.

    The good news: the revolver was paid down not because the banks demanded it and according to Tesla, it plans to tap that same amount again later this quarter. Then again, it won’t be the first time the company has lied in recent weeks. That said, it was not clear how high Tesla’s accounts payable had risen in the interim.

    Meanwhile, the cash flow that Tesla hopes to generate from an increase in vehicle deliveries in the second half of the quarter, is expected to leave it with several hundred million dollars more in cash at the end of September compared with three months earlier, according to the records.

    That may be a stretch: to conserve cash, as the WSJ reported last month, Tesla has asked some of its capital-equipment suppliers in recent weeks for cash back ranging from 9% to 20% of what the company paid dating back to 2016. In one email to a supplier reviewed by the Journal, Tesla asked for help to make “an immediate impact” by providing a rebate on products already purchased.

    One parts supplier was asked by Tesla for a 10% reduction on costs across the board going forward, a person familiar with the matter said in an interview. This person said the request was extreme, saying other auto makers typically seek savings of 1% to 2% on individual parts or programs.

    The supplier said Tesla indicated it would ask to extend the payment terms to 120 days from 60 days if it didn’t get the price reduction, a length rarer among auto makers than a 90-day term.

    As a reminder, no healthy company tries to blackmail its suppliers. And yet to Tesla it is perfectly normal: Ahuja said it is normal for auto makers to ask for better terms as the business improves. Tesla has steadily lengthened its payment terms over the past few years, and more U.S. public companies are extending the amount of time they take to pay their bills.

    More troubling is that one of the suppliers said Tesla has stopped making payments to the company since last spring despite numerous promises. This person said he fears insolvency for his own company if he continues to ship products to Tesla and not get paid.

    Furthermore, as has been reported on twitter in recent weeks, public records show 16 companies since October have taken the unusual step of filing mechanic’s liens—or legal claims seeking unpaid compensation—against Tesla claiming bills haven’t been paid for supplies and services. Previously, only four liens had been filed against Tesla in all of 2015 and 2016 combined.

    The liens were mostly filed this year in Alameda County, Calif., by small subcontractors against Tesla and contractors of the auto maker, primarily for providing work at the company’s Fremont factory. Some of the suppliers have since been paid, and the total outstanding dollar amount of claims is relatively small, totaling nearly $8 million, according to the documents.

    Liens filed by suppliers against auto makers are rare, say automotive industry specialists:

    “When a customer is having financial issues…suppliers start filing liens to protect their secured position to ensure they are paid,” said Dan Sharkey, a lawyer at Brooks, Wilkins, Sharkey & Turco PLLC who specializes in supply-chain issues.

    Here too Tesla vehemently denied it was in trouble: Tesla’s CFO “said it would be wrong to see the liens by subcontractors as a sign of financial distress.”

    “It is an issue between the subcontractor and contractor,” he said, adding that it is common practice for subcontractors to name the manufacturer in a lien to create pressure on it.

    What about the dwead B(ankwupt) word?

    The OEM Suppliers Association survey found that eight of 22 respondents said they are worried about the auto maker filing for bankruptcy. It was conducted between July 26 and Aug. 8, the day after Mr. Musk tweeted about a plan to go private. He has since revealed a deal is far from complete.

    In an email on Friday to the Journal, Mr. Musk said, “We are definitely not going bankrupt.”

    Of course, this is the same person how two weeks ago tweeted that a Tesla LBO is virtually assured as the “funding was secured.”

    A few days later it turned out that Musk lied, and his only goal was to “burn the shorts.” So why not lie again, especially as the shorts are increasingly getting the upper hand. That’s another question the SEC should probably once it finally pays Tesla a visit.

  • Pentagon: US Forces To Stay In Iraq "As Long As Needed"

    Via Middle East Eye,

    US forces will stay in Iraq “as long as needed” to help stabilise regions once controlled by the Islamic State (IS) group, a spokesman for the US-led international coalition said on Sunday.

    “We’ll keep troops there as long as we think they’re needed … The main reason, after ISIS (IS) is defeated militarily, is the stabilisation efforts and we still need to be there for that, so that’s one of the reasons we’ll maintain a presence,” Colonel Sean Ryan told a news conference in Abu Dhabi.

    The Pentagon said last week that IS appears to be “well-positioned to rebuild and work on enabling its physical caliphate to re-emerge,” Voice of America reported.

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

    In its latest intelligence estimates, the Pentagon put the number of IS militants operating in Iraq and Syria at between 28,000 and 32,000, VOA said.

    The number of American soldiers may decline, Ryan said, depending on when other forces from NATO deploy to help train the Iraqi army, he said, adding that about 5,200 US troops are currently based in Iraq.

    NATO defence ministers agreed in February to a bigger “train-and-advise” mission in Iraq after a US call for the alliance to help stabilise the country after three years of war against IS.

    “Possibly, there could be a drawdown, it just depends on when NATO comes in and they help train the forces as well,” Ryan said.

    Iraq officially announced victory over the militants last December, five months after capturing their stronghold of Mosul.

    The US also has about 2,000 troops in Syria, assisting the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) clear pockets still under the control of IS along the border with Iraq.

    “We’re starting to see a lot of collaboration between the SDF and ISF (Iraqi Security Forces), because it used to be that they would just come to the coalition, but now, we have them talking to each other as well,” said Ryan.

    The Iraqi military has carried out several air strikes against IS in Syria since last year, the last of which was a few days ago, with the approval of President Bashar al-Assad and the US-led coalition.

    SDF operations to finish off the militants on the Syrian side have been delayed by hundreds of explosive devices planted by IS, according to Ryan.

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Aug 20

Today’s News 20th August 2018

  • Iran Defends Eurasia Integration By Unveiling New Fighter Jet

    Iran served as a critical bridge in the ancient Silk Road, connecting the East and the West. It also has enormous potential to play a significant role in the new Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

    With the threat of hot war almost a monthly occurrence, the Trump administration has unleashed economic warfare on Iran, as it has become clear: Iran is a significant piece of the BRI.

    The assault of sanctions, launched after Washington’s unilateral pullout from the Iran nuclear deal, “should be interpreted as an advance gambit in the New Great Game at whose center lies in China’s New Silk Road–arguably the most important infrastructure project of the 21st century—and overall Eurasia integration,” said Pepe Escobar, a Brazilian journalist with focus on Central Asia and the Middle East.

    Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs: China, Iran, & One Belt, One Road

    The Trump administration’s economic warfare on Iran is evidence of how China’s New Silk Road, or BRI, threatens the American global hegemony.

    As the Eurasian Integration is expanding, Iran has considerably boosted economic cooperation with China.

    On Saturday, “China is ready to develop further cooperation with Iran and condemns the use of unilateral sanctions in international relations,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said during a phone conversation with his Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif.

    “China attaches a great importance to Chinese-Iranian relations and is ready to continue developing mutually beneficial cooperation between China and Iran,” Wang said, as quoted by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, adding that Beijing had opposed the use of unilateral sanctions in international relations.

    In response to Washington’s precision-guided economic warfare and constant threats from the Trump administration, Iran’s defense minister just announced plans to unveil a new fighter jet this week and continue enhancing missile capabilities.

    In other words, Iran is boosting its defense capabilities to protect the BRI from future American intervention in the region.

    Brigadier General Amir Hatami said in a live TV program over the weekend that the fighter jet would fly on Wednesday, which marks Iran’s Defense Industry Day. “Our focus has been on priorities, with the top priority being the missile issue,” he said. “We are in a good position in this field, but we need to develop it.”

    Hatami also elaborated on the recent unveiling of precision-guided ‘Fateh Mobin’ missile, stressing that new Iranian missiles will add to the country’s defenses.

    “We have never sought and will never seek weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons due to our religious beliefs and as stated by Leader of the Islamic Revolution [Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei], but we will not allow a violation of our interests and are looking for peace,” he said.

    “We operate within the framework of Iran’s strategy based on active deterrence. Iran has never invaded a country, but anyone attempting to threaten our security will receive a decisive response,” he added.

    Hatami said, “A plane, which has passed several stages, will be presented on the Defense Industry Day and people will see the fighter jet flying from a close distance as well as the equipment used for its manufacture.”

    According to Press Tv, Iran recently made breakthroughs in its defense sector and achieved self-sufficiency in producing military equipment and hardware domestically, which has ultimately bypassed US sanctions and economic pressure on the country.

    Hatami did not mention any detail about the new aircraft, but we have a hunch it could either one of these planes below:

    As for the demolition of US global power, well, China and the BRI have made sure the collapse of American global hegemony has been accelerated. In the meantime, the chart below explains how the Trump admin has unleashed economic warfare on critical countries of the BRI, e.g., China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Russia. Notice how the countries are all along the BRI?

    So, it all makes sense now, Make America Great Again really means destroying the countries underneath the BRI. Just look at what the US is doing to Turkey this month.

  • Spain Is A New Window For African Immigrants

    Via GEFIRA,

    Only a year ago, most African “refugees” came to Italy from Libya. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini in cooperation with the Libyan authorities and the Libyan coastguard took action to curb this procedure, and so Italy ceased to be the main migration route. Now Spain has become a new window for African immigrants wanting to get to Europe.

    The number of immigrants reaching the Old Continent through the Iberian Peninsula is growing with every year. From the beginning of January to August 5, a total of over 59 thousand traveled to Europe by sea, of whom fewer than 19,000 went to Italy, over 16,000 to Greece, and almost 24,000 to Spain, which is more than 40% of all the so-called refugees arriving in the Old Continent.

    Since the beginning of the year, nearly as many immigrants have passed through Spain as during the whole of the last year, and the number is rising. Thus, the transit route through Libya and Tunisia has lost its significance in favor of the road through Algeria and Morocco, where already 50 000 Africans are eager to cross the Strait of Gibraltar. This phenomenon is favored by the following circumstances:

    1. Spain’s leftist government of Pedro Sanchez has a completely different approach to immigration than its Italian counterpart headed by Giuseppe Conte. While the Italians are closing ports to non-governmental vessels transporting Africans and assure to return the undocumented immigrants to their countries of origin, Sanchez announced an open door policy in June. The Spanish government also pledged to remove the barbed wire fence in Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, and promised newcomers free health care.

    2. When the Italian government began to take increasingly determined actions to block the influx of people from Africa, George Soros, who supported and financed the flooding of Europe with re-settlers, met the Spanish prime minister at the end of June.

    The billionaire, who financed the independence activities of Catalonia, proposed withdrawal of support for separatist sentiments in Barcelona, in exchange for Madrid’s acceptance of African immigrants.

    3. When Germany and France became stretched to the limit coping with the wave of “refugees”, the government of Pedro Sanchez decided to open the country’s door to them, turning Spain into the European leader of migration policy. Soon after having been sworn into office, the new prime minister said that the EU should perceive migration as a problem of all member states and consequently, he said, the evasion of solidarity in this respect should be met with putting pressure on uncooperative governments through to their marginalization. The fact that Brussels pays for accepting Africans arouses a suspicion that by letting them in Madrid is looking for financial means to balance the state budget.

    4. Spain’s fertility rate is extremely low and amounts to 1.32. The new government – including Minister of Foreign Affairs Josep Borrel – claims that “new blood” is needed so that Europe “does not turn into an aging continent” but can grow economically. The same scenario, to which the Gefira Foundation has already alerted the readers, is to be implemented in other countries. Such an action, however, brings about an effect opposite to the desired one, which can be seen after the incidents in France, about which we wrote in June.

    5. The distance from Morocco and Algeria to the southern coast of Spain is definitely smaller than that from Libya to Italy.

    The distance between the Moroccan coast and the Spanish resort is less than 50 km.

    This allows international organizations to easily and quickly ferry immigrants, and even encourages the latter to take the sea crossing on their own, as shown in a film from the end of July this year with shots of newcomers landing on the beach in Zahora, Andalusia.

  • Satellite Shows Sprawling 'Re-education Camps' For Chinese Muslims In Xinjiang Region

    More proof has emerged confirming that China has erected expansive ‘re-education centers’ for up to a million or more ethnic Uighurs in what a recent United Nations statement said resembles a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”. 

    The minority Turkic speaking ethno-religious group concentrated in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang has found itself under increased persecution and oversight by Chinese authorities of late as their mostly Sunni Islamic identity and separatist politics have resulted in historic tensions with the Communist government.

    A U.N. panel examining human rights inside China wrapped up last week and included a Chinese delegation of about 50 officials which formally denied that prisons have been set up for the Uighur population. 

    Side of a re-education camp in Turpan’s New District. Image source: Wall Street Journal

    However, a senior Chinese official, Hu Lianhe of the United Front Work Department, for the first time acknowledged the existence of Uighur-focused facilities in response to the U.N. panel, claiming according to the WSJ that they were actually “vocational training centers” and that no “arbitrary detention” was taking place. 

    But the WSJ has gathered satellite imagery showing guard towers and other security measures, as well as testimony that contradicts the claim of mere “vocational” programs — evidence which goes so far as to demonstrate that China was constructing camps even as the U.N. rights panel was preparing to convene. 

    The Wall Street Journal presents the images as follows: 

    Satellite images reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and a specialist in photo analysis show that camps have been growing. Construction work has been carried out on some within the past two weeks, including at one near the western city of Kashgar that has doubled in size since Journal reporters visited in November.

    The full extent of the internment program was long obscured because many Uighurs feared speaking out. Now more are recounting experiences, including six former inmates interviewed by the Journal who described how they or other detainees had been bound to chairs and deprived of adequate food.

    Top above shows a camp near Kashgar, China on April 17, 2017 according to the WSJ.

    Below shows same camp on August 15, 2018, which appears to have doubled in size. Image source: Wall Street Journal

    The Uyghur American Association via Buzzfeed: “A satellite photo of a Chinese reeducation camp near Korla city in central Xinjiang. GPS coordinates were provided by a Uighur exile who had visited the camp.”

    Satellite image of a re-education camp in Makit, Xinjiang (above). Source: Shawn Zhang via Medium.

    A satellite image of a re-education camp in Payzawat, Xinjiang (above). Source: Shawn Zhang via Medium. 

    Another view of the Shule camp near Kashgar, China which the WSJ profiled as part of its investigation. Image source: Shawn Zhang, Mediu.

    Historically throughout parts of the 20th century, the strict Islamic strand of Wahhabi thought and practice has made deep inroads among the Uighurs, with a number of recent historical analysis papers documenting an uptick in Saudi money and influence in Xinjiang province in the 1990s — something which flies in the face of China’s official Communist party and ideology.

    A prior South China Morning Post article highlighted Chinese officials’ silence concerning the growing accusations and mass evidence revealing the fast expanding Uighur internment camps:

    Chinese delegation leader Yu Jianhua highlighted economic progress and rising living standards, among other things, but did not directly address the report on the Uygurs.

    Monitoring groups say the Uygurs have been targeted in a surveillance and security campaign that has sent thousands into detention and indoctrination centers.

    Meanwhile, the WSJ interviewed a number of former inmates at the camps, for example, a 22-year old Uigher only identified as Ablikim: “They would also tell us about religion, saying there is no such thing as religion, why do you believe in religion, there is no God,” he said. 

    According to Ablikim’s testimony, who described the process of eventually being held in a camp which he said was for political indoctrination, he was interrogated for days because of his Uighur identity: 

    Ablikim said he was questioned there for days, spending up to nine hours at a time bound to a chair by his ankles and hands, which were handcuffed behind his back. Interrogators wanted to know whether he was involved with religious groups abroad. He said he wasn’t.

    He was eventually permitted to join other inmates. The prisoners were awakened at 5 a.m. each morning and after a 45-minute run, shouting “The Communist Party is good!” were fed thin soup and steamed bread, he said.

    And another former detainee told the WSJ: “It’s like a black hole. People go in, but they don’t come out,” and said of further of his experience which he lived to tall about, “I’m afraid of the worst now.”

    Beijing has in recent years been accused of practicing collective punishment and broad crackdowns on the Uighur population in Xinjiang, which is numbered in total at 11 million (with some estimates of up to 15 million; China’s total Muslim population is at about 21 million).

    The minority ethnic group is also found in sizable numbers in neighboring Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan. China considers the foreign association and roots of the sizable ethnic group to pose a threat for the importation of terrorist ideology. 

    For example, the most notable separatist movement in Western China is the ethnic Uighur-founded and led East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM, also commonly called the Turkestan Islamic Party, or TIP), a Muslim separatist group based Xinjiang known to have conducted dozens of terror attacks in Chinese cities like Shanghai and Yunnan, but also in places like Afghanistan, and as far as Syria, where it’s believed up to 5,000 Uighurs fight alongside al-Qaeda. 

  • What If Russiagate Is The New WMDs?

    Authored by Jack Hunter via The American Conservative,

    Democrats, certain in their accusations of guilt, sound a lot like Republicans in 2002…

    “The evidence against Trump and Russia is huge and mounting every day,” declared liberal celebrity activist Rosie O’Donnell at a protest in front of the White House last week.

    “We see it, he can’t lie about it,” she added. “He is going down and so will all of his administration.”

    “The charge is treason,” O’Donnell declared. Protesters held held large letters that spelled it out: “T-R-E-A-S-O-N.”

    O’Donnell is by no means alone in her sentiments. Trump’s guilt in “Russiagate” is now assumed by much of the American left, and reaches greater levels of fervor with every passing day.

    This kind of partisan religiosity is not new.

    In the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, conservative pundit Ann Coulter accused war opponents of “treason” and insisted of Saddam Hussein, “We know he had weapons of mass destruction.”

    Coulter was confident and she wasn’t alone. Virtually the entire mainstream American right—from pundits like Coulter and Sean Hannity to President George W. Bush and the Republican Congress—was deeply invested in the notion that Hussein possessed WMDs and that the Iraq war was justified based on that unshakeable premise. This belief was so ingrained for so long that many excitedly rushed to pretend that chemical weapons discovered in Iraq as reported by the New York Times in 2014 were somehow the same thing as the “mushroom cloud” the Bush administration said Saddam was capable of.

    Unfortunately for the right (and America, and the world), that premise turned out to be false. There were no WMDs. Today, only a minority of delusional, face-saving hawks and unreconstructed neoconservatives still parrot that lie.

    And far from being “traitors,” Iraq war opponents today are considered to have been on the right side of history.

    Now, “Russian collusion” could be becoming the new WMDs.

    The post-2016 left’s most dominant narrative is arguably their deeply held belief—with all the ferocity and piety of yesterday’s pro-war conservatives—that Russia colluded with Trump’s campaign to undermine the presidential election. Many believe that the president and anyone who supports his diplomatic efforts like Senator Rand Paul are in the pocket of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    “I will meet not just with our friends, but with our enemies,” said Barack Obama in 2008, and he did just that with Putin, as has every other president in recent times.

    But Trump-Russia relations have been spun into far-fetched conspiracy theories on the left. New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait recently went so far as to speculate that Trump has been a Russian agent since 1987, a cockamamie idea on par with the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes’ discredited conspiracy theory that Saddam and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots.

    It really was plausible that Iraq had WMDs in 2003 based on what our intelligence agencies knew, or purported to know. Today, it is feasible that American democracy really has Putin’s fingerprints on it based on things revealed by U.S. intelligence.

    But isn’t it also possible that the left is reading far too much into Russiagate?

    The Nation’s Aaron Maté believes liberals are overreaching, and that’s putting it mildly:

    From the outset, Russiagate proponents have exhibited a blind faith in the unverified claims of US government officials and other sources, most of them unnamed. The reaction to special counsel Robert Mueller’s recent indictment of 12 Russian military-intelligence officers for hacking of Democratic party servers and voter databases is no exception. Mueller’s indictment is certainly detailed. Most significantly, it marks the first time anyone has been charged for offenses related to Russiagate’s underlying crime.

    But while it is a major step forward in the investigation, we have yet to see the basis for the allegations that Mueller has lodged. As with any criminal case, from a petty offense to a cybercrime charge against a foreign government, a verdict cannot be formed in the absence of this evidence.

    Then the irony kicks in. Maté continues, “The record of US intelligence, replete with lies and errors, underscores the need for caution. Mueller was a player in one of this century’s most disastrous follies when, in congressional testimony, he endorsed claims about Iraqi WMDs and warned that Saddam Hussein ‘may supply’ chemical and biological material to ‘terrorists.’”

    Noting Mueller’s 2003 WMD testimony is not an attempt to undermine him or his investigation, something Maté also makes clear. But it does serve as an important reminder that “intelligence” can be flat-out wrong. It reminds us how these scenarios, which so much of Washington and the elite class fully endorse, can be looked back on as lapses of reason years later.

    Mass psychology is real. Political classes and parties are not immune.

    “Suppose, however, that all of the claims about Russian meddling turn out to be true,” Maté asks. “Hacking e-mails and voter databases is certainly a crime, and seeking to influence another country’s election can never be justified.”

    He continues, “But the procession of elite voices falling over themselves to declare that stealing e-mails and running juvenile social-media ads amount to an ‘attack,’ even an ‘act of war,’ are escalating a panic when a sober assessment is what is most needed.”

    The U.S. could have certainly used less hyperbole and more sobriety in 2002 and 2003.

    And there’s good chance that when the history books are written about American politics circa 2018, much of Russiagate will be dismissed as more Red Scare than Red Dawn.

    With Russia, as with WMDs, left and right have elevated slivers of legitimate security concerns to the level of existential threat based mostly on their own partisanship. That kind of thinking has already proven to be dangerous.

    We don’t know what evidence of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia might yet come forth, but it’s easy to see how, even if this narrative eventually falls flat, 15 years from now some liberals will still be clinging to Russiagate not as a matter of fact, but political identity. Russia-obsessed liberals, too, could end up on the wrong side of history.

    No one can know the future. Republicans would be wise to prepare for new, potentially damaging information about Trump and Russia that may yet emerge.

    Democrats should consider that Russiagate may be just as imaginary as Republicans’ Iraq fantasy.

  • China Unleashes Economic War On LA Coffee Shop…For Serving Taiwan President

    China unleashed economic warfare against a bakery-and-coffee chain that served the President of Taiwan coffee during her trip to the United States.

    Gourmet Master Co Ltd., a Taiwan-based coffee shop mainly involved in the provision of western-style desserts with stores in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the United States, and Australia, saw their stock collapse last week as the company was caught in the middle of tensions with China over Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s visit to a store in Los Angeles, California.

    On August 12, during her layover in Los Angeles, the Taiwan President visited an 85C Cafe location, where social media pictures reportedly show her receiving gifts and coffee.

    “The light of Taiwan. Taiwanese chain coffee shop opened a branch in Los Angeles at 85 °C, and the visiting team stopped. President Xiaoying and the legislators ordered a few cups of coffee, thank you # 萧美琴 , this cup is her request,” said Keelung Cai, a Taiwanese Democratic Progressive Party official, who posted a series of images of the visit on Facebook.

    Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen receives gifts from the shop.

    And here it is. The one cup of coffee that led to the company’s stock collapsing.

    Surprisingly, Tsai’s visit went viral in mainland China which triggered a severe backlash.

    According to Bloomberg, shares tumbled in the Taipei trading session, wiping out over $310 million from its market capitalization, after several Chinese nationalistic media outlets published articles calling for a boycott of the company. Some even said Tsai’s stop at the chain, makes 85C Cafe a “supporter of Tsai Ing-wen and Taiwan’s independence.”

