Apr 26

Today’s News 26th April 2018

  • ECB Preview: Don't Expect Fireworks

    Submitted by RanSquawk

    Ahead of the ECB’s Monetary Policy Decision due Thursday at 07:45 EDT/13:45 CET with a Press Conference due at 08:30 EDT/14:30 CET, here are the key highlights:

    • Unanimous expectations look for the ECB to leave its three key rates unchanged
    • Ultimately, this week’s press conference is set to offer little in the way of fireworks with June/July touted as a more opportune time for the ECB to unveil their next stage of major policy announcements
    • Draghi will likely make some reference to the recent softness in data but ultimately maintain that risks to economic growth are ‘broadly balanced’

    BACKGROUND

    PREVIOUS MEETING: The main takeaway from March’s meeting was the ECB’s decision to remove their pledge to increase the size and/or duration of QE purchases; an action viewed by the market as the ECB beginning to lay the foundations for more policy ‘normalisation’. Aside from the removal of the easing bias, the staff projections saw only mild tweaks from those released in December with the most notable being an additional upgrade to the 2018 growth outlook from an already bullish 2.3% to 2.4%. Furthermore, Draghi also revealed that no additional discussions were held on further policy changes.

    ECB MARCH MINUTES: In comparison to the ECB statement and press conference, the minutes offered a slightly more dovish account of proceedings by noting widespread concerns about the potential impact of trade wars. Furthermore, FX was also cited as a source of uncertainty, with EUR strength not fully due to the macro environment and fears that it could have a more negative impact on inflation.

    SOURCE REPORTS: The most pertinent source reports came last week with the ECB said to see scope to wait until July to signal an end for its asset purchase program, adding that the ECB is said to have had no talks on the interest rate path after QE ends.

    ECB RHETORIC: The most recent rhetoric from President Draghi stated that measures of underlying inflation are subdued but are expected to rise gradually over the medium term, adding that growth momentum is to continue; largely a reiteration. Other notable input came from ECB’s Nowotny on 10th April with the Austrian representative stating that the deposit rate could be lifted to -0.2% from -0.4% to start the process of rate hikes then go on to the main Refi Rate in the second phase; a view which was later labelled as his own and not representative of the view held by the ECB’s governing council by an ECB spokesperson. This also appeared to be at odds with comments from other members of the ECB which stated that mid-2019 is a reasonable timeframe for markets to expect rate hikes by the Bank.

    DATA: Overall, data has been slightly softer since last month’s meeting but will most likely be downplayed by the ECB as largely a by-product of adverse weather conditions. Goldman Sachs explain that whilst the ECB will use weather as a driving factor rather than underlying economic concern, they are likely to acknowledge that March macro-economic staff projections are broadly on track, but that downside risks have become greater. On the inflation front, March’s HICP Y/Y inflation slipped to 1.3% from 1.4% with the core metric remaining at 1.0%, however, Capital Economics suggests that this blip is unlikely to deter many policymakers in their belief that inflation will rise towards its target in the medium-term. In terms of survey data, the Eurozone composite PMI for March pulled back to 55.2 (flash reading) from the highs seen in January of 58.8 and thus has erased gains seen later last year and early 2018.
     

    CURRENT ECB FORWARD GUIDANCE (INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT)

    RATES: We still expect the key ECB interest rates to remain at their present levels for an extended period of time and well past the horizon of our net asset purchases. (Mar 8th)

    ASSET PURCHASES: Net asset purchases, at the current monthly pace of €30 billion, are intended to run until the end of September 2018, or beyond, if necessary, and in any case until the Governing Council sees a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation consistent with its inflation aim. (Mar 8th)

    GROWTH: The risks surrounding the euro area growth outlook are assessed as broadly balanced. (Mar 8th)

    INFLATION: This outlook for growth confirms our confidence that inflation will converge towards our inflation aim of below, but close to, 2% over the medium term. At the same time, measures of underlying inflation remain subdued and have yet to show convincing signs of a sustained upward trend. In this context, the Governing Council will continue to monitor developments in the exchange rate and financial conditions with regard to their possible implications for the inflation outlook.
     

    POTENTIAL ADJUSTMENTS TO ECB FORWARD GUIDANCE (INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT)

    RATES: No changes on rates communication is expected at this stage given preferred sequencing at the ECB.

    ASSET PURCHASES: No additional changes expected to those made last month with June/July touted as a more opportune time for the ECB.

    GROWTH: No changes major changes are expected on growth guidance, although recent adverse weather conditions may be discussed during the press conference.

    INFLATION: No changes are expected on this front as that would require the ECB to acknowledge that their inflation objective had been achieved; something that it has not.

    PRESS CONFERENCE

    Ultimately, this week’s press conference is set to offer little in the way of fireworks with June/July touted as a more opportune time for the ECB to unveil their next stage of major policy announcements. June/July is viewed as a more likely time for Bank to outline its plans for policy normalisation as it will give the governing council the opportunity to digest an additional set of staff economic projections and see how the Eurozone economy performs in H1 2018.

    In terms of what could be discussed this week, as mentioned above, Draghi will likely make some reference to the recent softness in data but ultimately maintain that risks to economic growth are ‘broadly balanced’, albeit SocGen questions whether or not ‘hopes of a strong and lasting cycle and rising potential growth were premature’.

    Furthermore, Draghi will also likely comment/be questioned on recent protectionist measures which were cited in the March minutes and have escalated since the previous meeting as the US and China have now detailed plans for tariffs against other. Capital Economics explain that the fallout of this has been a firmer EUR which could pose concerns to policymakers outlook for inflation but ultimately should not be enough to derail the ECB in their belief that inflation will hit its target in the medium-term. Pictet also back the governing council’s view on inflation by stating that they “see very little evidence of a larger FX pass-through on core inflation” and “higher oil prices can be expected to provide a modest boost to headline inflation going into the more important June meeting”.

    As ever, journalists will likely ask many a question to the ECB President about what discussions (if any) took place regarding the future path of the Bank’s PSPP. However, it is likely that Draghi will stick to his usual rebuttal of “we did not discuss this” in order to avoid an unwarranted tightening of monetary conditions ahead of the June meeting. Furthermore, Capital Economics argue that Draghi will also wish to avoid any specifics on the outlook for interest rates given the backlash seen to recent comments by Nowotny and will most likely reiterate the ECB’s press release when questioned.

    As such, from a markets perspective, June/July is seen as much more of a pivotal meeting for the ECB and will likely see the commencements of the Bank’s series of policy adjustments. Please see below for Rabobank’s “expected ECB policy timeline”

    MARKET REACTION:

    Please see the following ING ‘ECB Scenario Analysis’ with subsequent potential market reactions.

  • Germany: Migrant Crisis Delusions

    Authored by Vijeta Uniyal via The Gatestone Institute,

    • A report commissioned by the German government found that newly-arrived asylum seekers were behind more than 90% percent of the increase in violent crimes in the state of Lower Saxony.

    • As of December 2017, an estimated 600,000 able-bodied asylum seekers in Germany were on the welfare dole, according to Die Welt. “More than half of the able-bodied unemployment benefit receivers at present are of foreign descent,” wrote Der Spiegel on April 10, 2018.

    • Meanwhile, poverty in Germany, especially among elderly pensioners, has reached a historic high.

    While the number of Salafists in Germany reaches a record high and machete-wielding gangs riot on the country’s streets, the establishment media not only covers up the fallout from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open door migration policy, but continues to paint a false picture of the country’s current state.

    “Cool Germany,” a cover story on Britain’s magazine, The Economist, claims that, “Germany is becoming more open and diverse” and “[m]any of the country’s defining traits” including “its ethnic and cultural homogeneity, conformist and conservative society” are “suddenly in flux.”

    The Economist attributes this change to Chancellor Merkel’s migrant policy. “The biggest change comes from Mrs. Merkel’s “open door” policy towards refugees, which brought in 1.2 million new migrants in 2015-16. The magazine celebrates the sudden outburst of diversity as its transforms “once-homogeneous Germany” into a “melting-pot” and claims that the “patriarchal culture has become more gender-balanced.”

    The Economist also advocates the urgent necessity of the open-door policy for refugees, and alleges that the “flow of newcomers to Germany” will “cushion the demographic crunch.”

    Since the onset of the migrant crisis, which began in the autumn of 2015, much of the mainstream media has been peddling the idea of an influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants from Arab and Muslim countries as a silver bullet for Europe’s economic woes. Young and sturdy immigrants were going to bolster Europe’s shrinking labor force and usher in the next economic boom, a miracle comparable to Germany’s post-war Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”).

    “Refugees to pay our pension,” an editorial headline the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau in February 2016 promised. The migrant “influx ensures rejuvenation that is so urgently needed” and the refugees “will soon pay into our public welfare system,” the newspaper pledged.

    “The German business community views the recent influx of refugees as an opportunity to help companies grow and ensure long term prosperity,” the Der Spiegel reported in its August 2015, issue, just ahead of Merkel’s decision to open the country’s borders to mass migration. “The business community urgently needs workers,” it added.

    “What the refugees bring to us is more valuable than gold,” said Martin Schulz, Merkel’s main political rival and the leader of Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD).

    “Many [migrants] are in integration courses or waiting to get in them. So I think we will need to show some patience,” Merkel said in September 2016.

    Unfortunately, these claims and assurances now seem like nothing more than liberal pipe-dreams to push through a pro-immigration policy in Germany.

    Instead of lining up to join the German workforce, as the political elite and most of the media were asking us to believe, these young immigrant men, in the hundreds of thousands, took refuge in the Germany’s generous welfare system.

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel poses for a selfie with Anas Modamani, a migrant from Syria, outside a shelter for migrants in Berlin, on September 10, 2015. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

    “More than half of the able-bodied unemployment benefit receivers at present are of foreign descent,” Der Spiegel reported on April 10, 2018. “According to latest numbers complied in September 2017, out of 4.3 million able-bodied welfare recipients, 55.2% were of an immigrant background. In 2013, that figure was 43%.”

    As of December 2017, an estimated 600,000 able-bodied asylum seekers in Germany were on the dole, the newspaper Die Welt revealed in December, 2017. For the first time in post-war German history, the number of foreigners living on unemployment benefits has crossed the 2-million-mark.

    All this has happened, moreover, at time when poverty, especially among elderly pensioners, reached a historic high. Under Merkel’s watch, nearly 20% of Germans are threatened by poverty, according to the German Federal Statistical Office. The current level of poverty is “higher than ever since the unification of the Federal Republic and the [Communist] German Democratic Republic,” the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported.

    Contrary to what the establishment media would have people believe, there is no evidence that the hundreds of thousands of young migrant men pouring into Germany are going to relieve the country’s aging work force or become productive citizens in other ways.

    Not only are these newly arrived immigrants a strain on Germany’s finances, but since their arrival, there has been a surge across the country in violent crime. A recent report commissioned by the German Ministry of Family Affairs found that the newly arrived asylum seekers were behind more than 90% percent of the increase in violent crimes in the northern state of Lower Saxony. Similar trends can be witnessed throughout the country.

    According to the country’s annual crime report of 2017, compiled by the Federal Crime Bureau (BKA), Germany saw a 50% year-on-year rise in migrant crimes. This tiny but growing minority, that presently makes up less than 2% of the German population, was charged for nearly 15% of all violent crimes, such as rapes and aggravated assaults, the BKA report revealed.

    In March, Turkish and Arab gangs “armed with machetes, clubs and baseball bats” clashed on German streets in violent attempts to demarcate gang territories. The country is also in the grip of a stabbing epidemic, with the attackers often turning out to be “unaccompanied minors” holding refugee status.

    While media outlets such as The Economist are busy touting Merkel’s Germany as “model for the West” for its newly-acquired “diversity,” the country is sinking ever deeper into a social, economic and demographic bog. With their collective heads buried in sand, many in the establishment and the media seem to want the rest of the Western world to follow Germany’s example by opening their borders to unregulated mass immigration. Sadly, the current result of Germany’s open-door policy indicates that all those rosy reports seem to have been nothing more than an elaborate campaign of deceit or misinformation.

  • Iranian Naval Commander Threatens To Sink US Ships, Create "Catastrophic Situation" If Trump Kills Deal

    President Donald Trump offered some of his most bellicose rhetoric yet about Iran on Tuesday when he said Iran would have “bigger problems than they have ever had before” if the country’s leadership dared to restart its nuclear program following a US pull-out of the JCPOA (otherwise known as the Iran deal), per the Times of Israel.

    And today, a top Iranian general hit back at Trump with an aggressive threat to sink US Navy ships, while warning that the US would find itself in a “catastrophic situation” if it withdraws from the deal and reimposes economic sanctions.

    “The actual information that the Americans have about us is much less than what they think they have. When will they figure this out? When it is too late,” the Revolutionary Guard Corps’s navy commander, Admiral Ali Fadavim, told Iranian television on Saturday.

    “They will definitely figure it out when their ships are sunk, or when they find themselves in a catastrophic situation,” Fadavi threatened in an interview with IRINN TV, according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

    On Wednesday, a non-proliferation envoy confirmed that the US isn’t seeking to renegotiate the JCPOA. Instead, the White House would like to pursue a separate agreement like the one French President Emmanuel Macron proposed during a press conference with Trump. And apparently, Macron’s proposal took his European partners by surprise.

    Admiral Fadavim’s remarks followed a similarly stern warning from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

    “I am telling those in the White House that if they do not live up to their commitments, the Iranian government will react firmly,” Rouhani said.

    “If anyone betrays the deal, they should know that they would face severe consequences,” he added.

    Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also reiterated over the weekend his warning that Tehran was ready to swiftly resume uranium enrichment if the US ditches the accord.

    Meanwhile, Ali Shamkhani, the Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, warned that Iran would consider withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty if the US reimposes sanctions.

    Of course, by leaving both the Iran deal and the NPT, Iran would only lend credence to its adversaries’ claims that the Islamic Republic is seeking to build a nuclear weapon – an accusation Iran has long denied. The White House has set a self-imposed deadline of May 12 for deciding whether to pull out of the deal.

  • Joy Reid Says Old Homophobic Blog Posts "Hacked"; Archive.org Hits Back

    MSNBC Weekend host Joy-Ann Reid – who in December apologized for a series of homophobic blog posts from 2007-2009, thought it would be a good idea to pour lighter fluid on herself and tell Mediaite that the offensive posts were “somehow put in by an “external party” that “manipulated material from my now-defunct blog.””

    In a statement to Mediaite, Reid said that the allegedly hacked entries do “not represent the original entries on her site.” 

    “In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology.

    I began working with a cyber-security expert who first identified the unauthorized activity, and we notified federal law enforcement officials of the breach. The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.” –Joy Reid

    So Reid is now claiming that hackers authored numerous anti-gay articles on The Reid Report to make her look bad. AKA the “I didn’t do anything wrong” defense. 

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    In December, Mediaite reported on the offensive content, noting that “Reid wrote a dozen blog posts in 2007, 2008, and 2009 that contained homophobic conspiracies and anti-gay jokes.“

    Reid wrote numerous bigoted blog posts smearing, mocking, and attacking former Florida governor Charlie Crist. These rants included calling Crist “Miss Charlie” and sarcastically using the tags “gay politicians” and “not gay politicians” — despite the fact that the twice-married, heterosexual man has never come-out as gay.

    Reid went on to spread the crackpot conspiracy theory that Crist was actually a closeted gay man who refused to come out for fear that his sexual orientation would hurt his political career. Additionally, the AM Joy host claims Crist’s marriages to women are part of this elaborate cover up.

    As bad as the conspiracy theory is in itself, Reid doesn’t just suggest Cris is gay — she assumes he is gay and proceeds to attack him for it. “Miss Charlie, Miss Charlie. Stop pretending, brother. It’s okay that you don’t go for the ladies,” wrote Reid in a 2007 post. –Mediaite

    It gets worse

    As The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald notes – “THE LAST 24 HOURS have changed the Joy Reid situation considerably. Last week, the same left-wing Twitter user (Jamie Maz) who first unearthed Reid’s anti-gay tweets about Crist unearthed far more toxic, bigoted, and vicious anti-gay articles that appeared to be from Reid’s old blog.”

    Reid has removed her blog from the internet, so Maz found the articles using the “Wayback Machine,” the internet digital archive that stores old online content even after it’s been removed or deleted by the publisher. Last night, the news outlet that reports on TV news media, Mediaite, published an extensive story on these newly found articles that appear under Reid’s byline.

    But unlike the posts for which Reid apologized in December — which she said were intended to mock the hypocrisy of GOP officials who are simultaneously closeted gays, but also anti-gay in their politics — these newly discovered articles have nothing to do with GOP hypocrisy. They are just hateful, bigoted, and homophobic in their own right.

    Click on any of the three tweets below to read the original Twitter thread by Jamie Maz, full of screenshots similar to the above.

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    Some of the lowlights, as Mediaite itemized, include (via The Intercept):

    • “defend[ing] former NBA star Tim Hardaway’s aggressively anti-gay comments by writing that while such comments are stupid for a public figure to make: ‘most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing’”;
    • saying she “couldn’t go see [Brokeback Mountain] either, despite my sister’s ringing endorsement, because I didn’t want to watch the two male characters having sex. Does that make me homophobic? Probably”;
    • arguing that “intrinsic” to being straight is finding gay sex acts “gross”;
    • “defending Marine General Peter Pace after he condemned ‘homosexual acts’ as ‘immoral’ by suggesting his views are actually normal”;
    • opposing Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court by implying she is a closeted lesbian and comparing her “lesbian haircut” to those worn by the presidents of NOW and GLAAD;
    • promoting the ugliest and most destructive stereotype of gay men as pedophile predators by suggesting that anti-gay attitudes are based in “concerns that adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types, bringing them ‘into the lifestyle’ in a way that many people consider to be immoral” and that “gay rights groups seek to organize very young, impressionable teens who may have an inclination that they are gay.”

    The Wayback Machine Hits Back

    Responding to Reid’s claims that the entries were hacked, the folks over at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at archive.org responded, claiming they hadn’t identified anything “to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine” versions of Reid’s blog.

    This past December, Reid’s lawyers contacted us, asking to have archives of the blog (blog.reidreport.com) taken down, stating that “fraudulent” posts were “inserted into legitimate content” in our archives of the blog. Her attorneys stated that they didn’t know if the alleged insertion happened on the original site or with our archives (the point at which the manipulation is to have occurred, according to Reid, is still unclear to us).

    When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions. At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities.

    We let Reid’s lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation. Consequently, and due to Reid’s being a journalist (a very high-profile one, at that) and the journalistic nature of the blog archives, we declined to take down the archives. We were clear that we would welcome and consider any further information that they could provide us to support their claims.-Internet Archive

    That leaves Reid with only one option; hackers must have broken into her website prior to the internet archive cataloging it, and made dozens of homophobic, bigoted entries, which just sat there for years until they were unearthed nearly a decade later. 

    Unfortunately we can’t check out Reid’s old blog posts, as “sometime after the story broke last December, Joy Reid had the archive taken down,” by adding a “robots.txt” file to the website which tells the Internet Archive to exclude the site. Unfortunately for her, Jamie Maz took copious screenshots to document Reid’s comments. 

  • Total Control: New Measures Toward Global Totalitarianism

    Authored by Jeremiah Johnson via SHTFplan.com,

    For those who have read “1984” by George Orwell, it is almost prophetic in its depth and accuracy. The reason that the warning has not been heeded is that change takes place with glacial slowness. Sometimes the changes take so long they dull the senses and we become inured to “more bad news,” or we just discount it continually. No matter what our reaction, the march toward global totalitarianism proceeds, with or without our consent or even our attention.

    The slow march is deliberate. The reason for this is simple. The generation/group of people between the ages of approximately 40 to 60 are of an age who still have a sense of nationalism and grew up/experienced their formative years without that complete socialist indoctrination inflicted upon the youth of today. For the youth, there is no escape from it on their own, because they have no point of reference with which to identify and compare it to what has been forced upon them now by indoctrinators (termed “educators”). The new “all for the communal hive” mentality has been crafted by those in power and carried out by teachers.

    So, a deliberate and systematic “ratcheting” up and down of the speed Wcof changes (the institution of new totalitarian controls) varies. Those in power need to eliminate those between 40 to 60 years old, or “engulf” them by numbers of the new manipulated youth and then just “vote” them out of effectiveness. The “Tyranny of the Majority” perfected to an art form. Obama couldn’t finish the job in 8 years…but the sporadic ratcheting just took a new twist.

    It was reported that Bill Gates is joining a group of investors for an initial investment of about $1 billion dollars. They are going to back a company based in Seattle, WA called EarthNow that will endeavor to emplace 500 satellites above the Earth. 

    When the emplacement is complete, every inch of the globe will be able to be surveilled in real time. 

    The Daily Mail wrote a good piece on it on 4/19/18 that seemed to run unnoticed. A few other networks picked it up and reported on it, with the most summarized version being a piece entitled “Surveillance of Entire Earth, Big Brother Satellite Army,” by Battle For World.

    EarthNow will provide this complete surveillance to “high value enterprise and government customers,” in other words: Mega-Corporations and Government.

    There’s more afoot. The article, “Compulsory Biometric ID Announced by European Commission,” by Virginia Hale came out on 4/17/18. Here’s an excerpt:

    “The European Commission has announced plans to make biometric ID cards compulsory across the bloc which will allow authorities to bar “terrorists and criminals” from accessing money and other services. Plans to introduce mandatory ID cards across all 28 EU member states — including Britain — have been in development for more than two years in Brussels as part of the Commission’s goal of building an effective “security union”, Die Welt reports.

    Set to be equipped with data including the holder’s fingerprint, the cards would be designed to tackle identity fraud and make it harder to falsify documents, according to Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos.  “We have to tighten the screws until there is no room left for terrorists or criminals and no more means for them to carry out attacks,” he told the German newspaper on Monday.  “This means that they must be barred from accessing money, counterfeit documents, weapons and explosives, and at the same time prevented from being able to cross our borders undetected.”

    Tightening the screws, eh? But none of those measures will restrict the true criminals…the “partners” of national governments…who access money, counterfeit documents, weapons, and explosive…they do the same things they claim to be “preventing.” All in the “interests of public safety,” and all under the Color of Law, at the expense of the citizen-beeves.

    Think this isn’t coming here, to the United States? Think again. The biggie that they want now is the DNA. If you recall, I wrote a piece last Fall that mentioned how the Baltimore Ravens Football Administration tried to give out “free DNA kits” on opening day to fans. It was stopped in the “interests of public health” where the fans would have swabbed their mouths and dropped it in a vial…all to “find out their ancestry,” etc. Not quite. They wanted to see if people would voluntarily give away their DNA.

    Myriad Genetics (the “inventors” of the Brica system of breast cancer detection) tried to patent genes they collected, and the courts struck it down. Little by little, the paradigm shifts, however, and recently you’ve been hearing some “murmurs” about DNA information for both ID cards (Driver’s Licenses, for now) and to obtain a firearm…as it is mandatory in some states already to submit biometric information prior to purchasing a pistol or rifle.

    On 4/12/18, an article came out entitled “Estonia offers free genetic testing in nationwide experiment,” by Jari Tanner of AP, and here’s an excerpt:

    “Estonia has started offering residents free genetic profiling in a nationwide experiment aimed at minimizing risks for typical diseases and encouraging a healthier lifestyle through personalized data reports.  Lili Milani, a researcher with the Estonian Genome Center at the University of Tartu, said Thursday the scheme kicked off in March and will initially cover some 100,000 volunteers in the Baltic country of 1.3 million. Participants are required to donate DNA samples from blood and give consent to storing their data to the Estonian Biobank, which has collected health records and biological samples from Estonians since 2000.”

    Do you like that one? “Required” and “give consent” for storing their data, as if it’s a service. The Estonians have been giving samples to a biobank that has been actively collecting physical samples for the past 18 years.

    This is to obtain a DNA “fingerprint” from everyone. It is a worldwide collection activity taking place right under our noses and before our eyes.

    As you can see, they’re pushing their “family-friendly” activities more and more…using the “voluntary” trick at first…but eventually it will become mandatory. It already happens in the U.S. When you have a surgical procedure or operation they take tissue and blood samples and save them in a repository, ostensibly to “compare with later tests,” etc., etc. The samples are frozen and kept by labs who have genetic repositories, such as Myriad Genetics.

    So, Bill Gates and his allies are going to emplace a global surveillance system of satellites, biometric IDs are being pushed and finalized for all of Europe, and genetics collection facilities are in “overdrive” worldwide.

    See the writing on the wall and don’t ignore it. They are moving toward global governance in every nation. Orwell is no longer alive, but his writings were a warning for all of mankind that we would all do well to heed before it’s too late.

  • "Black People Don't Have To Be Democrats": Obama-Linked Rapper Backs Kanye As MSM Melts Down Over MAGA

    Kanye West pal and fellow Chicago-based musician “Chance the Rapper” fired off a tweet in support of his controversial friend, who is once again taking flack from the left over his love of Donald Trump – and most recently, black conservative Candace Owens. 

    “Black people don’t have to be democrats,” tweeted the 25-year-old Chance in defense of Kanye. 

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    Donald Trump Jr. agreed with Chance – as did others who declared that people who belong to traditionally liberal demographics can also think differently.

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    Kanye then retweeted Trump supporter Scott Presler who echoed Chance’s sentiments:

    Interestingly, political strategist and pundit Ali Alexander (@ali) implored Chance to support Kanye 20 minutes before his tweet:

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    Born Chancelor Jonathan Bennett, Chance the Rapper’s father was an aide to then-Senator Barack Obama, before landing a job in the Department of Labor during Obama’s first term. Chance met with Obama when he was “13 or 14,” where he discussed his ambitions with the future president – who reportedly replied “word.”

    Chance has been an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump – while endorsing Hillary Clinton one month before the 2016 US election. That said, he may have become disillusioned at the skyrocketing murder rate in his hometown.

    West, who also hails from Chicago, noted in a Wednesday tweet that “Obama was in office for eight years and nothing in Chicago changed.”

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    Trump, meanwhile, has been talking about the Chicago murder rates for years – and then sent the ATF in to do something about it. 

    Kanye thrust himself back into the spotlight on Saturday after taking nearly a year off of Twitter – tweeting his support for black pro-Trump conservative, Candace Owens – director of Urban Engagement for Turning Point USA, who feels that black Americans are “slaves on the Democratic Party plantation.” 

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    West caused Twitter to further implode on Wednesday when he tweeted a picture of an autographed red “Make America Great Again” hat, which Trump responded to with “MAGA!”

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    Kanye addressed the uproar over his conservative leanings as well on Wednesday – tweeting “You don’t have to agree with trump but the mob can’t make me not love him. We are both dragon energy. He is my brother. I love everyone. I don’t agree with everything anyone does. That’s what makes us individuals. And we have the right to independent thought.“

    To which Trump replied “Thank you Kanye, very cool!”

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    MSM assassins everywhere 

    What makes Kanye so dangerous to the left is that he’s breaking through the “all or nothing” conditioning of identity politics, and with West tweeting pro-Trump sentiments to his 27.9 million followers, the MSM is trying their best to smear him. After flat out lying earlier Wednesday about drama in the West household, People Magazine was at it again later in the day – stirring up controversy over Kanye tweeting pictures from “Inside $20M House” despite his wife Kim Kardashian’s wishes. 

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    The Daily Mail – similar to People, said that Kim was scolding Kanye – to which Kardashian tweeted “Oh RELAX I’m joking! Seriously you can’t have a personality on social media these days or your called bizarre or disturbing”

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    Page Six also published an anti-Kanye hit piece, suggesting that people are fearing for “Kanye’s [mental] health” after suddenly firing his manager, Scooter Braun.

    Kanye West canceled 21 tour dates in 2016 after suffering a “nervous breakdown,” but there are new fears for his health after he abruptly fired manager Scooter Braun and a “friend” claimed West had been addicted to opioids. –Page Six

    Kardashian later tweeted “To the media trying to demonize my husband let me just say this… your commentary on Kanye being erratic & his tweets being disturbing is actually scary.” 

    To the media trying to demonize my husband let me just say this… your commentary on Kanye being erratic & his tweets being disturbing is actually scary. –Kim Kardashian

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    “WOW wrong again!!!!!” tweeted Kris Jenner, “Their house is $60 MIL“

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    Donald Trump Jr. also threw his hat in the ring, tweeting #ImWIthHer, and then “2 years ago who would have thought Kanye and Kim would be public enemy number one of Hollywood/Media for saying it’s ok to think differently“

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    And while the left has their collective Kanye meltdown, others over social media have been having a blast: 

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    Flashback: that time MSNBC accidentally interviewed black Trump supporters in North Carolina during the 2016 election – who let the network know “There’s a perception out there that he [Trump] has no black supporters. Wrong. He does.” 

  • The Backfire Continues: NRA Breaks Fundraising Records In Wake Of Gun Control Demands

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTHplan.com,

    The NRA continues to rake in money in the wake of gun control activists vocally demanding the government strip away the rights of gun owners.  The gun rights lobbying group broke fundraising records in March largely thanks to the gun control crowd.

    The numbers don’t lie either. The National Rifle Association’s Political Victory Fund raised $2.4 million from March 1 to March 31 of this year, according to The Tampa Bay Times.  As the March for Our Lives movement captured the mainstream media’s attention because it fit their carefully crafted pro-government narrative, in the weeks after the Parkland shooting, the other side of the gun control debate enjoyed a big month of its own.

    The $2.4 million haul is the most money raised by the NRA’s political arm in one month since June 2003, the last month when electronic federal records were readily available.

    It surpasses the $1.1 million and $1.5 million raised in January and February 2013, the two months after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

    Note that many of the NRA’s highest fundraising months are those after shootings when gun control Nazis seek to disarm the innocent over the actions of a lunatic. Another important tidbit to recognize about this particular fundraising month is that most of the donations, $1.9 million of the $2.4 million total, came from small donors who gave less than $200.  That means regular, everyday Americans are paying what little they have to avoid having even more of their basic fundamental human rights stripped away.

    And much to the rights violators dismay, gun control groups haven’t been able to match the NRA’s fundraising. Everytown for Gun Safety’s Political Action Fund raised $13,580 in March while former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ Political Action Committee raised $129,589 in March, according to the Tampa Bay Times.  In fact, much of the demands for innocent people to give up rights is met with resistance and more guns flooding into the hands of Americans. 

    The March for Our Lives group founded after the Parkland shooting has raised $3.5 million since February 18 via the online service GoFundMe, though that money was put toward organizing marches around the country. But big name companies, such as the fashion company Gucci has also publicly announced their own half-million-dollar donation. Those publicly disclosed donations total $2.5 million, meaning a large amount of the donations came from wealth celebrities or corporations.

  • The Great Exodus From America's 'Blue' Cities Accelerates

    Authored by Kristin Tate, op-ed via The Hill,

    Am I the only one in my spinning class at Equinox in Manhattan who’s fed up paying $200 every month for a gym with clean showers, $3,000 in rent every month for an apartment without cockroaches and $8 every morning for a cup of coffee? Am I the only one moving through the greater part of New York City boroughs and seeing an inexorable march of urban decay matched with the discomfort of crowding and inexplicable costs? I know I am not.

    New York is the most expensive city in America. Its lower-cost neighborhoods are riddled with crime and homelessness. Its public schools, some of which are among the worst in the nation, look more like prisons than places of learning.

    With between up to 50 percent of their paycheck going to a combination of federal, local and city taxes, not including other consumer taxes baked into every aspect of their consumer practices, residents don’t even have the comfort of knowing that their tax expenditures are going to the improvement of their lives in the city. New York infamously misuses the hard-earned tax revenues of its citizens in ways that scarcely benefit them.

    Eventually, city and state taxes, fees, and regulations become so burdensome that people and corporations jump ship. More people are currently fleeing New York than any other metropolitan area in the nation. More than 1 million people have moved out of New York City since 2010 in search of greener pastures, which amounts to a negative net migration rate of 4.4 percent.

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    The recently passed tax bill, which repeals the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, will only speed up the exodus. Thanks to the bill’s passage, many New York taxpayers will save little or nothing despite a cut in the federal rate. The state’s highest earners — who have been footing an outsized share of the bill — will pay tens of thousands of dollars more in income taxes in 2018. In New York alone, loss of the SALT deduction will remove $72 billion a year in tax deductions and affect 3.4 million residents.  

    And make no mistake: What’s happening in the Big Apple is a microcosm of what’s happening in the nation’s blue states, cities and towns.

    New York, Los Angeles, Chicago — the places where power and capital have traditionally congregated — have become so over-regulated, so overpriced and mismanaged, and so morally bankrupt and soft on crime that people are leaving in droves. Of course, these high-tax cities are the same places hit hardest by the removal of the SALT deduction.

    The cost of popular moving truck services, like U-Haul, is largely created through the ironclad rules of supply and demand. Turns out, there is much higher demand for trucks leaving high-tax blue states heading to low-tax red states than vice versa.

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    A route from California to Texas, for example, is more than twice as expensive as a route from Texas to California. Want to go from Los Angeles to Dallas? $2,558. Returning back? $1,232. Texas is the No. 1 state people move trucks to, with states like Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina and Colorado rounding out the top 10. The states people are fleeing? New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois — and at the top, California.

    These facts are not coincidences. In fact, in 2016 the Golden State lost almost 143,000 net residents to other states — that figure is an 11 percent increase from 2015. Between 2005 and 2015, Los Angeles and San Francisco alone lost 250,000 residents. The largest socioeconomic segment moving from California is the upper-middle class. The state is home to some of the most burdensome taxes and regulations in the nation. Meanwhile, its social engineering — from green energy to wealth redistribution — have made many working families poorer. As California begins its long decline, the influx outward is picking up in earnest.

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    The only way to slow the great exodus out of America’s blue meccas is to make these areas more affordable for middle-class families; the most significant way to do that is to lower state and city income taxes. And if residents don’t want to be “double taxed” following the removal of SALT deductions, the solution is simple: remove state and city income taxes altogether.

    Houston is the nation’s fourth-largest city and is able to operate, while funding massive infrastructure projects to support its population, without income tax revenue. When residents keep more of their hard-earned money, they are more incentivized to spend that money in ways that make their community a better place.

    This is a lesson high-tax states and cities need to learn if they want to avoid transforming into ghost towns.

  • Russia To Send Advanced Anti-Aircraft Missiles To Syria, Warns Israel Of "Catastrophic Consequences"

    Israel continues ratcheting up its rhetoric this week in response to Russia’s Defense Ministry signaling it will likely move forward in arming Syria with the advanced S-300 missile defense system, bringing both Israeli and Lebanese airspace to within targeting range of Syrian missiles. 

    On Tuesday Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said in unambiguous terms that his country would attack such missile sites should Russia move forward on supplying them.

    Liberman told Israel’s YNet, “What’s important to us is that the defensive weapons the Russians are giving Syria won’t be used against us,” and threatened further, “one thing should be clear: If someone fires on our planes, we will destroy them.”

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has in the past years of war in Syria – of which Israel is a significant player, especially given its longtime support of al-Qaeda linked anti-Assad insurgents to the south of Damascus – made it clear that transfer of the S-300 would constitute a “red line” on which Israel would act.

    In 2013, when Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly first considered the move, marking a major and exceptionally advanced update to Syria’s current Soviet-era deterrent systems, Netanyahu warned, “We’ll destroy your missiles if you deliver them to Assad.” He said that Israel would hit them before the system came online.

    Though displaying an early reluctance to derail its delicate diplomatic relationship with Israel, Russia changed its tune on the very morning after the US-led coalition strike took place overnight on April 13. Russia’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Rudskoi, said at the time that Russia would “reconsider” whether to supply the air defenses to Assad – an issue previously thought dead as a result of prior Israeli-Russian summits in Sochi. 

    However, multiple international reports now indicate Russia is likely moving forward with transfer of the feared system which has a range of up to 150-200 kilometers (or 120 miles max). 

    Reuters reports while citing Russia’s main state operated news agency:

    Russia plans to deliver new air defense systems to Syria in the near future, RIA news agency cited Russia’s Defence Ministry as saying on Wednesday.

    The ministry added it plans to study a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile captured by Syrian forces in a recent attack, in order to improve Russia’s own missiles, RIA reported.

    And crucially, as Haaretz notes, “With Putin’s S-300, Assad’s army could even ‘lock-on’ IAF aircraft as they take off from bases within Israel.” And as one Israeli defense analyst put it, “Israel should be worried.”

    But what’s really behind Israel’s dire warnings to the world and longtime threats of acting on “red lines”? It is certainly not out of concern for acts of aggression coming from either Syria or Russia, as neither country has attacked Israel in recent history.

    Instead, we find the opposite: Israel has attacked Russian allied Syria frequently and with impunity since at least 2013, and it simply wishes to maintain aerial superiority unimpeded (and going back to 2007, when it struck a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor near Deir Ezzor, as Israeli officials have recently admitted).

    Last summer, the head of Israel’s air force for the first time openly acknowledged nearly one hundred IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) attacks on convoys and sites inside Syria over the course of the past 5 years. Perhaps a dozen more have occurred since then, with Syria only very recently retaliating against Israeli incursions, shooting down at least one Israeli F-16 jet near the Golan. Israel also reportedly participated in the US-led missile strikes on April 13 in the hope of weakening the Syrian Army’s clear dominant trajectory over the armed insurgency. 

    Indeed, in spite of over a hundred unprovoked Israeli attacks, Assad has not taken the bait of an Israeli desire for escalation for years now. While pro-government Syrians have themselves at times complained about Israel’s seeming ability to strike inside sovereign Syrian territory with impunity, Assad appears to be operating with the long-game in mind of “survival now, retaliation later”.

    It was clear starting in 2013 that Israel’s semi-frequent strikes on largely non-strategic targets were more about provocation: should Damascus lob missiles back in Israel’s direction Netanyahu would launch an all-out assault while Syria was at its weakest in the midst of a grinding and externally funded al-Qaeda insurgency.

    Concerning Syria’s current missile defense deterrent capabilities – though contested among analysts – Syria’s over 30-year old current deterrent system appears to have performed well, likely stunning the West and neighboring Israel (which itself played a part in the coalition attack) as it reportedly shot down 71 of the 103 cruise missiles, according to official Russian and Syrian government sources (Russia this week has offered proof that its version is correct, over and against Pentagon claims that not a single tomahawk was shot down). 

    Israeli military analysts are now themselves quite open about the end-goal here: it is all about Israel’s aim of maintaining the capability to do whatever it wants in Syria, without repercussions – whether international censure or domestic push-back against the Likud establishment. 

    One can look no further than “the centrist” Jerusalem Post, whose Deputy Managing Editor Tovah Lazaroff is unusually candid regarding Israeli aims while citing an Israeli general:

    Israel fears the S-300 would hamper its ability to attack military sites in Syria that are dangerous to the Jewish State and would therefore allow Iran to strengthen its military foothold in that country.

    “This is by far the most advanced weapons system in air defense in Syrian hands so far,” said Brig. Gen. Assaf Orion (ret.), “so theoretically it is an entrenchment to the apparent freedom of action that the Israeli air force enjoys over Syria’s sky.”

    Meanwhile, Russian military sources were quoted in Haaretz as saying that if Israel tried to destroy the anti-aircraft batteries—as analysts have indicated Israel likely would—it would leads to “catastrophic consequences.”

    After Trump’s ‘one-off’ attack on Syria and Russia’s non-engagement against what was in the end a big American fireworks show, many around the world breathed a collective sigh of relief that World War III had been avoided… but are we only witnessing a mere prelude to the final act? 

     

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Apr 25

Today’s News 25th April 2018

  • Top Secret: DoD Building $110 Million Drone Base In Niger

    If you thought America’s overseas wars had reached their limit – think again.

    The United States Department of Defense (DoD) is building a new $110 million drone base in Niger, adding to its existing footprint of more than 800 military bases in more than 70 countries, the Associated Press (AP) reports.

    Recent satellite image of the new drone base in Agadez, Niger. (Source: Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times)

    On Monday, the AP detailed in a report that the U.S. Air Force is constructing a base for weaponized drones, the newest front in America’s expanding foreign wars “against the growing extremist threat in Africa’s vast Sahel region.”

    The drone base dubbed “Niger Air Base 201” resides a few miles outside the perimeter of Agadez, the largest city in central Niger, which was built at the request of Niger’s government. Three drone hangers and a leveled strip of smooth ground along which aircraft take off and land command a sandy, barren field, said AP. The base is expected to be functional early next year with fighter jets and General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drones transferred from another base 590 miles away in Niamey.

    Construction of a hangar on the new drone base last week in Agadez, Niger. (Source: Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times)

    Airmen work in the unmanned aerial device apron in Agadez, Niger, where drones will be parked when they are not in operation. (Source: John VanDiver for Stars And Stripes)

    AP writes, the MQ-9 Reaper is one of the most advanced drones in the U.S. arsenal. Its surveillance and striking capabilities are second to none, with a range of 1,150 miles; the drone will have the ability to reach most West and North African countries.

    “The $110 million project is the largest troop labor construction project in U.S. history, said Air Force officials. It will cost $15 million annually to operate.”

    U.S. defense officials did not disclose how many drones the new base will store, but there was mention that this base would be the second largest in Africa. Further, officials stated the drones would target al-Qaida and Islamic State-affiliated groups in the region.

    “Citing security reasons, no official will say how many drones will be housed at the base or whether more U.S. personnel will be brought to the region. Already the U.S. military presence here is the second largest in Africa behind the sole permanent U.S. base on the continent, in the tiny Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti. The drones at the base are expected to target several different al-Qaida and Islamic State group-affiliated fighters in countries throughout the Sahel, a sprawling region just south of the Sahara, including the area around Lake Chad, where the Nigeria’s Boko Haram insurgency has spread.”

    While the U.S. Air Force is expected to launch its first drone counterterrorism mission sometime in 2019, local civic leaders have expressed concerns about foreign drones bombing civilians.

    “The presence of foreign bases in general and American in particular is a serious surrender of our sovereignty and a serious attack on the morale of the Nigerien military,” said civic leader Nouhou Mahamadou.

    However, U.S. Africa Command spokeswoman Samantha Reho said, ” intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance” are the critical tools in the fight against terrorism.

    “The location in Agadez will improve U.S. Africa Command’s capability to facilitate intelligence-sharing that better supports Niger and other partner nations, such as Nigeria, Chad, Mali and other neighbors in the region and will improve our capability to respond to regional security issues,” Reho added.

    Commander Brad Harbaugh, who is in charge of the new base told AP that some residents in Niger are welcoming the growing U.S. military presence, due to overwhelming threat of extremist in the region.

    “Northern Mali has become a no man’s land, southern Libya is an incubator for terrorists and northeastern Nigeria is fertile ground for Boko Haram’s activities … Can Niger alone ensure its own security? I think not. No country in the world can today alone fight terrorism,” said Souleymane Abdourahmane, a restaurant promoter in the capital, Niamey.

    The expansion of drones in the desperately poor, remote West African country comes as U.S. special forces retreat from the front lines. Last October, an Islamic State linked-group of extremist ambushed four U.S. soldiers and five Africans. Until then, few knew the DoD’s presence in the region, nevertheless, the construction of the drone base.

    As the disastrous legacy of U.S. military failure is more than evident today in the Middle East, it seems as America’s military leaders are about to test their luck, in perhaps, the next round of wars in West and North African countries. How is this “Making America Great Again”?

  • A Furtive Glance At Washington's Ongoing War Preparations Against Russia

    Authored by Arkady Savitsky via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    While the world’s attention is riveted on Syria, the US is significantly boosting its forces in Europe. And these are not just divisions streaming in to take part in some exercises that will leave once those are over. This is a serious buildup to create a potentially offensive posture. The beefing up of the US forces is taking place amid preparations for a Russia-US summit. That’s a rather peculiar background for the event, to put it mildly!

    The 4th Combat Aviation Brigade and the 4th Infantry Division will deploy to Europe as part of its Operation Atlantic Resolve. Based in Germany, the forces will participate in multiple exercises, most of which will be held very near the Russian border in Poland, Hungary, Romania, and the Baltic States. The Army is considering deploying an entire division in a Reforger type of exercise, with troops coming over to use the pre-positioned hardware. Those forces could potentially see a surge, with a division-level deployment in late 2018 or 2019.