    One delicious cup of coffee collapsed the stock down 20 percent in a few trading sessions. The company has declined more than 42 percent since the top in December 2017.

    The Global Times, a state-run newspaper that has been known to distort information to incite nationalism, was the most active agitators this time, said The Diplomat. The Communist newspaper published a series of articles claiming that 85C Cafe – “such a Taiwanese company which is making big money in mainland China” – supports Tsai’s policy of pro-independence of Taiwan. It was even mentioned that 85C Cafe’s official website categorized its China branch under its “overseas operations,” a mistake that could cost the business of many Chinese nationalists.

    Mainland China accounted for 64 percent of Gourmet Master’s revenue, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In comparison, Taiwan, the company’s home base, and the United States each generated only 17 percent of the total revenue. As it seems a boycott in mainland China could be devastating for the company.

    The market has become a big “uncertainty,” where the government could punish it with measures including hygiene inspections, Reliance Securities Investment Consultant Co. Vice President Richard Lin said by phone to Bloomberg.

    On Wednesday, the company issued a press release, emphasizing that the company “has never changed its position of upholding the 1992 Consensus (or One China Consensus).”

    The company also said: “keep contributing to the peaceful development of cross-strait relations and opposing any behavior and words that split cross-strait compatriots,” the announcement said.

    However, the Global Times intensified its attacks on 85C Cafe after the press release, claiming that the company’s slow response is just a mean to ease criticism, because the announcement was not published on social media.

    “To make matters worse, several of China’s most popular platforms that offer online food delivery service, including ELEME Inc., Meituan, and Dianping, have deleted 85C Cafe from their apps. This collective move — against the logic of the market — implied that authorities in Beijing are likely standing behind the anti-85C Cafe campaign, although Beijing so far hasn’t publicly expressed its attitude on the incident,” said The Diplomat.

    Tsai’s spokesman Alex Huang condemned the need for the coffee operator to issue a “humiliating” statement. “It shouldn’t have happened in a civilized society,” Huang said in a text message to Bloomberg.

    Bloomberg also noted the company’s Taiwan website was hacked last week, per a report via Taipei-based Central News Agency. The website earlier had “many photos” of Tsai, CNA reported. Bloomberg failed to get a response from the company spokesman Chris Lee.

    While this is not the first time that overseas brands have suffered in China due to strong political action, the risks of more incidents like this are almost inevitable amid a worsening trade war environment between China and the United States. Which company is next?

  • New Study Finds Explosion In Concealed Carry Permits, Especially Among Women

    New research from economist and author John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center reveals that Americans have been applying for permits to carry concealed weapons (CCW) in record numbers, especially among women.

    According to Lott, there were 890,000 CCW permits issued in 2017, while 4.6 million have been issued between 2007 and 2018, according to official state records – meaning 2017 saw a jump of nearly 24% in one year. 

    “We have seen an increase from 4.6 million permits in 2007 to 17.25 million now, with the number increasing every year,” Lott – the author of the highly cited book More Guns, Less Crime told Fox News.

    There were 2.7 million concealed handgun permit holders in 1999, 4.6 million in 2007, 8 million in 2011, 11.1 million in 2014, and now 17.25 million in 2017. The growth in permits has been continuous. –Crime Prevention Research Center

    “The states that we have seen a slowing of permits have primarily been these Constitutional Carry states where a permit is no longer required, indeed some of those states have even seen a drop in the number of permits even though the number of people carrying in those places has undoubtedly gone up,” added Lott.

    The report also notes that despite the common assumption that CCW applications would drop off after the 2016 election, quite the opposite has happened. 

    “Conventional wisdom held that the sharp rise in gun sales during Obama’s presidency was driven, at least in part, by the threat of guns control,” the study says. “That’s why everyone expected gun sales to decline after Trump’s victory.”

    Other highlights: 

    The number of women and minorities with CCW permits has continued to rise, with Black and Asian women leading the pack. 

    Interest in CCW permits has corresponded to various mass shootings, as Lott illustrates on page 40. 

    After 2014, the murder rate began to climb with the rate of CCW holders, however an increase in violent crimes was comparatively muted: 

    Read the full report below:

  • Paul Craig Roberts: The CIA Owns The US & European Media

    Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

    William Blum shares with us his correspondence with Washington Post presstitute Michael Birnbaum. As you can tell from Birnbaum’s replies, he comes across as either very stupid or as a CIA asset.

    When I received my briefing as staff associate, House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which required top secret clearance, I was told by senior members of the staff that the Washington Post was a CIA asset. Watching the Washington Post’s takedown of President Richard Nixon with the orchestrated Watergate story, that became obvious. President Nixon had made too many overtures to the Soviets and too many arms limitations agreements, and he opened to China. Watching President Nixon’s peace initiatives water down the threat level from the Soviet Union and Maoist China, the military/security complex saw a threat to its budget and power and decided that Nixon had to go. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy had resulted in far too much skepticism about the Warren Commission Report, so the CIA decided to use the Washington Post to get rid of Nixon. To keep the clueless American left hating Nixon, the CIA used its assets in the leftwing to keep Nixon blamed for the Vietnam war, a war that Nixon inherited and did not want.

    The CIA knew that Nixon’s problem was that he could not exit the war without losing his conservative base, which was convinced of the nonsensical “Domino Theory.” I have always wondered if the CIA concocted the “Domino Theory,” as it so well served them. Unable to get rid of the war “with honor,” Nixon was driven to brutal methods to force the North Vietnamese to accept a situation that he could depart without defeat and soiling America’s “honor” and losing his conservative support base. The North Vietnamese wouldn’t bend, but the US Congress did, and so the CIA succeeded in discrediting among both the leftwing and righwing Nixon’s war management. With no one to defend him, Nixon was an easy target for the CIA.

    Here is Blum’s exchange with Birnbaum. It is possible that Birnbaum is neither stupid nor a CIA asset, but just a person wanting to hold on to a job. The last thing he can afford to do is to disabuse readers of the “Russian Threat” when Bezos’ Amazon and Washington Post properties are dependent on the CIA’s annual subsidy of $600 million disquised as a “contract.”

    The Anti-Empire Report # 159
    Willian Blum

    The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter:
    July 18, 2018

    Dear Mr. Birnbaum,
    You write Trump “made no mention of Russia’s adventures in Ukraine”. Well, neither he nor Putin nor you made any mention of America’s adventures in the Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, which led to the justified Russian adventure. Therefore …?
    If Russia overthrew the Mexican government would you blame the US for taking some action in Mexico?
    William Blum

    Dear Mr. Blum,
    Thanks for your note. “America’s adventures in the Ukraine”: what are you talking about? Last time I checked, it was Ukrainians in the streets of Kiev who caused Yanukovych to turn tail and run. Whether or not that was a good thing, we can leave aside, but it wasn’t the Americans who did it.
    It is, however, Russian special forces who fanned out across Crimea in February and March 2014, according to Putin, and Russians who came down from Moscow who stoked conflict in eastern Ukraine in the months after, according to their own accounts.
    Best, Michael Birnbaum

    To MB,
    I can scarcely believe your reply. Do you read nothing but the Post? Do you not know of high State Dept official Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador in Ukraine in Maidan Square to encourage the protesters? She spoke of 5 billion (sic) dollars given to aid the protesters who were soon to overthrow the govt. She and the US Amb. spoke openly of who to choose as the next president. And he’s the one who became president. This is all on tape. I guess you never watch Russia Today (RT). God forbid! I read the Post every day. You should watch RT once in a while.
    William Blum

    To WB,
    I was the Moscow bureau chief of the newspaper; I reported extensively in Ukraine in the months and years following the protests. My observations are not based on reading. RT is not a credible news outlet, but I certainly do read far beyond our own pages, and of course I talk to the actual actors on the ground myself – that’s my job.
    And: yes, of course Nuland was in the Maidan – but encouraging the protests, as she clearly did, is not the same as sparking them or directing them, nor is playing favorites with potential successors, as she clearly did, the same as being directly responsible for overthrowing the government. I’m not saying the United States wasn’t involved in trying to shape events. So were Russia and the European Union. But Ukrainians were in the driver’s seat the whole way through. I know the guy who posted the first Facebook call to protest Yanukovych in November 2013; he’s not an American agent. RT, meanwhile, reports fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time. By all means consume a healthy and varied media diet – don’t stop at the US mainstream media. But ask yourself how often RT reports critically on the Russian government, and consider how that lacuna shapes the rest of their reporting. You will find plenty of reporting in the Washington Post that is critical of the US government and US foreign policy in general, and decisions in Ukraine and the Ukrainian government in specific. Our aim is to be fair, without picking sides.
    Best, Michael Birnbaum

    *  *  *

    Right, the United States doesn’t play indispensable roles in changes of foreign governments; never has, never will; even when they offer billions of dollars; even when they pick the new president, which, apparently, is not the same as picking sides. It should be noticed that Mr Birnbaum offers not a single example to back up his extremist claim that RT “reports fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time.” “All the time”, no less! That should make it easy to give some examples.

    For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it’s bias, not “fake news” that’s the main problem – Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird.

    To the casual observer, THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA indictments of July 14 of Russian intelligence agents (GRU) reinforced the argument that the Soviet government interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So … we’re still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner.

    The Russians did it (cont.)

    Each day I spend about three hours reading the Washington Post. Amongst other things I’m looking for evidence – real, legal, courtroom-quality evidence, or at least something logical and rational – to pin down those awful Russkis for their many recent crimes, from influencing the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election to use of a nerve agent in the UK. But I do not find such evidence.

    Each day brings headlines like these:

    “U.S. to add economic sanctions on Russia: Attack with nerve agent on former spy in England forces White House to act”

    “Is Russia exploiting new Facebook goal?”

    “Experts: Trump team lacks urgency on Russian threat”

    These are all from the same day, August 9, which led me to thinking of doing this article, but similar stories can be found any day in the Post and in major newspapers anywhere in America. None of the articles begins to explain how Russia did these things, or even WHY. Motivation appears to have become a lost pursuit in the American mass media. The one thing sometimes mentioned, which I think may have some credibility, is Russia’s preference of Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But this doesn’t begin to explain how Russia could pull off any of the electoral magic it’s accused of, which would be feasible only if the United States were a backward, Third World, Banana Republic.

    There’s the Facebook ads, as well as all the other ads … The people who are influenced by this story – have they read many of the actual ads? Many are pro-Clinton or anti-Trump; many are both; many are neither. It’s one big mess, the only rational explanation of this which I’ve read is that they come from money-making websites, “click-bait” sites as they’re known, which earn money simply by attracting visitors.

    As to the nerve agents, it makes more sense if the UK or the CIA did it to make the Russians look bad, because the anti-Russian scandal which followed was totally predictable. Why would Russia choose the time of the World Cup in Moscow – of which all of Russia was immensely proud – to bring such notoriety down upon their head? But that would have been an ideal time for their enemies to want to embarrass them.

    However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They’re particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II.

    But we’re the Good Guys, ain’t we?

    For a defender of US foreign policy there’s very little that causes extreme heartburn more than someone implying a “moral equivalence” between American behavior and that of Russia. That was the case during Cold War I and it’s the same now in Cold War II. It just drives them up the wall.

    After the United States passed a law last year requiring TV station RT (Russia Today) to register as a “foreign agent”, the Russians passed their own law allowing authorities to require foreign media to register as a “foreign agent”. Senator John McCain denounced the new Russian law, saying there is “no equivalence” between RT and networks such as Voice of America, CNN and the BBC, whose journalists “seek the truth, debunk lies, and hold governments accountable.” By contrast, he said, “RT’s propagandists debunk the truth, spread lies, and seek to undermine democratic governments in order to further Vladimir Putin’s agenda.”

    And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had “charged that the U.S. government had interfered ‘aggressively’ in Russia’s 2012 presidential vote,” claiming that Washington had “gathered opposition forces and financed them.” Putin, wrote Malinowski, “apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other’s elections.”

    “Is this moral equivalence fair?” Malinowski asked and answered: “In short, no. Russia’s interference in the United States’ 2016 election could not have been more different from what the United States does to promote democracy in other countries.”

    How do you satirize such officials and such high-school beliefs?

    We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991:

    “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED’s wings wrote: “A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow’s campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance.”

    “Democracy assistance”, you see, is what they call NED’s election-interferences and government-overthrows. The authors continue:

    “This narrative is churned out by propaganda outlets such as RT and Sputnik [radio station]. … it is deployed by isolationists who propound a U.S. retreat from global leadership.”

    “Isolationists” is what conservatives call critics of US foreign policy whose arguments they can’t easily dismiss, so they imply that such people just don’t want the US to be involved in anything abroad.

    And “global leadership” is what they call being first in election-interferences and government-overthrows.

  • Tesla Shorts Up $1.2 Billion Since Musk "Going Private" Tweet As Saudis Plan Investment In Competitor

    It was less than three weeks ago when we posted “Tesla Shorts Refuse To Cover Despite Suffering Massive Losses” in which we wrote that “Tesla shares rocketed higher on August 2, by almost $50, the day after the company reported its second-quarter results” and added that “despite the stock rising more than 15% immediately after the report, WSJ analytics showed that short sellers are standing their ground in the name despite an estimated $1.7 billion paper loss resulting from the violent move higher.“

    At the start of the month, and heading into Tesla earnings, there was about $10.5 billion in short interest according to S3 Partners. And as the below chart shows, Tesla has remained the most heavily shorted stock in the U.S. both before and after its report.

    Of course, the pain for the shorts only spiked on August 7 when first the Saudi Sov. Wealth Fund announced a 5% stake, promptly followed by Musk tweeting his intention to take the company private at $420, which sent the stock just shy of its all time highs.

    Still, the shorts refused to cover, because as the FT reported on Sunday, while the buyout plan pitched by Musk may have been nothing more than a way to “burn the shorts“, something the SEC is now allegedly investigating, less than 4 per cent of the short positions have been closed since his tweet.

    And in retrospect, good thing they did not because as the bizarre events in the subsequent days demonstrated, Musk’s market manipulative tweet – it has since emerged that funding was not secured – may have been the catalyst to not only an SEC investigation, but the last nail of what has been one long, at times surreal emotional collapse for the Tesla CEO.

    Following every twist and turn in the grotesque Elon Musk saga, Tesla stock reversed course and less than two weeks after Musk’s tweet at the close on Friday, it traded 19% below their level before the tweet. Which, according to S3 Partners calculations, means that the mark-to-market value of the short positions is up $1.2bn over that period.

    As S3 also adds, the Tesla short interest has risen to $11.2bn, which not only means that more than a quarter of the company’s free float is short, but that the short interest is even greater than when it was before Tesla’s impressive earnings, the Saudi news and the Musk’s going private announcement.

    Making matters worse for the company’s narrative, S3 said several short sellers have increased their bets on a Tesla share price decline, “suggesting they remain unconvinced by Mr Musk’s ambition to buy out some existing shareholders at a mooted price of $420 per share” according to the FT.

    One could also say that they are betting that the stock will collapse even more now that the SEC is finally poking holes in the Musk story.

    One of the persistent shorts is Crispin Odey, a world-renowned market bear, who has bet against Tesla, and who as we reported on Friday in a letter to investors last week said that while “shorts like Tesla have been difficult to hold on t… Tesla feels like it is entering the final stage of its life.” He also compared Musk’s recent behavior to that of Donald Crowhurst,  “the amateur sailor who set off in the 1960s on a solo voyage around the world and never came back.”

    Meanwhile, as investors and analysts continue to encourage Musk to shut up and spend less time on Twitter and focus on his company, Musk tweeted out (at 2:30am Pacific Time) that changing the way he works is not an option in response to an open letter by Arianna Huffington imploring the Tesla CEO to change his ways.

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

    The tweets followed an emotional interview with the New York Times in which Musk acknowledged between “laughter and tears” that he was overworked and exhausted, saying his intense involvement at Tesla’s factory had taken a steep toll on his personal life and health. Yet even then, Musk did not fail to attack the shorts once again:

    “They’re not dumb guys, but they’re not supersmart. They’re OK. They’re smartish.”

    Meanwhile, late on Sunday, another “smartish” player in the drama re-emerged, when Reuters reported that the Saudi PIF, or Sovereign Wealth Fund, which previously had taken a 5% stake in Tesla and was allegedly helping Musk to “secure funding”, was in talks to invest in aspiring Tesla rival Lucid Motors.

    PIF and Lucid Motors have drawn up a term sheet under which PIF could invest more than $1 billion in Lucid Motors and obtain majority ownership, the sources said. PIF’s first investment in Lucid Motors, however, would be for $500 million, and subsequent cash injections would come in two stages that are contingent on Lucid Motors hitting certain production milestones, one of the sources added.

    According to Reuters, “a deal with Lucid Motors would also be more in line with PIF’s limited resources, given that, despite its $250 billion in assets, PIF has already made substantial commitments to other technology companies or investments, including a $45-billion agreement to invest in a giant technology fund led by Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp.”

    It would also be a confirmation that the fund, which as we reported previously is scrambling to raise capital in an add, roundabout way that involves Aramco (which recently scrapped its plans to go public) and the state run petrochemical giant Sabic, will not invest in a Tesla deal but will instead spread out its funds across similarly themed investment ideas.

    As a reminder, after Musk said that the funding for his going private deal was “secured,” he later elaborated last Monday that he believed Saudi Arabia’s PIF could provide the necessary funding, although sources close to the sovereign wealth fund have since played down that prospect; today’s new effectively kills any hope that PIF would participate in a Tesla buyout.

    As for Lucid, not only is it a company that is far earlier in its development, thus allowing investors a far greater piece of the pie at this moment, but ironically, it was founded in 2007 by Bernard Tse, a former Tesla vice president and board member, and Sam Weng, a former exec at Oracle Corp and Redback Networks. It received backing from Chinese investors, including tech entrepreneur Jia Yueting and state-owned automaker BAIC. Other venture capital backers have included Venrock, Mitsui & Co and Tsing Capital.

    Lucid Motors is not yet selling any cars. In 2016, it unveiled a prototype of its Lucid Air model, a $100,000 luxury sedan it had hoped to begin building in Arizona in late 2018. It is not clear when this car will become available, though the company – just like Tesla – is accepting refundable deposits of $2,500 from consumers on its website.

    And back to Tesla, while it is far more advanced in its production process, it remains unclear when, if ever, it will become profitable. UBS analysts last week calculated that Tesla would lose $6,000 on every base Model 3 model. As a reminder, it is the baseline Model 3 that is seen as the company’s entry into the mass market as opposed to the ultra-high end, where far more exciting and new offerings from the likes of Porsche and Jaguar are set to come to market soon, and grab market share from the increasingly troubled Tesla.

  • Ongoing Purge Of Dissenting Voices Almost Claims Another Victim

    Authored by Elizabeth Lea Vos via Disobedient Media.

    Since Julian Assange was gagged earlier this year, state-sponsored censorship has attempted to snuff out the light of independent and alternative media voices from across the political spectrum. In the first half of August, this process appeared to escalate drastically. As Disobedient Media reported earlier this week, outlets from Infowars to Telesur have faced the wrath of technocratic social media giants.

    The escalation of establishment censorship has been stunning. Just last week, former State Department official and whistleblower Peter Van Buren’s Twitter account was suspended under dubious circumstances. Consortium News wrote of his suspension:

    “This week Van Buren had his Twitter account permanently shut down and seven years of his Tweets wiped from the record. Why? Because he challenged mainstream journalists who contested a Tweet from journalist Glenn Greenwald that mainstream reporters support America’s wars and help bring them about. One corporate journalist decided to silence Van Buren by complaining to Twitter, which, within two days, and with no due process, obliged.”

    Yesterday, independent journalist Caitlin Johnstone’s Twitter account was suspended before being reinstated within hours after a massive public backlash.

    As Caitlin wrote after her suspension was lifted, a wave of lesser-known accounts, both conservative and left-leaning, have also been suspended in what has become a massive social media purge of dissenting thought. Johnstone commented on Twitter’s decision to reactivate her account, characterizing it as a tacit admission of a wrongful decision. This comment, in turn, appears to have led to a twelve-hour lockout.

    In her article discussing the incident, Johnstone noted that the tweets and articles at issue were consistent with previous articles and sentiments which, though controversial, had not resulted in the termination of her account. She wrote:

    “Interestingly, I’ve been saying this exact same thing repeatedly for over a year. An article I wrote about McCain in July of last year titled “Please Just Fucking Die Already” received a far more widespread backlash than this one, with articles published about it by outlets like CNN, USA Today and the Washington Post. Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar talked about me on The View. I was never once suspended or warned by any social media outlet or blogging platform at that time; it was treated as the political speech about a public figure that it clearly and undeniably is. The only thing that has changed since that time is the climate of internet censorship.“

    Disobedient Media spoke with Caitlin Johnstone, asking her what she believes motivated the marked escalation in censorship over the last few weeks. She told us:

    “The Silicon Valley billionaires which coordinate extensively with the US government are plainly a part of the ruling alliance between plutocrats and secretive government agencies. That alliance, which some refer to as the deep state, depends on its ability to propagandize us effectively to manufacture support for the plutocratic agendas of war, exploitation, ecocide and domestic espionage. It needs to control the media in order to manufacture consent for those agendas (which no ordinary person would otherwise support), and the internet has given rise to media platforms which are much harder to control than the mainstream media.

    So they’ve been working to quickly manufacture consent for internet censorship, beginning with widely reviled soft targets like Alex Jones and manipulating the conversation to a debate about who should be censored instead of a debate about whether a handful of plutocrats should be permitted to censor the dominant platforms that society uses to communicate at all. From there, their goal is plainly to squeaze all dissenting voices as far away from large audiences as possible, one by one.

    But they work to manufacture consent because they need that consent. If they don’t have it, the mask of freedom and democracy falls away, people lose trust in the propaganda machine, and the media psyops upon which the ruling power establishment is built become impossible. People refused to give their consent to my banning, speaking out with one voice across all political factions, I was reinstated, and someone at Twitter was probably reprimanded. Even people who don’t like me much spoke up, because they know they’re next in line. They found a huge collective “NO” to this, and they used it, and it worked. And I find that very encouraging.”

    Accounts that rapidly challenged Johnstone’s suspension included but were not limited to Matt Taibbi, Jimmy Dore, Max Blumenthal, Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange, (whose account is currently run by his campaign) and many others, including this writer.

    To provide additional context on Caitlin’s suspension, we return to the infamous Shareblue and events earlier this month, when Disobedient Media and others who have reported on the fallacies surrounding Guccifer 2.0 became the subjects of a disingenuous smear piece penned by journalist Duncan Campbell.

    That attack was rapidly amplified by none other than Caroline Orr, a writer and Editor of Shareblue, who spread the hit piece to her hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, many of whom appear to be part of a massive botnet.

    Similarly, Orr posted twitter threads lambasting Johnstone for her stance on John McCain, after which Johnstone documented a flood of attacks from obviously bot-net accounts. Orr’s direct involvement in instigating Johnstone’s suspension and in amplifying the doxx of Adam Carter was separated by fewer than two weeks.