    The plans include the creation of a rear-area operations command to be hosted by Germany. Another command is planned that will ensure mobility in the North Atlantic shipping lanes. A “military Schengen” to allow easy movement across borders is under consideration. NATO is rotating four battalion-size, combat-ready, air-power-supported battle groups throughout Poland — which is hosting 800 American troops — and the Baltic States.

    In February, the US Army held the largest artillery exercise in Europe since the Cold War. The event was dubbed Dynamic Front 18 and involved seven rocket-launching systems, 94 artillery pieces, including eight German Panzerhaubitze 2000 armored howitzers, 14 British L118 light guns, and 18 US M777 155 mm howitzers.

    The US military command is weighing the option of keeping the USS Harry S. Truman carrier strike group in the Mediterranean, the European command’s area of responsibility, instead of deploying it to the Middle East, which is under the control of Central Command. The group left Norfolk on April 11. This move would be intended to “check Russia,” freeing other American naval assets to carry out missions in the Baltic and the Black Sea. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee on April 12 that he was studying the possibility of shaking up his department’s employment of carrier groups. The rotational deployments have been increased from the traditional six to ten months. A large number of US ships are concentrated in the vicinity of Syria.

    Poland will host Anakonda 2018, the largest ever NATO military exercise, the scale of which is truly exceptional this year. It will involve about 100,000 troops, 5,000 vehicles, 150 aircraft, and 45 warships. The event was much smaller two years ago. The scenario is based on the premise of a surprise attack against Russia. Obviously this huge force will be assembled for offensive, not defensive operations. One hundred thousand troops, just imagine! This is the most flagrant violation of the NATO-Russia Founding Act, signed between NATO and Russia in 1997, which contains a passage about NATO refraining from the “stationing of substantial combat forces.”

    Meanwhile, around 3,600 American soldiers have landed in Jordan. They are participating in the two-week US-Jordanian exercise, Eager Lion, which kicked off on April 15. The training event is a drill for AV-8B Harriers, MV-22 Ospreys, and attack helicopters. It follows the US, UK, and French air strikes on Syria. The situation in southern Syria is fraught with conflict, which might easily pull in US and Russian armed forces.

    In his remarks about a possible Russia-US summit, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated that he is confident Russian and American military leaders will prevent an armed conflict. US officials have said many times they are ready to do anything to keep hostilities from erupting. Well, that’s what they say, but actions speak louder than words. Forces are amassing that are poised for attack. The US deployments cannot be seen as anything other than war preparations that are already well underway, and Moscow has to be doubly vigilant.

    The two nations’ leaders will have a host of urgent issues to discuss, but moving to tame the heightened tensions would be a step in the right direction. Some things could be done without delay, reviving some existing agreements that have been undeservedly forgotten for instance, such as the 1989 Prevention of Dangerous Military Activities Agreement or the Incidents at Sea (INCSEA) agreement of 1972. The INCSEA stood both parties in good stead, preventing a military clash between the Soviet and US navies during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It can do so again in the same region.

    Provocative military deployments in Europe are hardly the way to create a propitious environment for a summit. Nor do they enhance the security of the United States. But they are taking place, poisoning the atmosphere and creating a big problem.

  • Visualizing The Prolific Plastic Problem In Our Oceans

    In February of 2018, a dead sperm whale washed up on along the picturesque shoreline of Cabo de Palos in Spain.

    Officials noted that the whale was unusually thin, and a necropsy confirmed that the whale died from an acute abdominal infection. Put simply, the whale ingested so much plastic debris – 67 lbs worth – that its digestive system ruptured.

    THE PLASTIC PROBLEM, VISUALIZED

    Today’s infographic comes to us from Custom Made, and it helps put the growing marine debris problem in perspective.

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

    A SPIRALING PROBLEM

    The equivalent of one garbage truck full of plastic enters the sea every minute and the volume of ocean plastic is expected to triple within a decade.

    Every stray bit of trash that enters the ocean, from a frayed fishing net off the coast of the Philippines to a plastic bottle cap from an Oakland storm drain, all end up circulating in rotating ocean currents called gyres.

    For this reason, the Pacific Gyre is now better known by another name: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

    THE SUM OF MANY PLASTIC PARTS

    The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is often misrepresented online as a literal raft of floating trash stretching as far as the eye can see. The real situation is less visually dramatic, but it’s what we can’t see – microplastic – that’s the biggest problem. Tiny fragments of plastic pose the biggest risks to humans because it’s easy for them to enter the food chain after being ingested by marine life.

    While derelict fishing gear such as nets and floats are a contributor to the problem, land-based activity accounts for the majority of the garbage circulating in the ocean. Most of the world’s countries have ocean coastlines, and with so many jurisdictions and varying degrees of environmental scrutiny, truly curbing the flow of plastic isn’t realistic in the near term.

    NO SOLUTION ON THE HORIZON

    Garbage patches have formed deep in the middle of international waters, so there is no clear cut way to decide who is responsible for cleaning up the mess. Organizations like The Ocean Cleanup are researching ocean gyres and providing better insight into the extent of the plastic problem. The Ocean Cleanup is best positioned to make a real impact, though executing on their vision will require vast resources and substantial funding.

    Nobody likes seeing whales wash up on shore, but for now, a fully-scaled solution may still far out on the horizon.

  • John Whitehead: "Is The US Government Evil?"

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    Is the U.S. government evil? 

    You tell me.

    This is a government that treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, tracked, tortured, and eventually eliminated once they’ve outgrown their usefulness.

    This is a government that treats human beings like lab rats to be caged, branded, experimented upon, and then discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.

    This is a government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn.

    This is a government that wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and then turns a blind eye and a deaf ear while its henchmen rape and kill and pillage.

    No, this is not a government that can be trusted to do what is right or moral or humane or honorable but instead seems to gravitate towards corruption, malevolence, misconduct, greed, cruelty, brutality and injustice.

    This is not a government you should trust with your life, your loved ones, your livelihood or your freedoms.

    This is the face of evil, disguised as a democracy, sold to the people as an institution that has their best interests at heart.

    Don’t fall for the lie. 

    The government has never had our best interests at heart.

    Endless wars. The government didn’t have our best interests at heart when it propelled us into endless oil-fueled wars and military occupations in the Middle East that wreaked havoc on our economy, stretched thin our military resources and subjected us to horrific blowback.

    A police state. There is no way the government had our best interests at heart when it passed laws subjecting us to all manner of invasive searches and surveillance, censoring our speech and stifling our expression, rendering us anti-government extremists for daring to disagree with its dictates, locking us up for criticizing government policies on social media, encouraging Americans to spy and snitch on their fellow citizens, and allowing government agents to grope, strip, search, taser, shoot and kill us. 

    Battlefield America. Certainly the government did not have our best interests at heart when it turned America into a battlefield, transforming law enforcement agencies into extensions of the military, conducting military drills on domestic soil, distributing “free” military equipment and weaponry to local police, and desensitizing Americans to the menace of the police state with active shooter drills, color-coded terror alerts, and randomly conducted security checkpoints at “soft” targets such as shopping malls and sports arenas. 

    Secret human experimentation. One would also be hard-pressed to suggest that the American government had our best interests at heart when it conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins. The government reasoned that it was legitimate (and cheaper) to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental patients, and poor blacks. 

    For instance, there was the CIA’s Cold War-era program, MKULTRA, in which the government began secretly experimenting on hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel by dosing them with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug secretly slipped into their drinks, so that the government could explore its uses in brainwashing and controlling targets. The CIA spent nearly $20 million on its MKULTRA program, reportedly as a means of programming people to carry out assassinations and, to a lesser degree, inducing anxieties and erasing memories, before it was supposedly shut down. 

    Sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theorists, I know, but the government’s track record of treating Americans like lab rats has been well-documented, including its attempts to expose whole communities to various toxins as part of its efforts to develop lethal biological weapons and study their impact and delivery methods on unsuspecting populations.

    John Lennon was right: “We’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends.”

    Unfortunately, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

    Just recently, for example, a Fusion Center in Washington State (a Dept. of Homeland Security-linked data collection clearinghouse that shares information between state, local and federal agencies) inadvertently released records on remote mind control tactics (the use of “psycho-electronic” weapons to control people from a distance or subject them to varying degrees of pain).

    Mind you, there is no clear evidence to suggest that these particular documents were created by a government agency. Then again, the government—no stranger to diabolical deeds or shady experiments carried out an unsuspecting populace—has done it before.

    After all, this is a government that has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

    For too long now, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the American people have been persuaded to barter their freedoms for phantom promises of security and, in the process, have rationalized turning a blind eye to all manner of government wrongdoing—asset forfeiture schemes, corruption, surveillance, endless wars, SWAT team raids, militarized police, profit-driven private prisons, and so on—because they were the so-called lesser of two evils. 

    No matter how you rationalize it, the lesser of two evils is still evil.

    So how do you fight back?

    How do you fight injustice? How do you push back against tyranny? How do you vanquish evil? 

    You don’t fight it by hiding your head in the sand.

    Stop being apathetic. Stop being neutral. Stop being accomplices.

    Start recognizing evil and injustice and tyranny for what they are. Demand government transparency. Vote with your feet (i.e., engage in activism, not just politics). Refuse to play politics with your principles. Don’t settle for the lesser of two evils. 

    As British statesman Edmund Burke warned, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men [and women] to do nothing.” 

    It’s time for good men and women to do something. And soon.

  • 100 Migrants From Infamous "Caravan" Prepare For Border Crossing After Arriving In Mexicali

    Despite President Trump’s threat to make stopping migrants from Central America a condition of a revised NAFTA agreement, the second part of a caravan of migrants arrived Tuesday afternoon in the border state of Mexicali, Buzzfeed reported, after refusing the Mexican government’s offer to let them stay in Mexico. 

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

    The migrants, who arrived following a bus trip from the city of Hermosillo, located in the Mexican state of Sonora, are expected to be followed by as many as 500 more Tuesday night and Wednesday – setting them up for a showdown with national guard soldiers and ICE agents who have been instructed to stop them from entering the country.

    While media attention to the caravan has dropped in recent weeks, the Trump administration has been keeping a watchful eye on the caravan’s progress. Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said Monday that her agency was monitoring “the remnants” of the caravan.

    “If members of the ‘caravan’ enter the country illegally, they will be referred for prosecution for illegal entry in accordance with existing law,” Nielsen said in a statement. “For those seeking asylum, all individuals may be detained while their claims are adjudicated efficiently and expeditiously, and those found not to have a claim will be promptly removed from the United States.”

    Attorney General Jeff Sessions also issued a statement Monday, saying the migrants and “their smugglers” had ignored the willingness of the Mexican government to allow them to stay in Mexico.

    “Our nation has the most generous immigration system in the world, but this is a deliberate attempt to undermine our laws and overwhelm our system. There is no right to demand entry without justification,” Sessions said in a statement. “Promoting and enforcing the rule of law is essential to protecting a nation, its borders, and its citizens. But, as President Trump has warned, the need to fix these loopholes and weaknesses in our immigration system is critical and overdue.”

    Unsurprisingly, the expanded federal border enforcement has drawn the ire of immigrants rights groups, who are accusing the federal government of ignoring asylum laws.

    “The efforts of US officials to tarnish asylum seekers as criminals are cynical fabrications that ring hollow,” the statement said, attributing the comment to Erika Guevara Rosas, the group’s Americas director.

    Officials of Pueblos Sin Fronteras, the volunteer group that organized the caravan, have said throughout the journey that migrants have the right to ask the US for asylum and that the United States must grant them the opportunity to do so.

    Tristan Call, an organizer with Pueblos Sin Fronteras, said the US is trying to punish people who have a right to ask for asylum.

    “The United States is punishing them so they won’t be able to get asylum,” Call told reporters outside Hotel del Migrante, a migrant shelter in Mexicali. “They’re punishing the most vulnerable people. These are people who the last thing they saw was their home in ashes. The last thing they saw was a funeral.”

    Alex Mensing, an organizer with Pueblos Sin Fronteras, said the right to refuge is established in US law.

    Some in the migrant caravan have already moved on to Tijuana, their final destination in Mexico before they attempt the treacherous crossing. Nearly all of the caravan’s members – who once numbered more than 1,000 – are fleeing violence in Central America. Many are from Honduras, where gangs control virtually every aspect of daily life.

    Migrants

    Despite the long journey, one family beamed with excitement while speaking with a New York Times reporter, expressing their excitement that the US border fence was only miles away.

    “Well, this is incredible,” said Bryan Claros, 20, a migrant from El Salvador who was traveling with his younger brother, Luis, and their stepfather, Andres Rodríguez.

    From where they were standing, on the broken sidewalk outside the Hotel del Migrantes shelter, they could see the steel border fence two blocks away and the tops of lamp posts and buildings on the other side, in Calexico, Calif.

    They had fled El Salvador because of a gang’s death threats, they said, and were planning to apply for asylum when they crossed into the United States from Tijuana. Organizers had encouraged participants to seek asylum at Tijuana rather than Mexicali because it was easier to arrange for volunteer lawyers.

    “We’ve almost arrived in the United States,” Mr. Claros said, smiling broadly at his brother. But then he considered the legal road ahead, and his smile faded.

    The group of migrants set off from Tapachula, Mexico on March 25 and moved north en masse by foot, or by hopping on buses or stowing away on trains.

    In its early days, the group was the largest migrant caravan on record, according to NYT. Of the ones that remain, organizers of the caravan expect between 100 and 300 to petition for asylum.

  • Dershowitz: "Should Robert Mueller Be Investigated For Violating Civil Liberties?"

    Authored by Alan Dershowitz via The Gatestone Institute,

    Just as the first casualty of war is truth, so, too, the first casualty of hyper-partisan politics is civil liberties.

    Many traditional civil libertarians have allowed their strong anti-Trump sentiments to erase their long-standing commitment to neutral civil liberties. They are now so desperate to get Trump that they are prepared to compromise the most basic due process rights. They forget the lesson of history that such compromises made against one’s enemy are often used as precedents against one’s friends. As Robert Bolt put it in the play and movie A Man for all Seasons:

    Roper: So now you would give the Devil benefit of Law!

    Thomas Moore: Yes, what would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

    Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that?

    Thomas Moore: And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

    But today’s fair weather civil libertarians are unwilling to give President Trump – who they regard as the devil — the “benefit of law” and civil liberties.

    Consider the issue of criticizing Robert Mueller, the Special counsel. Any criticism or even skepticism regarding Mueller’s history is seen as motivated by a desire to help Trump. Mueller was an Assistant US attorney in Boston, the head of its criminal division, the head of the criminal division in Main Justice and the Director of the FBI during the most scandalous miscarriage of justice in the modern history of the FBI. Four innocent people were framed by the FBI in order to protect mass murdering gangsters who were working as FBI informers while they were killing innocent people. An FBI agent, who is now in prison, was tipping off Whitey Bulger as to who might testify against him so that these individuals could be killed. He also tipped off Bulger allowing him to escape and remain on the lam for 16 years.

    What responsibility, if any, did Robert Mueller, who was in key positions of authority and capable of preventing these horrible miscarriages, have in this sordid incident?

    A former member of the parole board – a liberal Democrat who also served as mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts – swears that he saw a letter from Robert Mueller urging the denial of release for at least one of these wrongfully convicted defendants. When he went back to retrieve the letter, it was not in the file. This should surprise no one since Judge Mark Wolf (himself a former prosecutor), who conducted extensive hearings about this entire mess, made the following findings:

    “The files relating to the Wheeler murder, and the FBI’s handling of them, exemplify recurring irregularities with regard to the preparation, maintenance, and production in this case of documents damaging to Flemmi and Bulger. First, there appears to be a pattern of false statements placed in Flemmi’s informant file to divert attention from his possible crimes and/or FBI misconduct….

    Second, contrary to the FBI’s usual policy and practice, all but one of the reports containing Halloran’s allegations against Bulger and Flemmi were not indexed and placed in an investigative file referencing their names. Thus, those documents were not discoverable by a standard search of the FBI’s indices. Similar irregularities in indexing and, therefore, access occurred with regard to information that the FBI received concerning an extortion by Bulger of Hobart Willis and from Joseph Murray concerning the murder of Brian Halloran, among other things.

    Third, when documents damaging to the FBI were found by the Bureau, they were in some instances not produced to the defendants or the court at the time required by the court’s Orders.”

    Judge Wolf also made a finding that directly references Mueller’s state of knowledge regarding the “history”:

    “The source also claimed to have information that Bulger and Pat Nee had murdered Halloran and Bucky Barrett. The source subsequently said that there was an eyewitness to the Halloran shooting who might come forward, and elaborated that: “there is a person named John, who claims he talked to Whitey and Nee as they sat in the car waiting for Halloran on Northern Avenue. He sits in a bar and talks about it. He saw the whole operation”. The source added that the person providing the information to the source “will be willing to talk to you (authorities) soon.” On February 3, 1988, Weld directed Keeney to have the information that he had received sent to the United States Attorney in Boston, Frank McNamara, and to the Strike Force Chief, O’Sullivan. Weld added that: “Both O’Sullivan and [Assistant United States Attorney] Bob Mueller are well aware of the history, and the information sounds good.”

    It is not the beyond the realm of possibility therefore that Mueller wrote this letter, even if it is no longer in the files. If in fact Mueller wrote such a letter, without thoroughly investigating the circumstances, he surely bears some responsibility. Moreover, it is widely believed among Boston law enforcement observers that the FBI was not really looking for Whitey Bulger during the years that Mueller was its Director. It is believed that the FBI was fearful about what Bulger would disclose about his relationship with agents over the years. It took a member of the US Marshall’s office to find Bulger who was hiding in plain view in Santa Monica, California.

    Recently, a former federal judge, who used to be a civil libertarian, rushed to Mueller’s defense, declaring “without equivocation” that Mueller “had no involvement” in the massive miscarriage of justice. Her evidence is the lack of evidence in the files. But no civil libertarian should place such great trust in government files, especially in light of Judge Wolf’s findings. They should join my call for an objective investigation by the Inspector General of the Justice Department before they assure the public “without equivocation” that Mueller had absolutely “no involvement.” But these “Get Trump At Any Cost” partisans have rejected my call for an investigation, out of fear that it may turn up information that might tarnish the image of the Special Counsel who is investigating Trump. Instead they criticize those of us who point out that Mueller was “at the center” of the Justice Department and FBI, while this miscarriage of justice occurred. All civil libertarians should want the truth about this sordid episode — and Mueller’s possible role in it — regardless of its impact, if any, on the Trump investigation. Mueller too should welcome an objective investigation, which might eliminate any doubt about his role in this travesty. But too many former civil libertarians are prepared to sacrifice civil liberties and the quest for truth on the altar of “Get Trump.”

    Robert Mueller. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

    This is all too typical of the about-face many civil libertarians have taken since Trump became president. I have previously written about the ACLU’s abdication of its traditional role in challenging governmental overreaching. For the new ACLU getting Trump trumps civil liberties.

    It is ironic to see many right-wingers being the ones to criticize overreach by law enforcement, while many left-wingers now defend such overreaching. Hypocrisy and selective outrage abounds, as neutral principles take a back seat. Conservatives used to say that “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.” I would respond that “a liberal is a conservative who is being audited or whose kid was busted for pot.” Today a civil libertarian is a conservative whose candidate is being investigated, while a law-and-order type is a liberal who wants to see Trump charged or impeached.

    I am a liberal who voted against Trump but who insists that his civil liberties must be respected for all of our sake.

  • British Politicians Declare War On Knives

    For proof of the expression that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” look no further than Britain, where families may have to start practicing cutting their dinner with a spoon. This is because Britain’s politicians have now made the absurdly ridiculous move to call for the banning of what Reason magazine called “the most useful tool ever invented” – the knife.

    Julia Child - making a casserole or on the verge of killing someone?
    Julia Child: preparing beef stew or about to kill someone?

    According to Reason, British politicians have “declared war on knives” and are swiftly moving with an attempt to ban them, as gun bans have amazingly failed to stop crime altogether:

    Having failed to disarm criminals with gun controls that they defy, British politicians are now turning their attention to implementing something new and different: knife control. Because criminals will be much more respectful of knife laws than of those targeted at firearms, I guess.

    “No excuses: there is never a reason to carry a knife. Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full force of the law,” London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan tweeted on April 8.

    Not to be outdone, his predecessor, Boris Johnson, currently Foreign Secretary, called for increased use of stop-and-search powers by police. “You have got to stop them, you have got to search them and you have got to take the knives out of their possession.”

    Poundland (the British equivalent of a dollar store) announced last week that it will no longer sell kitchen knives in any of its 850 stores. Similar stores are being slapped with fines for selling knives to minors.

    This latest regulatory insanity get worse:

    British politicians propose banning home delivery of knives and police promote street-corner bins for the surrender of knives while also conducting stings against knife vendors. Their goal is to “target not only those who carry and use knives, but also the supply, access and importation of weapons.”

    It all sounds all so familiar, doesn’t it? And yet so utterly pointless. If British authorities have been unable to block criminals’ access to firearms—mechanical devices that require some basic mechanical skill to manufacture, or at least a 3D printer—how are they going to cut off the flow of knives, which require nothing more than a piece of hard material that can take an edge?

    There are also practical downsides to discouraging the public from possessing knives—one of the oldest and most useful tools ever invented. Poundland, after all, isn’t dropping the sale of combat blades; the company’s move applies specifically to the tools people use to make their meals. The law looks much more likely to inconvenience peaceful people planning to carve a roast than to put off thugs who, push comes to shove, can find a way to sharpen a piece of rebar against a rock.

    This hyperbolic response by politicians who desperately need to be seen as doing something, comes in the wake of a growing number of stabbings since Britain outlawed guns altogether. While Britain can now boast, as Piers Morgan famously did in his interview with Alex Jones, that they were only about 30 gun murders in Britain in the year prior, British politicians failed to notice that crime continues to happen, just through different means.  It became clear when Britain’s crime stats were put up against those of gun toting New Yorkers.

    As we recent reported,  London now has a higher murder rate than New York City, a metropolis of nearly identical population and one long considered more vulnerable to crime. “London police investigated more murders than their New York counterparts did over the last two months,” Reuters reported earlier this month. “In the latest bloodshed, a 17-year-old girl died on Monday after she was found with gunshot wounds in Tottenham, north London, a day after a man was fatally stabbed in south London.”

    Commentators note that this may be a blip and that New York City’s murder rate for 2017 stood at more than double that for London. In fact, London’s murder rate really hasn’t risen much—instead, New York’s has dropped dramatically. But that still represents a big shift. In her 2002 Guns and Violence: The English Experience, historian Joyce Lee Malcolm noted that “New York City’s homicide rate has been at least five times higher than London’s for two hundred years. For most of that time, there were no serious firearm restrictions in either city.”

    New Yorkers didn’t need firearms to exceed the bloodlust of their trans-Atlantic rivals. Even if you removed crimes committed with guns from the comparison, “New Yorkers still managed to outstab and outkick Liverpudlians by a multiple of 3 and Londoners by a multiple of 5.6″ over those two centuries,” wrote the late Eric H. Monkkonen in Murder in New York City, published in 2000.

    Shortly after London Mayor Sadiq Kahn’s city-wide ban on knives, The Express had reported  that one of Scotland’s leading doctors has called for a ban on “killer” kitchen knives.

    Dr John Crichton, the new chairman of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Scotland, wants the sale of pointed kitchen knives to be banned to help reduce the number of fatal stabbings.

    Crichton, who took on the role of chairman in June this year, is championing a switch to so-called “R”-bladed knives, which have rounded points and are far less effective as weapons.

    As The Express adds, the doctor noted that research shows many attacks, particularly in households where there has been a history of violence, involve kitchen knives because they are so easily accessible. Dr Crichton believes a switch from sharp-pointed, long-bladed knives to the new design could save lives.

     “This is a public health measure and public health measures are always about society deciding on a self-imposed restriction for the public good.”

    As bizarre as the idea of the banning kitchen knives sounds – why not ban truck rentals too while you’re at it, after all that’s what a terrorist used in the deadly March 2017 attack on London Bridge and again yesterday in Toronto – it hasn’t stopped its advocates from beating the drum even harder over recent weeks. However, politicians may be shocked to learn that the knife ban will lead to the same outcome as the attempted gun ban: criminals will find different methods to commit violent crimes as those who don’t obey the law will hardly be bothered by even more regulation.

    Meanwhile, law-abiding British citizens hoping to prepare dinner from scratch inside the comfort of their own kitchen, well, they may be stuck ordering in… indefinitely.

  • Did McCabe Order FBI Agents To "Stand Down" On Early Clinton Email Investigation?

    Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe reportedly gave a “stand-down” order to FBI agents who began probing Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server for official government business following a report in the New York Times, reports journalist Sara Carter, citing “multiple former FBI officials, along with a Congressional official.” 

    After The New York Times publication, the FBI Washington Field Office began investigating Clinton’s use of private emails and whether she was using her personal email account to transmit classified information. According to sources, McCabe was overseas when he became aware of the investigation and sent electronic communications voicing his displeasure with the agents. –Sara Carter

    “Electronic communications” you say? Sounds like McCabe picked the right time to relaunch his new legal defense fund. 

    McCabe’s reported March 2015 “stand down” order to agents investigating the New York Times report may have broken FBI rules, to say the least. The official DOJ request to investigate Clinton would not be issued until the end of July 2015, four months later.

    Andrew McCabe, Hillary Clinton, Jill McCabe

    “McCabe tried to steer people off the private email investigation and that appears to be obstruction and should be investigated,” said one former FBI official with knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the investigation. “Now if the information on the ‘stand-down’ order is obtained by the IG that could bring a whole lot of other troubles to McCabe.”

    Last week, Inspector General Michael Horowitz released an internal report which revealed that McCabe had lied four times to investigators, including twice while under oath, about authorizing an F.B.I. spokesman and attorney to tell Devlin Barrett of the Wall St. Journal, just days before the 2016 election, that he had not issued a similar “stand-down” order on the reported FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation – right around the time McCabe was coming under fire for his wife Jill taking a $467,500 campaign contribution from Clinton proxy pal, Terry McAuliffe. 

    So McCabe was accused of a “stand-down” order during the 2016 election, for which he authorized the leak that got him fired – and he now stands accused of a separate, previous “stand-down” order as agents began to follow up on a March 2 2015 New York Times report into Clinton’s use of a private server.

    Horowitz and his team of investigators at the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) have been sifting through more than 1.2 million documents, of which Sara Carter‘s sources say 46,000 are connected to ongoing investigations. “Of those documents, Congress has received a tiny fraction of the emails pertaining to their oversight investigations.”

    Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog group, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in September 2017 against the FBI for the communications on behalf of retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent Jeff Danik, as previously reported. Danik spent more than 28 years with the bureau as a supervisor in the counter-terrorism division and special overseas advisor. Thus far, the FBI has failed to abide by a judge’s order to turn over all of former McCabe’s text messages, emails and SMS phone messages. –Sara Carter

    According to the OIG report on McCabe, the Wall Street Journal article which used McCabe’s leak “discussed not only the FBI’s handling of the Clinton E-mail Investigation but ‘internal disagreements within the Bureau and the Justice Department surrounding the Clintons’ family philanthropy.’” It stated that “McCabe, in particular, was caught . . . [in] an increasingly acrimonious fight for control between the Justice Department and FBI agents pursuing the Clinton Foundation case.”

    The former law enforcement sources who spoke to this reporter said a possible stand-down order on the Clinton Foundation investigation doesn’t preclude another stand-down order from McCabe on the Clinton email server investigation. They noted that it appears from the IG’s report that the Justice Department was attempting to dissuade McCabe from moving forward with the FBI’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation. McCabe said he authorized the disclosure to The Wall Street Journal of his conversation with the DOJ’s Principal Assistant Attorney General (PADAG) in an effort to counter the narrative that he had given a stand-down order on the Bureau’s Clinton Foundation investigation. –Sara Carter

    Meanwhile, ol’ Andy has received two referrals seeking criminal prosecution – the first sent last week by 11 GOP Congressional legislators, and the second coming from Inspector General Horowitz. As Carter notes, evidence collected by the Inspector General has raised new questions over McCabe’s role in the FBI’s investigations of Clinton and Trump – as well as what role President Obama’s DOJ (and State Department) may have played in both. 

  • The Latest Ridiculous Lawsuit In The Sue-nited States

    Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

    On June 6, 1991, Richard Overton finally hit his breaking point.

    Apparently, Mr. Overton had been spending quite a lot of time in front of his television, watching a flurry of beer commercials featuring scantily clad women falling all over themselves for average looking men.

    Overton realized immediately that drinking Anheuser-Busch’s magical products would be the solution to all of his problems.

    So he hurtled to his nearest liquor store for a case of beer.

    Except… nothing happened. No tropical islands. No Clydesdale horses. No Swedish bikini team.

    Moreover, Overton found out that alcohol can actually have negative effects on the mind and body.

    Overton was shocked and dismayed. He felt that, by buying and drinking beer, he was entitled to the fantasy lifestyle in the commercials… without any of the downside.

    Anheuser-Busch had betrayed him. And he wasn’t going to take it lying down.

    So, in the name of beer drinkers everywhere, Overton sued on grounds of false advertising, claiming that Anheuser-Busch’s TV commercials “involving tropical settings, and beautiful women. . . had caused him physical and mental injury, emotional distress, and financial loss.”

    Sadly this is a true story – just one example of the countless absurd, frivolous lawsuits that get filed in the Sue-nited States of America every year.

    Here’s a more recent one:

    Late last week, the Democratic National Committee (the headquarters for one of the two major political parties in the Land of the Free) launched a suit against everyone they could think of.

    The DNC believes a carefully coordinated conspiracy between Russia and the Presidential campaign of Donald Trump hijacked the 2016 US Presidential Election.

    So they filed a federal lawsuit in Southern District of New York (Manhattan) against more than two dozen defendants, including:

    • – Russia

    • – Wikileaks

    • – The Trump Campaign

    • – The GRU (the successor to the KGB)

    • – Ten unknown, unnamed individuals, cited in the lawsuit as John Doe #1 through #10.

    The DNC alleges in the complaint that these defendants violated a multitude of laws, from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to the State of Virginia’s common law prohibiting ‘Conspiracy to Commit Trespass to Chattels’.

    Now, I won’t bother to comment on the grounds of the lawsuit. That’s not relevant here.

    However you feel about this Trump/Russia issue, it’s important to step back for a moment and take note of the absurdity of this lawsuit.

    How in the world is it even possible to sue “Russia?”

    “Russia” is not even a legal entity. It’s just the name given to a giant piece of land on a map.

    In theory you could sue the Russian president. Or even the Russian government.

    But suing “Russia” is about as ridiculous as suing “Rap Music.” Yet in the Sue-nited States, you’re free to sue anyone or anything.

    Perhaps more importantly, the DNC is suing ten different “John Doe’s,” i.e. people who are entirely unknown.

    But again, in the Sue-nited States, you’re even free to sue people who might not exist.

    One of the truly bizarre things I find about this lawsuit is that the defendants are alleged to have violated an obscure Virginia state law… even though the lawsuit was filed in New York City.

    But in the Sue-nited States, you’re free to sue for any reason whatsoever.

    This is an incredibly important reminder. Whether you’re living in the US, or you just do business or invest in the US– this is the most litigious country that’s ever existed in the history of the world.

    And you can either hope that it never happens to you… or you can do something to prevent it.

    Frivolous litigators are trolls that are always scavenging for easy targets– businesses or people with wealth that’s completely exposed.

    Cash in your bank account. A profitable, healthy business. A home where the primary mortgage balance has been paid down. Even cryptocurrency.

    If you ever get sued, you’ll quickly end up going through a ‘discovery’ process, whereby the opposing legal counsel will obtain access to EVERYTHING in your entire life– financial records, bank statements, phone records, Facebook messages, and emails.

    Their job isn’t to prove that you actually wronged their client.

    All they need to do is demonstrate to the jury that you’re a bad person.

    And, chances are, there’s probably something in the last 20 years of your email records– a crass joke, a naughty email that you forwarded, etc. that presents you in an unfavorable light.

    In a lawsuit, all of your assets are on the table. The judge has the power to freeze your bank account, put a lien on your home, liquidate your business, whatever he/she wants.

    And of course, even if you win, you lose. The mere pain of having to go through a lawsuit can be incredibly expensive and emotionally draining.

    Litigators are betting on this… that you don’t have the financial resources or emotional wherewithal to go to court. So they’ll push you into a costly out-of-court settlement.

    The central idea behind asset protection is to make yourself a less attractive target.

    First and foremost, that means not flaunting your wealth. The more people who know about your finances, the higher the chances are that someone will want to sue you.

    Second, don’t keep all of your eggs in one basket. If you own your home, your business, your bank account, investments, etc. all in the same place, you’re really taking on a lot of risk.

    Your entire life and livelihood can be frozen with the stroke of a judge’s pen. And it’s just never worth taking that kind of chance.

    One option is to consider moving certain assets abroad, to a jurisdiction that’s not under the control of your home country’s government, particularly a place with strong asset protection laws. (Nevis is a good example.)

    When structured properly, this approach makes it difficult for litigators to attack your assets, which is a huge disincentive for anyone to file suit against you.

    And to continue learning how to ensure you thrive no matter what happens next in the world, I encourage you to download our free Perfect Plan B Guide.

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Apr 24

Today’s News 24th April 2018

  • Turkish President Erdogan Blasts The US For "Sending 5,000 Trucks Loaded With Weapons To Northern Syria"

    On Saturday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sharply criticized the United States Armed Forces and its N.A.T.O. (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) allies for supplying weapons to Kurdish militias in Syria for free, while refusing to sell defense hardware to Turkey.

    “We cannot buy weapons from the US with our money, but unfortunately, the US and coalition forces give these weapons, this ammunition, to terrorist organizations for free,” Erdoğan stated in an interview on Turkish NTV news channel.

    “So where does the threat come from? It comes primarily from strategic partners,” he said, warning that Washington continues to pump in truckloads of weapons into northern Syria.

    President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appearing as a guest of the Political Affairs Special program on NTV news channel over the weekend. (Source:NTV)

    During the interview, the Turkish president unloaded a bombshell that most Americans are entirely oblivious to — Washington and the Trump administration are deploying thousands of trucks jammed packed with guns and ammunition to Syrian terrorist.

    The United States has recently “sent 5,000 trucks loaded with weapons to northern Syria,” he said.

    Meanwhile, Trump took to Twitter on April 14 with a triumphant message in less than 280 characters after the US-led precision strikes in Syria hit alleged chemical weapons manufacturing sites earlier this month. “A perfectly executed strike,” he bragged, ending the tweet with a foolish phrase: “Mission accomplished!”

    The tweet eerily echoed that famous phrase of a former president, George W. Bush, who announced “mission accomplished” in 2003 to mark the start of the Iraq War, also called Second Persian Gulf War, that would continue for another 8-years until 2011. Even though Trump could have been using the phrase in a different context — the recent delivery of 5,000 trucks packed with military weapons and ammunition via Washington to terrorist organizations in Syria, indicates that fight in Syria is far from over.

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

    In recent times, Washington has supplied weapons to the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The support “infuriated Ankara, which sees the YPG as the Syrian branch of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK),” said Press TV.

    Erdogan accused Washington of building a “terror army” in Syria, which this could very well be true — considering the weapons convoy, he alleges…

    On January 20, Turkey launched an operation against the YPG in the Syrian city of Afrin. The cross-border invasion of Syria, dubbed Operation Olive Branch, has severely strained relations between Washington and Ankara.

    As the situation between both countries becomes dire, Ankara has gravitated towards Russia and Iran to ensure a smooth political transition in Syria, leaving Washington out of the discussions. Ankara has even decided to purchase arms from Russia, including the S-400 air defense systems, which has made the country vulnerable to Western sanctions. Assistant Secretary of State Wess Mitchell recently warned, noting that “it is in the American national interest to see Turkey remain strategically and politically aligned with the West.”

    “The ease with which Turkey brokered arrangements with the Russian military to facilitate the launch of its Operation Olive Branch in the Afrin district –arrangements to which America was not privy– is gravely concerning,” he said. “Turkey lately has increased its engagement with Russia and Iran.”

    Nevertheless, Marcus Montgomery, a fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC, has warned: “The Trump administration do not seem to understand the gravity of Turkey’s concerns.”

    Robert Stephen Ford, a retired American diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Syria from 2010 to 2014, echoed Montgomery’s comments about the Trump administration’s progress to ease the worries of Ankara.

    “The American position in northern Syria is strategically foolish and operationally dangerous,” Ford told Middle East Eye news portal, which he is referring to Washington’s decision to arm terror organizations in Syria.

    While President Trump has told the American people the U.S. would “be coming out of Syria very soon,” there are new claims from Turkish President Erdoğan that Washington is preparing for further conflict by resupplying their proxy armies with more than 5,000 truckloads of weapons.

  • Merkel Caught In Energy Conundrum Over Germany's Future

    Authored by Tom Luongo,

    The nominal U.S. President, Donald Trump, will meet with the two main European leaders this week with the goal of pushing the President off his position to end the Iran Nuclear Deal, or JCPOA. But it is the bigger issues of energy security that will be the real focus.

    From soy-boy Emmanuel Macron of France to the Gelded One of Germany, Angela Merkel, putting the European Union back in its place is one of the few things that Trump may still be able to affect the trajectory of when it comes to foreign policy.

    He has no control over Syria, having ceded his authority to the neoconservative crazies who have been wrong about everything since the fall of the Soviet Union.  I also don’t think he has much control over negotiations with North Korea.

    While everyone on the right keeps talking about how he keeps winning, after the disaster of his strikes on Syria, why would anyone take him seriously during Korean demilitarization talks?

    Does anyone think now Donald Trump has the leeway to negotiate an end to the Korean War and make those terms stick?

    And if you do, do you think Xi or Putin or Kim himself do?

    EU Fracturing

    And that brings me back to Macron and Merkel.  They were split on striking Syria.  It’s obvious that Macron saw this as an opportunity to up his ‘street cred’ with the globalist oligarchy, cozying up to the U.S. and U.K. and finish what his predecessors started in Syria decades ago.

    Macron is positioning himself to replace Merkel as the de facto leader of the EU. He’s been groomed for this position as Merkel’s time on the world stage comes to an end.

    While a terminally-weakened Merkel, fielding off political and social unrest at home, saw through the cheap theatre of the U.K.’s machinations to further isolate Russia, i.e. Skripal and the false flag in Syria, refusing to support airstrikes.

    Both leaders have raised Trump’s ire.  Merkel over not being a good NATO partner and Macron for over-stating his influence with Trump for staying in Syria.

    So, suffice it to say there may not be any “beautiful chocolate cake” on this diplomatic table.

    In fact, the divisions over many issues may be deep enough that we begin to see real movement from Merkel away from the U.S. and towards the hated Russia.

    It has been a staple of geopolitical maneuvering for the past couple hundred years to keep Germany and Russia from forming any sort of real political and economic alliance.  And up to now Merkel has been the good soldier, working to align Germany and the EU with the goals of the globalist oligarchy that Trump has been so vocal in wanting to curtail.

    This is the basis for their antipathy.

    But, her days of being the leader of that front are approaching their end.  Deep divisions have opened up in German politics and her coalition with the Social Democrats is thin to the point of being anorexic.

    New SPD leader Andrea Nehles is going to be a handful for Merkel.  Merkel won’t have a whipped hound as coalition partner for the next four years.  So, expect a lot more, dare I say, “Germany First,” from Germany.

    And this will lead to problems with Trump and his “Empire First’ cabinet.

    Drill, Baby Drill

    Because where Merkel and Trump fundamentally disagree is allowing Russia any more access to the European gas market.  This is one of the ways in which his neocon Iagos can convince him so easily on staying in the Middle East.

    All they have to do is whisper, “Energy security” and “billions in natural gas revenues” and Trump makes the wrong decision every time.

    Merkel knows that Germany’s path to independence lies through the Nordstream 2 pipeline as well as extricating itself from the mess that is Ukraine.  Energy independence for Germany means Nordstream 2, now that they’ve shuttered their nuclear reactors and the coup in Ukraine has failed to produce leverage over Russia in gas markets.

    But, no one in the U.S wants this pipeline built and we’ve threatened the world with nuclear annihilation over it.  And that we’ve expended so much political capital in attempting to stop it tells you just how important it is to power brokers in D.C. and London.

    The realities are not lost on Trump who has a domestic oil and gas industry to build new markets for while maintaining control over European Union policy.

    That’s the song that’s been sung to him over Syria.  Don’t kid yourself.

    Because the U.S. ousting Assad in Syria delivers a devastating blow to Russia, Iran and China while re-opening pipeline access to Europe per the original plan.

    And that’s why Merkel’s abstention on Syria was so significant.  It is also why Nordstream will be the most heated discussion between them next week.  Not Iran’s nuclear program, but how the U.S. can craft policy that brings ‘energy security’ to Europe which cuts out Russia and curtails China’s plans for central Asian development and integration.

    Merkel in the Middle

    In other words, same policy, different president.

    To this point Merkel has tried to walk the fine line between the loyal NATO/US satrap and unwilling partner in antagonizing the Russians over energy needs.  But, Trump has been more than clear in his willingness to screw over all of Europe and Asia just to sell a few tankers of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Poland at prices that ensure Europe’s anti-competitiveness for a generation.

    On this idea I don’t think he disagrees with the neocons at all.

    Because in the end Trump is a mercantilist, just like I said before he was elected.  And while he talks a good game about better deals for the U.S., what he really means is a cheap dollar, protection tariffs and mafioso foreign policy to sell half as many goods at twice the price.

    Like all mercantilist policies, it’ll work for a while.  And Europe’s own fecklessness has brought it to this position where it’s vulnerable to it.  When the sovereign debt crisis begins to hit Europe, it will need the U.S. to help manage it, if possible.

    And that’s why Merkel will say nothing that will change the situation one whit.

    *  *  *

    To support work like this and see how it correlates to a holistic investment strategy in strategic commodities, join My Patreon and subscribe to the Gold Goats ‘n Guns Investment Newsletter

  • 70% Of Taiwanese "Willing To Fight" China

    Just days after China launched its “largest naval drill in 600 years”  in the Taiwan Strait, The Taipei Times reports that 67.7 percent of respondents said they were willing to go to war to defend Taiwan if China launched an armed assault on the nation to force unification.

    The survey, released by the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy last week, also showed the number of people willing to fight to prevent unification with China rose to 70.3 percent among respondents aged 20 to 39, the survey showed.

    The foundation president Hsu Szu-chien told a news conference in Taipei that it considers it a fitting time to pose the question as the Chinese military has over the past few years been increasing activity near Taiwan.

    94 percent of people said that living in a democratic society is “important,” of which 65.8 percent said it is “very important.”

    In addition, 76.4 percent of people agreed with the statement: “Democracy, despite its flaws, is still the best system,” the poll showed.

    “If we factor in questions about whether young people support democracy, we discover that the more people support democracy, the more willing they are to defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion by China,” Hsu said.

    “I think it is our democratic lifestyle and values that people want to protect.”

    Earlier this month, the Trump administration cleared various American manufacturers for business to sell submarine technology to Taiwan, which deeply angered Beijing.

    “The live-fire drills would almost certainly be intended to be seen as a response to the Trump administration’s new initiatives over Taiwan,” Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, said.

    “It is probably intended more for Taipei than Washington as the military exercise cannot intimidate the US but can get Taipei to think of the security dilemma, which is that the more Taipei seeks to secure US support, the more Beijing will do to make Taipei feel less secure.”

    Ni Feng, director of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the parallel events of the Syrian crisis and the Taiwan Strait war drill is coincidental.

    “Beijing needs to send its warning to Taipei on time if Bolton wants to visit Taipei, which will obviously be a breakthrough [in the US-Taiwan relationship],” he said.

    Yun Sun, director of the China programme at the Stimson Centre in Washington, agreed with the other military analyst, stating the Trump administration is playing a dangerous game “using Taiwan as a potential bargaining chip with China.”

    “With Trump’s love for transactions and linking issues together, it is conceivable that he is using Taiwan as a potential bargaining chip with China,” she said.

    That move increases “the possibility of an armed conflict between the US and [mainland] China out of miscalculation; and it creates an illusion that Taiwan is up for negotiation”.