    In dispensing with the use of proxies, Orr provided a direct link between the attacks on Adam Carter, Caitlin Johnstone, and Shareblue. This raises a core question: why did a Shareblue Editor get her hands dirty in not one, but two occasions in such a brief span of time?

    In the wake of the publication of Campbell’s smear, Disobedient Media reminded readers that Shareblue is closely tied to Hillary Clinton, with The New York Times affectionately dubbing it ‘Hillary Clinton’s Outrage Machine’ in 2016. The organization is owned by Clintonite David Brock, who was reported to have run a multi-million dollar troll army in favor of Clinton in the lead-up to the 2016 US Presidential election. The New York Times explained:

    “The Brock network includes his Media Matters for America watchdog website; two pro-Clinton “super PACs,” the opposition research outfit American Bridge and the pro-Clinton fact-checking and reporter-spamming operation Correct the Record; and Shareblue, which filled the need, Mr. Brock said, for a progressive outlet that spoke directly to the grass roots and which “was avidly and unabashedly pro-Hillary.”

    “… Beyond creating a boisterous echo chamber, the real metric of success for Shareblue, which Mr. Brock said has a budget of $2 million supplied by his political donors, is getting Mrs. Clinton elected. Mr. Daou’s role is deploying a band of committed, outraged followers to harangue Mrs. Clinton’s opponents.”

    The Los Angeles Times described David Brock’s other pro-Clinton Super PAC, Correct the Record:

    “In effect, the effort aims to spend a large sum of money to increase the amount of trolling that already exists online… a paid army of “former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, designers” and others to produce online counterattacks.”

    The above descriptions of Correct The Record’s paid troll armies and Shareblue’s attempts at narrative control fit the description of the botnet that Johnstone described mass-reporting her at the instigation of Caroline Orr, who Tweeted:

    “What does an Assad apologist look like? It looks like someone who would say John McCain deserves to die for his role in promoting US wars… but that Assad is just a family man who definitely hasn’t slaughtered civilians.”

    Some of the botnet Tweets that followed Orr’s attack, cited by Johnstone in her article on her suspension, are included here to visually illustrate the reality that this was a coordinated bot army at work.

    The fact that the multitude of accounts attacking Caitlin not only lacked even ten followers, while also using an identical, copy-pasted message is a textbook example of botnet activity. In other words, these were not human beings reporting Johnstone: this was a mindless hive literally repeating the establishment line.

    Such an occurrence is stunning, because it shows us in very plain terms that a botnet was deployed to silence an anti-war voice. These were not human beings used to mass-report and suspend Caitlin – it was a soulless digital faux-human army wielded by a the Editor of a Clintonite superPAC, the existence of which has been documented by numerous establishment media outlets and independent researchers.

    In real time, we witnessed the establishment desperate attempt retake narrative control on social media, an aim which Caitlin often reminds us is at the core of the plutocratic control over public discourse and therefore control over policy and society.

    It is also worth reiterating that, just as Russian election meddling allegations were a stale projecting of the DNC’s very real rigging of the 2016 Democratic Primary race, the use of botnets to wield political influence has been projected onto Russia and conservatives to deflect from their use by Clinton sponsors. In fact, just prior to her suspension, Johnstone wroteregarding this manipulative tactic, stating:

    “Manipulators particularly use projection as a tactic to hide what they’re doing to you in plain sight. A manipulator can have you chasing your tail by simply suggesting that you or others are doing what you are seeing them doing with your own eyes. DNC caught rigging the election? Oh no, it was actually Russia who rigged the election by catching the DNC rigging the election. See what I did there? It’s so dumb, but it works.”

    This author previously wrote that the plutocrat’s intense abhorrence of Twitter botnets could be read in Jungian terms as the subconscious projection of the establishment’s shadow. That is, the more the elite protest about the use of bots on social media, the more they are likely to use such technologies and similar tools to attack the very human public that they continuously misidentify as inhuman bots.

    One explanation for recent events is that, now that the unelected power structures has gagged Assange, his supporters and dissent in general are next in line to bear the brunt of the weight Assange carried singularly on his back for all these years, while trapped in a tiny embassy with a broken tooth and a frozen shoulder.

    The truth is, we cannot shed light at this time on the specific motivations behind the steep escalation of censorship we’ve seen in the first half of August. However, we can very much theorize that it represents the next falling domino after the silencing of Julian Assange.

    What we can state with certainty is that it represents a real example of information warfare. Whether we – writers and readers alike – recognize that we are on one side of a war is irrelevant. The establishment has not just taken up arms, it is deploying them against all of us.

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Aug 19

Today’s News 19th August 2018

  • Sanctions, Sanctions, Sanctions – The Final Demise Of The Dollar Hegemony?

    Authored by Peter Koenig via The Saker Blog,

    Sanctions left and sanctions right. Financial mostly, taxes, tariffs, visas, travel bans – confiscation of foreign assets, import and export prohibitions and limitations; and also punishing those who do not respect sanctions dished out by Trump, alias the US of A, against friends of their enemies. The absurdity seems endless and escalating – exponentially, as if there was a deadline to collapse the world. Looks like a last-ditch effort to bring down international trade in favor of — what? – Make America Great Again? – Prepare for US mid-term elections? – Rally the people behind an illusion? – Or what?

    All looks arbitrary and destructive. All is of course totally illegal by any international law or, forget law, which is not respected anyway by the empire and its vassals, but not even by human moral standards. Sanctions are destructive. They are interfering in other countries sovereignty. They are made to punish countries, nations, that refuse to bend to a world dictatorship.

    Looks like everybody accepts this new economic warfare as the new normal. Nobody objects. And the United Nations, the body created to maintain Peace, to protect our globe from other wars, to uphold human rights – this very body is silent – out of fear? Out of fear that it might be ‘sanctioned’ into oblivion by the dying empire? – Why cannot the vast majority of countries – often it is a ratio of 191 to 2 (Israel and the US) – reign-in the criminals?

    Imagine Turkey – sudden massive tariffs on aluminum (20%) and steel (50%) imposed by Trump, plus central bank currency interference had the Turkish Lira drop by 40%, and that ‘only’ because Erdogan is not freeing US pastor Andrew Brunson, who faces in Turkey a jail sentence of 35 years for “terror and espionage”. An Izmir court has just turned down another US request for clemency, however, converting his jail sentence to house arrest for health reason. It is widely believed that Mr. Brunson’s alleged 23 years of ‘missionary work’ is but a smoke screen for spying.

    President Erdogan has just declared he would look out for new friends, including new trading partners in the east – Russia, China, Iran, Ukraine, even the unviable EU, and that his country is planning issuing Yuan-denominated bonds to diversify Turkey’s economy, foremost the country’s reserves and gradually moving away from the dollar hegemony.

    Looking out for new friends, may also include new military alliances. Is Turkey planning to exit NATO? Would turkey be ‘allowed’ to exit NATO – given its strategic position maritime and land position between east and west? – Turkey knows that having military allies that dish out punishments for acting sovereignly in internal affair – spells disaster for the future. Why continue offering your country to NATO, whose only objective it is to destroy the east – the very east which is not only Turkey’s but the world’s future? Turkey is already approaching the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) and may actually accede to it within the foreseeable future. That might be the end of Turkey’s NATO alliance.

    What if Iran, Venezuela, Russia, China – and many more countries not ready to bow to the empire, would jail all those spies embedded in the US Embassies or camouflaged in these countries’ national (financial) institutions, acting as Fifth Columns, undermining their host countries’ national and economic policies? – Entire cities of new jails would have to be built to accommodate the empire’s army of criminals.

    Imagine Russia – more sanctions were just imposed for alleged and totally unproven (to the contrary: disproven) Russian poisoning of four UK citizens with the deadly nerve agent, Novichok – and for not admitting it. This is a total farce, a flagrant lie, that has become so ridiculous, most thinking people, even in the UK, just laugh about it. Yet, Trump and his minions in Europe and many parts of the world succumb to this lie – and out of fear of being sanctions, they also sanction Russia. What has the world become? – Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, would be proud for having taught the important lesson to the liars of the universe: “Let me control the media, and I will turn any nation into a herd of Pigs”. That’s what we have become – a herd of pigs.

    Fortunately, Russia too has moved away so far already from the western dollar-controlled economy that such sanctions do no longer hurt. They serve Trump and his cronies as mere propaganda tools – show-offs, “we are still the greatest!”.

    Venezuela is being sanctioned into the ground, literally, by from-abroad (Miami and Bogota) Twitter-induced manipulations of her national currency, the Bolívar, causing astronomical inflations – constant ups and downs of the value of the local currency, bringing the national economy to a virtual halt. Imported food, pharmaceuticals and other goods are being deviated at the borders and other entry points, so they will never end up on supermarket shelves, but become smuggle ware in Colombia, where these goods are being sold at manipulated dollar-exchange rates to better-off Venezuelan and Colombian citizens. These mafia type gangs are being funded by NED and other similar nefarious State Department financed “NGOs”, trained by US secret services, either within or outside Venezuela. Once infiltrated into Venezuela – overtly or covertly – they tend to boycott the local economy from within, spread violence and become part of the Fifth Column, primarily sabotaging the financial system.

    Venezuela is struggling to get out of this dilemma which has people suffering, by de-dollarizing her economy, partly through a newly created cryptocurrency, the Petro, based on Venezuela’s huge oil reserves and also through a new Bolivar – in the hope of putting the breaks on the spiraling bursts of inflation. This scenario reminds so much of Chile in 1973, when Henry Kissinger was Foreign Secretary (1973-1977), and inspired the CIA coup, by “disappearing” food and other goods from Chilean markets, killing legitimately elected President Allende, bringing Augusto Pinochet, a horrendous murderer and despot to power. The military dictatorship regime brought the death and disappearance of tens of thousands of people and lasted until 1990. Subjugating Venezuela might, however, not be so easy. After all, Venezuela has 19 years of revolutionary Chavista experience – and a solid sense of resistance.

    Iran – is being plunged into a similar fate. For no reason at all, Trump reneged on the five-plus-one pronged so-called Nuclear Deal, signed in Vienna on 14 July 2015, after almost ten years of negotiations. Now – of course driven by the star-Zionist Netanyahu – new and ‘the most severe ever’ sanctions are being imposed on Iran, also decimating the value of their local currency, the Rial. Iran, under the Ayatollah, has already embarked on a course of “Resistance Economy”, meaning de-dollarization of their economy and moving towards food and industrial self-sufficiency, as well as increased trading with eastern countries, China, Russia, the SCO and other friendly and culturally aligned nations, like Pakistan. However, Iran too has a strong Fifth Column, engrained in the financial sector, that does not let go of forcing and propagating trading with the enemy, i.e. the west, the European Union, whose euro-monetary system is part of the dollar hegemony, hence posing similar vulnerability of sanctions as does the dollar.

    China – the stellar prize of the Big Chess Game – is being ‘sanctioned’ with tariffs no end, for having become the world’s strongest economy, surpassing in real output and measured by people’s purchasing power, by far the United States of America. China also has a solid economy and gold-based currency, the Yuan – which is on a fast track to overtake the US-dollar as the number one world reserve currency. China retaliates, of course, with similar ‘sanctions’, but by and large, her dominance of Asian markets and growing economic influence in Europe, Africa and Latin America, is such that Trump’s tariff war means hardly more for China than a drop on a hot stone.

    North Korea – the much-touted Trump-Kim mid-June Singapore summit – has long since become a tiny spot in the past. Alleged agreements reached then are being breached by the US, as could have been expected. All under the false and purely invented pretext of DPRK not adhering to her disarmament commitment; a reason to impose new strangulating sanctions. The world looks on. Its normal. Nobody dares questioning the self-styled Masters of the Universe. Misery keeps being dished out left and right – accepted by the brainwashed to-the-core masses around the globe. War is peace and peace is war. Literally. The west is living in a “peaceful” comfort zone. Why disturb it? – If people die from starvation or bombs – it happens far away and allows us to live in peace. Why bother? – Especially since we are continuously, drip-by-steady drip being told its right.

    In a recent interview with PressTV I was asked, why does the US not adhere to any of their internationally or bilaterally concluded treaties or agreements? – Good question. – Washington is breaking all the rules, agreements, accords, treaties, is not adhering to any international law or even moral standard, simply because following such standards would mean giving up world supremacy. Being on equal keel is not in Washington’s or Tel Aviv’s interest. Yes, this symbiotic and sick relationship between the US and Zionist Israel is becoming progressively more visible; the alliance of the brute military force and the slick and treacherous financial dominion – together striving for world hegemony, for full spectrum dominance. This trend is accelerating under Trump and those who give him orders, simply because “they can”. Nobody objects. This tends to portray an image of peerless power, instilling fear and is expected to incite obedience. Will it?

    What is really transpiring is that Washington is isolating itself, that the uni-polar world is moving towards a multipolar world, one that increasingly disregards and disrespects the United States, despises her bullying and warmongering – killing and shedding misery over hundreds of millions of people, most of them defenseless children, women and elderly, by direct military force or by proxy-led conflicts – Yemen is just one recent examples, causing endless human suffering to people who have never done any harm to their neighbors, let alone to Americans. Who could have any respect left for such a nation, called the United States of America, for the people behind such lying monsters?

    This behavior by the dying empire is driving allies and friends into the opposite camp – to the east, where the future lays, away from a globalized One-World-Order, towards a healthy and more equal multi-polar world. – It would be good, if our world body, the members of the United Nations, created in the name of Peace, would finally gather the courage and stand up against the two destroyer nations for the good of humanity, of the globe, and of Mother Earth.

  • CDC: 25% Of Adults Have Life-Impacting Disability

    According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), one in four adults report having a disability that impacts major life activities – “the most dominant one affecting mobility,” reports UPI. 

    The CDC measured six types of disability; mobility, cognition, hearing, vision, independent living and self-care, using data from 458,811 adults who participated in the 2016 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. 

    The report reveals that disability is more common among women, non-Hispanic American Indians / Alaska Natives, low-income adults, and those living in the South Census region of the US. 

    Disability affects about 41 percent of those age 65 and older, compared with younger adults at 16.6 percent and middle age people at 28.6 percent. Overall, 25.7 percent of participants reported any disability. –UPI

    “At some point in their lives, most people will either have a disability or know someone who has a one,” said Dr. Coleen Boyle, director of CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. “Learning more about people with disabilities in the United States can help us better understand and meet their health needs.”

    The study also found that adult disability rates increase as income decreases.

    Among the younger age groups (18-44 years old), the most common type of disability is cognative, at 10.6%. Mobility was most prevalent among middle-aged respondants (45-64 years old) at 18.1%, as well as older people (65+) at 26.9%. 

    Specifically, mobility disability is nearly five times as common among middle-aged people — 45 to 64 years old — living below the poverty level compared with those whose income is twice that level.

    Hearing, mobility and independent living disabilities were higher among older adults. –UPI

    The study also reveals that more adults over 65-years-old with disabilities are covered by health insurance, have a primary doctor and get routine checkups, vs. middle-aged and younger adults with disabilities. 98% of Americans have access to Medicare coverage by the age of 65, however older adults reporting self-care disabilities come under increased financial strain due to higher medical needs. 

    “People with disabilities will benefit from care coordination and better access to healthcare and the health services they need, so that they adopt healthy behaviors and have better health,” said Dr. Georgina Peacock, director of CDC’s Division of Human Development and Disability. “Research showing how many people have a disability and differences in their access to healthcare can guide efforts by healthcare providers and public health practitioners to improve access to care for people with disabilities.”

  • The Unpleasant Truth About The 1941 Parachuting Of Rudolf Hess In England, Part 1

    Authored by Sylvain LaForest via Oriental Review,

    Even though a vast majority of the population admits the saying that history is written by those who win the wars, most are unwilling to question its core and rather choose to accept that what they’re being told by their government controlled education and mainstream media reflects reality.

    We have to keep in mind that our knowledge of the Second World War was mostly redacted by American and Western historians that carried over time a deeply fake idea of reality. In an ironic way, this makes of history a very interesting and lively subject today, since this overall incomprehension of WW2 allows a researcher to solve in July 2018 an event like the parachuting of Rudolf Hess in England on May 10th 1941, which has remained an event shrouded in mystery for 77 years.

    Its complexity and huge historical ramifications make it the most interesting enigma that we have left from the worst war that the world has ever known. If the event didn’t hide vital information, the British government would’ve revealed a long time ago its classified documents on the matter. For Hess’ landing in England isn’t a simple war spy flick, it’s actually at the heart of the shaping of our world. And Rudolf knew it.

    Upon his initial arrest, the Nazi first claimed that his name was Alfred Horn, then after his transfer in the hands of the British military, he finally revealed his real name and added: “I have come to save humanity.”

    What actually happened?

    Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess around 1934

    By 1941, Rudolf Hess had just been ranked by Hitler as the Number Three in the Third Reich hierarchy and bore the title of Deputy Fuhrer. Hess had been amongst the first to embrace Hitler to lead the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; he had participated in the 1924 failed Munich Putsch that sent him along with his beloved leader in the Landsberg prison, where they wrote Mein Kampftogether, or Hitler’s guidebook for the future of Germany and the rest of Europe. He was arguably the most devoted and loyal friend Hitler ever had. Hence, the parachuting of this very high ranked Nazi in England in the midst of WW2 is not to be taken lightly under any circumstance. Hess had to carry a message of the outmost importance that could not be transmitted over a telephone line, a telegram, or any other form of communication that could be intercepted by intelligence agencies that were all on full alert 24/7 all over Europe in 1941.

    “Official” history had to create a well-crafted narrative to hide the real purpose of this mission. So, it says that Rudolf Hess got a Messerschmitt Bf 110, learned to pilot the plane in a few weeks, then flew to England by himself, was able to escape most radars by flying at a very low altitude towards Scotland, but then was spotted by the DCA in Scotland and jumped off his plane wearing a parachute and was later arrested by the British police. Some have disputed this version of the flight, saying that Hess was not in command of the plane that parachuted him, and even that the plane had been escorted by the Royal Air Force in the last stage of the flight since Hess was expected by a few insiders. Whatever the truth is on this first Act, fact is that he landed with a sore ankle on British soil on May 10th 1941. This is where the plot thickens, since hereafter, every ally authority at the time judged that the essence of his mission was not to be revealed to the public. In fact, had he not landed on a farm 10 miles from his intended target on the Duke of Hamilton estate, we would have never heard of the story.

    Many historians and journalists have leaned over the table as if facing a jigsaw puzzle, trying to fit the pieces to make some sense of the crazy Hess trip to England.

    If you’re amongst the few people still interested in history and you’re looking for some information on the matter, Wikipedia and multiple other mainstream narratives loosely reflect what we learn in schools. One explanation simply says that Hess had suddenly gone mad and tried to escape the fate of Germany on a solo flight. Others claim that Hess sought to win Hitler’s favors back by negotiating a truce with England on his own initiative. There is also the wild theory that Hess was trying to use the British monarchy to oust Churchill of power. Different theories will range all the way to the most popular version of an official mission under the order of Hitler that needed to negotiate peace with England before he attacked the Soviet Union, which would come the next month on June 22nd 1941.

    In almost every theory, historians agree that Hess had chosen to meet the Duke of Hamilton, an influential member of the Anglo-German Fellowship Association, since there is overwhelming evidence that the Royal Family was in favor of the Nazis and wanted peace with Germany, as opposed to Churchill who posed as the great Nazi slayer. Most of the theories will end by saying that neither the Duke of Hamilton, nor Churchill, nor anyone holding a high-profile position accepted to meet Hess, before he was sent in prison after saying what he had to say. And whatever that was, Hess had forgotten about it by the time he was prosecuted in Nuremberg after the war, since timely amnesia got ahold of his suddenly failing brain.

    If any of the aforementioned theories held any truth, Hess would have never suffered amnesia since they all bear their good share of political correctness and the British government would have no reason to keep the Hess files secret. Any of these versions could have been released to the public, since they became over time different explanations of the Hess journey in our history books. But the roots of most theories hold no logical ground and don’t even make sense, since it was Germany that was attacking England and not the other way around. Therefore, if Hess was really looking for a truce, he only needed to talk to Hitler. And if Adolf himself wanted peace with England, he just had to do nothing at all.

    That sudden Nuremberg amnesia might be the reason why Rudolf died at 93 eating daily steaks and lobsters, gardening flowers and watching TV in the golden and comfortable Spandau prison in Germany, instead of sharing the fate of most of his fellow Nazis whose lives ended at the end of a rope at the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials in 1946. Here again, the cloud of mystery around Hess has created an aura of doubt upon his official death by suicide that many swear was the murder of an invalid elder that knew too much and was ready to confess.

    01 Jan 1946, Nuremberg, Germany – The defendants at the Nuremberg Nazi trials. Pictured in the front row are: Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel and Ernst Kaltenbrunner. In the back row are: Karl Doenitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, and Fritz Sauckel.

    Well, the truth about Hess in England is so much more interesting than anything mentioned above and is a master key to the full understanding of the stakes and objectives of WW2, which is why it was always hidden under the murky shadows of a historical enigma. And his mission was so important that we can now fully appreciate why such a high-ranking Nazi official was ordered to execute it.

    Historical speculation

    To confront the spectrum of narratives that our official history offers, especially in the case of an event that took place 77 years ago, independent researchers have to mostly rely on logical speculation, because of the lack of access to precious documentation that is kept confidential in locked vaults, usually for national security reasons. In the case of the Rudolf Hess trip to England, everything has been up to speculation, since no official reason or explanation was ever given by the British authorities. Every theory that has become mainstream and accepted over time is threaded over pure speculation and has absolutely nothing to substantiate it.

    Some were articles written by journalists at the time who claimed they had insider information that could never be verified, while other explanations were backed by simple made-up and fake information. The example of an alleged letter written by Hess that he had left for Hitler, saying that he was making this trip on his own will, has to be ranked with the rest of the propaganda.

    A 28-page report was discovered by Matthias Uhl of the German Historical Institute Moscow in the State Archive of the Russian Federation. The document was written in February 1948 by Hess’ adjutant Karlheinz Pintsch, whom eye-witnessed Hitler’s reaction when he learned that the Deputy Führer had parachuted in England. According to Pintsch, Hitler was not the least surprised, nor angry, and had full knowledge of the plan. Thus, a whole range of theories can be brushed away, since Hitler obviously had ordered the mission himself. Those theories only hold ground when facts are disregarded, which is often how mainstream media works.

    We have to accept that only one theory is right, but also that this theory won’t have much hard evidence to back it up until classified documents are released to the public. Therefore, the objective is to find the most likely. We have to rely on logical analysis, but above everything, circumstantial evidence might shed a magical ray of light and reveal the truth. I will apply this system on:

    (A) The importance of Hess in the hierarchy and the will to keep his mission secret to the rest of the world.

    (B) The timetable of the events of WW2: what happened before and after, and the impact that the mission had over the behavior changes of different nations.

    I have come to a definitive conclusion that has never been verbalized before. In fact, no one was even close to the truth. But it’s the only one that stands the scrutiny of cross-examination of circumstances. At the base, the initiative of a secret underground mission outside official channels of communication, for such an important Nazi, raises a most crucial question: why was Germany trying to hide this meeting from the rest of the world?

    To be continued…

  • Mexico Seizes Record 50 Tons Of Meth From Superlab

    After locating a massive drug laboratory near the town of Alcoyonqui, in Culiacán, Sinaloa, personnel of the Secretariat of the Navy seized 50 tons of methamphetamine, allegedly from the Sinaloa Cartel, in the most significant drug bust of this kind in the history of Mexico.

    According to Sin Embargo News, the Secretariat of the Navy (Semar) said the synthetic drug was discovered in a rustic laboratory and two separate underground bunkers. The military operation, which began on Thursday evening, involved roughly 50 troops. It was only until Friday morning was the size of the cache realized.

    A military source said the camp, of about 500 square meters, was operated by the Sinaloa Cartel. The laboratories were divided into four sections for the preparation of chemical precursor or base, rest, reactors, and cooling. Within the rural compound, there was a building for at least 30 people, but military personnel did not find anyone during the operation.

    The drug was in a rustic “narcolaboratorio” and in two hiding places underground (Source/ Semar, via Cuartoscuro) 

    The laboratory was equipped with heaters, pans and light plants (Source/ Semar, via Cuartoscuro)

    Only in the place of preparation, there were seven tons of meth ready for commercialization. (Source/ Semar, via Cuartoscuro)

    The narcotic was in drums and sacks, Semar said. Photo: Special, via Northwest (Source/ Semar, via Cuartoscuro)

    With the area fairly camouflaged from above and the surrounding town, troops found 180 drums, with a capacity of 60 liters (15.5 gallons) each, with stored meth. Authorities estimate 47 to 50 tons of the drug have been counted on site, both in liquid and solid forms.

    A high command of the Navy confirmed that the seized drug belongs to the Cartel of the Pacific or Cartel of Sinaloa. (Semar, via Cuartoscuro)

    Video: The Navy confiscated 50 tons of the drug in Sinaloa

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    “The largest confiscation of finished meth in the history of Sinaloa”, said the military official.

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    Military sources said the quality of the meth is high. A daily kitchen of this size can produce 200 kilos of meth (440 pounds). “The average cost per pound is $ 5,000 on the US border, and in Sinaloa about 25,000 pesos per pound (1,300 dollars) is paid,” said one of the military officers who participated in the operation.

    The meth superlab in Mexico is very disturbing because ultimately it will end up in America’s inner cities and rural towns. The Centers for Disease Control estimates drug overdose deaths based on a current flow of mortality data from the National Vital Statistics System has just reached a record of 71,568 Americans in 2017.

    That is a 6.6 percent jump in overdose deaths over 2016 and represents a rapid deterioration of America’s inner core: The middle class.

    Here is a simple question: If the economy is the “greatest ever” as President Trump has described on Twitter countless times, then why are record Americans dying from drug overdoses?

    As long as the American middle class continues to fracture, they will continue to demand low-cost drugs from Mexico.

  • Seymour Hersh And The Death Of Journalism

    Authored by James Bovard via The American Conservative,

    He won a Pulitzer for My Lai and cracked Abu Ghraib wide open. But this reporter is still a lonely breed.

    Seymour Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, Sy Hersh. Knopf, June 2018, 368 pages

    When people are comforted by government lies, trafficking the truth becomes hellishly difficult. Disclosing damning facts is especially tricky when editors en masse lose their spines. These are some of the takeaways from legendary Seymour Hersh’s riveting new memoir, Reporter.   

    Shortly before Hersh started covering the Pentagon for the Associated Press in 1965, Arthur Sylvester, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, berated a group of war correspondents in Saigon: “Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that? Stupid.” Hersh was astonished by the “stunningly sedate” Pentagon press room, which to him resembled “a high-end social club.”

    Hersh never signed on to that stenographers’ pool. He was soon shocked to realize“the extent to which the men running the war would lie to protect their losing hand.” Hersh did heroic work in the late 1960s and early 1970s exposing the lies behind the Vietnam War. His New Yorker articles on the My Lai massacre scored a Pulitzer Prize and put atrocities in headlines where they remained till the war’s end.   

    Hersh’s 1974 expose on the CIA’s illegal spying on Americans helped spur one of the best congressional investigations of federal wrongdoing since World War II. (Many of the well-written reports from the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities remain regrettably relevant to the Leviathan in our time.) By the late 1970s, despite revelations of CIA assassinations and other atrocities, Hersh was chagrined that “[n]o one in the CIA had been prosecuted for the crimes that had been committed against the American people and the Constitution.” Welcome to Washington.

    Any journalist who has been hung out to dry will relish Hersh’s revelations of editors who flinched. After Hersh joined the Washington bureau of the New York Times, he hustled approval for an article going to the heart of foreign policy perfidy. Bureau chief Max Frankel finally approved a truncated version of Hersh’s pitch with the caveat that he should run the story by “Henry [Kissinger] and [CIA chief] Dick [Helms].” Hersh was horrified: “They were the architects of the idiocy and criminality I was desperate to write about.” A subsequent Washington bureau chief noted that the Times “was scared to death of being first on a controversial story that challenged the credibility of the government.”

    After Hersh exited the Times, snaring high-profile newshole became more challenging. When he pitched a piece to the New Yorker on the turmoil and coverups permeating the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, editor Robert Gottlieb told him to “go for it.” But as Hersh was exiting Gottlieb’s office, the editor added: “Sy, I just want you to know that I don’t like controversy.” Gottlieb had the wrong dude. Elsewhere in the book, Hersh slams a gutless specimen at Life magazine, “If there is a journalism hell, that editor belongs there;” he also clobbers the Times business section’s “ass-kissing coterie of moronic editors.” On the other hand, throwing a typewriter through a plate glass window would perturb even the paper’s non-moronic editors.  

    Despite superb demolitions by Hersh and other reporters, the credibility of government agencies soon revived like a salamander growing a new tail. After Nixon was toppled, “the pendulum had swung back to a place where a president’s argument that national security trumps the people’s right to know was once again carrying weight with editors and publishers,” Hersh noted. A few weeks before the 9/11 attacks, New York Times columnist Flora Lewis, wrote that “there will probably never be a return to the… collusion with which the media used to treat presidents, and it is just as well.” But the collapse of the World Trade Center towers made the media more craven than at any time since Vietnam. Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks complained that, in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, “There was an attitude among editors: ‘Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?’” 

    Hersh’s career revived after 9/11 with a series of New Yorker exposés on the lies, failures, and shenanigans of the War on Terror. He soon “began to comprehend that 8 or 9 neoconservatives who were political outsiders in the Clinton years had essentially overthrown the government of the United States—with ease.” Hersh eventually concluded that “America’s neocons were a menace to civilization.” But, with the exception of his explosive work on Abu Ghraib and the torture scandal, his articles rarely received the attention they deserved. Hersh’s reports on the war on terror have been far more accurate and prescient than the vast majority of the stories touted by cable news, but he is rarely credited for his foresight.

    In recent years, Hersh has been criticized for writing articles that rely too heavily on too few, and not altogether authoritative sources. After his articles on the killing of Osama Bin Laden (he presented an alternative scenario that questioned the Pentagon’s version of events) and  White House claims about a 2013 Syrian chemical weapons attack were rejected by American publications, he published them in London Review of Books and has continued to publish his gumshoe reporting there and in places like Germany’s Welt am Sonntag. In his book, Hersh declares that “insider sources” are “what every reporter needs.” But some of the sources he now relies on  may have long since retired or no longer have access to 24 karat insider information.

    There are some excellent investigative journalists at New York Times, USA Today, and elsewhere, but the most visible media venues have often ignored the most potentially damning stories. The mainstream media continues to pursue Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential campaign like Captain Ahab chasing Moby Dick. At the same time, they almost completely ignore how U.S. government manipulations are paving the path to war with Iran. Most of the American media coverage of the Syrian civil war has been appalling, touting a fairytale of terrorist extremists as freedom fighters, and ignoring the flip-flops and contradictions in U.S. policy. In a 2013 interview, Hersh derided the American media’s fixation on “looking for [Pulitzer] prizes. It’s packaged journalism so you pick a target like are railway crossings safe and stuff like that.”

    Reporting nowadays rarely penetrates the Leviathan’s armor. Fourteen years after Hersh broke Abu Ghraib, many of the details of the post- 9/11 torture scandal remain unrevealed. Could anyone imagine Liuetenant William Calley, who was convicted of mass murder for the 1968 My Lai carnage, subsequently becoming a favorite media commentator on military ethics, foreign policy, and democracy? No. But the main culprits in the torture scandal and coverup—from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, to former CIA chief John Brennan—are all regularly touted these days as founts of wisdom. The veneration of Bush, Cheney, and Brennan is one of the starkest measures of the failure of journalism in our time.

    Hersh’s Reporter has plenty of tips for journalists willing to vigorously hound government wrongdoing. But finding good venues for smoking guns may be more difficult now than ever. As Assistant Pentagon Secretary Sylvester scoffed at reporters in that 1965 Saigon briefing, “I don’t even have to talk to you people. I know how to deal with you through your editors and publishers back in the States.” Unfortunately, there are too many editors and publishers who would rather kowtow than fight.

  • Is US Government Developing Real-Life Supersoldier, Wonder-Dog In New Research Program? 

    The US army has announced a new proposal for what really looks like a program to develop supersoldiers and wonder-dogs capable of fast healing, optimized physiological and mental performance, withstanding extreme environments, and wearing high-tech bio-enhancements and other gear. 

    According to documents from the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), the “primary emphasis of the USSOCOM Biomedical, Human Performance, and Canine Research Program is to identify and develop techniques… for early intervention in life-threatening injuries, prolonged field care, human performance optimization, and canine medicine/performance.“

    The project will allocate $15 million on bio-enhancement studies which could result in soldiers with “enhanced physiological performance” that require a fraction of a normal night’s sleep, as well along with other “human performance optimization,” according to documents from the Defense Department. 

    The scope of the project includes: 

    1. Damage Control Resuscitation
      • Global Treatment Strategies and Next Generation Wound Management
      • Analgesia
      • Far Forward Blood, Blood Components, Blood Substitute, & Injectable Hemostatic
      • Austere Surgical Stabilization
    2. Prolonged Field Care (PFC)
      • Medical Sensors and Devices (includes rapidly deployable medical sensors and/or devices for extended care beyond initial trauma resuscitation; wireless biosensors that demonstrate physiological monitoring capabilities; see FOA for details)
    3. Portable Lab Assays and Diagnostics
      • Occupational and Environmental Health (OEH) Hazards
    4. Force Health Protection and Environmental Medicine
      • Optimal Acclimatization Strategy
      • Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive (CBRNE) Rapid Diagnostics, Treatment, and Prophylaxis
      • Operational Monitoring (wireless biosensors in extreme environments and/or hazards materials exposure)
    5. Medical Simulation and Training Technologies
    6. Human Performance Optimization
      • Improve Sleep
      • Diagnostics for Performance Sustainment
      • Nutritional Status
      • Enhanced Physiological Performance
      • Enhanced Mental Performance
      • Optimal Performance Strategy
      • Pharmaceutical and Nutritional Supplement interactions
      • Wearable Devices
    7. Canine Medicine
      • Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive (CBRNE) Canine Decontamination, Treatment, and PPE from possible exposure
      • Sensory Optimization and Protection
      • Trauma Resuscitation
      • Non-Traditional Anesthesia Protocols
      • Optimizing Canine Performance and Nutrition
      • Pre and Post Trauma Training / Behavioral Issues
      • Environmental Extremes

    This won’t be the first such program to enhance the US military’s assets. In 2017, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) announced a plethora of plans to create an elite fighting force. 

    One of the projects on the horizon is to create software which could be uploaded directly to the brain to give their soldiers heightened senses while also attempting to cure ailments such as blindness, paralysis and speech disorders creating an army of Captain Americas. –Express

    Darpa said the program – known as the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) “aims to develop an implantable neural interface able to provide advanced signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth between the brain and electronics.” 

    Program manager Phillip Alvelda said that the brain-computer interface (BCI) “program looks ahead to a future in which advanced neural devices offer improved fidelity, resolution, and precision sensory interface for therapeutic applications.”

    Another DARPA program aims to give super-human sight to soldiers. 

    The Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras (SCENICC) program is attempting to create a small contact lens which would improve fighters vision tenfold.

    Research began on this project in 2011, and DARPA hopes to “develop novel computational imaging capabilities and explore joint design of hardware and software to give war fighters access to systems that greatly enhance their awareness, security and survivability.”  –Express

    They’re also working on exoskeletons, such as the XOS2 – currently being developed in conjunction Raytheon – which could make soldiers up to 17 times stronger. 

    Apparently battery technology is the limiting factor for now. 

    Business Insider also provides this list of 8 technologies the Pentagon is pursuing to create supersoldiers: 

    1. Bulletproof clothes made of carbon chainmail

    Researchers tested the potential ballistic protection of graphene by firing tiny bullets of gold at it. They found that the material was stronger, more flexible, and lighter than both the ballistic plates and the Kevlar vests troops wear. And, a million layers of the stuff would be only 1 millimeter thick.

    MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies is working on an effective manufacturing method for graphene-based chainmail, potentially giving troops better protection from a T-shirt than they currently get from bulky vests.

    2. Synthetic blood

    Synthetic blood would be much more efficient than natural cells. The most promising technology being investigated is a respirocyte, a theoretical red blood cell made from diamonds that could contain gasses at pressures of nearly 15,000 psi and exchange carbon dioxide and oxygen the same way real blood cells do.

    Super soldiers with respirocytes mixed with their natural blood would essentially have trillions of miniature air tanks inside their body, meaning they would never run out of breath and could spend hours underwater without other equipment.

    3. Seven-foot leaps and a 25 mph spring

    Scientists at MIT and other research universities are looking for ways to augment the human ankle and Achilles tendon with bionic boots that mimic kangaroo tendons. Humans equipped with such boots would be able to leap seven feet or more, sprint at inhuman speeds, and run all day without wearing out their muscles.

    4. Pain immunizations

    DARPA’s Persistence in Combat initiative aims to help soldiers bounce back almost immediately from wounds. Pain immunizations would work for 30 days and eliminate the inflammation that causes lasting agony after an injury. So, soldiers could feel the initial burst of anguish from a bullet strike, but the pain would fade in seconds. The soldiers could treat themselves and keep fighting until medically evacuated.

    5. Freedom from sleep

    Not all animals sleep the same way. DARPA wants to find a way to let humans sleep with only half of their brain at a time like whales and dolphins or possibly even skip sleep for long periods of time like ENU mice, a genetically-engineered species of mouse, do.

    6. Telepathy

    Not all brain implants look very comfortable.US Patent Application Richard A. Normann

    Part of DARPA’s “Brain Machine Interface” project is the development of better computer chips that can directly connect to a human brain via implants. In addition to allowing soldiers to control robotics with thought alone, this would allow squads to communicate via telepathy.

    While the chips are already improving, the project has some detractors. One offshoot of the research is the ability to remote control mice via implanted chips, and some defense scientists worry about the risk of troops having their minds hacked.

    7. Powered underwear

    While the Harvard researchers working on it prefer the term “soft exoskeleton,” the DARPA-funded robotic suit is essentially a series of fabric muscles worn under the clothes that assist the wearer in each step or movement. This reduces fatigue and increases strength without requiring the huge amounts of power that bulkier, rigid exoskeletons need.

    8. Gecko-like climbing gloves and shoes

    Geckos use tiny hairs on their feet to grab onto surfaces on the molecular level. While the “Z-Man” project wouldn’t necessarily give humans the ability to crawl along a ceiling like a gecko, special climbing gloves and shoes would allow soldiers to easily climb sheer rock faces or up skyscrapers without any other equipment, drastically easing an assault on the high ground.

    We can picture it now…

  • Have You Committed Your Three Felonies Today?

    Authored by James George Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Several years ago the Commonwealth of Virginia enacted a law restricting firearms purchases to one per month. This was intended to discourage smuggling of weapons to urban areas outside Virginia with tight gun control laws and (unsurprisingly) high homicide rates. The law didn’t seem to do much good and in a rare outbreak of common sense was later repealed, though there’s recent misguided talk from Attorney General Mark Herring of reviving it.

    During its short period in force, the prohibition spawned a popular saying in the Old Dominion: “Buy one gun a month – it’s the law!”

    A similar attitude may be appropriate in light of an estimate that due to vague statutes and the proliferation of federal regulations – which have the force of law – we wake up in the morning, go to work, come home, eat dinner, and go to sleep  unaware we may have committed several federal crimes in the course of the day. The number varies but the average number of crimes per American seems to be about three.

    The more important point is that every one of us is probably guilty of something. “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime,” retired Louisiana State University law professor John Baker told the Wall Street Journal in July 2011. “That is not an exaggeration.”

    • This means that if they want you, they can get you.
    • That in turn means that who gets charged, prosecuted, and jailed is a matter of the relevant officials’ discretion.
    • And that in turn means that discretion can and will be politicized.

    Like the boychiks used to say in the good ol’ NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs; Народный комиссариат внутренних дел): “Give Us the Man, and We Will Make the Case.” (I guess nowadays, we should say “person.”)

    Let’s stipulate that the true Rechtsstaat, where justice is administered in a politically neutral manner is few and far between in human history. The norm is politicized justice where holders of power – in an elective system, the winners – use the justice system to harass and terrorize the losers.

    But America today must be the only country that’s ever been so goofy that the losers are able to terrorize the winners. Whatever your feelings about the current administration, consider: the feds come in like gangbusters, breaking down doors, rousting targets from their beds, seizing their personal documents and devices, and subjecting them to piled-on charges and questioning designed to result in perjury, obstruction, and conspiracy charges – especially the phony crime of “lying to the FBI” – adding  up to decades in jail. Those accused are forced to plead guilty to a lesser charge or bankrupt themselves hoping they will be vindicated by a jury of sheep their peers, where the feds have a 90 percent-plus conviction rate. That’s treatment meted out to Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen, and others.

    Conversely, clear evidence of crime, such as mishandling classified material, is a freebie: “No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” Oh, some of the emails are “personal?” That’s OK, you decide what’s what – we trust you! There’s a claim a foreign power hacked a computer server, which some compare to an act of war demanding retaliation – no, we don’t need to see the server itself, your contractor’s report is good enough for us! And while you’re at it, go ahead and purge your electronic records (even material you’re obligated to preserve) and smash up your smart phones and pull out SIM cards. Oh, hey, does anyone need immunity? No need to bargain, we’re happy to provide! That’s the treatment accorded to Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Tony Podesta, and their ilk.

    It’s no coincidence, Comrades, that this disparity is the work of denizens of a law enforcement and intelligence apparatus that is focused like a laser on two closely linked objectives: One, get Donald Trump. Two, at all costs, make sure that he cannot in any way move forward on his stated objective to improve ties with Russia. Those objectives are the two sides of the coin called Russiagate. All else, including the disparity of treatment given those close to Trump versus his opponents, is a function of Russiagate. Three other things also follow:

    • Trump’s powerlessness, even within his own administration. What kind of Chief Executive is reduced to tweeting what his subordinates ought to do – for example, providing Congress with documents demanded from the Department of Justice – versus ordering them to do it?
    • Trump’s personnel. People wonder, especially on foreign policy, why has Trump surrounded himself with a swarm of neoconservatives and Bush-retread Republicans? Maybe he is one of them. Or maybe anyone who dissented from the established warmongering line would be putting his head through a noose.
    • Flipping the “Russians did it” narrative: Among the President’s defenders, on say Fox News, no less than among his detractors, Russia is the enemy who (altogether now!) “interfered in our elections” in order to “undermine our democracy.” Mitt Romney was right! The only argument is over who was the intended beneficiary of Muscovite mendacity, Trump or Hillary – that’s the variable. The constant is that Putin is Hitler and only a traitor would want to get along with him. All sides agree that the Christopher Steele dossier is full of “Russian dirt” – though there’s literally zero actual evidence of Kremlin involvement but a lot pointing to Britain’s MI6 and GCHQ.

    The Russia! Russia! Russia! hysteria is sometimes called a new McCarthyism, but that’s unfair – to Tailgunner Joe. In his day, whatever his excesses, there really were Stalinist agents at the State Department. This new panic is nothing we’ve seen before, except maybe during the Salem witch frenzy of the 1690s.

    Which brings us to Maria Butina, a Russian grad student and Second Amendment advocate jailed (and refused bail) on thin allegations of unregistered lobbying. As Phil Giraldi observes:

    “If you are a Russian and you are caught talking to anyone in any way influential, there is potentially hell to pay because the FBI will be watching you. You are automatically assumed to be part of a conspiracy. Once ‘evidence’ is collected, you will be indicted and sent to prison, mostly to send a message to Moscow. It is the ultimate irony that how the old Soviet Union’s judiciary used to function is now becoming standing operating procedure in the United States.” 

    Butina has been portrayed as some kind of honey pot femme fatale, a cross between Anna Chapman and Natasha from “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle,” using her Slavic charms to bewitch the naïve ΜOΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ crowd at the National Rifle Association. Among Butina’s nefarious activities: networking at the National Prayer Breakfast. If they arrested everyone with foreign government connections schmoozing at the Prayer Breakfast, they’d have to shut the thing down.  Honestly, I doubt even the investigators believe Butina is guilty of anything, and if she were any other nationality but Russian she wouldn’t be facing years in jail. [ATTENTION: A legal defense fund for Butina has now been formed!]

    Which brings us to the biggest threat to what’s left of our liberties as Americans. (No, not the yanking of the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan.) As is well known, we are facing an unprecedented, coordinated campaign of deplatforming, shadowbanning, flitering, and other foul means of putting dissenting voices into a digital GULag. While the glove belongs to tech giants and their executives, the hand inside is the government’s. Using Russian meddling as a pretext, companies that do billions of dollars of business with the federal government are only too happy to police the web of “suspected Russian-linked accounts.” And since, as Hillary says, Putin is the leader of the worldwide “authoritarian, white-supremacist, and xenophobic movement” who is “emboldening right-wing nationalists, separatists, racists, and even neo-Nazis,” anything and anybody that fails Virginia Senator Mark Warner’s or Mark Zuckerberg’s sniff test is now fair game. We are told that to sow discord and chaos Russian troll farms and social media ads target “divisive” issues related to race, Black Lives Matter, and Ferguson, absent which we’d all be holding hands singing Kumbaya. Connecting Putin and Russia with racism feeds into a cockamamie phantasmagoria of Crimethink concepts that increasingly are considered outside the protection of what was once quaintly known as free speech: hate speech, fake news, conspiracy theories, white nationalism, white supremacy, white privilege, patriarchy, “cisgenderism,” and many more. The idea of “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is out the window.  Instead we have: anyone to the right of me gets what he deserves.

    While we hear a lot about the “input” end – violation of free speech rights, a deadly, valid concern – even more worrisome is the “output”: limiting what Americans can see and hear that differs from the official media line, itself largely a bulletin board for government sources. Unsurprisingly, that line is unfailingly for war and intervention. As Patrick Armstrong puts it, maybe the censors could just buy some old Soviet jamming equipment.

    It is hard to escape the notion that we are approaching the edge of some profound historical moment that will have far-reaching, literally life and death consequences, both domestically and internationally. In the period preceding World War I how many Europeans suspected that their lives would soon be forever changed – and, for millions of them, ended? Who in the years, say, 1910 to 1913, could have imagined that the decades of peace, progress, and civilization in which they had grown up, and which seemingly would continue indefinitely, instead would soon descend into a horror of industrial-scale slaughter, revolution, and brutal ideologies?