    “For many policy experts, US support for Taiwan is warranted, and should be independent from political or economic deals [between Washington and Beijing].”

    Given the Taiwanese willingness to fight, the threat of World War III being sparked from this conflict continue to rise…

  • The Great Game Comes To Syria

    Authored by Conn Hallinan via Counterpunch.org,

    An unusual triple alliance is emerging from the Syrian war, one that could alter the balance of power in the Middle East, unhinge the NATO alliance, and complicate the Trump administration’s designs on Iran. It might also lead to yet another double cross of one of the region’s largest ethnic groups, the Kurds.

    However, the “troika alliance” – Turkey, Russia and Iran – consists of three countries that don’t much like one another, have different goals, and whose policies are driven by a combination of geo-global goals and internal politics.

      In short, “fragile and complicated” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

    How the triad might be affected by the joint U.S., French and British attack on Syria is unclear, but in the long run the alliance will likely survive the uptick of hostilities.

    But common ground was what came out of the April 4 meeting between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Meeting in Ankara, the parties pledged to support the “territorial integrity” of Syria, find a diplomatic end to the war, and to begin a reconstruction of a Syria devastated by seven years of war. While Russia and Turkey explicitly backed the UN-sponsored talks in Geneva, Iran was quiet on that issue, preferring a regional solution without “foreign plans.”

    “Common ground,” however, doesn’t mean the members of the “troika” are on the same page.

    Turkey’s interests are both internal and external. The Turkish Army is currently conducting two military operations in northern Syria, Olive Branch and Euphrates Shield, aimed at driving the mainly Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) out of land that borders Turkey. But those operations are also deeply entwined with Turkish politics.

    Erdogan’s internal support has been eroded by a number of factors:  exhaustion with the ongoing state of emergency imposed following the 2016 attempted coup, a shaky economy, and a precipitous fall in the value of the Turkish pound. Rather than waiting for 2019, Erdogan called for snap elections this past week and beating up on the Kurds is always popular with right-wing Turkish nationalists. Erdogan needs all the votes he can get to imlement his newly minted executive presidency that will give him virtually one-man rule.

    To be part of the alliance, however, Erdogan has had to modify his goal of getting rid of Syrian President Bashar Assad and to agree—at this point, anyhow—to eventually withdraw from areas in northern Syria seized by the Turkish Army. Russia and Iran have called for turning over the regions conquered by the Turks to the Syrian Army.

    Moscow’s goals are to keep a foothold in the Middle East with its only base, Tartus, and to aid its long-time ally, Syria. The Russians are not deeply committed to Assad personally, but they want a friendly government in Damascus. They also want to destroy al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which have caused Moscow considerable trouble in the Caucasus.

    Russia also wouldn’t mind driving a wedge between Ankara and NATO. After the U.S., Turkey has NATO’s second largest army. NATO broke a 1989 agreement not to recruit former members of the Russian-dominated Warsaw Pact into NATO as a quid pro quo for the Soviets withdrawing from Eastern Europe. But since the Yugoslav War in 1999 the alliance has marched right up to the borders of Russia. The 2008 war with Georgia and 2014 seizure of the Crimea were largely a reaction to what Moscow sees as an encirclement strategy by its adversaries.

    Turkey has been at odds with its NATO allies around a dispute between Greece and Cyprus over sea-based oil and gas resources, and it recently charged two Greek soldiers who violated the Turkish border with espionage.  Erdogan is also angry that European Union countries refuse to extradite Turkish soldiers and civilians who he claims helped engineer the 2016 coup against him.  While most NATO countries condemned Moscow for the recent attack on two Russians in Britain, the Turks pointedly did not.

    Turkish relations with Russia have an economic side as well. Ankara want a natural gas pipeline from Russia, has broken ground on a $20 billion Russian nuclear reactor, and just shelled out $2.5 billion for Russia’s S-400 anti-aircraft system.

    The Russians do not support Erdogan’s war on the Kurds and have lobbied for the inclusion of Kurdish delegations in negotiations over the future of Syria. But Moscow clearly gave the Turks a green light to attack the Kurdish city of Afrin last month, driving out the YPG that had liberated it from the Islamic State and Turkish-backed al-Qaeda groups. A number of Kurds charge that Moscow has betrayed them.

    The question now is, will the Russians stand aside if the Turkish forces move further into Syria and attack the city of Manbij, where the Kurds are allied with U.S. and French forces? And will Erdogan’s hostility to the Kurds lead to an armed clash among three NATO members?

    Such a clash seems unlikely, although the Turks have been giving flamethrower speeches over the past several weeks. “Those who cooperate with terrorists organizations [the YPG] will be targeted by Turkey,” says Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said in a pointed reference to France’s support for the Kurds. Threatening the French is one thing, picking a fight with the U.S. military quite another.

    Of course, if President Trump pulls U.S. forces out of Syria, it will be tempting for Turkey to move in. While the “troika alliance” has agreed to Syrian “sovereignty,” that won’t stop Ankara from meddling in Kurdish affairs. The Turks are already appointing governors and mayors for the areas in Syria they have occupied.

    Iran’s major concern in Syria is maintaining a buffer between itself and a very aggressive alliance of the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia, which seems to be in the preliminary stages of planning a war against the second-largest country in the Middle East.

    Iran is not at all the threat it has been pumped up to be. Its military is miniscule and talk of a so-called “Shiite crescent”—Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon—is pretty much a western invention (although the term was dreamed up by the King of Jordan).

    Tehran has been weakened by crippling sanctions and faces the possibility that Washington will withdraw from the nuclear accord and re-impose yet more sanctions. The appointment of National Security Advisor John Bolton, who openly calls for regime change in Iran, has to have sent a chill down the spines of the Iranians.  What Tehran needs most of all is allies who will shield it from the enmity of the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia. In this regard, Turkey and Russia could be helpful.

    Iran has modified its original goals in Syria of a Shiite-dominated regime by agreeing to a “non-sectarian character” for a post-war Syria. Erdogan has also given up on his desire for a Sunni-dominated government in Damascus.

    War with Iran would be catastrophic, an unwinnable conflict that could destabilize the Middle East even more than it is now. It would, however, drive up the price of oil, currently running at around $66 a barrel. Saudi Arabia needs to sell its oil for at least $100 a barrel, or it will very quickly run of money. The on-going quagmire of the Yemen war, the need to diversify the economy, and the growing clamor by young Saudis—70 percent of the population—for jobs requires lots of money, and the current trends in oil pricing are not going to cover the bills.

    War and oil make for odd bedfellows. While the Saudis are doing their best to overthrow the Assad regime and fuel the extremists fighting the Russians, Riyadh is wooing Moscow to sign onto to a long-term OPEC agreement to control oil supplies. That probably won’t happen—the Russians are fine with oil at $50 to $60 a barrel—and are wary of agreements that would restrict their right to develop new oil and gas resources. The Saudi’s jihad on the Iranians has a desperate edge to it, as well it might. The greatest threat to the Kingdom has always come from within.

    The rocks and shoals that can wreck alliances in the Middle East are too numerous to count, and the “troika” is riven with contradictions and conflicting interests. But the war in Syria looks as if it is coming to some kind of resolution, and at this point Iran, Russia and Turkey seem to be the only actors who have a script that goes beyond lobbing cruise missiles at people.

  • Ranked: The Best And Worst State Economies

    On a global scale, the U.S. economy is massive at close to $19 trillion in size.

    However, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins explains below, the United States is also the sum of its parts. America represents the union of 50 states and other jurisdictions such as D.C., and all of these state-level economies have their own unique problems to overcome, drivers of growth, and local resources that factor into their prosperity.

    How can we compare these state economies on an even playing field?

    RANKED: STATE ECONOMIES

    Using absolute numbers, it’s hard to directly compare California ($2.75 trillion GDP, 39.5 million people) to a state like Vermont ($33 billion, 0.6 million people). By leveling the playing field, we can get an idea of how states contrast in terms of relative economic strength that companies and workers would better recognize.

    Today’s infographic uses 27 metrics from WalletHub to rank state economies.

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

    These metrics are grouped into three major categories, which are evenly weighted:

    1. Economic Activity: GDP growth, startup activity, exports per capita, and three other metrics

    2. Economic Health: Labor force changes, median household income, unemployment, and 13 other metrics

    3. Innovation Potential: Entrepreneurial activity, R&D investment, patents per capita, and three other metrics

    Note: the full methodology with all 27 factors can be found here.

    Here’s how the rankings shake down, for all 50 state economies and D.C.:

    Topping the list for overall score were the states of Washington, California, and Utah, and the first place state in each major category includes Washington (Economic Activity), Utah (Economic Health), and Massachusetts (Innovation Potential).

    CASE IN POINT

    Looking at statistics and scoring methodologies alone can be a bit esoteric, so let’s look at some individual cases to see some contrast.

    Utah (Rank: #3)
    Utah consistently ranks as one of the top states for business, in the country, as well as a top state for job growth and employment. It’s also pretty unique in that it has a fairly diversified economy, with major sectors in the tourism, agriculture, tech, manufacturing, finance, energy, and mining industries.

    Utah has a higher median household income ($65,977), and a blistering 3.4% employment growth rate.

    Florida (Rank: #22)
    Using this methodology, Florida falls somewhere in the middle of the rankings. The good news is the state has good employment growth (2.9%) and a myriad of thriving industries like aerospace. The bad news? Florida has the second-highest level of poverty in the union at 19%, and it also has a lower median household income ($50,860) than the national average.

    Maine (Rank: #45)
    Economic activity is sluggish in the country’s most northeastern state. With an aging population, slow employment growth (0.8%), and a number of lost manufacturing jobs over the last 15 years, the state is trying to rebound. Maine isn’t helped by having one of the highest tax burdens for its citizens and businesses in the country, either.

  • New Zealand Braces For "Super Gonorrhea": It's A Matter Of "When, Not If"

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    The island nation of New Zealand is bracing itself for what scientists are calling “super gonorrhea.”  They say it is not a matter of ‘if’ the nation will be impacted by the disease, but a matter of ‘when.’

    A historically-resistant strain of gonorrhea has made its way from South East Asia to the United Kingdom and Australia, and experts are warning New Zealand will be struck next by the antibiotic-resistant super-bug gonorrhea strain. It’s in Eastern Australia, and it’s in Queensland, Australia, so those in New Zealand are rightly concerned.

    Last month, it was reported a British man had contracted what was dubbed the world’s ‘worst ever’ case of gonorrhea, that he picked up in southeast Asia. It was the first documented case of the sexually transmitted infection that could not be cured with a combination of standard antibiotics. England’s public health agency even launched an “incident response” after discovering more cases of gonorrhea recently that are resistant to nearly all antibiotics currently available.

    So, how long will it be before it makes its way to New Zealand?

    According to Family Planning’s Christine Roke, “if it isn’t here now, it will be very soon.” Auckland University associate professor of infectious diseases Mark Thomas agrees, telling Morning Reportit’s “almost certain” there will be cases within the next year or two. It’s simply a matter of “who has sex with who,” he said.

    Gonorrhea is caused by the Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria. The symptoms of the disease are difficult for men to live with, so most know fairly soon if they’ve contracted the infection. Symptoms can include discolored discharge, stomach pain, various forms of bleeding from the genitalia, discharge or bleeding from the anus and, for the fellas, sore testes. Women often are unaware of an infection, as it normally infects the cervix,which has no sensation. Occasionally you may also get a dry throat if you’ve contracted the bacteria.  Normally, it has been easily treated with antibiotics, however, this new strain, appears to be resistant.

    “The problem with gonorrhea is it’s a very wily bug,” says Roke. “And it’s able to mutate very easily. This leads to developing resistance.” Thomas agreed, adding that it is entirely possible that within the next ten years, humanity will run out of drugs to treat the bacteria. Roke also says that with international travel at the levels it is these days, it’s only a matter of time before someone smuggles the gonorrhea bacteria unintentionally into the country. As invasive as customs can be, New Zealand is not exactly screening for this stuff at the border.

    Thomas said the current test for gonorrhea does not determine if the usual treatment of an injection antibiotic and two oral antibiotic pills will work. He said more resistant strains will require hospitals to administer the necessary antibiotics.

  • US CENTCOM Chief Makes "Secret And Unprecedented" Visit To Israel As Russia Mulls Arming Syria

    Increasingly it appears that the recent US coalition missile strikes on Syria have utterly backfired: instead of weakening Syria or degrading its military capabilities, the attack may have actually served to strengthen Syria’s defenses. 

    Since the massive strike which involved the US, UK, and France launching over 100 cruise missiles, Russia is rumored to be moving forward on delivery of its advanced S-300 missile defense system, which would be a monumental upgrade allowing Syrian defenses to far surpass current capabilities which utilize the Soviet-made S-125 and S-200 air defense systems.

    Crucially, S-300s have a range of up to 150-200 kilometers (or 120 miles), bringing Syrian deterrent reach easily to within Lebanese airspace (as Israel has routinely struck targets inside Syria while firing over “neutral” Lebanese airspace in recent years), and could even extend airspace coverage into Israel itself. 

    Could this be the reason for some major behind-the-scenes diplomatic scrambling?

    Undated file photo of S-300 air defense missiles launched at Ashuluk shooting range in southern Russia.

    On Monday VOA News chief White House correspondent Steve Herman announced that US CENTCOM commander General Joseph Votel is in the midst of “a secret and unprecedented visit to Israel.”

    Knowledge of the “secret” visit was based on exclusive footage broadcast by Israel’s Kann News, which first reported, “the commander of the American Central Command arrived for the first time to Israel, and met with senior security officials, including the Chief of Staff.”

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    No doubt the potential for what weapons experts have commonly described as the “exceptionally advanced” Russian-supplied S-300 in Israel’s backyard is making Tel Aviv and its allies nervous. Israel has repeatedly called delivery of the S-300s a “red line” for which it would act, however, plans for just such a scenario could be hastening.

    Early Monday morning Israel’s Channel 10 senior diplomatic correspondent broke the following, subsequently confirmed in the Times of Israel and Reuters:

    Russian newspaper Kommersant reports that Russia might deliver S-300 anti aircraft missiles to Syria in the very near future in order to defend Damascus & Strategic Syrian army bases from Israel & U.S. airstrikes.

    Kommersant reported Russia will give the S-300 missiles to Syria for free from Russian army supplies as part of its military assistance to Syria. This way the delivery could be done very quickly.

    Russian military sources said parts of the S-300 will be delivered soon to Syria via cargo planes or Russian navy ships. Until Syrian officers will be trained to operate the system it will be operated by Russian military experts in coordination with the Syrian army.

    According to Kommersant Russia believes that delivering the system will stabilize the situation in Syria and deter Israel and the U.S. from continuing its airstrikes in Syria. Russian sources said that if Israel attacks the missiles the results would be catastrophic.

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    Though still being hotly debated and contested among analysts, Syria’s over 30-year old current deterrent system appears to have performed well, likely stunning the West and neighboring Israel (which itself played a part in the coalition attack) as it reportedly shot down 71 of the 103 cruise missiles, according to official Russian and Syrian government sources. 

    As we previously described, Pentagon officials have vehemently denied that their “nice and new and smart” cruise missiles were actually shot down, and Russia now further claims to be in possession of at least two non-detonated coalition missiles. Most Western media reports continue to assert that Syrian missile defense failed to shoot down a single inbound missile. Notably, the Pentagon has been careful in all statements to say Russia’s S-300 system (currently present aboard Russian battleships in the Mediterranean) did not engage. 

    However, there are other possibilities that the coalition’s missiles simply failed in reaching their targets in some instances without intercept by Syrian defenses, or even that advanced Russian air defense Electronic Counter Measures (ECM) may have been in play. 

    But one doesn’t need to take the Russian Defense Ministry’s word for it. It is entirely possible and even likely that Russian intercept claims are inflated, yet that there were a number of intercepts that night was also reported by several important outside sources, including by Syrian pro-rebel media, foremost being the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which has for years been a chief go-to source for all mainstream reporting on Syria (though ironically when SOHR contradicts the mainstream media, such as in this case, its numbers are ignored).

    SOHR reported, based on “several intersected sources” on the ground, that “the number of missiles that were downed exceeded 65.” That anti-Assad/anti-Russia pro-rebel SOHR is saying this is hugely significant, and is consistent with Russia’s claim. 

    But all of this will perhaps quickly become a moot point if Russia does indeed deliver the S-300 system to Syria after warning immediately on the heels of the US-led strike, that there would be consequences.

    Graphic and Info Source: Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems via Graphic News

    On the very morning after the US strike took place, Russia’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Rudskoi, said Russia would “reconsider” whether to supply the air defenses to Assad – an issue previously thought dead as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had reportedly successfully lobbied President Putin against the possibility in 2013. 

    Netanyahu was quoted at the time as saying of the S-300 system, “We’ll destroy your missiles if you deliver them to Assad” – a warning which has recently been repeated in the form of an Israeli “red line”. However, Russian military sources have this week been quoted in the Times of Israel as saying: if Israel tried to destroy the anti-aircraft batteries—as analysts have indicated Israel likely would—it would be “catastrophic for all sides.”

    But on Monday, Reuters reported that no decision had been made on S-300 delivery to Syria, citing Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who said, “We’ll have to wait to see what specific decisions the Russian leadership and representatives of Syria will take.” Lavrov added, “There is probably no secret about this and it can all be announced (if a decision is taken).”

    However, given Israel’s past history of “strike first” in Syria and negotiate later, we could witness missiles flying before any official announcement takes place. 

  • The Pension Crisis Gets A Catchy Name: "Silver Tsunami"

    Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

    Pensions really are in crisis, but the story is so full of large numbers, obscure projections, and dry terms like “unfunded liabilities” that not many people are paying attention.

    The same is true for a lot of other big trends out there, which is why those sounding the alarm eventually settle on pithy/scary (if not always accurate) terms to get people’s attention. Global warming, for instance, or nuclear winter.

    Now the pension crisis may have found its hook:

    ‘Silver Tsunami’ hits as pension costs devour California school budgets

    (San Francisco Chronicle) – What happens when state funding improves, but local school budgets get worse? And how did we get into this situation in the first place?

    It’s simple. School systems are getting hammered by the rising costs of pension and health care commitments. Meanwhile, they are being pinched by external factors including declining student enrollment, increased competition and frozen federal funding.

    California is not an anomaly. Districts throughout the nation are facing the same squeeze.

    So why isn’t anyone paying attention? Three main reasons:

    Money is boring: And only boring people like chief financial officers talk about money and use phrases like “unfunded liabilities.” Interesting, cutting-edge people talk about “disruptive innovations” like personalized learning, or anything with the word “maker” in it.

    Money is politically messy. Everyone wants funding for their favorite education project. In this zero-sum world, no one wants to talk about making tough choices. Even fewer want to discuss sensitive topics such as pension and health care liabilities.

    Education finance has never been part of our nation’s education wars.Most of the opinion makers in education are like the Great Houses of Westeros in the HBO series “Game of Thrones.” They are much happier fighting each other to the death about issues like unions and charter schools than focusing on the more powerful forces that could destroy them all.

    In “Game of Thrones,” that force is the White Walkers. In education, it’s the “Silver Tsunami” — the tens of billions of dollars in pension and other post-retirement benefits guaranteed to retirees.

    In the olden days (before the mid-2000s), these budget problems seemed very far away. But over the past decade, millions of Baby Boomers have retired. Suddenly pension and retiree health care costs were at hand.

    Most state and local officials failed to plan for these increased costs. During good times, they sweetened already generous benefits. During bad times, such as the Great Recession, they reduced the already inadequate amounts they were socking away.

    The size of these unfunded liabilities is mind-boggling. Nationally, the estimate is $1.4 trillion. In California, it’s $97 billion for teachers and other school employees as of 2015-16. To put this into perspective, total venture capital investment in educational technology since 2010 was $2.3 billion.

    In 2013, California state leaders attempted to address the shortfall by increasing payments from districts into the pension fund to $1,600 per pupil in 2023-24 from $500. This increase will only pay for part of the state pension obligation. Billions of dollars more will come directly from state coffers and never reach education budgets.

    Just when you think it couldn’t get worse, California has more than $92 billion in unfunded health care liabilities. By 2030, Los Angeles Unified School District, serving more than a half-million students, is projected to spend half its budget on retiree pension and health care costs. Hundreds of other districts could make dramatic budget cuts or even go bankrupt.

    District and charter leaders are beginning to talk about the impact of these rising costs. Unfortunately, everyone else is making things worse. Unions, foundations, and nonprofits still live in a world where an improving state economy was a reason to advocate for salary increases or fund the latest program.

    That world is gone. Winter is already here. Unlike the fantasy world of Westeros, there are no magical solutions or heroes coming to save us.

    With 10,000 or so baby boomers – many of whom are public sector employees – turning 65 every day, pension imbalances will explode in the coming decade. That means life gets harder for pretty much everyone who drives, needs police protection or has kids in school. Which in turn makes politics even more unstable and unpredictable than currently.

    At the same time, the weakest pension plans and their cities will be forced into bankruptcy, leading to panic among the not yet bankrupt and – now we’re getting to the systemic risk – the owners and potential future buyers of the bonds cities and states issue to keep afloat. When the muni market dies, so does much of the rest of the US financial system.

  • Army Building "Self-Aware" Squid-Like Robot That Can Be "3-D Printed" During Combat

    The Army Research Laboratory’s next robot weapon isn’t a new predator drone or even a robot dog like the infamous prototype developed by Boston Labs.

    Instead, it’s a “self-aware” robot built from flexible materials inspired by invertebrates like squid, the Army Times reports.

    Squid

    But in addition to its advance machine-learning capabilities, the material used to build the robots is so lightweight and malleable that soldiers will be able to “print” the robots on the battlefield, the control them with controllers that send electric currents through the materials. 

    In case you weren’t already terrified of robots that can jump over walls, fly or crawl, Army researchers are developing your next nightmare – a flexible, soft robot inspired by squid and other invertebrates.

    And they want soldiers to be able to use 3D printers to make them on the battlefield.

    The U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the University of Minnesota are developing materials that can be 3D printed based on the flexibility and nimbleness of invertebrates such as a squid, according to an ARL release.

    Researchers were inspired to design the new type of robot after testing material that would bend in any direction when hit with electricity.

    Traditional materials are too rigid and limit certain types of movement that robots might require to get into “confined or restricted spaces,” said Ed Habtour, an ARL researcher.

    The prototypes that Habtour and fellow ARL researchers developed gave 3D-printed actuators three times the movement as what’s been tested before.

    The material that they’ve used in their testing will bend in any direction when hit with electricity.

    “In the initial phase of the project, our team began by investigating new methods for emulating the locomotion of invertebrates,” said Michael McAlpine, a professor at the University of Minnesota.

    That helped researchers learn how to apply the natural movement of invertebrates like squids to produce “high bending motions without skeletal support,” McAlpine said.

    As scientists continue to study the material, the head researchers say they will be able to build robots that are “dynamic”, “self-aware” and able to adjust to battlefield conditions.

    Because the material doesn’t have to be dried, heated or assembled, it would require little training and could be used for printable robots that soldiers could make and use whenever and wherever they’re needed.

    “If we can understand these interactions, then we can use those insights to fabricate dynamic structures and flexible robots which are designed to be self-aware, self-sensing and capable of adjusting their morphologies and properties in real time to adapt to a myriad of external and internal conditions,” Habtour said.

    While the Army is building squid-like robots that can squeeze into confined spaces – whether it’s to search for explosives or rescue or treat wounded soldiers – Amazon is working on a “top secret” robotics project of its own: Building what it hopes will be the first domestic robot to break into the mainstream.

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Apr 23

Today’s News 23rd April 2018

  • European Parliament Urges Boycott Of Soccer World Cup In Russia

    German Green Party member Rebecca Harms has initiated an open letter calling on EU governments to stay away from the FIFA World Cup taking place in Russia in June.

    Sixty Members of the European Parliament from 16 member states and 5 different political groups are supporting the call.

    The letter (in full below) reads that the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain last month “was just the latest chapter in Vladimir Putin’s mockery of our European values.”

    Citing “indiscriminate bombings of schools, hospitals, and civilian areas in Syria; the violent military invasion in Ukraine; systematic hacking; disinformation campaigns; election meddling; trying to destabilize our societies and to weaken and divide the EU.”

    Concluding that:

    “All this doesn’t make for a good World Cup host.”

    Additionally, Harms said on Friday that Putin is responsible for the occupation and war in Ukraine.

    Harms letter – and the backing of a growing group of MEPs follows White House representatives warning British and American fans to think twice before going to the World Cup in Russia.

    The official said: “We won’t have the same ability to protect our citizens or even just deal with the regular consular affairs.

    “If you get into any kind of difficulty there then we just won’t have the wherewithal. People have accidents. They get ill, they need to be medivacked out.”

    The official also warned of the threat of Russian hooligans promising to hunt down English fans in the streets and even “kill”.

    *  *  *

    OPEN LETTER

    To all EU governments,

    We, Members of the European Parliament, call on you, as representatives of the people in the European Union, to join the governments of Iceland and the UK in not attending the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.

    The Salisbury attack was just the latest chapter in Vladimir Putin’s mockery of our European values: indiscriminate bombings of schools, hospitals and civilian areas in Syria; the violent military invasion in Ukraine; systematic hacking; disinformation campaigns; election meddling; trying to destabilize our societies and to weaken and divide the EU – all this doesn’t make for a good World Cup host.

    While we agree that sport can help build metaphorical bridges, as long as Putin is blowing up real ones in Syria, we cannot pretend this World Cup is just like any other major sporting event.

    As long as Putin is illegally occupying Crimea, holding Ukrainian political prisoners and supporting the war in Eastern Ukraine we cannot pretend that this tournament’s host is our welcoming neighbour.

    And as long as political dissidents and the free press are in constant danger in Russia and beyond, we cannot turn our backs on them to shake Putin’s hand in a football stadium.

    Three days after the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Putin invaded Ukraine, and the world watched in dismay. This time, we can make things right by not cheering at his grave violations of human rights at the 2018 World Cup.

    The world is looking at Europe in these difficult times. Our governments should not strengthen the authoritarian and anti-western path of the Russian President, but boycott the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia and raise their voices for the protection of human rights, of democratic values and peace.

    Sincerely,

    Adaktusson, Lars (EPP, Sweden)
    Andrikiene, Laima (EPP, Lithuania)
    Auštrevičius, Petras (ALDE, Lithuania)
    Boni, Michal (EPP, Poland)
    Bové, José (Greens/EFA, France)
    Buzek, Jerzy (EPP, Poland)
    Childers, Nessa (S&D, Ireland)
    Delli, Karima (Greens/EFA, France)
    Durand, Pascal (Greens/EFA, France)
    Eickhout, Bas (Greens/EFA, Netherlands)
    Fjellner, Christofer (EPP, Sweden)
    Fotyga, Anna (ECR, Poland)
    Gabelic, Aleksander (S&D, Sweden)
    Giegold, Sven (Greens/EFA, Germany)
    Griffin, Theresa (S&D, UK)
    Guteland, Jytte (S&D, Sweden)
    Harms, Rebecca (Initiator of this call, Greens/EFA, Germany)
    Hetman, Krzysztof (EPP, Poland)
    Heubuch, Maria (Greens/EFA, Germany)
    Hökmark, Gunnar (EPP, Sweden)
    Jadot, Yannick (Greens/EFA, France)
    Jávor, Benedek (Greens/EFA, Hungary)
    Jazłowiecka, Danuta (EPP, Poland)
    Joly, Eva (Greens/EFA, France)
    Kalinowski, Jarosław (EPP, Poland)
    Kelam, Tunne (EPP, Estonia)
    Kozłowska-Rajewicz, Agnieszka (EPP, Poland)
    Kudrycka, Barbara (EPP, Poland)
    Lambert, Jean (Greens/EFA, UK)
    Lewandowski, Janusz (EPP, Poland)
    Łukacijewska, Elżbieta (EPP, Poland)
    Macovei, Monica (EPP, Romania)
    Moody, Clare (S&D, UK)
    Olbrycht, Jan (EPP, Poland)
    Pabriks, Artis (EPP, Latvia)
    Pietikäinen, Sirpa (EPP, Finnland)
    Pitera, Julia (EPP, Poland)
    Plura, Marek (EPP, Poland)
    Rivasi, Michèle (Greens/EFA, France)
    Ropé, Bronis (Greens/EFA, Lithuania)
    Rosati, Dariusz (EPP, Poland)
    Sargentini, Judith (Greens/EFA, Netherlands)
    Siekierski, Czesław (EPP, Poland)
    Smith, Alyn (Greens/EFA, UK)
    Šojodrová, Michaela (EPP, Czech Republic)
    Staes, Bart (Greens/EFA, Belgium)
    Štětina, Jaromír (EPP, Czech Republic)
    Szejnfeld, Adam (EPP, Poland)
    Tarand, Indrek (Greens/EFA, Estonia)
    Telička, Pavel (EPP, Czech Republic)
    Thun und Hohenstein, Róża Gräfin von (EPP, Poland)
    Trüpel, Helga (Greens/EFA, Germany)
    Turmes, Claude (Greens/EFA, Luxembourg)
    Vaidere, Inese (EPP, Latvia)
    Valero, Bodil (Greens/EFA, Sweden)
    Wałesa, Jarosław (EPP, Poland)
    Ward, Julie (S&D, UK)
    Wenta, Bogdan (EPP, Poland)
    Zdrojewski, Bogdan (EPP, Poland)
    Zwiefka, Tadeusz (EPP, Poland)

  • Is A False-Flag Attack On A US Navy Ship Next?

    Authored by Nick via The Saker blog,

    The USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group left the east coast Naval Station Norfolk, VA on 11th April.

    The aircraft carrier is accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Normandy, the guided-missile destroyers USS Burke, Bulkeley, Forest Sherman and Farragut, and the destroyers USS Jason and The Sullivans. The strike group carries 6,500 sailors and Carrier Air Wing One.

    Recent announcements about Russia’s hypersonic Kinzhal (‘Dagger’) missile system having made these vessels effectively obsolete, this means that the ships and their crews are essentially being sailed into a bloody scrapyard.

    Even without the recent upgrading of the Kinzhal system, the experience of the British fleet in the Falklands conflict illustrates the vulnerability of warships to low-flying missiles. In addition to the sinking of the HMS Sheffield and Sir Galahad, virtually every British ship was hit by at least one of Argentinian’s French-made Exocet missiles – a weapons system which was already 20 years old at the time.

    Exocet missile sinks HMS Sheffield during Falklands War:

    Reportedly the only thing that saved the UK force from obliteration was that the Argentinians had got their missile altimeter settings wrong. The Russians will not make the same sort of error!

    These facts are of course known to the US military planners and – one would assume and hope, for it is duty to know – by Donald Trump. And yet the US fleet is now nearing the coast of Syria, where it will met up with American and other NATO warships already in position. Together, they will make one big flock of sitting ducks.

    If the people pushing Trump manage to get him launch a new strike on Syria (and we must expect a new false flag attack) and if the massive increase in NATO firepower means that enough missiles get through to enough targets to kill Russians, then Putin really has no choice but to sink the US fleet.

    No choice because, whatever the danger of doing so, failure to respond would signal Russian defeat and retreat in Syria, which would of course lead to a rapid escalation of military pressure against Lebanon and Iran, and mean that when the Empire then rolls on to strike Russia, her most reliable allies will already have gone and her ‘soft underbelly’ will be seriously exposed.

    So Putin orders the destruction of the US fleet, and an hour later all that is left is debris and mangled corpses in some oil slicks – and some ‘great’ photos and video clips to illustrate Trump’s declaration of war on account of “Russia’s deadly sneak attack on a US humanitarian force”.

    Sounds familiar? It should do. Because we’re not just thinking here of the USS Maine, the Lusitania and the Gulf of Tonkin. The Washington habit of using sunken ships as the causus belli also of course included Pearl Harbor.

    Just in case you need a reminder, here’s just one example of the many short videos out there on the truth about the Japanese attack on 7th December 1941 which explain how Roosevelt had advance intelligence of the planned attack, but decided not to pass it on to the anchored sitting duck fleet:

    The more or less official excuse (the President’s guilt never having been formally acknowledged) is that to have alerted the fleet would also have tipped off the Japanese that their naval codes had already been broken. But the truth is of course that deliberately didn’t warn the fleet because he knew that the sacrifice would goad the American people into a war against Hitler to which he and those around and behind him were committed, but which the American people opposed.

    The circumstances this time are of course somewhat different, not least that everyone with even a passing knowledge of the Russian missile capability already knows that 6,500 sailors are “on their way to Samara”.

    Which makes Donald Trump either a criminally incompetent fool, a bad poker player or a wholly controlled puppet of the psychotic Anglo-Zionist elite. If he is one of the first two of these, then there is of course still a chance that he might respond to the disaster by blinking and retreating. In which case, the Beltway elite will use the human tragedy and his humiliation to remove him from office (not a bad consolation prize, from their point of view).

    But if he is the third, then the ‘shock’ blitz on the US fleet will lead to the immediate declaration of World War Three.

    Indeed, if things get that far (and we’re probably 48 hours and one White Helmets’ video away from it) then the only thing that realistically stands a chance of stopping the racist Anglo-Zionist psychopaths in their tracks is if the Russian attack and its result are such a devastating show of ‘shock and awe’ as to make it impossible for them to ignore a simultaneous public warning by Putin to Netanyahu that any further US hostile response will place Israel directly in the firing line as well.

    That might JUST be enough to make the Neocons back off. If not, then World War Three it will be. It might not go nuclear straight away, but even while it is conventional EVERYTHING will change:

    Dissident anti-war voices such as this will rapidly be silenced by blanket censorship and internment; your sons and daughters will be conscripted; your taxes will go through the roof – and you will have to live with the ever-present fear that, once China enters the war against Washington and its client states, the tide will run so fast against the ‘democratic allies’ that their ‘humanitarian missiles’ will end up with nuclear tips.

    If that disturbs you (and it surely should) then all I ask is that you take the Pearl Harbor analogy and get busy spreading it on social media RIGHT NOW. Because once those young sailors and airmen have been sacrificed, the demand for a war of ‘revenge’ will be unstoppable. But if the warmongers realize that plenty of people have already understood the plan, it might just spook them into backing off.

    In which case the fleet can do a few face-saving manoeuvres and then sail home again and we can look forward to a summer which may be warm, but not as uncomfortably hot as it could otherwise become!

  • 63% Of The World's Tallest Buildings Are In Asia

    Authored by Yuka Kato via Fixr.com,

    With tall buildings dominating skylines and creating a sense of wonder and pride for those who call their locations home, we wanted to explore more about the constant and continued race to the clouds. A recent infographic explored the tallest completed buildings in the U.S., but left some to wonder how the skyline looked outside of the U.S. borders.

    Defining a “tall building” is harder than it seems as there is no absolute definition on what constitutes one; however, once a building reaches 328 ft (100 m), it can be called a skyscraper. At heights over 984.3 ft (300 m) it is designated “supertall” and at 1,968.5 ft (600 m) it boasts the title “megatall”. As of today, there are 129 supertalls and only three megatalls completed globally.

    This article and the above infographic, which visually depicts the most up to date data, collected and grouped by CTBUH into building height ranges of +492.1 ft (150 m), +656.2 ft (200 m), and +984.3 ft (300 m), will focus on skyscrapers that extend upwards to heights at or exceeding 492.1 ft (150m).

    The Clear Leader and The Distant Runner Up

    With over 63% of the world’s tallest buildings, Asia leads the globe in reaching skywards. In total, Asia is home to more than 3,600 buildings that reach over 492.1 ft (150 m) in height according to the data available at the CTBUH. Of that same data, China enjoys the lion’s share of 63.6% for a total of 2,306 giants. The majority (72.3%) of China’s giants fall into the +492.1 ft (150 m) range and they have more than double (57) the number of buildings that reach upward of 984.3 ft (300 m) than any other country.

    North America’s position is a distant second to Asia in terms of sheer number of tall buildings; however, it must be noted that North America is comprised of two countries; whereas, Asia is comprised of 18, making it a smaller region overall. The United States leads not only the North America region but the entire Americas region too, with 943 giants in total. Over 78% of those buildings are +492.1 ft (150 m), 19% over 656.2 ft (200 m), and the remaining make up the buildings over 984.3 ft (300 m) in height.

    The Biggest of the Big

    China and the U.S. are definitively ahead of other countries in the number of tall buildings that sit on their soil; however, when it comes to the tallest of the tall, it is another country that soars. There are 11 countries which are home to more than 100 buildings that reach heights of 492.1 ft (150 m) or more. Of those, the U.A.E. has the largest proportion of supertall and megatall structures with 7.2% (25) of their buildings exceeding 984.3 ft (300 m). One building in particular, the Burj Khalifa located in Dubai, reaches as astronomical height of 2,717 feet (828 m) and holds the record of the World’s Tallest Completed Building. It is 31% (643 ft / 196 m) taller than the world’s second tallest completed building, the Shanghai Tower in China. Despite the fact that the U.S. ranks second in terms of total number of tall buildings, it’s tallest completed building, One World Trade Center, currently ranks sixth in terms of height.

    Tall Trends Today and Tomorrow

    In 2015 China completed 62 new skyscrapers while the U.S. completed two. The following year China reached 84 newly completed; whereas, the U.S. again only completed two. Although likely to the chagrin of Donald Trump, it is no surprise that economist Tyler Cowen jokingly refers to this trend as “The Great Skyscraper Stagnation”.

    There are some new predictions for future trends too. For example, Philadelphia’s Comcast Technology Center, located in a 4-season climate, is a potential indicator that the high-rise sky-garden model is moving beyond warm climates. The timber trend is taking hold too. With the TallWood House in Vancouver being completed in 2017 and the HoHo in Vienna still under construction, a Japanese company has come forward to announce plans to build the world’s tallest wooden skyscraper to mark its 350th anniversary in 2041.

    The distribution of behemoths across the globe is not equally balanced, and while there may not be a straightforward answer as to why, there are some clues. In a 2017 CTBUH research paper, the authors reached the conclusion that a country’s GDP was a causal factor in predicting the amount of skyscraper floor space available. Another study done by Schläpfer, Bettencourt and Lee found correlation between the size and density of cities and the height of skyscrapers.

    Regardless of the reason for building a tower, and the bragging rights that come along with it, one thing is for sure: Based on the data explored here, the trends witnessed to date, and impending projects like the Jeddah Tower, it can be surmised that they will continue soaring onwards and upwards for years to come.

    Data

  • Lies And Deception In The Failed US Strike On Syria

    Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    At 4am on April 14, the United States, France and the United Kingdom executed a strike on Syria.

    The Syrian Free Press reported:

    US Navy warships in the Red Sea and Air Force B-1B bombers and F-15 and F-16 aircraft rained dozens of ship- and air-launched cruise missiles down on the Syrian capital of Damascus, an airbase outside the city, a so-called chemical weapons storage facility near Homs, and an equipment-storage facility and command post, also near Homs. B1-Bs are typically armed with JASSM cruise missiles, which have a 450 kg warhead and a range of 370 kms. US Navy warships launched Tomahawks, which have 450 kg warheads and an operational range of between 1,300 and 2,500 kms. The British Royal Air Force’s contingent for the assault consisted of four Tornado GR4 ground-attack aircraft armed with the Storm Shadow long-range air-to-ground missile, which the UK’s Defense Ministry said targeted ‘chemical weapons sites’ in Homs. These weapons have a range of 400 kms. Finally, France sent its Aquitaine frigate, armed with SCALP naval land-attack cruise missiles (SCALP is the French military’s name for the Storm Shadow), as well as several Dassault Rafale fighters, also typically armed with SCALP or Apache cruise missiles. According to the Russian defense ministry, the B-1Bs also fired GBU-38 guided air bombs. Undoubtedly weary of the prospect of having their aircraft shot down after Israel lost one of its F-16s over Syria in February, the Western powers presumably launched their weapons from well outside the range of Syrian air defenses, with all the targets located just 70-90 kms from the Mediterranean Sea, and having to fly through Lebanon first.

    Recapping the information on the strike, the US and its allies used the following assets:

    • 2 destroyers (USS Laboon, USS Higgins)

    • 1 US cruiser (USS Monterey)

    • 1 French frigate (Georges Leygues)

    • 5 Rafale jets

    • 4 Mirage 2000-5F

    • 4 British Tornado fighter-bombers

    • Virginia-class submarine USS John Warner

    • 2 US B-1B bombers

    Their ordnance brought to bear consisted of the following:

    • The cruiser Monterey launched 30 Tomahawk missiles

    • The destroyer Higgins 23 Tomahawks

    • The destroyer Laboon 7 Tomahawks

    • The submarine John Warner 6 Tomahawks

    • 2 B-1 bombers 21 JASSM missiles

    • 4 British Tornado GR4 fighter bombers 16 Storm-shadow missiles.

    • The French Languedoc fired 3 MdCN land-attack missiles.

    The US Pentagon reports the strike group targeted:

    – 76 missiles at the Barzah research center in Damascus:

    (Source)

    – 22 missiles at an undefined “chemical” structure:

     (Source)

    – 7 missiles against an undefined “chemical bunker”:

     (Source)

    The Syrian anti-aircraft forces responded, firing a total of 112 air-defence missiles:

    • the Pantsyr system fired 25 missiles and hit 24 targets;

    • the Buk system fired 29 missiles and hit 24 targets;

    • the Osa system fired 11 and hit 5 targets;

    • the S-125 system fired 13 missiles and hit 5 targets;

    • the Strela-10 system fired 5 missiles and hit 3 targets;

    • the Kvadrat system fired 21 and hit 11 targets;

    • the S-200 system fired 8 and hit no targets.

    (Source)

    The Russians have stated that the target of the raids and the effectiveness of the missiles have resulted in a big fiasco for the Americans:

    • 4 missiles were launched targeting the area of the Damascus International Airport; these 4 missiles were intercepted.

    • 12 missiles were launched targeting the Al-Dumayr Military Airport; these 12 missiles were intercepted.

    • 18 missiles were launched  targeting the Bley Military Airport; these 18 missiles were intercepted.

    • 12 missiles were launched targeting the Shayarat Military Airport; these 12 missiles were intercepted.

    • 9-15 missiles were launched  targeting the Mezzeh Military Airport; 5 of them were intercepted.

    • 16 missiles were launched targeting the Homs Military Airport; 13 of which were intercepted.

    • 30 missiles were launched targeting targets in the areas of Barzah and Jaramani; 7 of which were intercepted.

    The effectiveness of the attack is called into question, especially in light of the prompt reaction of the civilian population that took to the streets in support of Bashar al Assad and the Syrian government only a few hours after the US-led attack.

    (Celebrations the morning of the 14th of April in Umayyad Square, Damascus )

    What emerges immediately from the Syrian/Russian and American narratives are contrasting assessments of the outcome of the attack.

    We can certainly try to dispute some statements.

    The Americans repeated that at least two chemical-weapons laboratories together with a chemical-weapons storage center were affected. As evidenced by the images shot by PressTV a few hours after the attack, the structure is destroyed but there are no chemical contaminations. To confirm this, the television operators were able to perform interviews and live footage a few meters from the site of the strike without experiencing any physical effects, which would have been impossible were the American version of events true, given that the release of chemical agents would have made the whole area inaccessible.

    Further confirmation comes from Ammar Waqqaf interviewed on The Heat on CGTV, claiming that his relatives were about 500 meters from one of the alleged chemical-weapons research centers attacked by the Americans. Ammar says that even in this case, no chemical agent appears to have been released, thus disproving Washington’s claims.

    Another important consideration concerns the targets. For Washington, the targets were limited to research laboratories (Barzah and Jaramani) and storage centers. But Moscow revealed that the objectives also included military bases as well as the civilian Damascus International Airport, namely: Al-Dumayr Military Airport, Bley Military Airport, Shayarat Military Airport, Mezzeh Military Airport, Homs Military Airport. These were mostly unsuccessful attacks.

    In light of the foregoing, we can assume that the operational goal of the Americans was twofold.

    On the one hand, it was aimed at the media, to show a response to the (false) accusations of a chemical attack in Douma (Robert Fisk has just dismantled the propaganda and RT reminds us of the various false flags perpetrated by the US in the past to start wars); on the other, it was used by the military to actually permanently damage the Syrian Air Force, as suggested by the warmongering neocon Lindsey Graham. The failure of this latter objective could be seen in the following hours when the Syrian planes resumed operational tasks.