    Whether opposition to the gathering darkness can be effective is uncertain. But what is not uncertain is our duty to oppose it, even at the risk of committing three felonies a day. “Fellow Thought criminals – unite!”

    [A version of the foregoing was delivered to the Ron Paul Institute Media & War 2018 Conferenceon August 18, 2018.]

  • White House Counsel "Cooperating Extensively" With Obstruction Probe, Trump Says He Allowed It

    Update: Trump has commented on the story, saying he allowed McGahn “and all other requested members of the White House Staff” to fully cooperate with the Special Counsel. He also notes that the White House has given over one million pages of documents adding “No Collusion, No Obstruction. Witch Hunt!”

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    Separately, William Burck, attorney for Don McGahn, also said that Trump declined to assert privilege over McGahn’s testimony and answered the Special Counsel’s questions “fulsomely and honestly.”

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    * * *

    White House counsel Donald McGahn II, has been quietly cooperating “extensively” with special counsel Robert Mueller in his probe of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to an explosive New York Times report published Saturday afternoon.

    Sources told the Times that McGahn has had at least three voluntary interviews with Mueller’s team totaling 30 hours, in which he discussed accounts of multiple episodes at the center of Mueller’s probe into whether President Trump obstructed justice, as well as the president’s furor toward the Russia investigation and the ways in which he urged McGahn to respond to it.

    For a lawyer to share so much with investigators scrutinizing his client is unusual. Lawyers are rarely so open with investigators, not only because they are advocating on behalf of their clients but also because their conversations with clients are potentially shielded by attorney-client privilege, and in the case of presidents, executive privilege.

    Among the episodes McGahn reprotedly discussed with investigators is Trump’s firing last year of former FBI Director James Comey and the president’s repeated urging of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to claim oversight of the special counsel despite his recusal from Russia probes. McGahn was also centrally involved in Trump’s attempts to fire the special counsel, Robert Mueller, himself which investigators might not have discovered without him.

    Commenting on the report, Solomon L. Wisenberg, a deputy independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation “which did not have the same level of cooperation from President Bill Clinton’s lawyers”, said that “a prosecutor would kill for that. Oh my God, it would have been phenomenally helpful to us. It would have been like having the keys to the kingdom.”

    McGahn began cooperating with Mueller’s team last year after Trump’s first round of personal lawyers decided to give investigators as much information as possible, believing the president had nothing to hide.

    Trump assembled a personal legal team to defend him. He wanted to take on Mr. Mueller directly, attacking his credibility and impeding investigators. But two of his newly hired lawyers, John M. Dowd and Ty Cobb, have said they took Mr. Trump at his word that he did nothing wrong and sold him on an open-book strategy. As long as Mr. Trump and the White House cooperated with Mr. Mueller, they told him, they could bring an end to the investigation within months.

    Mr. McGahn, who had objected to Mr. Cobb’s hiring, was dubious, according to people he spoke to around that time. As White House counsel, not a personal lawyer, he viewed his role as protector of the presidency, not of Mr. Trump. Allowing a special counsel to root around the West Wing could set a precedent harmful to future administrations.

    However, McGahn eventually became concerned over his growing exposure in the investigation and began to suspect the president was setting him up to take the fall for any alleged obstruction of justice.

    McGahn and his own lawyer, William Burck, then decided for the White House counsel to do as much on his own to cooperate with Mueller. According to the NYT, McGahn was worried that Mr. Trump would ultimately blame him in the inquiry; the lawyer then told people he was determined to avoid the fate of the White House counsel for President Richard M. Nixon, John W. Dean, who was imprisoned in the Watergate scandal.

    The NYT also reports that Trump’s personal lawyers could have exercised attorney-client privilege to know what McGahn planned to tell investigators, but the president’s lawyers did not go through that process.

    The times adds that “it is not clear that Mr. Trump appreciates the extent to which Mr. McGahn has cooperated with the special counsel”, meaning that Trump will likely be quite angry once again by what he perceives as betrayal by one more person close to him. The reason for that is that the president “wrongly believed that Mr. McGahn would act as a personal lawyer would for clients and solely defend his interests to investigators”

    McGahn reportedly laid out how Mr. Trump tried to control the investigation, giving investigators a mix of information both potentially damaging and favorable to the president. Of note, McGahn cautioned to investigators that he never saw Trump overstep his legal authorities.

    Whether McGahn reveals any groundbreaking information remains unknown. The Times report, however, does underscore the sprawling nature and depth of Mueller’s probe, which has moved to scrutinize people closer to Trump’s inner circle in recent months amid calls from Trump’s personal legal team for it to wrap up before the November midterm elections.

    Asked for comment, the White House sought to quell the sense of tension.

    “The president and Don have a great relationship,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said in a statement. “He appreciates all the hard work he’s done, particularly his help and expertise with the judges, and the Supreme Court” nominees.

    For the real story keep an eye on Trump’s tweet: any imminent attacks on McGahn will not only indicate how much of a surprise today’s report is, but lead to further allegations that Trump is trying to further obstruct Mueller’s investigation.

  • Actor Jim Carrey's Art Goes Viral: "Our Missile, Our Crime" In Yemen

    Responding to the now confirmed fact that it was a laser-guided MK 82 bomb made by Lockheed Martin that killed 40 children while they were riding inside a school bus in northern Yemen over a week ago, actor Jim Carrey has highlighted the crime in his latest art. 

    In a now viral tweet posted to his official account Friday afternoon, Carrey wrote, “40 innocent children killed on a bus in Yemen.” And added, “Our ally. Our missile. Our crime.” 

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

    Carrey referenced the US-Saudi coalition in Yemen responsible for dropping the 500-pound bomb on the bus as it made its way through a crowded market in Dahyan in Saada province on August 9th, which both the US State Department and the Saudis had defended as a “legitimate military operation”.

    The cartoon art, signed by Carrey’s hand as the artist, depicts a bus full of terrified children during the moment a missile marked with the American flag and “USA” hurtles toward them. The tweet garnered over 30,000 retweets and more than 68,000 likes less than 24 hours after it was published. 

    Carrey’s tweet corresponded with CNN’s Friday afternoon story confirming that the bomb which killed the children was supplied by the US as part of a batch of Lockheed Martin produced munitions transferred under a prior US-government approved contract.

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

    CNN’s reporting came nearly a full week after our own coverage – Guided Bomb Fragments At Site Of Yemen Bus Airstrike Trace Back To Lockheed Martin -wherein we analyzed and traced markings from photos showing the side of bomb fragments found at the site to conclude it possessed Lockheed’s unique CAGE Code (or Commercial and Government Entity Code), based on the prior research of American journalist Ben Norton. 

    Regardless, we’re just glad that (to our surprise) CNN actually decided feature such a story that reveals the clear and shocking extent of ongoing US/Saudi/UAE war crimes in Yemen. And further that Hollywood celebrities like Jim Carrey would put aside the usual hyperpartisan domestic political narratives to focus on what’s really happening in the world. 

    Meanwhile, the Pentagon was silent when CNN asked about the provenance of the bomb, and refused to own up to any responsibility regarding the bus attack. 

    The United States has long tried to present its role in the conflict as attempting to stave off humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, yet as even NPR confirmed while reporting from inside the country earlier this year the US military “has provided targeting information, equipment and aircraft refueling to the Saudi air campaign, which has been widely criticized for being indiscriminate and killing civilians in places like hospitals, funerals and homes.”

    And now with CNN and celebrity figures belatedly spotlighting Yemen (after years of silence going back to 2015), next week’s White House and State Department press briefings are sure to get interesting. 

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Aug 18

Today’s News 18th August 2018

  • 5 Articles Show How TPTB "Fix" You Like Staked Goats

    Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces ) via SHTFplan.,com,

    Five recent articles exemplify the ever-increasing surveillance by TPTB (The Powers That Be) to “fix” you and I… in the manner of goats staked out to lure in the lion. In this case, the lion is a ravening wolf, performing his own staking in the guise of a sheep. The articles will be listed in chronological order. Ironically, the level of alarm should increase with that order, as well.

    The reason I’m writing about this is that it is important to cite the things that generally do not receive the greatest amount of interest by the public overall. Some of them are obscure and do not really “jump” out at you until you examine them and see them not merely as they are presented… but the underlying significance to it all. Then it materializes into a puzzle piece.

    When the pieces are matched with others in the jigsaw picture? To paraphrase O’Brien in Orwell’s “1984,” you will then see the true portrait of the world they are creating.

    1. July 24th, 2018 “What is 5G and what will it mean for you?” by Matthew Wall. 

    This explains the 5G system that will be emplaced by many nations by 2020, according to the article. Here are some excerpted passages, compressed together to save time:

    “What is 5G exactly?  It’s the next-fifth generation of mobile Internet connectivity promising much faster data download and upload speeds, wider coverage, and more stable connections. What will it enable us to do?  “Whatever we do now with our smartphones we’ll be able to do faster and better,” says Ian Fogg from OpenSignal, a mobile data analytics company. “Think of smart glasses featuring augmented reality, mobile virtual reality, much higher quality video, the Internet of things making cities smarter. But what’s really exciting is all the new services that will be built that we can’t foresee…driverless cars will be able to “talk” to each other and traffic management systems…swarms of drones co-operating to carry out search and rescue missions, fire assessments and traffic monitoring, all communicating wirelessly with each other and ground base stations over 5G networks…mobile videos should be near instantaneous and glitch-free….wearable fitness devices could monitor your health in real time, alerting doctors as soon as any emergency arises.”

    Ian Fogg goes on to write that “…China is experimenting with ultra high definition live drone broadcasts using 5G,” and then adds “Meanwhile, regulators around the world have been busy auctioning off spectrum to telecom companies, who’ve been experimenting with mobile phone makers on new services.”

    I like the manner in which that last sentence was presented. Preceding it, Wall mentions “friendly” China, the “lab experiment” for the rest of the world…testing out new gear on their subjects that will be implemented here in Oceania and Eurasia. Then, as if Wall is writing a story for starry-eyed high-school students: “Meanwhile, regulators…”  interchangeable with “Meanwhile, your friendly, honest, elected rulers/lawmakers”… Let’s translate the whole last sentence:  Meanwhile, politicians and lobbyists have been steering the contracts off to those telecoms already in their back pockets, as Edward Snowden revealed in his expose “Citizen Four” a few years ago, to put you completely under their thumb and surveilled…you, the citizen paying for the surveillance placed upon you.

    Remember the line I just paraphrased from “1984”?  Can you see what they’re creating? A world where your refrigerator will be able to tell the authorities how much Absolut you have, and how much you’ve consumed. A world where everything…everything, people, and everyone…will be monitored. Swarms of drones on “search and rescue missions?” Or will they be search and destroy operations? Traffic management systems, traffic monitoring, regulators…all of this they want to bring in.

    Funny, though: with all of this, they don’t seem to want it when it is placed upon themselves, as you’ll see in the 3rd article cited. First this:

    2. July 31st,  2018 “Senate Democrats are Circulating Plans for Government Takeover of the Internet: Reason Roundup,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown.

    The Democrats are using the Russians as the “bogeyman/Emmanuel Goldstein” to push forward measures that are totalitarian. A leaked memo by Senator Mark Warner is entitled “Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms,” with the created threat in this instance being listed as “Russian disinformation techniques.”

    Really, Warner? To address him as “Senator” would be an insult to the few remaining who truly are. How about the American disinformation techniques by the MSM (Mainstream Media) such as CNN, NBC, CBS, and all of the other quacking, lying, Associated Press (AP) sanctioned scriptwriters who have lied to us over the decades?

    Here is what Warner and the other communists (Democrats) want, regarding the Internet and Social Media in the U.S., individuals and companies alike:

    1. Mandatory location verification – on all user accounts and posts

    2. Mandatory identity verification – authentication by companies and forced compliance of those companies by the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and the FTC (Federal Trade Commission)

    3. Bot Labeling – companies to label bots or be penalized

    4. Define popular tech as “essential facilities” – THIS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, IS THE KEY TO THE WHOLE THING…to force regulation in the “interests of national security for critical infrastructure,” and “to protect the public good.” That is the vehicle…for your own good do they subjugate you

    5. More disclosure requirements for online political speech – simply put, to know who is going against the establishment…identify all of them

    6. Countering Cybersecurity Threats – i.e., creating the eternal threat/bad guy for justification for protection of the public and the nation, yada yada.

    7. More funding for the FTC – Of course! What better way to prompt a bureaucracy to regulate the people…than to pay them more money?  Especially as the money is coming from the people, via taxes!

    8. Requirements for social media and Internet firms’ algorithms to be audited by the feds – undoubtedly requiring a whole new bureaucratic arm to be created and funded

    9. [This one I’ll quote directly]: “The paper also suggests making as a rule that tech platforms above a certain size must turn over internal data and processes to “independent public interest researchers” so they can identify potential “public health/addiction effects, anticompetitive behavior, radicalization, scams, user propagated misinformation, and harassment – data that could be used to inform actions by regulators or Congress” Sounds great!  Nebulous and open to selective interpretation.

    Regarding “item 9” above, I wrote a piece for SHTF that was released July 16, 2018, entitled “A Micro Example of the Increasing U.S. Totalitarianism” that completely ties in with Warner’s memo. Please read it to see what they suggest here in “item 9”…an “outside” firm that is non-governmental set up to be an “authority and regulator” but with government approval and support. It’s a new paradigm: hire a “patsy” to do the dirty work with your authority that can be shut down and take a fall at any time. With the citizens, that’s called a “shell company,” but the government calls them “independent public interest researchers.”

    3. August 6th, 2018 “Pentagon Prohibits Personnel From Using GPS Services in All ‘Operational’ Areas,” by Jack Corrigan of Nextgov.

    [As mentioned, this one ties in to #1…how the government will not allow any restrictions upon themselves] 

    Here is a short excerpt:

    “The Defense Department on Monday issued an order barring all personnel from using geolocation services on their personal and government-issued devices in all operational areas. The policy, which applies to smartphones, tablets, fitness trackers, smartwatches and all other applications with geolocation features, goes into effect immediately.”

    The article goes on to say that the government can exempt personnel from this (termed “make exceptions”) when they want to. Naturally, the measure is to protect government workers, soldiers, operatives, etc., from being compromised when their little clicking toys and devices reveal their locations.

    But of course, we common folk are permitted to stroll around the kingdom, shop, talk, twitter, tweet, etc., with all of our locations known, monitored, and recorded. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

    4. August 8th, 2018 “Homeless people wearing barcodes to accept cashless payments,” by Camilla Turner of The Telegraph. 

    This is in England, as a part of an Oxford University-based initiative superficially appearing to “aid the homeless,” but in reality, it is a purely totalitarian construct. You need to read this article.  The homeless individual carries a card that is matched to an account that is managed by a caseworker…to assure that the donation goes toward a rental payment or an identification card. The “donor” can even make the “donation” with their happy cell phone! Yay! And they can see a “profile” on the homeless individual that gives their circumstances, etc. Isn’t that wonderful?

    So, they can actually verify the miserable cause of the person’s misery, and make a miserly donation that will be accounted for by a miserable case worker with their miserable computer…ensuring the miserly money goes toward a miserable, approved payment of some kind. Eliminate the cash, and control all of the serfs.

    5. August 9th, 2018 “MLB and NFL fans submit their faces and fingerprints to buy food, beer, and tickets,” out of massprivatei.blogspot.com. 

    This piece details how citizen-serfs can line up for their sporting events and scan their fingerprints for CLEAR’s TSA checkpoints and even to purchase food and alcohol. Complete, of course, with biometric-gathering photo and camera devices. The photo shows a guy who could be quarterback Tom Brady’s brother scanning his fingerprint at the counter while a smiling puppet-person-employee lovingly watches.

    Read the article. They’re collecting the data in the easiest manner: passively, and all the while conditioning the people to submit to such actions. What could be the purpose? That is a question you should have answered already. I’ll give it to you, in case you missed it.

    They want to monitor, control, and enslave every person on the globe, and kill any who resist or will not serve of use to them.

    That is it, plain and simple.

    Five different articles from different sources. Look at them as jigsaw puzzle pieces, and see them for their underlying significance. 5G technology interconnecting everything, the Internet and social media completely regulated with no privacy, government maintaining privacy and secrecy for itself, every segment of society including the homeless being controlled and “managed,” and biometric collection on people proceeding without halt.

    It’s just an article, I know. The problem lies with the fact that we’ve all been so conditioned as to just accept what is done to us as a whole. Acceptance and complacence are interchangeable in this instance, as either translates into doing nothing to stem the flow toward tyranny. The first step to resisting that tyranny is to be aware, and to sift what is truly relevant from what does not appear to be important at first glance. If you can visualize how the cage is being constructed, you can complete the puzzle, and just maybe the door to the cage will not close with you in it.

  • Death Of A Nation: Drug Overdose Deaths Jump To Record 72,000 Last Year

    The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates drug overdose deaths based on a current flow of mortality data from the National Vital Statistics System has just reached a record of 71,568 Americans in 2017. That is a 6.6 percent jump in overdose deaths over 2016 and represents a rapid deterioration of America’s inner core: The middle class.

    More than 40,000 Americans died from opioid-related overdoses last year, and around 30,000 people died from overdoses of synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, said The Hill.

    The overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids increased sharply from 2016, while deaths from heroin, prescription opioids, and methadone dropped.

    Last month, in a separate CDC’s Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, we explained: The third wave of the opioid epidemic is here, as new synthetics [fentanyl analogs] that are 10,000 times as potent as morphine and used to tranquilize elephants are attributing to the latest surge in deaths.

    Watch: First responders revive women with Narcan after an opioid overdose

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    For context, drug overdoses killed more Americans last year (71,568) than the Vietnam War (58,220 U.S. military fatal casualties).

    Overdoses outpaced fatalities from suicide, or from influenza, and pneumonia, which claimed about 44,000 and 57,000 lives, respectively, in 2016. Drug overdoses almost rivaled the 79,500 people who die from diabetes each year in the U.S., which is the 7th leading cause of death.

    But there is no comparison to the 150,000 Americans that die each year from automobile crashes.

    The biggest spike in drug overdoses occurred in Nebraska, North Carolina, New Jersey, Indiana, and West Virginia (33.3 percent, 22.5 percent, 21.1 percent, 15.1 percent, and 11.2 percent increases, respectively).

    Infographic: Overdose Deaths Hit 72,000 As Numbers Still Come In | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    On a lighter note, the report mentioned areas like Wyoming, Utah, and Oklahoma experienced fewer deaths.

    Regions like Mississippi and, notably, Massachusetts, saw modest declines in overdoses, said the report. New England, the South, and the Rust Belt have been particularly hard-hit by the opioid epidemic, as their local economies continue to deteriorate.

    The Department of Health and Human Services recently declared the opioid outbreak a public health emergency. States are using grant money, which was signed into law in 2016, to counter the funding stress as the crisis continues to spread.

    Earlier this summer, House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill in June aimed at curbing the out of control overdoses. Some Democrats voted for the legislation; others opposed it for not going far enough and for not containing guaranteed funding.

    The drug epidemic is so concerning that opioid-related deaths have shifted the overall life expectancy rate for the U.S. lower for the second consecutive year. The last time this occurred, it was the early 1960s when the stock market raced to new highs, but then, shortly after that, experienced a sizeable market correction.

    America is in decline. Drug overdoses are at record levels. So…what now?

  • This Week Showed Internet Censorship Is As Much A Threat To The Left As The Right

    Authored by Danielle Ryan via RT.com,

    The banning of right wing controversialist Alex Jones from multiple social media platforms last week was a cause of celebration for many liberals, but should those on the left really be so complacent about creeping censorship?

    So far, the evidence suggest that there is indeed plenty for the left to worry about when it comes to corporations like Facebook and Twitter and their alliances with government censors.

    1. Facebook censorship of Venezuelan news

    In May, Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council in an effort to weed out “inauthentic content” on the platform. This organization is funded by various NATO governments and a slew of arms manufacturers like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Its board includes names like Henry Kissinger and former CIA director Michael Hayden — and it has consistently lobbied for regime change in Syria and, you guessed it, Venezuela, where it has funnelled large amounts of money into pro-opposition groups for years.

    So, it’s no surprise that weeks after Facebook partnered up with this less-than-objective group, it deleted from its platform the page belonging to top English-language, left-leaning Latin American news outlet Telesur without any explanation at all. The page was restored two days later, with Facebook citing vague “instability on the platform” as the cause of the block.

    Telesur just so happens to be one of the only major outlets reporting on events in Venezuela in a manner that goes against the US government position and US mainstream media perspective — so obviously, out with Alex Jones it must go.

    It wasn’t just Telesur, though. Facebook deleted the pages belonging to independent grassroots Venezuela Analysis and Haiti Analysis, which are also leftist websites highly critical of US foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean region.

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

    2. Facebook complying with Israeli deletion orders

    Last year, journalist Glenn Greenwald reported that Facebook met with Israeli government officials to determine which Palestinian activists should have their accounts deleted. The Israeli government threatened to enact laws forcing Facebook to comply with its deletion orders if it did not do so voluntarily.

    Of course, Facebook capitulated immediately and set about deleting accounts owned by Palestinian activists. Of some 158 requests submitted (over just four months) by Tel Aviv to Facebook asking for the removal of Palestinian content, 95 percent of them were granted. According to the same Intercept report,  Facebook hasn’t been overly concerned about what Israelis themselves are saying on Facebook and even calls for murder can be ignored by the social media giant.

    3. Google and Facebook censorship of left/socialist websites

    The World Socialist Web Site reported last year that changes to Google’s algorithms had seriously negatively impacted left-wing socialist and anti-war websites. An analysis by WSWS found that 13 such websites had seen their traffic plunge by a whopping 55 percent in the six months since Google had changed its algorithms. WSWS itself experienced a 74 percent drop in traffic between April and July last year. The changes also affected sites like Alternet, which saw its traffic plunge by 71 percent between April and September, Democracy Now (50 percent drop) and Truth-out.org (49 percent drop).

    Similarly, Police the Police (a page dedicated to exposing US police brutality) and the Free Thought Project (which focuses on government transparency) also saw their Facebook page traffic tank in 2018 after Facebook made changes to its newsfeed and search algorithms in an effort to combat “fake news”. PTP traffic dropped from between 12-15 million people per week to about 4 million — and the website had to fire its writing staff as a result. “The left is cheering this on, when historically the left is usually the side cheering for free speech,” PTP founder Jason Bassler told Mic.

    Amidst all of the celebration over the banning of Jones, some on the left cautioned that in fact, the left may indeed be the“real target” in all of this — and that those celebrating while people like Jones are banned are in fact being “conditioned”into accepting further censorship down the road.

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

    4. Legitimate left-wing protests targeted?

    A particularly strange example of Facebook’s commitment to banning “fake news” and promoting a nice, cozy atmosphere for everyone online is its decision to delete event pages for anti-racist and anti-fascist protests happening in Washington D.C.