    What does all this information tell us? First of all, the American goal was not to hit the non-existent chemical weapons or their production sites. The aim was to reduce as much as possible Syrian Air Force assets at different military airports. The mission was a failure, as reported by the Russian military envoy in Syria thanks to the air-defense measures of the Syrian forces as well as probably a high electronic-warfare (EW) contribution from the Russian forces present in the country. Very little has been leaked out in technical terms from the Russian Federation, which officially states that it did not contribute towards defending against the attack. It is probable that Russia played a decisive role in terms of EW, with its little-known but highly effective systems as demonstrated in previous attacks in 2017.

    Moscow has no interest in promoting its cutting-edge EW systems, and often does not confirm the reports issued by more or less government agencies, as in the case of the USS Donald Cook in 2014. Yet Russia Beyond explains EW as probably being fundamental in foiling the American attack:

    Before the electronic jamming system kicks in, the aircraft scans the radio signals in its zone of ​​activity. After detecting the traffic frequencies of the enemy’s equipment, the operator on board the aircraft enables the jamming system in the required bandwidth,” a defense industry source told Russia Beyond. In addition to onboard systems, there are ground-based Krasnukha-4 EW complexes stationed around the Khemeimim airbase, Russia’s key stronghold in the Middle East. Their purpose is to suppress enemy “eavesdropping” and weapons guidance systems. The Krasnukha-4 blinds enemy radar systems to targets at a distance of 250 km.

    The general public is yet to understand that the American attack was a complete fiasco, much to the irritation of Lindsey Graham, thereby confirming Damascus’s narrative, which presented Syria’s response as decisive and effective.

    The logic of the matter must also be considered. We know that the US and her allies launched 105 missiles aimed at various targets, including some military bases, but none of them hit the targets indicated, except for two buildings already emptied previously and a non-existent chemical-weapons depot. The Pentagon amplified the military report with the lie that only two research centers and a chemical-weapons depot were intentionally bombed with something like 105 missiles; this in order to account for the number of missiles launched and to drown out other assessments that contradict the preferred narrative. But it is ridiculous to believe that the US used 76 missiles to hit three buildings. A much more plausible explanation is that there were many more targets but only three of them were hit, this measly success carrying zero tactical or strategic importance.

    We should ask ourselves what the real goal of Washington was.

    First, let us split the story into two parts. On the one hand we have a PR exercise, and on the other an intended military strategy.

    In the first case, Washington was able to pursue its self-assigned role as “protector of the weak”, like those victims of the alleged Douma chemical attack. The intended optics were those of a humanitarian intervention, in line with the West’s self-assigned role of regent of the post-World War II neoliberal world order. In reality, we know very well that US hegemony is based on millions of deaths in dozens of wars scattered around the globe. According to the fictitious narrative of the media, it all boils down to good-guys-versus-bad-guys, and Assad is the bad guy while the US is the good guy punishing the regime for the use of chemical weapons.

    The success of PR exercise depends very little on the military outcome and much more on the story as told by the media. It is based solely on the affirmation of the role taken up by the US and her allies, that of being in the right and driven only by the noblest interests. But such a series of unreasonable lies has only served to drag the world into chaos, diminished the role of the mainstream media, and destroyed the credibility of practically the whole Western political class.

    From a military point of view, however, the goals, intent and results show a far more disturbing result for Washington and her allies. Soviet-era weapons that were updated by Moscow and integrated into the Russian air defense infrastructure network severely degraded the effectiveness of the American attack. Washington wanted to ground the entire Syrian air force, hitting air bases with precision, but failed in this objective. It remains to be seen whether this attack was a prelude to something bigger, with the USS Harry S Truman Carrier Strike Group currently heading towards Syrian territorial waters. Following the logic of deconfliction with Russia, it seems unlikely that a more intense attack will occur, rumors even circulating that Mattis dissuaded Trump from targeting Russian and Iranian targets, being well aware of the risks in a Russian response.

    Let us focus for a moment on the risks in this kind of scenario. We are told that it would have brought about World War Three. This is probably true. But the consequences could also entail something much worse for Washington than for the rest of the world. The rhetoric that an American attack on Russian forces in Syria would trigger a direct war between the two superpowers is certainly true, but perhaps it is wrong in its interpretation. The danger seems to lie less in the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse and more in exposing the US’s inability to go toe to toe with a peer competitor.

    While we cannot (and hope not to) test this hypothesis, we can certainly join the dots. If Soviet-era systems, with a slight Russian modernization, can nullify an American attack, what could the Russian forces do themselves? They could probably even block an attack of the scale visited on Baghdad, where several hundred missiles were directed towards civilian and military targets. It would be highly unlikely in such a scenario for Washington to peddle the false propaganda of a successful attack with little in terms of bomb-damage assessment commensurate with the number of missiles launched.

    Already in the April 14 attack, the explanation that 76 cruise missiles were directed against three buildings is ridiculous but is nevertheless sustained thanks to the lies of the mainstream media and the paucity of available information. However, when thinking of 500 Tomahawks launched with limited damage to the Syrian infrastructure, even that would be impossible to sell to a very ignorant and deceived public. It would be the definitive proof of the decline in American military effectiveness and the potency of Russian air-defense systems. Just like during Putin’s presentation of new weapons some months back, when the Empire feels its core (military power) is threatened, it simply dismisses such reports as false, in the process becoming a victim of its own propaganda.

    Yet one would only need to listen to the words of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Michael Griffin, in a conference at the Hudson Institute where he explained how Moscow and Beijing capabilities are far more advanced in hypersonic and supersonic missile defense and attack capabilities. He openly explained that Washington takes about 16 years to implement a paper-to-service idea, while its rivals in a few years have shown that they can move from concept to practical development, gaining a huge advantage over rivals like Washington.

    The problem is inherent for the United States in its need to keep alive a war machine based on inflated military spending that creates enormous pockets of corruption and inefficiency. Just look at the F-35 project and its constant problems. Although Moscow’s spending is less than twelve times that of the United States, it has succeeded in developing systems like hypersonic missiles that are still in the testing phase in the United States, or systems like the S-500, which the US does not possess.

    The S-300, S-400, P-800 anti-ship missiles and the 3M22 Zircon hypersonic missiles, in addition to EW, pose a fundamental problem for Washington in dealing with attacks against a peer competitor. The military in Washington are probably well aware of the risks of revealing the US to be a paper tiger, so they prefer to avoid any direct confrontation with Russia and Iran, more for the purposes of maintaining military prestige than out of a desire to avoid risking World War Three. If Russian forces ever were targeted by the US, in all probability Moscow would simply disable the electronics of the US ship rather than sinking it, leaving it to float in the Mediterranean uncontrolled for days.

    The last fig leaf hiding the US military’s inadequacy rests in Hollywood propaganda that presents the US military as practically invincible. Accordingly, some sites have spread stories that Russia had been forewarned of the attack and that the whole bombing event was the same sort of farce as a year ago. In the first place, it is important to clarify that Moscow had not been given advanced warning of the targets, and the reason for this is simple: the attack was real and, as explained above, did not succeed precisely because of Moscow and Damuscus’s effective parries and blocks.

    In reality, Washington has failed in its military strategy, and the media have turned to the usual propaganda of chemical weapons and the need to enforce justice in the world and proclaim a non-existent success. In the meantime, Moscow fine-tunes its weapons and prepares to deliver the S-300 to the Syrian state and its allies (Lebanon?), effectively limiting Washington’s ability to attack in the Middle East. This is a fitting conclusion for a story that has only damaged the status of the United States and her allies in the Middle East, bringing Syria closer to a final victory.

  • IMF Blasts New Zealand's "Discriminatory" Ban On Home Sales To Foreigners

    Amid reports that 40,000 kiwis were living on the streets or in emergency shelters thanks to an acute housing crisis in the nation of nearly 5 million, New Zealand’s Labour-led government knew it needed to take drastic action to cool the country’s white hot housing market – or at least convince the public that it was doing something.

    So late last year, lawmakers proposed a bill that would limit home purchases to people who carry residential visas. It is called the Overseas Investment Act.

    As we’ve pointed out, home prices in New Zealand have risen dramatically since the financial crisis. Over the past ten years, New Zealand home prices have risen by roughly 60% due to a combination of factors, including limited supply, low interest rates fueling a boom in borrowing, and – of course – foreign speculation.

    Housing

    And on Sunday, the chorus of critics against the measure – which hasn’t been passed into law – gained another voice: That of the International Monetary Fund. In its annual report on the New Zealand economy, the IMF said the measure would be “unlikely to have a significant impact on housing affordability,” and that the rest of the government’s “ambitious policy agenda” would likely be more than enough to help make homes more affordable.

    The government has initiated an ambitious policy agenda to restore housing affordability, which appropriately focuses on strengthening supply and lowering tax distortions . The agenda includes several work streams.

    The KiwiBuild program aims to increase housing supply at affordable price points. The Urban Growth Agenda aims to address regulatory, planning and other policies that reduce development capacity for growth, along with the under-funding of local infrastructure development and maintenance. The government has already announced the extension of the bright-line test on sale of residential property from within two years of purchase to within five years and also proposes to limit negative gearing from rental properties. A Tax Working Group is considering possible additional reform, including a broader capital gains tax on real estate investment and land tax reform, although its mandate is narrow on the latter. These reforms are complementary, and the success of the housing policy agenda will depend on well-coordinated progress on all fronts.

    A ban of residential real estate purchases by nonresidents is unlikely to have a significant impact on housing affordability. The proposed ban in the draft amendment to the Overseas Investment Act is a capital flow management measure (CFM) under the IMF’s Institutional View on capital flows. The measure is unlikely to be temporary or targeted, and foreign buyers seem to have played a minor role in New Zealand’s residential real estate markets recently. The broad housing policy agenda above, if fully implemented, would address most of the potential problems associated with foreign buyers on a less discriminatory basis.

    Should the measure become law, foreigners would be allowed to build new developments, but only as long as they have plans to sell the property as soon as its finished.

    However, it would include an exception for people who can convince New Zealand’s Overseas Investment Office that they intend to live in the country long term (a group that might soon include a handful of US-based billionaires). Australian citizens are also exempt from the rule.

    Ironically, reports about the rule led to a surge in home sales as foreigners scrambled to buy ahead of the ban.

    Housing

    Local critics of the law, including the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand, agree with the IMF that the measure is unnecessary because foreigners just aren’t that big of a factor in the country’s housing market: The organization estimates that less than 4% of home buyers are foreigners, per the Independent.

    As we’ve previously pointed out, it’s probable that banning foreign speculators will cool off the country’s property market. But the problem that the government is missing is that it risks triggering a real-estate crash. And when housing prices crash, people feel poorer, so they spend less, a pattern that threatens to afflict the broader economy. In its report, the IMF applauded New Zealand’s “solid economic expansion in recent years” and noted that “household debt-related vulnerabilities are expected to decrease…”

  • "Our Hands Are On The Trigger": Iran Threatens To "Annihilate" Israel

    The head of Iran’s military, Abdolrahim Mousavi, said that the Iranian Army and the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) – another branch of the Iranian military, will “move hand in hand” to ensure that the “arrogant system will collapse and the Zionist regime will be annihilated” within 25 years, reports FARS news agency.

    “When the arrogant powers create a sanctuary for the Zionist regime to continue survival, we shouldn’t allow one day to be added to the ominous and illegitimate life of this regime,” General Moussavi added, addressing the ceremony.

    Mousavi’s remarks come one day after IRGC Lieutenant Commander Brigadier General Hossein Salami warned Israel not to engage in further saber-rattling against Iran – claiming that their airbases are “within reach,” putting them “in the dragon’s mouth.” 

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

    ​”Don’t trust your airbases. They’re within reach,” said Salami, adding that “wherever you are in the occupied land, you’ll be under fire from us, from east and west. You became arrogant. If there’s a war, the result will be your complete elimination.”

    Salami noted that Iran’s “Hands are on the trigger & missiles are ready & will be launched at any moment that the enemy has a sinister plot.”

    “We know you well, you are too vulnerable,” Salami said, addressing Israel. “You have no depth and no backyard, you are the size of our Beit-ul-Moqaddas operations (during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war), any point in the land under your occupation is a cross point of fire from North and from West, and this is a new phenomenon. You have no way out to escape and you are living in the dragon’s mouth.”

    General Salami told the Zionists to be aware that in case of outbreak of any war “you can be assured that it will result in wiping you off, the smallest target is your existence, there is no smaller target than that“. –FARS

    Salami also told Israel that they shouldn’t count on the help of the UK, Britain and France, saying “You are gone when they arrive there like an ambulance sent to a dead man that can only take him to the graveyard; then, behave yourselves and avoid doing dangerous calculations.”

    Two Israeli aircraft struck the T-4 airbase in central Syria April 9, approximately 48 hours after an alleged chemical attack in the city of Douma – and five days before U.S. led coalition forces bombed three Syrian targets in retaliation. RT reported that two Israeli F-15 jets fired eight guided missiles at the airfield from Lebanese airspace. The jets never entered Syria.

    Of these, Syrian air defenses intercepted five. The attack left roughly 14 people dead, including Iranians and Syrians, the Associated Press reported.

    Russia and the Syrian military blamed Israel for a pre-dawn missile attack Monday on a major air base in central Syria, saying Israeli fighter jets launched the missiles from Lebanon’s air space. A war-monitoring group said the airstrikes killed 14 people, including Iranians active in Syria.

    Last Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conferred with US President Donald Trump before ordering the April 9 strike which targeted Iranian air-defense and other military hardware such as a drone program.

    After conferring with President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a strike on the newly arrived antiaircraft battery to prevent Iranian forces from using it against Israeli warplanes carrying out increasing numbers of operations in Syria, some of these people said.

    Israeli officials told the Trump administration about the planned strike in advance so that the U.S. was aware of their plans to directly target an Iranian base, according to two people briefed on the plans.

    Israeli leaders have kept silent about the strike, but Russia, Iran and Syria all accused Israel of carrying it out. Information provided by intelligence officials and others briefed on the strike offered new details on the specific target, Israel’s goals, and the discussions with Washington. –WSJ

    In response, Israel’s Netanyahu fired back at Salami on Friday. 

    “We hear the threats from Iran. IDF fighters and the security branches are ready for any development. We will fight anyone who tries to harm us.” 

    Israel has carried out over 100 airstrikes in Syria since 2013 – primarily targeting Hezbollah, an Iranian-funded Lebanese militia group. Beginning in 2018, however, Israel began targeting Iran directly. 

    A missile strike earlier this month, which killed seven Iranian military advisors from the country’s elite Quds Force in the Syrian city of Homs, has been neither confirmed nor denied by Israel’s government.

    However, New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that a senior Israeli military official admitted to him that Israel attacked the Syrian base known as  T4, in a separate attack. “It was the first time we attacked live Iranian targets – both facilities and people,” the official reportedly said. –Yahoo!

    “Tel Aviv will be punished for its aggressive action,” said Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghassemi last week. “The occupying Zionist regime will, sooner or later, receive an appropriate response to its actions.”

    That said, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zerif said in CBS interview that while further Israeli strikes in Syria will have “consequences,” he  suggested that a major military escalation is unlikely. 

    “I do not believe that we are headed towards regional war but I do believe that unfortunately, Israel has continued its violations with international law, hoping to be able to do it with impunity because of the U.S. support and trying to find smokescreens to hide behind,” Zarif told CBS News.

  • Iran Officially Switches From Dollar To Euro

    Just two weeks after “panic” hit the streets of Tehran as the Iranian government attempted to ‘fix’ the freefall of the Rial against the USDollar…

    Middle East Monitor reports that Iran’s feud with the US is set to get worse after Tehran announced this week that it will start reporting foreign currency amounts in euros rather than US dollars, as part of the country’s effort to reduce its reliance on the American currency due to political tension with Washington.

    Central bank governor Valiollah Seif said last week that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had welcomed his suggestion of replacing the dollar with the euro in foreign trade, as the “dollar has no place in our transactions today”.

    Iran does hardly any trade with the US due to decades of economic sanctions. It’s most important trading partner is the UAE, which accounts for around 24 per cent of all Iranian imports and exports. China is not far behind with 22 per cent, followed by Turkey, India and the EU, all of which account for around six per cent of Iran’s trade.

    Iran’s leaders have been threatening for some time to ditch the dollar for a different currency. The shift towards euro took on added urgency after the appointment of Donald Trump and his decision to include Iran on a list of mainly Muslim majority countries banned from entering the US.

    Trump has also threatened to exit a 2015 nuclear deal Iran made with world powers. The next major test for the deal is 12 May when Trump will be required to re-endorse the deal, which he has derided as “the worst deal ever”.

    The move is seen by Iranian officials as a logical and necessary step. The threat of further US sanctions has destabilised Iran’s foreign exchange market in recent months. Bank transactions involving the dollar are already difficult for Iran; sanctions have made US banks unwilling to do business with Tehran; foreign firms can be exposed to sanctions if they do Iranian deals in dollars, even if the operations involve non-US branches.

    According to Reuters, Ali Khamenei, who has welcomed the decision to replace the dollar, blamed foreign enemies for the “recent issues in the currency market” and asked Iran’s intelligence services to defuse the plots against the Islamic Republic.

  • "Ice Nine" Comes To China

    Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

    The war on cash has been going on for decades. The U.S. abolished the $500 bill in late 1969. (The old $500 bill featured a portrait of President William McKinley, by the way. I remember seeing a few when I was a kid.)

    Today’s $100 bill is only worth 10 cents on the dollar compared with the $100 bill of 1969.

    Europe will abolish the 500 euro this year. We all recall what happened in India in late 2016 when India abolished the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes (worth about $10 and $20, respectively); there was mass chaos as peasants lined up to turn in the old notes for digital credit.

    ATMs were shut down because the replacement notes were too big for the ATMs!

    Now the war on cash is being taken to a new level. China, the world’s most populous country and the world’s second-largest economy, has said that physical cash may soon become obsolete.

    China has huge digital payments platforms developed by their own companies Tencent and Alibaba, in addition to traditional credit and debit cards and mobile phone payments.

    Movements like this might start slowly, but they gain momentum and end quickly. Cash can be expensive to handle because vendors have to hire armored cars to move it, buy machines to count it, pay premiums to insure it and risk losses due to theft.

    Those costs only make sense if they can be spread among a high volume of cash. Once cash usage falls below that critical threshold, the handling costs per unit are too high and merchants quickly abandon cash altogether.

    China may be getting close to that tipping point, and will get there sooner if the government pushes cash off the ledge by regulation.

    This is consistent with the Communist plan for total control of their people.

    Once physical cash is gone, your liberty is gone because government can easily monitor and freeze all digital payments. The only recourse for the Chinese people once their cash is gone will be physical gold and silver.

    This brings me to what I’ve warned about for years…

    It’s what I call “ice-nine.” This refers to government’s ability to lock down the financial system in the next global crisis. And it won’t be just China.

    In the 2008 crisis, governments met the demand for liquidity by printing money, guaranteeing banks and money market funds and engaging in trillions of dollars of currency swaps.

    The problem is that the central banks still have not normalized their balance sheets and interest rates since the last crisis and are unlikely to be able to do so before the next one. Money printing won’t be an option, because central banks have printed too much already. Any more money printing would trigger a complete loss of confidence in fiat money and a mad scramble for hard assets.

    Instead of money printing, central banks and governments plan to lock down the system and not let investors get their money out.

    This will begin with money market funds and then spread quickly to bank accounts, ATMs and stock exchanges until the entire system is frozen.

    Then an international monetary conference will be convened to create a new global monetary standard, probably based on special drawing rights (SDRs), which will be printed by the trillions and handed out to governments to gradually reliquify the system.

    Governments can see this coming and are already taking steps to prepare for more extreme measures.

    A few years ago, the SEC changed the rules so that U.S. money market funds can suspend redemptions. Recently, China announced that it would follow suit and allow its money market funds to also suspend redemptions. Now China has halted trading in the stock of one of its largest companies, HNA.

    This comes on top of the government takeover of another giant Chinese corporation, Anbang Insurance, at the end of February.

    The bottom line is governments are preparing for ice-nine and the lockdown of banks and stock exchanges. That includes the U.S. government.

    You should prepare also by buying physical gold and silver to be kept outside the banking system.

  • Most Millionaires Expect To Live To 100 According To UBS

    Thanks to modern scientific advancements, people are living much longer than their ancestors – decades in fact. The average lifespan in China, the U.S. and the majority of Eastern Europe is now the late 70’s, while those living in Western Europe and Japan can expect to become octogenarians – according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 

    Most millionaires, however, expect to live a century thanks to their ability to buy the healthiest, cleanest, lowest risk lifestyle. Statistically speaking, that’s true. 

    In the U.S., for example, the richest 1 percent of American women by income live more than 10 years longer than the poorest 1 percent, a 2016 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found. For men, the gap between the richest and poorest Americans is almost 15 years. –Bloomberg

    In 1930, the average life expectancy for American men was only 58, and 62 for women, according to the SSA. 50 years before that, one could expect to live to around 35 years-old. 

    Expectations of living to 100 vary widely by country, with 76% of Germans expecting to become centenarians, while only 30% of Americans think they’ll make it that far. On average, 53% of investors with at least $1 million in investible assets say they expect to live to 100.

    Extending your life isn’t cheap

    The wealthy know that if they’re going to make it to 100, they will need to spend money on the best healthcare, food, exercise and other services that can extend life. Then of course, there’s all of the other standard living expenses one must plan for if one is to try and stick around as long as possible. 

    UBS says that 91% of the 5,000 investors surveyed are “making financial changes due to increased life expectancy.”

    The rich are more than willing to sacrifice money for extra longevity. Nine of 10 wealthy people agreed that “health is more important than wealth.” Asked by UBS how much of their fortune they’d be willing to give up “to guarantee an extra 10 years of healthy life,” the average responses varied by wealth level. Investors who are barely millionaires, with $1 million to $2 million in net worth, were willing to give up a third of their nest egg for an additional decade of life. Investors with more than $50 million were willing to part with almost half of their fortune. –Bloomberg

    In recent years, life expectancy of Americans has surprisingly declined for two years in a row, a phenomenon Bloomberg suggests is due in part to the country’s opioid abuse crisis. It could also be because Americans are fatter than ever, with 40% of adults considered obese, according to the CDC. 