    The “No Unite the Right 2-DC” event (a counter-rally against a previous white nationalist event in the city) was taken down after Facebook decided it displayed some “coordinated inauthentic behavior” (the kind of random phrase that can no doubt be arbitrarily applied to anything without explanation).

    The event organizer said in a statement: “This is a real protest in Washington, D.C. It is not George Soros. It is not Russia. It is just us.”

    5. Twitter suspending and banning anti-war activists

    Twitter has come under fire recently for “shadowbanning” conservative accounts, making them harder to find on the platform and having their tweets appear less prominently in people’s feeds in an effort to limit their audience. But again, it’s not just the right.

    Twitter recently suspended the accounts of Daniel McAdams, the executive director of the libertarian and antiwar Ron Paul Institute and Scott Horton, the editor of the AntiWar.com website. Explaining what happened, McAdams said that he and Horton were suspended after defending former US diplomat Peter Van Buren who had just been banned permanently from Twitter after heated exchanges with journalist Jonathan M. Katz over what Van Buren said was his “unwillingness to challenge government lies”. In one of his tweets to Katz, Buren sarcastically commented: “I hope a MAGA guy eats your face”. Katz reported him for “promoting violence” and Twitter later caved and removed Buren’s account.

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    In explaining his suspension, Twitter told McAdams that he could not “promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease” — none of which he accepts that he did.

    *  *  *

    Perhaps the really amazing thing about all of this is that it is happening in front of our eyes and the powers that be are not even bothering to lie about it. Elected US officials are openly promoting this kind of censorship as a way to prevent the“sowing of discord” among populations. At a Senate Judiciary Committee last year about “Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online,” Democratic Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono called on social media platforms to prove their commitment to preventing “the fomenting of discord” online.

    Working hand-in-glove with governments, corporations like Facebook have been handed enormous power to decide what constitutes free speech and which opinions are worthy of being heard. How long will it be before people realize banning Alex Jones wasn’t really a victory at all?

    Danielle Ryan

  • How The Hell Did A Teenager Hack Apple's Secured Servers?

    An Australian teenager whose name has been withheld is facing serious charges by authorities over a massive data breach of Apple’s secured network.

    Apple said on Friday no customer information was compromised after Australian media reported a boy, 16, from the southern city of Melbourne, hacked into the world’s most valuable company from his parent’s basement many times over the last year, The Age newspaper reported, citing statements by the teenager’s lawyer in Children’s Court. He was summoned to a Melbourne court on Thursday.

    Apple contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation which launched a major international investigation, The Age said, quoting statements made in court. The FBI then passed the case to the Australian Federal Police (AFP), where they later tracked down the teen and found software that had enabled the hacking.

    The AFP raided the teen’s family home in Melbourne and seized two laptops, a mobile phone, and a hard drive. Court documents said the teenage hacker stored 90 gigabytes of Apple secured files and customer accounts in a folder titled “hacky hack hack,” the newspaper said. Authorities also said he readily spoke about his illegal activities on Facebook-owned instant messenger WhatsApp.

    Here is what the court heard:

    “Two Apple laptops were seized and the serial numbers matched the serial numbers of the devices which accessed the internal systems,” a prosecutor said.

    “A mobile phone and hard drive were also seized and the IP address … matched the intrusions into the organization.

    “The purpose was to connect remotely to the company’s internal systems.”

    The teen’s lawyer told the courtroom his client had become so popular in the international hacking community that even mentioning the case in detail could expose him and his family to unwanted risk.

    Crown Prosecutors also acknowledged that Apple was “very sensitive about publicity,” as it seems the story has not been widely reported.

    An Apple spokesman said this in a statement to Guardian Australia:

    “At Apple, we vigilantly protect our networks and have dedicated teams of information security professionals that work to detect and respond to threats,” said the spokesman.

    “In this case, our teams discovered the unauthorized access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement. We regard the data security of our users as one of our greatest responsibilities and want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised.”

    Dr. Suelette Dreyfus, a privacy expert from the University of Melbourne’s school of computing and information systems, urged against jailtime. “I have researched a number of teen hacker cases internationally,” Dreyfus told Guardian Australia.

    “Almost all these teens grew out of the technology boundary-pushing of their youth, and then went on to live useful lives and contributing to society. Putting them in prison is often a waste of that potential. “Young people often make mistakes when they are exploring and rule-breaking especially online – including boasting about their exploits. It’s not right, but for tech teens, it can be a part of growing up … there’s usually a really worried teen and family at the end of this sort of court case.”

    Both AFP and Melbourne court declined to comment on the matter when asked by Guardian Australia. Reports indicate the teenager would be sentenced next month on September 20.

    So we ask a difficult question: How the hell did a teenager hack the world’s most valuable company and steal customer data? Apple has a lot of explaining to do…

  • Twitter Bans Anti-War Activist Caitlin Johnstone For "Abusing" John McCain

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    UPDATE: It looks like the suspension was lifted just after I hit publish on this. A lot of my fans and even a few haters made a big noise in objection to Twitter’s actions, and it worked! As we discussed recently, the plutocratic manipulators work so hard to manufacture our consent because they need that consent, and they can’t act if we don’t give it to them. I’ve left the article as-is below for posterity, and so people can see my experience with #Resistance Twitter’s attempt to silence dissident speech. Never stop fighting.

    *  *  *

    I’ve received an email from Twitter which reads as follows:

    Hello Caitlin Johnstone,

    Your account, caitoz has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules.

    Specifically, for:

    Violating our rules against abusive behavior.

    You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.

    Note that if you attempt to evade a permanent suspension by creating new accounts, we will suspend your new accounts. If you wish to appeal this suspension, please contact our support team.

    They’re calling it a “suspension”, but nobody can view my page and I can’t perform any activities on it, and it appears to be permanent unless I succeed in going through the anonymous and unaccountable appeals process. Now when people try to access my account, they get a screen that looks something like this depending on what device they’re using:

    I haven’t abused anybody, and I’ve been observing extreme caution with my language for the last few days ever since I made a political tweet about John McCain which drew the wrath of #Resistance Twitter. The offending tweet reads as follows:

    “Friendly public service reminder that John McCain has devoted his entire political career to slaughtering as many human beings as possible at every opportunity, and the world will be improved when he finally dies.”

    I posted this four days ago when John McCain was trending because Donald Trump didn’t pay him any respect when signing the bloated NDAA military spending bill that was (appropriately) named after him. My reason for doing so was simple: the establishment pundits responsible for manipulating the way Americans think and vote have been aggressively promulgating the narrative that McCain is a hero and a saint, and I think it’s very important to disrupt that narrative. If we allow them to canonize this warmongering psychopath, then they’ll have normalized and sanctified his extensive record of pushing for psychopathic acts of military violence throughout his entire political career. They’ll have helped manufacture support for war and the military-industrial complex war whores who facilitate it. Saying we’ll be glad when he’s gone is a loud and unequivocal way of rejecting that establishment-imposed narrative.

    Interestingly, I’ve been saying this exact same thing repeatedly for over a year. An article I wrote about McCain in July of last year titled “Please Just Fucking Die Already” received a far more widespread backlash than this one, with articles published about it by outlets like CNN, USA Today and the Washington Post. Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar talked about me on The View. I was never once suspended or warned by any social media outlet or blogging platform at that time; it was treated as the political speech about a public figure that it clearly and undeniably is. The only thing that has changed since that time is the climate of internet censorship.

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

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

    So anyway, I tweeted the thing about McCain, it was getting some angry backlash, and I received an email that a different tweet I’d made about McCain had been reported, reviewed and found not to be in violation.

    Then a popular #Resist account condemned my post and was retweeted by Caroline Orr, a pundit with hundreds of thousands of followers who works with the David Brock propaganda firm Shareblue. Instantly, my Twitter notifications began filling up with comments like these:

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

    I also got a bunch of notifications like these from bot accounts as soon as Orr shared the response to my tweet:

    And I’ve received furious, vitriolic notifications from Clintonite Twitter accounts ever since, up until my account was shut down.

    So it looks like anyone who voices a political opinion that is deemed sufficiently offensive to Centrist Twitter can be purged in this way now. If you can get enough people reporting the same thing over and over again for a few days, one of those reports will eventually land in the lap of an admin whose personal bias allows them to squint just right at political speech about a public figure and see a violation of Twitter policy.

    I’ve been writing about the dangers of internet censorship so much lately because this is becoming a major problem. In a corporatist system of government, wherein government power and corporate power are not separated in any meaningful way, corporate censorship is state censorship.

    The plutocratic class which effectively owns the US government also owns all the mass media, allowing that plutocratic class to efficiently manipulate the way Americans think and vote so as to manufacture public consent for the establishment status quo upon which those plutocratic empires are built.

    Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. The only cracks in plutocratic narrative control have come in the form of alternative media outlets and social media, the access to which is unfortunately guarded by plutocrats with well-documented ties to secretive and unaccountable government agencies. The plutocratic alliance has successfully funneled online audiences into platforms that can be easily regulated, and now they are censoring those platforms.

    An ungoverned media landscape would cripple the consent-manufacturing propaganda machine of the ruling oligarchs, making us impossible to manipulate and control. This would give us our only real shot at ending the wars that the John McCains of the world have devoted their lives to facilitating, our only shot at creating true and authentic democracy, and our only shot at turning the world around from the omnicidal, ecocidal trajectory that these sociopathic oligarchs have us on.

    They can’t allow that. Their rule depends upon it, and, historically, rulers do not give up power willingly.

    The longer we wait to fight this, the more marginalized our voices become, and the smaller our window to escape the cage they are building around us shrinks. Make your voices heard and refuse to consent to allowing a few Silicon Valley plutocrats to manipulate public discourse in their own interest. The time to act is now.

    *  *  *

    Internet censorship is closing in, so the best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to get on 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.

  • How US Sugar Subsidies Bring A 'Red Tide' Of Algae To Florida's Shores

    Authored by Mark Thornton via The Mises Institute,

    ABC News reports that “Toxic red tide blooms are creeping up Florida’s west coast, killing marine life and irritating humans.” The red (or maroonish) tide is truly a nasty problem that I have experienced first-hand in the form of a ruined vacation.

    It is a potentially toxic algae to wildlife when it occurs in high concentrations. The Karenia brevis algae can be a threat to fish, birds, and even manatee. At least 92 manatees have been killed so far and at least one whale shark! This creates conditions at the beach of discolored water, dead fish, and a horrible smell. Tourists are adversely affected as well as local businesses.

    The algae are a natural phenomenon that has been known of for almost two centuries. However, the harmful “blooms” have occurred much more often and in more places in recent decades. More recently, it has been plaguing southwest Florida beaches since November 2017 and is now particularly bad over a larger area.

    I was recently attacked on Facebook for explaining all the benefits we would receive if we reduced the number of regulators and their budgets, i.e., fewer unnecessary regulatory restrictions on businesses and resource owners, less spending and taxes, more resources in the productive economy, and more entrepreneurship to name the primary ones.

    My “friend” wrote that if we reduced the number of regulators, who would protect him from all the various perceived evils, including the red tide at the Florida coast. I replied to him, in part, that we pay for over 100,000 regulators for financial markets and they did not protect us from the financial crisis, that BP’s deep-water oil rigs are extremely highly regulated (in fact they would not be drilling in deep water at all if not for regulations!), and in fact, EPA rules and regulators are there to protect the interests of polluters and to block citizens from protecting themselves in court. That was the end of the conversation.

    Back to the story. Actually, this is an old story that I most recently I wrote about 4 ½ years ago. There is an easy answer to why this red tide problem is growing increasingly worse, as well as having an easy solution. There is no need to create a Red Tide Project to do declare a War on Red Tide.

    The Red Tide starts as natural growth of the “bad algae” dozens of miles off shore near the continental shelf. That algae can then drift toward shore and enter brackish water inlets. The blooms are not stimulated in open circulating waters. However, they are stimulated to grow and get bigger in the presence of manmade nutrients, such as fertilizers that have run into water sources from agricultural production all over the Gulf of Mexico.

    In contrast, if the water in the Gulf is circulating well, then it brings more natural nutrients to the coastline. These nutrients feed other types of green “good algae” which keeps the Red Tide in check. In other words, mother nature can keep the problem in check.

    However, when water circulation is down and fertilizer runoff is in play, you have a problem. A multi-billion-dollar problem.

    Though other factors play a role in the algae bloom crises, one of the most significant involves the sugar industry. A combination of federal sugar subsidies, federal regulations on pollution, and federal control of Lake Okeechobee (a giant lake in southern Florida) runoff guidelines has created a recipe for disaster.

    The federal sugar subsidy prevents Americans from buying sugar from Cuba and other sources. This means that we have to produce our own sugar and that we pay the world’s highest price for sugar. It also means that we grow sugar and sugar substitutes in a high-cost fashion using a lot of fertilizer!

    According to ABC News:

    Once the red tide is inshore, the algae can grow even more using man-made nutrients, such as fertilizer.

    “The increase in runoff may likely exacerbate an existing bloom,” Weisberg said.

    Earlier this week, Florida Gov. Rick Scott called for the FWC and FDEP to “mobilize all available resources” to address the impacts of the red tide.

    On Friday, Scott blamed the cause of the blooms on “the federal government releasing water from Lake Okeechobee.”

    “For too long, Floridians have had to deal with harmful algal blooms caused by the federal government releasing water from Lake Okeechobee into our rivers and coastal estuaries,” Scott said in a press release.

    So, there you have it. Federal rules, regulations, and regulators are the cause. The federal sugar subsidy has created a massive increase in fertilizer use in agriculture in southern Florida and in other states, such as Louisiana. The EPA protects farmers and others who dump chemicals into the water by setting protection “limits,” and then federal officials dump excessive pollutants into our water ways and we have no recourse against them.

    I think the solutions are simple and straightforward. End the sugar subsidies and the EPA and its protection limits. Restore the right of the people to sue polluters that cause demonstrable harm.

  • The 2nd Special Counsel, Assange, & The 'Free' Press

    Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

    Two thirds of Americans want the Mueller investigation (inquisition, someone called it) over by the midterm elections. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani has said that if Mueller wants to interview Trump, he’ll have to do so before September 1, because the Trump camp doesn’t want to be the one to unduly influence the elections. Mueller himself appears to lean towards prolonging the case, and that may well be with an eye on doing exactly that.

    And there’s something else as well: as soon as the investigation wraps up, Trump will demand a second special counsel, this time to scrutinize the role the ‘other side’ has played in the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath.

    He’s determined to get it, and he’ll fire both Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein if they try to stand in his way.

    There have of course been tons of signs that it’s going to happen, but we got two significant ones just the past few days.

    The first is the termination of John Brennan’s security clearance. It looks impossible that no additional clearances will be revoked. There are more people who have them but would also be part of a second special counsel’s investigation. That doesn’t rhyme.

    The second sign is Senator Rand Paul’s call for immunity for Julian Assange to come talk to the US senate about what he knows about Russian involvement in the 2016 election. Obviously, we know that he denies its very existence, and has offered to provide evidence to that end. But before he could do that, a potential deal with the DOJ to do so was torpedoed by then FBI chief James Comey and Senator Mark Warner.

    Both will also be part of the second investigation. Rand Paul’s motivation is simple: Assange’s testimony could be a very significant part of the process of figuring out what actually happened. And that should be what everybody in Washington wants. Question is if they all really do. That’s -ostensibly- why there is the first, the Mueller Russian collusion, investigation. Truth finding.

    But Mueller doesn’t appear to have found much of anything. At least, that we know of. He’s locked up Paul Manafort on charges unrelated to collusion, put him in isolation and dragged him before a jury. But don’t be surprised if Manafort is acquitted by that jury one of these days. The case against him seemed a lot more solid before than it does now. A jury that asks the judge to re-define ‘reasonable doubt’ already is in doubt, reasonable or not. And that is what reasonable doubt means.

    But it wasn’t just Brennan and Comey and Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and all the rest of them in the intelligence community who played questionable roles around the election and the accusations of Russian meddling in it. The American media were also there, and very prominently. Which is why when 300 papers publish editorials pushing against Trump ‘attacking’ the media, you can’t help but -wryly- smile.

    Why does Trump attack the press? Because they’ve been attacking him for two years, and they’re not letting go. So the press can attack the president, but he cannot fight back.

    That’s the rationale, but with the Mueller investigation not going anywhere it’s a hard one to keep alive.

    There are three reasons for the behavior of the New York Times, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN et al.

    The first is political, they’re Democrat hornblowers.

    The second is their owners have a personal thing against Donald Trump.

    But these get trumped by the third reason: Trump is their golden goose. Their opposition makes them a fortune. All they need to do is publish articles 24/7 denouncing him. And they have for two years.

    That puts the 300 papers’ editorials in a strange light. Many of them would have been fighting for their very lives if not for anti-Trump rhetoric. All 300 fit neatly and easily in one echo chamber. And, to put it mildly, inside that chamber, not everyone is always asking for evidence of everything that’s being said.

    It’s not difficult to whoop up a storm there without crossing all your t’s. And after doing just that for 2 years and change, it seems perhaps a tad hypocritical to claim that you are honest journalists just trying to provide people with the news as it happened.

    Because when you’ve published hundreds, thousands of articles about Russian meddling, and the special counsel that was named to a large degree because of those articles, fails to come up with any evidence of it, it will become obvious that you’ve not just, and honestly, been reporting the news ‘as it happened’.

    You have instead been making things up because you knew that would sell better.

    And when the second special counsel starts, where will American media be? Sure, it may not happen before the midterms, and you may have hopes that the Democrats win those bigly, but even if that comes to pass (slim chance), Trump will still be president, and the hearings and interviews won’t be soft and mild. Also, there will be serious questions, under oath, about leaks to the press.

    Still, whichever side of this particular fence you’re on, there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on. That is, when we get to count how many of the 300 editorials have actually mentioned, let alone defended, Julian Assange, and I’ll bet you that number is painfully close to zero, that is where we find out how honest this defense of the free press is.

    If for you the free press means that you should be able to write and broadcast whatever you want, even if it’s lacking in evidence, as much of the Russiagate stuff obviously is, and you ‘forget’ to mention a man who has really been attacked and persecuted for years, for publishing files that are all about evidence, you are not honest, and therefore probably not worth saving.

    Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are the essence of the free press. A press that is neutral, objective, fearless and determined to get the truth out. The New York Times and CNN simply don’t fit that description -anymore-. So when their editors publish calls to protect free press, but they leave out the one person who really represents free press, and the one person who’s been tortured for exactly that, you have zero credibility.

    Sure, you may appear to have credibility in your echo chamber, but that’s not where real life takes place, where evidence is available and where people can make up their own minds based on objective facts provided by real journalists.

    You guys just blew this big time. You don’t care about free press, you care about your own asses. And the second special counsel is coming. Good luck. Oh, and we won’t forget your silencing of Assange, or your attacks on him. If you refuse to do it, WE will free the press.

  • Not The Onion: Southwest To Allow Miniature Horses As 'Emotional Support Animals'

    Southwest Airlines has revamped their policy for travelers who need to fly with unconventional “emotional support animals,” following similar moves by JetBlue, United, American and Delta – which have all cracked down on those traveling with everything from motherfu*king therapy snakes, to supportive spiders, to peacocks trained to stow one’s emotional baggage. Cats and dogs are still allowed. 

    One animal Southwest hasn’t restricted, however, is miniature horses. Because why not? 

    Each passenger will be allowed one Emotional Support Animal (ESA) – which we imagine will be the ultimate Sophie’s Choice for those hoping to smuggle their emotional ant farms past security. Also, a note from a licensed medical doctor or mental health professional will be required on the day of departure. 

    For everyone not bringing an emotional support cat, dog, or miniature horse – looks like you’re just going to have to go to your happy place – or take a road trip.

     

  • Crispin Odey: It Feels Like Tesla's "Final Stage of Life"

    Hedge fund manager and noted Tesla bear Crispin Odey, in the wake of Tesla’s nearly 10% crash on Friday, talked in his most recent investor letter about how difficult it was to be short the name. He also made the revelation that he believes that the company is “entering the final stages of its life”.

    Odey, like many shorts, has ridden out the seemingly never-ending bullishness in Tesla stock as, despite failed promises and erratic behavior from CEO Elon Musk over the last couple of years, the equity has done very little but move higher since it has been a public company.

    Odey also compared Musk’s behavior to Donald Crowhurst, “the amateur sailor who set off in the 1960s on a solo voyage around the world and never came back,” according to a Bloomberg article. 

    Tesla shares were pummeled on Friday, dropping almost 10% after Thursday night’s New York Times piece, in which Musk tearfully broke down and admitted not only that no one had reviewed his going private Tweet before he put it out whilst driving, but also that he would voluntarily resign the position of CEO to somebody who could do it better.

    “…if you have anyone who can do a better job, please let me know,” he told the New York Times. “They can have the job. Is there someone who can do the job better? They can have the reins right now.”

    Also in Musk’s interview with the New York Times, published Thursday evening, he again couldn’t help himself and had to take a shot at short-sellers like Odey.

    Musk said he was bracing for “at least a few months of extreme torture from the short-sellers, who are desperately pushing a narrative that will possibly result in Tesla’s destruction.”

    Referring to  short-sellers, he added: 

    “They’re not dumb guys, but they’re not supersmart. They’re O.K. They’re smartish.”

    It’s not just short sellers that Musk thinks are “not supersmart” – he reserves that designation for virtually anyone, especially if they happen to disagree with him: in recent months, in addition to wrangling with short-sellers and sending David Einhorn “short shorts”, Musk has belittled analysts for asking “boring, bonehead” questions.

    The Bloomberg article noted that Tesla is Odey European Inc’s second biggest equity short position.

    “The path this fund has taken to reach this place was so painful, but now I would not swap this portfolio for anyone else’s,” Odey wrote in the letter. “It is a pity you daren’t give it a try.”

    Perhaps over the coming weeks, we will truly see who is smart and who is “smartish”.

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Aug 17

Today’s News 17th August 2018

  • Switzerland Refuses To Sign Nuclear-Bomb-Ban Treaty

    The Swiss Federal Council has decided against signing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) adopted at the United Nations last year. A working group had advised that the arguments against outweighed potential opportunities of joining. 

    A total of 122 states, including Switzerland, adopted the treaty at the UN in July 2017 (although the nine nuclear powers were not part of that group). The TPNW will enter into force when at least 50 countries ratify it. Signatories have obligations not to develop, test, produce, acquire, possess, stockpile, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons. The agreement also prohibits the deployment of nuclear weapons on national territory and assistance to any country involved in prohibited activities. 

    Activists with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Photo: AFP

    As SwissInfo.ch reports, Switzerland’s seven-member executive body took the decision not to sign based on an interdepartmental working group report published in June. The government acknowledged that there were “humanitarian, international law and peace policy considerations” in favour of acceding to the treaty but felt it was not the right moment. 

    “It is the Federal Council’s opinion, however, that in the current international context, the TPNW entails risks in terms of both the continued advancement of disarmament diplomacy and Switzerland’s security policy interests. Furthermore, the TPNW contains a number of provisions whose interpretation and implications can only be tentatively gauged at the current time,” said a government statement.

    While Treaty supporters argue that a failure to sign the treaty by Switzerland could have an impact on the country’s humanitarian credentials…

    “If Switzerland does not sign this treaty, people will question our status as a champion of humanitarian rights and disarmament. I think [failure to sign] would undermine our credibility in this area,” Beatrice Fihn, head of the Geneva-based International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) said during an interview on RTS recently

    Ambassador Sabrina Dallafior, who represents Switzerland at the United Nations Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, defended the cautious position taken by Bern in relation to the signing of the treaty in March, skeptically pointing out that:

    “We are not sure that this treaty will really be a step towards the elimination of nuclear weapons because the countries which have the atomic bomb are not a party to it, although we are convinced that they should be implicated, them and their allies. This treaty should not be against them but with them.”

    As The Local reports, the Swiss working group report itself notes that should Switzerland sign up to the TPNW, it would, in extreme cases of self-defence “reduce its freedom of action and abandon the option of explicitly placing itself under a nuclear umbrella within the framework” of self-defence alliances “not least with nuclear weapon states or their allies” – taken by Swiss daily Tages Anzeiger to be a reference to NATO.

    Switzerland said it would “closely monitor further developments and remain committed in this matter” and would re-examine its position in the future as necessary.

  • NATO Repeats The Great Mistake Of The Warsaw Pact

    Authored by Martin Sieff via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Through the 1990s, during the terms of US President Bill Clinton, NATO relentlessly and inexorably expanded through Central Europe. Today, the expansion of that alliance eastward – encircling Russia with fiercely Russo-phobic regimes in one tiny country after another and in Ukraine, which is not tiny at all – continues.

    This NATO expansion – which the legendary George Kennan presciently warned against in vain – continues to drive the world the closer towards the threat of thermonuclear war. Far from bringing the United States and the Western NATO allies increased security, it strips them of the certainty of the peace and security they would enjoy if they instead sought a sincere, constructive and above all stable relationship with Russia.

    It is argued that the addition of the old Warsaw Pact member states of Central Europe to NATO has dramatically strengthened NATO and gravely weakened Russia. This has been a universally-accepted assumption in the United States and throughout the West for the past quarter century. Yet it simply is not true.

    In reality, the United States and its Western European allies are now discovering the hard way the same lesson that drained and exhausted the Soviet Union from the creation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955 to its dissolution 36 years later. The tier of Central European nations has always lacked the coherence, the industrial base and the combined economic infrastructure to generate significant industrial, financial or most of all strategic and military power.

    In fact the current frustrating experience of NATO, and the long, exhausting tribulations that faced Soviet diplomats and generals for so many decades was entirely consistent with the previous historical record going back at least until 1718.

    From 1718 until 1867 – a period of a century and a half – most of Central Europe, including even regions of Poland at the end of the 18th century, were consolidated within the Austro –Hungarian Empire, However even then, the Habsburg multi-national empire was always militarily weak and punched beneath its weight. After Emperor Franz Josef recklessly proclaimed his famous Compromise of 1867, the effectiveness of the imperial army was reduced to almost zero. The autonomous and feckless conduct of the Hungarian aristocracy ensured a level of confusion, division, incompetence and ineptitude that was revealed in the army’s total collapse against both Russia and Serbia in the great battles of 1914 at the start of World War I.

    Germany moved in to occupy and consolidate the region in both world wars. But far from making Germany a global giant and enabling it to maintain its domination of Europe, the Central European regions – whether as part of Austro-Hungary during World War I or as independent nation-states allied to the Nazis in World War II – proved miniscule and worthless against the alliances of Russia, the United States, Britain and France that the Germans fought against in both global conflicts.

    After the Soviet Union militarily destroyed the genocidal military power of Nazi Germany in World War II, Russia’s Great Patriotic War, the political consolidation of East Germany and Poland were strategically necessary for Russia’s security. But occupying and organizing the rest of the region was not. Far from strengthening the Soviet Union, those nations weakened and distracted it. Today, NATO is repeating the Soviet Mistake and that fatal move is inexorably draining the alliance of all its strength and credibility.

    NATO is also repeating the disastrous mistake that France made in 1920-21 when it created a “Little Entente” of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania to supposedly counterbalance the revival of Germany. The plan failed completely.

    Today those very same nations – enthusiastically joined by Hungary, Poland and the three little Baltic states – are relentlessly distorting both NATO and the EU. They generate weakness and chaos in the alliances they are in – not unity and strength.

    As I have noted before in these columns, the great British historian Lord Correlli Barnett drew the important distinction between militarily powerful nations that are generators and exporters of security and those, either tiny or disorganized, pacifist and weak nations that have to import their security from more powerful states.

    One might call such small countries “feeder” or “parasite” states. They siphon off energy and strength from their protector partners. They weaken their alliance partners rather than strengthening them.

    The consistent lessons of more than 300 years of Central European history are therefore clear: Leading and organizing the tier of Central European nations in the Warsaw Pact did not strengthen the Soviet Union: Instead, those activities relentlessly weakened it.

    Incorporating most of the small nations in Central Europe into any empire or alliance has never been a cause or generator of military or national strength, regardless of the ideology or religious faith involved. At best, it is a barometer of national strength.

    When nations such as France, Germany, the Soviet Union or the United States are seen as rising powers in the world, the small countries of Central Europe always hasten to ally themselves accordingly. They therefore adopt and discard Ottoman Islamic imperialism. Austrian Christian imperialism, democracy, Nazism, Communism and again democracy as easily as putting on or off different costumes at a fancy dress ball in Vienna or Budapest.

    As Russia rises once again in global standing and national power, supported by its genuinely powerful allies China, India and Pakistan in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the nations of Central Europe can be anticipated to reorient their own loyalties accordingly once again.

  • From Boston To Ferguson To Charlottesville: The Evolution Of A Police State Lockdown

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “It takes a remarkable force to keep nearly a million people quietly indoors for an entire day, home from work and school, from neighborhood errands and out-of-town travel. It takes a remarkable force to keep businesses closed and cars off the road, to keep playgrounds empty and porches unused across a densely populated place 125 square miles in size. This happened … not because armed officers went door-to-door, or imposed a curfew, or threatened martial law. All around the region, for 13 hours, people locked up their businesses and ‘sheltered in place’ out of a kind of collective will. The force that kept them there wasn’t external – there was virtually no active enforcement across the city of the governor’s plea that people stay indoors.Rather, the pressure was an internal one – expressed as concern, or helpfulness, or in some cases, fear – felt in thousands of individual homes.”

    – Journalist Emily Badger, “The Psychology of a Citywide Lockdown”

    It has become way too easy to lockdown this nation.

    Five years ago, the city of Boston was locked down while police carried out a military-style manhunt for suspects in the 2013 Boston Marathon explosion. 

    Four years ago, the city of Ferguson, Missouri, was locked down, with government officials deploying a massive SWAT team, an armored personnel carrier, men in camouflage pointing heavy artillery at the crowd, smoke bombs and tear gas to quell citizen unrest over a police shooting of a young, unarmed black man.

    Three years ago, the city of Baltimore was put under a military-enforced lockdown after civil unrest over police brutality erupted into rioting. More than 1,500 national guard troops were deployed while residents were ordered to stay inside their homes and put under a 10 pm curfew.

    This year, it was my hometown of Charlottesville, Va., population 50,000, that was locked down while government officials declared a state of emergency and enacted heightened security measures tantamount to martial law, despite the absence of any publicized information about credible threats to public safety.

    As Tess Owen reports for Vice:

    One year after white supremacists paraded through the streets, the face of downtown Charlottesville was transformed once again – this time with checkpoints, military-style camps for National Guard, and state police on every corner. When residents woke up Saturday, all entrances to the downtown mall were blocked off, apart from two checkpoints, where police looked through people’s bags for lighters, knives or any other weapons. Up above, standing atop a building site, two national guard members photographed the individuals coming in and out… A National Guard encampment was set up in McGuffey Park, between the children’s playground and the basketball court, where about 20 military police officers in camouflage were snoozing in the shade of some trees. A similar encampment was set up a few blocks away.

    More details from journalist Ned Oliver:

    Downtown Charlottesville felt like the green zone of a war-torn city Saturday. More than a thousand local and state police officers barricaded 10 blocks of the city’s popular pedestrian district, the Downtown Mall, to prepare for the one-year anniversary of the white supremacist rally last year that left dozens injured and one dead. To enter, people had to submit to bag checks and searches at one of two checkpoints… Preparations aside, unlike last year, no white supremacist groups had said they were going to visit the city, and, by week’s end, none had. Instead, it was a normal day on the mall except for the heavy security, a military helicopter constantly circling overhead, and hundreds of police officers milling around.

    Make no mistake, this was a militarized exercise in intimidation, and it worked only too well.

    For the most part, the residents of this city—once home to Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third president, author of the Declaration of Independence, and champion of the Bill of Rights—welcomed the city-wide lockdown, the invasion of their privacy, and the dismantling of every constitutional right intended to serve as a bulwark against government abuses.

    Yet for those like myself who have studied emerging police states, the sight of any American city placed under martial law—its citizens essentially under house arrest (officials used the Orwellian phrase “shelter in place” in Boston to describe the mandatory lockdown), military-style helicopters equipped with thermal imaging devices buzzing the skies, tanks and armored vehicles on the streets, and snipers perched on rooftops, while thousands of black-garbed police swarmed the streets and SWAT teams carried out house-to-house searches—leaves us in a growing state of unease.

    Watching the events of the lockdown unfold, I couldn’t help but think of Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goering’s remarks during the Nuremberg trials. As Goering noted:

    It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

    As the events in Charlottesville have made clear, it does indeed work the same in every country.

    Whatever the threat to so-called security—whether it’s civil unrest, school shootings, or alleged acts of terrorism—government officials will capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state.

    These troubling developments are the outward manifestations of an inner, philosophical shift underway in how the government views not only the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but “we the people,” as well. 

    What this reflects is a move away from a government bound by the rule of law to one that seeks total control through the imposition of its own self-serving laws on the populace.

    Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much for the American people to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, even if it means submitting to martial law, having their homes searched, and being stripped of one’s constitutional rights at a moment’s notice.

    In Charlottesville, most of the community fell in line, except for one gun-toting, disabled, 71-year-old war veteran who was arrested for purchasing cans of Arizona iced tea, a can of bug spray and razor blades, all of which were on the City’s list of temporarily prohibited, potentially “dangerous” items. Incidentally, the veteran’s guns (not among the list of prohibited items) caused no alarm. 

    Talk about draconian.

    This continual undermining of the rules that protect civil liberties will inevitably have far-reaching consequences on a populace that not only remains ignorant about their rights but is inclined to sacrifice their liberties for phantom promises of safety. 

    Be warned: these lockdowns are just a precursor to full-blown martial law.

    The powers-that-be want us acclimated to the sights and sounds of a city-wide lockdown with tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones patrolling overhead.

    • They want us to accept the fact that in the American police state, we are all potentially guilty, all potential criminals, all suspects waiting to be accused of a crime.

    • They want us to be meek and submissive.

    • They want us to report on each other.

    • They want us to be grateful to the standing armies for their so-called protection.

    • They want us to self-censor our speech, self-limit our movements, and police ourselves.

    As Glenn Greenwald notes in The Intercept:

    “Americans are now so accustomed to seeing police officers decked in camouflage and Robocop-style costumes, riding in armored vehicles and carrying automatic weapons first introduced during the U.S. occupation of Baghdad, that it has become normalized… The dangers of domestic militarization are both numerous and manifest. To begin with… it degrades the mentality of police forces in virtually every negative way and subjects their targeted communities to rampant brutality and unaccountable abuse… Police militarization also poses grave and direct dangers to basic political liberties, including rights of free speech, press and assembly.”

    Make no mistake: these are the hallmarks of a military occupation.

    Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality.

    We are already under martial law, held at gunpoint by a standing army.

    Take a look at the pictures from Charlottesville, from Baltimore, from Ferguson and from Boston, and then try to persuade yourself that this is what freedom in America is supposed to look like.

    A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the American people of any vestige of freedom.

    It was for this reason that those who established America vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military government, ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

    Unfortunately, with the Constitution under constant attack, the military’s power, influence and authority have grown dramatically. Even the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which makes it a crime for the government to use the military to carry out arrests, searches, seizure of evidence and other activities normally handled by a civilian police force, was greatly weakened by both Barack Obama and George W. Bush, who ushered in exemptions allowing troops to deploy domestically and arrest civilians in the wake of alleged terrorist acts.

    Now we find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military and have just as little regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.

    We’ve already gone too far down this road.

    Add these lockdowns onto the list of other troubling developments that have taken place over the past 30 years or more, and the picture grows even more troubling: the expansion of the military industrial complex and its influence in Washington DC, the rampant surveillance, the corporate-funded elections and revolving door between lobbyists and elected officials, the militarized police, the loss of our freedoms, the injustice of the courts, the privatized prisons, the school lockdowns, the roadside strip searches, the military drills on domestic soil, the fusion centers and the simultaneous fusing of every branch of law enforcement (federal, state and local), the stockpiling of ammunition by various government agencies, the active shooter drills that are indistinguishable from actual crises, the economy flirting with near collapse, etc.

    Suddenly, the overall picture seems that much more sinister.

    The lesson for the rest of us is this: once a free people allows the government to make inroads into their freedoms or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm, because the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government. 

    Remember, a police state does not come about overnight.

    It starts small, perhaps with a revenue-generating red light camera at an intersection.

    When that is implemented without opposition, perhaps next will be surveillance cameras on public streets. License plate readers on police cruisers. More police officers on the beat. Free military equipment from the federal government. Free speech zones and zero tolerance policies and curfews. SWAT team raids. Drones flying overhead. City-wide lockdowns.

    No matter how it starts, however, it always ends the same.

    Remember, it’s a slippery slope from a questionable infringement justified in the name of safety to all-out tyranny. 

    These are no longer warning signs of a steadily encroaching police state.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the police state has arrived.

  • Here Are The Top 10 Highest Paying Jobs In America

    Glassdoor is out with its annual report on the 25 highest-paying jobs in America, over half of which, 13, are in the technology sector. 

    Taking the top three spots, however, are physicians, pharmacy managers and pharmacists – with average salaries of $195,842, $146,412 and $127,120 respectively. 

    In tech, enterprise architects, software development managers, software engineering managers and software architects were the highest paid professions, with the lowest average salary at over $100,000. 

    The report gathered salary data from millions of employees, examined job titles that received a minimum of 100 salary reports over the past year, and used algorithms to estimate the median annual base pay. C-suite-level jobs were excluded from the report. –Bloomberg

    “Technology and health care are the two industries that are making the greatest impact on the economy,” said Glassdoor community expert Sarah Stoddard. “There’s a high demand but short supply for those roles, driving up salaries.”

    Top Ten: 

    Meanwhile, about 70% of those surveyed said salary is a key factor in determining a career, while 27% of Americans say they “don’t have a good sense of their career path” and 25% say they feel like they’re “on a treadmill going nowhere,” according to a Wednesday LinkedIn survey of 2,000 professionals. 

    And despite men dominating the country’s highest paying jobs, tech companies employ nearly twice as many males as females vs. health care, according to a 2017 report by Linkedin. 

    Interestingly, over half of employed Americans are looking to leave their current jobs, according to a July Gallup survey, while the average American remains in the same job for approximately a decade.

  • The Looming Economic Collapse: The $250 Trillion Dollar Worldwide Debt Crisis

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    As governments raise taxes to cope with their unending spending habits, people are increasingly being forced to supplement their own income with loans. And according to most financial experts, this debt problem is so big that it will usher in a global economic collapse of epic proportions.

    According to the Institute of International Finance’s latest Global Debt Monitor, the amount of debt held in the world rose by the biggest amount in two years during the first quarter of 2018. It grew by $8 trillion to hit a new all-time high of $247 trillion, up from $238 trillion as of December 31, 2017.  And that’s up by $30 trillion from the end of 2016.

    Global debt is staggering to the point most of it will never be repaid and as governments continue their spending sprees and the debts keep mounting, the future of the economy looks bleak. There is more than enough economic data out there to show there could be an economic collapse and stock market crash in 2018. Bill Gross stated in 2017 that “our highly levered financial system is like a truckload of nitroglycerin on a bumpy road”. One wrong move and the whole thing could blow sky high, wrote the Epic Economist. Once this bubble pops, it will fling the globe into a financial crisis of epic proportions never before seen.

    According to Financial Times, it is becoming clear that the global monetary policy is now caught in a debt trap of its own making. Continuing on the current monetary path is ineffective and increasingly dangerous. But any reversal also involves great risks. It stands to reason that the odds of another crisis blowing up will continue to rise. –Ready Nutrition

    The Epic Economist also has a video out detailing how all of this came to pass.  It’s easy enough to understand, yet most still can’t get past their own preconceived notions and biases to comprehend that this will be the fault of governments and those who continue to look to rulers or masters to solve their problems.

    “It is all about taking money from us and transferring it into government pockets. And then, taking money from government pockets, and transferring it into the hands of the elite. It’s a game that’s been going on for generations and its time for the humanity to say that ‘enough is enough’.” -Epic Economist

    The future of the global economy doesn’t look promising based on the vast amount of debt and wealth being transferred from people to their masters.  We are living in economic slavery and until humanity understands that, the only other option is an economic crisis.

    It comes as a bit of a surprise the infamous Keynesian economist Bernanke would express concerns over the government’s inability to decrease spending.  But now that he has, will Americans heed the warning and protect themselves against the next financial crisis? –SHTFPlan

    There are ways to prepare for a financial crisis, although an ongoing and global crash could complicate things for preppers. But there are still ways to prepare and an open and educated mind is step one.  If you still believe the government and global elites have your best interests in mind, you probably also don’t anticipate a global economic crash, and therefore, are not going to prepare.  For the rest of us, taking on a “prepper’s mindset” will give you the upper hand in any financial crisis.

    “If we have learned one thing studying the history of disasters, it is this: those who are prepared have a better chance at survival than those who are not.” -Tess Pennington, author of The Prepper’s Blueprint

  • Pentagon Whistleblower Demoted After Exposing Millions Paid To FBI Spy Halper, Clinton Crony

    A Pentagon whistleblower was stripped of his security clearance and demoted after complaining about questionable government contracts with both FBI informant spy Stefan Halper and a company headed by Chelsea Clinton’s “best friend” for whom then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arranged meetings, reports the Washington Times. 

    Adam Lovinger, a Trump supporter and 12-year veteran of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), filed a whistleblower reprisal complaint with the Defense Department’s inspector general in May against ONA boss James Baker – who hired Halper, 73, to “conduct foreign relations” and kept the details of the spy’s contracts “close to the vest.” Baker was appointed chief of the ONA in 2015 by Obama Defense Secretary, Ashton Carter.

    At that point, Lovinger wouldn’t have known was a spy working with the FBI/DOJ on operation “Crossfire Hurricane” – the code name for the Obama administration’s counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign.  

    In an internal October 2016 email to higher-ups, Mr. Lovinger wrote of “the moral hazard associated with the Washington Headquarters Services contracting with Stefan Halper,” the complaint said. It said Mr. Baker hired Mr. Halper to “conduct foreign relations,” a job that should be confined to government officials.

    …

    In the fall of 2016, as the election loomed, Mr. Lovinger sent emails to Mr. Baker and other officials at the Office of Net Assessment complaining about the entire outside contracting process. He also said the office failed to write papers on long-term threats presented by radical Islam, China and Iran.

    And in September 2016, Lovinger sent an email directly to Baker summing up the perceived problems, which reads in part: 

    “Some of our contractors distribute to others their ONA work for personal and professional self-promotion,” wrote Lovinger. “Another part is the growing narrative that ONA’s most high-profile contractors are known for getting paid a lot to do rather peripheral work.”

    “On the issue of pay, our contractors boast about how much they get paid from ONA. Such boasting, of course, generates jealously among those outside the club, and particularly from those who have tried to secure ONA contracts unsuccessfully.”

    “On the issue of quality, more than once I have heard our contractor studies labeled ‘derivative,’ ‘college-level’ and based heavily on secondary sources. One of our contractor studies was literally cut and pasted from a World Bank report that I just happened to have read the week before reading the contractor study itself. Even the font was the same.”

    Halper – an Oxford University professor, former US government official and longtime FBI / CIA asset (who was married to the CIA deputy director’s daughter at one point), received over $400,000 for a 2016 contract which Lovinger complained about. 

    According to USASpending.gov, Mr. Halper was paid $411,000 by Washington Headquarters Services on Sept. 26, 2016, for a contract that ran until this March. –Washington Times

    In total, the American citizen teaching abroad received over $1 million from contracts dated between 2012 and 2016.

    Lovinger’s attorney, Sean M. Bigley, filed the second of four complaints on July 18 with the Pentagon’s senior ethics official, claiming that Lovinger’s bosses punished him on May 1, 2017 by abusing the security clearance process to yank his credentials and relegate him to clerical chores. Lovinger’s complaint also names the Washington Headquarters Services, a support agency within the Pentagon that awarded the Halper contracts. 

    “As it turns out, one of the two contractors Mr. Lovinger explicitly warned his ONA superiors about misusing in 2016 was none other than Mr. Halper,” wrote Bigley in the ethics complaint, which referred to the contracts as “cronyism and corruption.”

    “Nobody in the office seemed to know what Halper was doing for his money,” said Bigley. “Adam said Jim Baker, the director, kept Halper’s contracts very close to the vest. And nobody seemed to have any idea what he was doing at the time. He subcontracted out a good chunk of it to other academics. He would compile them all and then collect the balance as his fee as a middleman. That was very unusual.”

    A longtime CIA and FBI asset who once reportedly ran a spy-operation on the Jimmy Carter administration, Halper was enlisted by the FBI to spy on several Trump campaign aides during the 2016 U.S. election, including Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.

    Halper’s $411,575 award came three days after a September 23 Yahoo! News article by Michael Isikoff about Trump aide Carter Page, which used information fed to Isikoff by “Steele dossier” creator Christopher Steele. The FBI would use the Yahoo! article along with the largely unverified dossier as supporting evidence in an FISA warrant application for Page. 

    The unassuming university professor approached Page during an election-themed conference at Cambridge on July 11, 2016, six weeks after the September 26 DoD award start date. The two would stay in contact for the next 14 months, frequently meeting and exchanging emails.

    He said that he first encountered the informant during a conference in mid-July of 2016 and that they stayed in touch. The two later met several times in the Washington area. Mr. Page said their interactions were benign. –New York Times

    And as the Daily Caller reported, Halper used a decades-old association with Paul Manafort to break the ice with Page. 

    Page noted that in their first conversation at Cambridge, Halper said he was longtime friends with then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort. A person close to Manafort told TheDCNF that Manafort has not seen Halper since the Gerald Ford administration. Manafort and Page are accused in the Steele dossier of having worked together on the campaign’s collusion conspiracy, but both men say they have never met. –Daily Caller

    Halper would continue to spy on Page after the election. Two days after the second installment of Halper’s 2016 DoD contract, On July 28, he emailed Page with what the Trump campaign aide describes as a “cordial” communication, which did not seem suspicious to him at the time. 

    In the email to Page, Halper asks what his plans are post-election, possibly probing for more information. “It seems attention has shifted a bit from the ‘collusion’ investigation to the ‘ contretempts’ [sic] within the White House and, how–or if–Mr. Scaramucci will be accommodated there,” Halper wrote. 

    Clinton connection

    The other complaint lodged by Lovinger concerns a string of contracts totaling $11 million to Long Term Strategy Group – a D.C. consulting firm headed by self-described “best friend” of Chelseal Clinton, Jacqueline Newmyer Deal.

    In October, the Washington Free Beacon reported that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arranged meetings in 2009 between Deal and Pentagon officials to discuss contracts – to which Deal says no award “resulted directly or indirectly from the actions or influence of Secretary Clinton.”

    According to one 2009 email, Clinton said she recommended Deal to Michele Flournoy, the newly installed undersecretary of defense for policy, who was seeking young women to mentor.

    Deal, a specialist in China affairs who worked at the White House as a press aide for First Lady Clinton in the 1990s, wrote back to Clinton saying she would meet Flournoy on May 5, 2009, and stated “thank you very much for making this happen.”

    Later that month, Deal thanked Clinton for “all your encouragement and help with DoD, ” shorthand for the Defense Department. –Free Beacon

    In a statement, Deal said: “Jacqueline Deal and the Long Term Strategy Group (LTSG) are justifiably proud of their collaboration with the US Department of Defense across multiple administrations over the last two decades, beginning under the administration of President George W. Bush. LTSG’s work has consistently earned the highest respect and confidence of its clientele in government and has won LTSG a reputation for producing research and analysis of exceptional quality.”

  • America, The Punitive

    Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    There has been a dramatic shift in how the United States government carries out its business internationally. Admittedly, Washington has had a tendency to employ force to get what it has wanted ever since 9/11, but it also sometimes recognized that other countries had legitimate interests and accepted there was a place for diplomacy to resolve issues short of armed conflict. The Bush Administration reluctance to broaden its engagement in the Middle East after it recognized that it had blundered with Iraq followed by Obama’s relaxation of tensions with Cuba and his negotiation of a nuclear agreement with Iran demonstrated that sanity sometimes prevailed in the West Wing.

    That willingness to be occasionally accommodating has changed dramatically, with the State Department under Mike Pompeo currently more prone to deliver threats than any suggestions that we all might try to get along. It would be reasonable enough to criticize such behavior because it is intrinsically wrong, but the truly frightening aspect of it would appear to be that it is based on the essentially neoconservative assumption that other countries will always back down when confronted with force majeure and that the use of violence as a tool in international relations is, ultimately, consequence free.

    I am particularly disturbed with the consequence free part as it in turn is rooted in the belief that countries that have been threatened or even invaded have no collective memory of what occurred and will not respond vengefully when the situation changes. There have been a number of stunningly mindless acts of aggression over the past several weeks that are particularly troubling as they suggest that they will produce many more problems down the road than solutions.

    The most recent is the new sanctioning of Russia over the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury England. For those not following developments, last week Washington abruptly and without any new evidence being presented, imposed additional trade sanctions on Russia in the belief that Moscow ordered and carried out the poisoning of Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia on March 4th. The report of the new sanctions was particularly surprising as Yulia Skripal has recently announced that she intends to return to her home in Russia, leading to the conclusion that even one of the alleged victims does not believe the narrative being promoted by the British and American governments.

    Though Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded with restraint, avoiding a tit-for-tat, he is reported to be angry about the new move by the US government and now believes it to be an unreliable negotiating partner. Considering the friendly recent exchanges between Putin and Trump, the punishment of Russia has to be viewed as something of a surprise, suggesting that the president of the United States may not be in control of his own foreign policy.

    Turkey is also feeling America’s wrath over the continued detention of an American Protestant Pastor Andrew Brunson by Ankara over charges that he was connected to the coup plotters of 2016, which were allegedly directed by Fetullah Gulen, a Muslim religious leader, who now resides in Pennsylvania. Donald Trump has made the detention the centerpiece of his Turkish policy, introducing sanctions and tariffs that have led in part to a collapse of the Turkish lira and a run on the banking system which could easily lead to default and grave damage to European banks that hold a large party of the country’s debt.

    And then there is perennial favorite Iran, which was hit with reinstated sanctions last week and is confronting a ban on oil sales scheduled to go into effect on November 4th. The US has said it will sanction any country that buys Iranian oil after that date, though a number of governments including Turkey, India and China appear to be prepared to defy that demand. Several European countries are reportedly preparing mechanisms that will allow them to trade around US restrictions.

    What do Russia, Turkey and Iran have in common? All are on the receiving end of punitive action by the United States over allegations of misbehavior that have not been demonstrated.

    Nobody has shown that Russia poisoned the Skripals, Turkey just might have a case that the Reverend Brunson was in contact with coup plotters, and Iran is in full compliance with the nuclear arms agreement signed in 2015.

    One has to conclude that the United States has now become the ultimate angry imperial power, lashing out with the only thing that seems to work – its ability to interfere in and control financial markets – to punish nations that do not play by its rules. Given Washington’s diminishing clout worldwide, it is a situation that is unsustainable and which will ultimately only really punish the American people as the United States becomes more isolated and its imperial overreach bankrupts the nation. As America weakens, Russia, Turkey, Iran and all the other countries that have been steamrolled by Washington will likely seek revenge. To avoid that, a dramatic course correction by the US is needed, but, unfortunately, is unlikely to take place. 

  • Shocking Report Details How CIA Hubris Exposed Agents In China, Resulting In 30 Executions

    A bombshell new report in Foreign Policy reveals that up to 30 CIA agents and assets working in China were identified and executed by Chinese counterintelligence over a two year period after the CIA’s encrypted communications system was infiltrated. 

    The report is based on former and current unnamed CIA officials who were part of the program, which established a network of spies across China. The in-country spies communicated with their CIA handlers via an online system capable of being logged into from any laptop or computer. 

    But when starting in late 2010 Chinese authorities began to sweep up the network of spies for interrogation and eventual execution, the CIA was “shellshocked” in the words of one former official, and for eight years a joint FBI-NSA-CIA investigation has sought answers as to what went wrong in what is widely considered “one of the CIA’s worst failures in decades”.

    For the first time, it appears answers have been made public. Foreign Policy asks, “How were the Chinese able to roll up the network?” and begins by answering:

    Now, nearly eight years later, it appears that the agency botched the communication system it used to interact with its sources, according to five current and former intelligence officials. The CIA had imported the system from its Middle East operations, where the online environment was considerably less hazardous, and apparently underestimated China’s ability to penetrate it.

    The CIA officials paint a picture of both hubris on the part of American operatives and shockingly sophisticated abilities of the Chinese to gain access to the CIA communications system, which the Americans wrongly thought impenetrable.

    One officials is cited as saying, “The attitude was that we’ve got this, we’re untouchable.”

    “You could tell the Chinese weren’t guessing. The Ministry of State Security [which handles both foreign intelligence and domestic security] were always pulling in the right people,” one of the officials told Foreign Policy. “When things started going bad, they went bad fast.”

    News of the roundup and detention of a dozen or more spies in China was first revealed in a May 2017 story in the New York Times, but Foreign Policy’s sources say it was actually around 30, with some offering a high figure. The FP report contains this stunning line: “All the CIA assets detained by Chinese intelligence around this time were eventually killed, the former officials said.”

    The officials told FP that the only plausible explanation for how Chinese counterintelligence was able to accurately expose that many US spies as quickly as they did could only be chalked up to hacking the secret communication system.

    The officials explained that when a new asset was recruited, the person at first communicated with their CIA handlers via an “interim” or “throwaway” system set up to shield the rest of the network from the possibility that the new asset could either be a double agent or be quickly tracked or exposed. Later, the agent was brought into the main covert communication platform — exploitation of which was considered potentially far more disastrous as it would risk revealing broader clandestine operations in China, however unlikely.

    Foreign Policy explains how the temporary system may have been used to penetrate the permanent platform: 

    Although they used some of the same coding, the interim system and the main covert communication platform used in China at this time were supposed to be clearly separated. In theory, if the interim system were discovered or turned over to Chinese intelligence, people using the main system would still be protected—and there would be no way to trace the communication back to the CIA. But the CIA’s interim system contained a technical error: It connected back architecturally to the CIA’s main covert communications platform. When the compromise was suspected, the FBI and NSA both ran “penetration tests” to determine the security of the interim system. They found that cyber experts with access to the interim system could also access the broader covert communications system the agency was using to interact with its vetted sources, according to the former officials.

    Ultimately, as one CIA official is cited in the FP report as saying, the CIA had “fucked up the firewall” between the two systems.

    It’s believed that either a sole double-agent, or single exposure and arrest of a US asset therefore could have led to a breach in the entire China-wide covert network, which up till then the CIA had worked to keep highly compartmentalized. 

    And this brings up another key factor in how the communication network could have been initially penetrated…

    Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 53, was arrested in January after entering the US from Hong Kong. He was found to be in possession of handwritten notebooks containing the names and contact information of CIA employees and informants. Lee is an American citizen who left the CIA in 2007, where he had been a case officer running Chinese sources since 1994.

    FP explains of the possible role that former CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee, indicted earlier this year on conspiring to give Chinese spies highly classified information about the CIA activities in China, played in exposing agents’ identities:

    During the investigation, the task force identified three potential causes of the failure, the former officials said: A possible agent had provided Chinese authorities with information about the CIA asset network, some of the CIA’s spy work had been sloppy and might have been detected by Chinese authorities, and the communications system had been compromised. The investigators concluded that a “confluence and combination of events” had wiped out the spy network, according to one of the former officials.

    Eventually, U.S. counterintelligence officials identified Lee, the former CIA officer who had worked extensively in Beijing, as China’s likely informant. Court documents suggest Lee was in contact with his handlers at the Ministry of State Security through at least 2011.

    But the CIA officials involved in China operations emphasized that not even Lee — though occupying a relatively high position in operations — himself had enough access to be able to expose the full network of operations. 

    The officials explained to FP that, “Information about sources is so highly compartmentalized that Lee would not have known their identities,” resulting in the following conclusion: “That fact and others reinforced the theory that China had managed to eavesdrop on the communications between agents and their CIA handlers.”

    The other interesting detail from FP’s report is that the CIA decided to use an internet-based communications system previously utilized in the Middle East, but not suited to evade China’s much more sophisticated surveillance and security detection systems.

    As FP explains, “The system was not designed to withstand the scrutiny of a place like China, where the CIA faced a highly sophisticated intelligence service and a completely different online environment.”

    Meanwhile one particular pressing question, which Foreign Policy doesn’t seem to address, remains: with perhaps the entirety of the CIA’s clandestine eyes and ears and China wiped out through agency hubris and underestimating Chinese hacking capabilities, is the United States now flying completely blind on China?

  • "Too Big To Fail": Russia-Gate, One Year After Intel Vets Showed A Leak, Not A Hack

    Authored by Patrick Lawrence via ConsortiumNews.com,

    One year later, the VIPS memo contending that the DNC emails were leaked and not hacked has yet to be successfully challenged. Meanwhile, the country sinks deeper into the morass of the new McCarthyism…

    A year has passed since highly credentialed intelligence professionals produced the first hard evidence that allegations of mail theft and other crimes attributed to Russia rested on purposeful falsification and subterfuge. The initial reaction to these revelations—a firestorm of frantic denial—augured ill, and the time since has fulfilled one’s worst expectations. One year later we live within an institutionalized proscription of proven reality. Our discourse consists of a series of fence posts and taboos. By any detached measure, this lands us in deep, serious trouble. The sprawl of what we call “Russia-gate” now brings our republic and its institutions to a moment of great peril—the gravest since the McCarthy years and possibly since the Civil War. No, I do not consider this hyperbole.

    Much has happened since Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity published its report on intrusions into the Democratic Party’s mail servers on Consortium News on July 24 last year. Parts of the intelligence apparatus—by no means all or even most of it—have issued official “assessments” of Russian culpability. Media have produced countless multi-part “investigations,” “special reports,” and what-have-yous that amount to an orgy of faulty syllogisms. Robert Mueller’s special investigation has issued two sets of indictments that, on scrutiny, prove as wanting in evidence as the notoriously flimsy intelligence “assessment” of January 6, 2017.

    Indictments are not evidence and do not need to contain evidence. That is supposed to come out at trial, which is very unlikely to ever happen. Nevertheless, the corporate media has treated the indictments as convictions.

    Numerous sets of sanctions against Russia, individual Russians, and Russian entities have been imposed on the basis of this great conjuring of assumption and presumption. The latest came last week, when the Trump administration announced measures in response to the alleged attempt to murder Sergei and Yulia Skripal, a former double agent and his daughter, in England last March. No evidence proving responsibility in the Skripal case has yet been produced. This amounts to our new standard. It prompted a reader with whom I am in regular contact to ask, “How far will we allow our government to escalate against others without proof of anything?”

    This is a very good question.

    Cover of 2001 book that looks back on the earlier period of anti-Russia hysteria

    There have been many attempts to discredit VIPS50 as the group’s document is called. There has been much amateurish journalism, false reporting, misrepresentation, distortion, misquotation, and omission. We have been treated to much shoddy science, attempts at character assassination, a great deal of base name-calling, and much else. Russia is routinely advanced as the greatest threat to democracy Americans now face. Is there any denying that we live amid an induced hysteria now comparable to the “Red under every bed” period of the 1950s?

    None of this has altered the basic case. VIPS and forensic scientists working with it have continued their investigations. New facts, some of which alter conclusions drawn last year, have come to light, and these are to be addressed. But the basic evidence that Russia-gate is a false narrative concocted by various constituents of national power stands, difficult as this is to discern. Scrape back all that is ethically unacceptable and unscrupulously conveyed into the public sphere and you find that nothing has changed: No one “hacked” the Democratic party’s mail in the summer of 2016. It was leaked locally. From what one can make out, it was done to expose the party leadership’s corrupt efforts to sink Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign to win the Democratic nomination.

    But in another, very profound way, more has changed since VIPS50 was published than one could have imagined a year ago. American discourse has descended to a dangerous level of irrationality. The most ordinary standards of evidentiary procedure are forgone. Many of our key institutions—the foreign policy apparatus, the media, key intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, the political leadership—are now extravagantly committed to a narrative none appears able to control. The risk of self-inflicted damage these institutions assume, should the truth of the Russia-gate events emerge—as one day it surely will—is nearly incalculable. This is what inspires my McCarthy and Civil War references. Russia-gate, in a phrase, has become too big to fail.

    This column is an attack on no one. However it may be read, it is not intended as another round of vituperative argument adding to the din and fog we already suffer daily. No shred of ideology informs it. I write a lament—this for all we have done to ourselves and our institutions this past year, and to the prospect of an orderly world, and for all that must somehow be done to repair the damage once enough of us indeed recognize what has been done.

    Binney: Dares anyone to prove remote speeds

    New VIPS Findings

    The forensic scientists working with VIPS continued their research and experiments after VIPS50 was published. So have key members of the VIPS group, notably William Binney, the National Security Agency’s former technical director for global analysis and designer of programs the agency still uses to monitor internet traffic. Such work continues as we speak, indeed. This was always the intent: “Evidence to date” was the premise of VIPS50. Over the past year there have been confirmations of the original thesis and some surprises that alter secondary aspects of it. Let us look at the most significant of these findings.

    At the time I reported on the findings of VIPS and associated forensic scientists, that the most fundamental evidence that the events of summer 2016 constituted a leak, not a hack, was the transfer rate—the speed at which data was copied. The speed proven then was an average of 22.7 megabytes per second. That speed matches what is standard when someone with physical access uses an external storage device to copy data from a computer or server and is much faster than a remote hack, reliant on communications topology available at the time, could achieve.

    Binney experimented into the autumn. By mid-autumn he had tested several routes—from East Coast locations to cities in eastern Europe, from New Jersey to London. The fastest internet transfer speed achieved, during the New Jersey–to–Britain test, was 12.0 megabytes of data per second. Since this time it has emerged from G-2.0’s metadata that the detected average speed—the 22.7 megabytes per second—included peak speeds that ran as high as 49.1 megabytes per second, impossible over the internet. “You’d need a dedicated, leased, 400–megabit line all the way to Russia to achieve that result,” Binney said in a recent interview.

    To my knowledge, no one with an understanding of the science involved, including various former skeptics, any longer questions the validity of the specific finding based on the observed transfer rate. That remains the bedrock evidence of the case VIPS and others advance without qualification. “No one—including the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA—has come out against this finding,” Binney said Monday. “Anyone who says the speed we demonstrated can be achieved remotely, our position is ‘Let’s see it. We’ll help any way we can.’ There hasn’t been anyone yet.”

    There is also the question of where and when leaks were executed. Research into this has turned out differently.

    Evidence last year, based on analysis of the available metadata, showed that the copy operation date-stamped July 5, 2016, took place in the Eastern U.S. time zone. But Forensicator, one of the chief forensic investigators working on the mail-theft case anonymously, published evidence in May showing that while there was activity in the Eastern zone at the time of that copy, there was also a copy operation in the Pacific time zone, where clocks run three hours earlier that EST. In an earlier publication he had also reported activity in the Central time zone.

    Plainly, more was awaiting discovery as to the when and where of the copy operations. The identity of Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be a Romanian hacker but which the latest Mueller indictment claims is a construct of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, has never been proven. The question is what G–2.0 did with or to the data in question. It turns out that both more, and less, is known about G–2.0 than was thought to have been previously demonstrated. This work has been completed only recently. It was done by Binney in collaboration with Duncan Campbell, a British journalist who has followed the Russia-gate question closely.

    Peak Speed Established

    Binney visited Campbell in Brighton, England, early this past spring. They examined all the metadata associated with the files G–2.0 has made public. They looked at the number of files, the size of each, and the time stamps at the end of each. It was at this time that Binney and Campbell established the peak transfer rate at 49.1 megabytes per second.

    But they discovered something else of significance, too. At some point G–2.0 had merged two sets of data, one dated July 5, 2016, which had been known, and another dated the following September 1, which had not been known. In essence, Campbell reverse-engineered G–2.0’s work: He took the sets of data G–2.0 presented as two and combined them back into one. “G–2.0 used an algorithm to make a downloaded file look like two files,” Binney explained. “Those two shuffled back together like a deck of cards.”

    G–2.0 then took another step. Running another algorithm, he changed all the dates on all the files. With yet another algorithm, he changed the hours stamped on each file. These are called “range changes” among the professionals. The conclusion was then obvious: G–2.0 is a fabrication and a fabricator. Forensicator had already proven that the G–2.0 entity had inserted Russian “fingerprints” into the document known as the “Trump Opposition Report,” which G-2.0 had published on June 15, 2016. It is clear that no firm conclusions can be drawn at this point as to when or where G–2.0 did what he did.

    “Now you need to prove everything you might think about him,” Binney told me. “We have no way of knowing anything about him or what he has done, apart from manipulating the files. We detected activity in the Eastern time zone. Now we have to ask again, ‘Which time zone?’ The West Coast copy operation [discovered by Forensicator] has to be proven. All the data has been manipulated. It’s a fabrication.”

    This throws various things into question. The conclusions initially drawn on time and location in VIPS50 are now subject to these recent discoveries. “In retrospect, giving ‘equal importance’ status to data pertaining to the locale was mistaken,” Ray McGovern, a prominent VIPS member, wrote in a recent note. “The key finding on transfer speed always dwarfed it in importance.”

    The indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers announced in mid–July by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney-general, also come into question. They rest in considerable part on evidence derived from G–2.0 and DCLeaks, another online persona. How credible are those indictments in view of what is now known about G–2.0?

    Binney told me:

    “Once we proved G–2.0 is a fabrication and a manipulator, the timing and location questions couldn’t be answered but really didn’t matter. I don’t right now see a way of absolutely proving either time or location. But this doesn’t change anything. We know what we know: The intrusion into the Democratic National Committee mail was a local download—wherever ‘local’ is.” That doesn’t change. As to Rosenstein, he’ll have a lot to prove.”

    What Role does Evidence Play?

    Rosenstein’s predicament—and there is no indication he understands it as one—brings us to an essential problem: What is the place of evidence in American public discourse? Of rational exchange?

    The questions are germane far beyond the Russia-gate phenomenon, but it is there that answers are most urgent. What is implicit in the Rosenstein indictments has been evident everywhere in our public sphere for a year or more: Make a presumption supported by circumstantial evidence or none and build other presumptions upon it until a false narrative is constructed. The press has deployed this device for as long as I have been a practitioner: “Might” or “could” or “possibly” becomes “perhaps,” “probably” and “almost certainly,” and then moves on to unqualified fact in the course of, maybe, several weeks. Now this is how our most basic institutions—not least agencies of the Justice Department—routinely operate.

    This is what I mean when I refer to ours as a republic in peril.

    There is the argument that certain things have been uncovered over the past year, and these are enough to conclude that Russia plots to undermine our democracy. I refer to the small number of Facebook advertisements attributed to Russians, to strings of Twitter messages, to various phishing exercises that occur thousands of times a day the world over. To be clear, I am no more satisfied with the evidence of Russian involvement in these cases than I am with the evidence in any other aspect of the Russia-gate case. But for the sake of argument, let us say it is all true.

    Does this line up with the Russophobic hysteria—not too strong a term—that envelops us? Does this explain the astonishing investments our public institutions, the press, and leading political parties have made in advancing this hysteria as they did a variant of in the 1950s?

    As global politics go, some serious thought should be given to a reality we have created all by ourselves: It is now likely that America has built a new Cold War division with Russia that will prove permanent for the next 20 to 30 years. All this because of some Facebook ads and Twitter threads of unproven origin? Am I the only one who sees a weird and worrisome gap between what we are intent on believing—as against thinking or knowing—and the consequences of these beliefs?

    There was an orthodoxy abroad many centuries ago called Fideism. In the simplest terms, it means the privileging of faith and belief over reason. It was the enemy of individual conscience, among much else. Fideism has deep roots, but it was well around in the 16th century, when Montaigne and others had to navigate its many dangers. Closer to our time, William James landed a variant on American shores with an 1896 address called “The Will to Believe.” Bertrand Russell countered this line of thinking a couple of decades later with “Free Thought and Official Propaganda,” a lecture whose title I will let speak for itself. Twenty years ago, none other than Pope John Paul II warned of a resurgence of Fideism. It is still around, in short.

    Do we suffer from it? A variant of it, I would say, if not precisely in name. There seems to be a givenness to it in the American character. I think we are staring into a 21st century rendition of it.

    To doubt the hollowed-out myth of American innocence is a grave sin against the faith. It is now unpatriotic to question the Russia-gate narrative despite the absence of evidence to support it. Informal censorship of differing perspectives is perfectly routine. It is now considered treasonous to question the word of intelligence agencies and the officials who lead them despite long records of deceit. Do we forget that it was only 15 years ago that these same institutions and people deceived us into an invasion of Iraq the consequences of which still persist?

    This was the question Craig Murray, the former British diplomat (who has vital information on the DNC mail theft but who has never been interviewed by American investigators) posed a few weeks ago. Eugene Robinson gave a good-enough reply in a Washington Post opinion piece shortly afterward: “God Bless the Deep State,” the headline read.

    How we got here deserves a work of social psychology, and I hope someone takes up the task. Understanding our path into our self-created crisis seems to me the first step to finding our way out of it.

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