    A troubling new report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that almost 40 percent of American adults and nearly 20 percent of adolescents are obese — the highest rates ever recorded for the U.S.

    “It’s difficult to be optimistic at this point,” said Dr. Frank Hu, chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. “The trend of obesity has been steadily increasing in both children and adults despite many public health efforts to improve nutrition and physical activity.” –NBC

    A study from Georgia Southern University revealed that it’s not just poor eating habits that’s causing Americans to pack on the pounds...extreme laziness and binge watching the latest Netflix series are also contributing factors.

    “There’s still a huge amount of cheap, accessible, highly processed food available everywhere almost anytime,” says Hu. “And despite people doing more recreational activity these days, the overall activity level, household activity and occupational activity has decreased in recent years.”

    No wonder just 30% of the Americans millionaires UBS surveyed thought they’d make it to 100. That said, Bloomberg says they should cheer up – as the wealthy in the United States have been “increasingly insulated from the depressing health trends afflicting most Americans.” 

    A 2016 study by University of California at Berkeley professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman compared the death rates for American men aged 65 to 79 across several decades by wealth. If these men’s wealth placed them in the top 1 percent, their mortality rates in the early 1980s were 12 percent lower than average. Twenty-five years later, the wealthiest American men’s death rates had plunged to 40 percent below average. –Bloomberg

    Of course, if you’ve eaten yourself into a blissful state of deadly obesity, there’s always the hail mary option of freezing one’s body until science can find a way to cure whatever ails.

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Apr 22

Today’s News 22nd April 2018

  • Did The West Just Lose World War III By Forfeit?

    Authored by James George Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    In the fall of the year 1480, at a point not far from Moscow, two armies faced each other on the opposite banks of the Ugra River.

    On the one side were the forces of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, whose ruler, Grand Prince Ivan III (known as “the Great” and the “gatherer of the Russian lands”), had recently rejected further payment of tribute to the Great Horde.

    On the other were the forces of Grand Khan Ahmed bin Küchük, who had come to lay waste to Moscow and instruct the impudent Prince Ivan to mend his ways.

    For weeks the two assembled hosts glared at one another, each wary of crossing the water and becoming vulnerable to attack by the other.

    In the end, as though heeding the same inaudible signal, both withdrew and hastily returned home.

    Thus ended more than two centuries of the Tatar-Mongol yoke upon the land of the Rus’.

    Was this event, which came to be known as “the great standing on the Ugra River,” a model of what happened in Syria last week?

    Almost immediately upon reports of the staged chemical attack in Douma on April 7, speculation began as to the likely response from the west – which in reality meant from the United States, in turn meaning from President Donald J. Trump. Would Trump, who had repeatedly spoken harshly of his predecessors’ destructive and pointless misadventures in the Middle East, and who just days earlier had signaled his determination to withdraw the several thousand Americans (illegally) stationed in Syria, see through the obvious deception?

    Or, whether or not he really believed the patently untrue accusations of Syrian (and Russian) culpability, would Trump take punitive action against Syria? And if so, would it be a demonstrative pinprick of the sort inflicted almost exactly a year earlier in punishment for an obvious false flag chemical attack in Idlib? Or would we see something more “robust” (a word much beloved of laptop bombardiers in Washington) aimed at teaching a lesson to both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his ally, Prince Ivan III’s obstreperous heir Russian President Vladimir Putin?

    The answer soon came on Twitter. Assad was an “animal.” Putin, Russia, and Iran were “responsible” for “many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack” – “Big price to pay.”

    Around the world, people mentally braced for the worst. Would a global conflagration start in Syria with an American attack on Russian forces? A grim trepidation reminiscent of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis gripped the hearts of those old enough to remember those thirteen days when the fate of all life on our planet was in doubt.

    Certainly there were enough voices in the US establishment egging Trump on. Besides, at home he still had the relentless pressure of the Mueller investigation, intensified by the FBI’s April 9 raid on his lawyer Michael Cohen. Trump’s only respite from the incessant hammering was his strike on Syria last year.

    During the first Cold War both American and Soviet forces took great care to avoid direct conflict, rightly afraid it could lead to uncontrolled escalation. But now, in this second Cold War, western commentators were positively giddy at the thought of killing Russians in Syria…

    …or rather killing more Russians, citing the slaughter of a disputed number of contractors (or “mercenaries” as western media and officials consistently called them, implying they deserved to have been exterminated). That’ll teach ‘em not to tangle with us! It was unclear whether the warning from Russian Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov that Russia would respond against an attack by striking both incoming weapons as well as the platforms that launched would be taken seriously.

    After a slight softening of tone by both Trump and Defense Secretary General James “Mad Dog” Mattis on April 12, during which a team from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was approaching Douma to conduct an on-site examination, there emerged a slim ray of hope that Trump would step back from acting on the transparently false provocation. (The slimness of any such hope was illustrated by the fact seemingly the most restrained of Trump’s advisers was somebody nicknamed “Mad Dog.”)

    When on the evening of Friday the Thirteenth (Washington time) news came that the US had initiated military action, together with France and (the country Russia had accused of staging the Douma fraud) the United Kingdom, many feared the worst. The hasty timing was clearly aimed at preempting the arrival of the OPCW inspectors.

    Of greater concern was the extent of the assault? If Russians were killed, Gerasimov was serious.

    As it turned out, the worst didn’t come. World War III didn’t happen. Or hasn’t – yet.

    In fact nothing much happened at all. According to the official US reports, something over a hundred missiles were launched at three targets. All missiles reached their targets – “Mission Accomplished!” The other side, however, claimed to have shot down roughly 75 percent of the incoming Tomahawks.

    In the end, the damage was even less than from the follow-up to Idlib last year. No one was reported killed, neither Syrian nor Russian nor Iranian. Western governments claimed to have struck a serious blow at Syria’s chemical weapons capability. Syrians and Russians scoffed that the missiles had hit empty buildings and that Syria had no CW to hit since 2014, as certified by the OPCW.

    In the aftermath of the missile show, media carried unverified reports that Trump had wanted a stronger campaign but deferred to Mattis’s caution, no doubt reflecting the views of professional military men who didn’t want to find out whether Gerasimov was bluffing. Mattis also reportedly wanted Congress to vote on any action before it was taken but was overruled by Trump.

    There was even some speculation that the whole thing was a charade worked out in cooperation with the Russians. Even if true (and it’s unlikely) the mere fact that Trump would have to engage in such a ruse speaks volumes about the weakness of his position. “Whatever Trump says, America is not coming out of Syria,” writes Patrick Buchanan. “We are going deeper in. Trump’s commitment to extricate us from these bankrupting and blood-soaked Middle East wars and to seek a new rapprochement with Russia is ‘inoperative’.”

    That’s clear from the comments of US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

    She states that America won’t disengage until three objectives have been met: that ISIS has been defeated (a pretext, since ISIS is on the ropes and remains alive only because of hostile actions taken by the US and others against Syria); Damascus is finally deterred from using chemical weapons (a falsehood, since they don’t have any); and Iran’s regional influence is blocked (which means we’re staying in effect permanently in preparation for a larger war against Iran and perhaps eventually Russia).

    The last point is unfortunately true, as plans are underway to beef up a Sunni anti-Iran bulwark in eastern Syria to cut off Tehran’s so-called “land bridge” the Mediterranean. Most Americans in Syria are to be replaced with a so-called Arab force – the “Arab NATO” touted last year in connection with Trump’s maiden foreign trip as president. (As though the one NATO we already have weren’t bad enough!)

    Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir has suggested troops from his country would participate. Aside from whether Riyadh can spare them from their ongoing task of wrecking Yemen, Saudi personnel are likely to become a prime target for Syrians itching to get a crack at their chief tormenters over the past seven years.

    So was anything really settled on April 13? On this occasion the West chose not to “cross the river,” much as Khan Ahmed’s force declined to do in 1480. For their part, the Russians in Syria, like their ancestors on the Ugra, were on defense and had no need to risk offensive action.

    Unfortunately, unlike the “the great standing on the Ugra River,” which resolved the question of Russian independence and sovereignty in that era, nothing has been resolved now. The question remains: will the US peacefully relinquish its position as the sole arbiter of authority, legality, and morality in a unipolar world in favor of a multipolar order where Russia’s and China’s legitimate interests and spheres of influence are respected? Or will we continue to risk plunging mankind into a global conflict?

    Syria remains a key arena where one path or the other will be taken to finally wrap up what US Army Major Danny Sjursen calls “Operation Flailing Empire.” The irony is that peacefully “losing” our pointless and dangerous attempt to rule the world would only be to Americans’ benefit. That’s what Trump promised in 2016. He hasn’t delivered and it’s increasingly doubtful he can.

    In the end, the threat of World War III hasn’t vanished. It has just been postponed.

  • What If A Nuke Goes Off In DC: Science Mag Simulates "The Unthinkable"

    Authored by Mitchell Waldrop via ScienceMag.com,

    At 11:15 on a Monday morning in May, an ordinary looking delivery van rolls into the intersection of 16th and K streets NW in downtown Washington, D.C., just a few blocks north of the White House. Inside, suicide bombers trip a switch.

    Instantly, most of a city block vanishes in a nuclear fireball two-thirds the size of the one that engulfed Hiroshima, Japan. Powered by 5 kilograms of highly enriched uranium that terrorists had hijacked weeks earlier, the blast smashes buildings for at least a kilometer in every direction and leaves hundreds of thousands of people dead or dying in the ruins.

    An electromagnetic pulse fries cellphones within 5 kilometers, and the power grid across much of the city goes dark. Winds shear the bomb’s mushroom cloud into a plume of radioactive fallout that drifts eastward into the Maryland suburbs.

    Roads quickly become jammed with people on the move – some trying to flee the area, but many more looking for missing family members or seeking medical help.

    It’s all make-believe, of course – but with deadly serious purpose.

    Known as National Planning Scenario 1 (NPS1), that nuclear attack story line originated in the 1950s as a kind of war game, a safe way for national security officials and emergency managers to test their response plans before having to face the real thing.

    Sixty years later, officials are still reckoning with the consequences of a nuclear catastrophe in regular NPS1 exercises. Only now, instead of following fixed story lines and predictions assembled ahead of time, they are using computers to play what-if with an entire artificial society: an advanced type of computer simulation called an agent-based model.

    Today’s version of the NPS1 model includes a digital simulation of every building in the area affected by the bomb, as well as every road, power line, hospital, and even cell tower. The model includes weather data to simulate the fallout plume. And the scenario is peopled with some 730,000 agents—a synthetic population statistically identical to the real population of the affected area in factors such as age, sex, and occupation. Each agent is an autonomous subroutine that responds in reasonably human ways to other agents and the evolving disaster by switching among multiple modes of behavior—for example, panic, flight, and efforts to find family members.

    The point of such models is to avoid describing human affairs from the top down with fixed equations, as is traditionally done in such fields as economics and epidemiology. Instead, outcomes such as a financial crash or the spread of a disease emerge from the bottom up, through the interactions of many individuals, leading to a real-world richness and spontaneity that is otherwise hard to simulate.

    That kind of detail is exactly what emergency managers need, says Christopher Barrett, a computer scientist who directs the Biocomplexity Institute at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, which developed the NPS1 model for the government. The NPS1 model can warn managers, for example, that a power failure at point X might well lead to a surprise traffic jam at point Y. If they decide to deploy mobile cell towers in the early hours of the crisis to restore communications, NPS1 can tell them whether more civilians will take to the roads, or fewer. “Agent-based models are how you get all these pieces sorted out and look at the interactions,” Barrett says.

    The downside is that models like NPS1 tend to be big—each of the model’s initial runs kept a 500-microprocessor computing cluster busy for a day and a half—forcing the agents to be relatively simple-minded. “There’s a fundamental trade-off between the complexity of individual agents and the size of the simulation,” says Jonathan Pfautz, who funds agent-based modeling of social behavior as a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Arlington, Virginia.

    But computers keep getting bigger and more powerful, as do the data sets used to populate and calibrate the models. In fields as diverse as economics, transportation, public health, and urban planning, more and more decision-makers are taking agent-based models seriously. “They’re the most flexible and detailed models out there,” says Ira Longini, who models epidemics at the University of Florida in Gainesville, “which makes them by far the most effective in understanding and directing policy.”

    A plume of radioactive fallout (yellow) stretches east across Washington, D.C., a few hours after a nuclear bomb goes off near the White House in this snapshot of an agent-based model. Bar heights show the number of people at a location, while color indicates their health. Red represents sickness or death.

     

    The roots of agent-based modeling go back at least to the 1940s, when computer pioneers such as Alan Turing experimented with locally interacting bits of software to model complex behavior in physics and biology. But the current wave of development didn’t get underway until the mid-1990s.

    One early success was Sugarscape, developed by economists Robert Axtell of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and Joshua Epstein of New York University (NYU) in New York City. Because their goal was to simulate social phenomena on ordinary desktop computers, they pared agent-based modeling down to its essence: a set of simple agents that moved around a grid in search of “sugar”—a foodlike resource that was abundant in some places and scarce in others. Though simple, the model gave rise to surprisingly complex group behaviors such as migration, combat, and neighborhood segregation.

    Another milestone of the 1990s was the Transportation Analysis and Simulation System (Transims), an agent-based traffic model developed by Barrett and others at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Unlike traditional traffic models, which used equations to describe moving vehicles en masse as a kind of fluid, Transims modeled each vehicle and driver as an agent moving through a city’s road network. The simulation included a realistic mix of cars, trucks, and buses, driven by people with a realistic mix of ages, abilities, and destinations. When applied to the road networks in actual cities, Transims did better than traditional models at predicting traffic jams and local pollution levels—one reason why Transims-inspired agent-based models are now a standard tool in transportation planning.

    A similar shift was playing out for epidemiologists. For much of the past century, they have evaluated disease outbreaks with a comparatively simple set of equations that divide people into a few categories—such as susceptible, contagious, and immune—and that assume perfect mixing, meaning that everybody in the affected region is in contact with everyone else. Those equation-based models were run first on paper and then on computers, and they are still used widely. But epidemiologists are increasingly turning to agent-based models to include factors that the equations ignore, such as geography, transportation networks, family structure, and behavior change—all of which can strongly affect how disease spreads. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, for example, the Virginia Tech group used an agent-based model to help the U.S. military identify sites for field hospitals. Planners needed to know where the highest infection rates would be when the mobile units finally arrived, how far and how fast patients could travel over the region’s notoriously bad roads, and a host of other issues not captured in the equations of traditional models.

    In another example, Epstein’s laboratory at NYU is working with the city’s public health department to model potential outbreaks of Zika, a mosquito-borne virus that can lead to catastrophic birth defects. The group has devised a model that includes agents representing all 8.5 million New Yorkers, plus a smaller set of agents representing the entire population of individual mosquitoes, as estimated from traps. The model also incorporates data on how people typically move between home, work, school, and shopping; on sexual behavior (Zika can be spread through unprotected sex); and on factors that affect mosquito populations, such as seasonal temperature swings, rainfall, and breeding sites such as caches of old tires. The result is a model that not only predicts how bad such an outbreak could get—something epidemiologists could determine from equations—but also suggests where the worst hot spots might be.

    In economics, agent-based models can be a powerful tool for understanding global poverty, says Stéphane Hallegatte, an economist at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. If all you look at are standard metrics such as gross domestic product (GDP) and total income, he says, then in most countries you’re seeing only rich people: The poor have so little money that they barely register.

    To do better, Hallegatte and his colleagues are looking at individual families. His team built a model with agents representing 1.4 million households around the globe—roughly 10,000 per country—and looked at how climate change and disasters might affect health, food security, and labor productivity. The model estimates how storms or drought might affect farmers’ crop yields and market prices, or how an earthquake might cripple factory workers’ incomes by destroying their cars, the roads, or even the factories.

    The model suggests something obvious: Poor people are considerably more vulnerable to disaster and climate change than rich people. But Hallegatte’s team saw a remarkable amount of variation. If the poor people in a particular country are mostly farmers, for example, they might actually benefit from climate change when global food prices rise. But if the country’s poor people are mostly packed into cities, that price rise could hurt badly.

    That kind of granularity has made it easier for the World Bank to tailor its recommendations to each country’s needs, Hallegatte says—and much easier to explain the model’s results in human terms rather than economic jargon. “Instead of telling a country that climate change will decrease their GDP by X%,” he says, “you can say that 10 million people will fall into poverty. That’s a number that’s much easier to understand.”

    Given how much is at stake in those simulations, Barrett says, users always want to know why they should trust the results. How can they be sure that the model’s output has anything to do with the real world—especially in cases such as nuclear disasters, which have no empirical data to go on?

    Barrett says that question has several answers.

    First, users shouldn’t expect the models to make specific predictions about, say, a stock market crash next Tuesday. Instead, most modelers accommodate the inevitable uncertainties by averaging over many runs of each scenario and displaying a likely range of outcomes, much like landfall forecasts for hurricanes. That still allows planners to use the model as a test bed to game out the consequences of taking action A, B, or C.

    Second, Barrett says, the modelers should not just slap the model together and see whether the final results make sense. Instead, they should validate the model as they build it, looking at each piece as they slot it in—how people get to and from work, for example—and matching it to real-world data from transit agencies, the census, and other sources. “At every step, there is data that you’re calibrating to,” he says.

    Modelers should also try to calibrate agents’ behaviors by using studies of human psychology. Doing so can be tricky—humans are complicated—but in crisis situations, modeling behavior becomes easier because it tends to be primal. The NPS1 model, for example, gets by with built-in rules that cause the agents to shift back and forth among just a few behaviors, such as “health care–seeking,” “shelter-seeking,” and “evacuating.”

    Even so, field studies point to crucial nuances, says Julie Dugdale, an artificial intelligence researcher at the University of Grenoble in France who studies human behavior under stress. “In earthquakes,” she says, “we find that people will be more afraid of being without family or friends than of the crisis itself.” People will go looking for their loved ones first thing and willingly put themselves in danger in the process. Likewise in fires, Dugdale says. Engineers tend to assume that when the alarm sounds, people will immediately file toward the exits in an orderly way. But just watch the next time your building has a fire drill, she says: “People don’t evacuate without first talking to others”—and if need be, collecting friends and family.

    The evidence also suggests that blind, unthinking panic is rare. In an agent-based model published in 2011, sociologist Ben Aguirre and his colleagues at the University of Delaware in Newark tried to reproduce what happened in a 2003 Rhode Island nightclub fire. The crowds jammed together so tightly that no one could move, and 100 people died. Between the police, the local paper, and survivors’ accounts, Aguirre’s team had good data on the victims, their behavior, and their relationships to others. And when the researchers incorporated those relationships into the model, he says, the runs most consistent with the actual fire involved almost no panic at all. “We found that people were trying to get out with friends, co-workers, and loved ones,” Aguirre says. “They were not trying to hurt each other. That was a happenstance.”

    The NPS1 model tries to incorporate such insights, sending its agents into “household reconstitution” mode (searching for friends and family) much more often than “panic” mode (running around with no coherent goal). And the results can sometimes be counterintuitive. For example, the model suggests that right after the strike, emergency managers should expect to see some people rushing toward ground zero, jamming the roads in a frantic effort to pick up children from school or find missing spouses. The model also points to a good way to reduce chaos: to quickly restore partial cell service, so that people can verify that their loved ones are safe.

    If agent-based modelers have a top priority, it’s to make the simulations easier to build, run, and use—not least because that would make them more accessible to real-world decision-makers.

    Epstein, for example, envisions national centers where decision-makers could access what he calls a petabyte playbook: a library containing digital versions of every large city, with precomputed models of just about every potential hazard. “Then, if something actually happens, like a toxic plume,” he says, “we could pick out the model that’s the closest match and do near–real-time calculation for things like the optimal mix of shelter-in-place and evacuation.”

    At Virginia Tech, computer scientist Madhav Marathe is thinking along the same lines. When a Category-5 hurricane is bearing down, he says, someone like the mayor of San Juan can’t be waiting around for a weeklong analysis of the storm’s possible impact on Puerto Rico’s power grid. She needs information that’s actionable, he says—”and that means models with a simple interface, running in the cloud, delivering very sophisticated analytics in a very short period of time.”

    Marathe calls it “agent-based modeling as a service.” His lab has already spent the past 4 years developing and testing a web-based tool that lets public health officials build pandemic simulations and do what-if analyses on their own, without having to hire programmers. With just a few clicks, users can specify key variables such as the region of interest, from as small as a single city to the entire United States, and the type of disease, such as influenza, measles, Ebola, or something new. Then, using the tool’s built-in maps and graphs, users can watch the simulation unfold and see the effect of their proposed treatment protocols.

    Despite being specialized for epidemics, Marathe says, the tool’s underlying geographic models and synthetic populations are general, and they can be applied to other kinds of disasters, such as chemical spills, hurricanes, and cascading failures in power networks. Ultimately, he says, “the hope is to build such models into services that are individualized—for you, your family, or your city.” Or, as Barrett puts it, “If I send Jimmy to school today, what’s the probability of him getting Zika?”

    So it won’t just be bureaucrats using those systems, Barrett adds. It will be you. “It will be as routine as Google Maps.”

  • Visualizing The Pension Time Bomb: $400 Trillion By 2050

    Are governments making promises about pensions that they might not be able to keep?

    According to an analysis by the World Economic Forum (WEF), there was a combined retirement savings gap in excess of $70 trillion in 2015, spread between eight major economies..

    As Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, The WEF says the deficit is growing by $28 billion every 24 hours – and if nothing is done to slow the growth rate, the deficit will reach $400 trillion by 2050, or about five times the size of the global economy today.

    The group of economies studied: Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Japan, India, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

    MIND THE GAP

    Today’s infographic comes to us from Raconteur, and it illuminates a growing problem attached to an aging population (and those that will be supporting it).

    Since social security programs were initially developed, the circumstances around work and retirement have shifted considerably. Life expectancy has risen by three years per decade since the 1940s, and older people are having increasingly long life spans. With the retirement age hardly changing in most economies, this longevity means that people are spending longer not working without the savings to justify it.

    This problem is amplified by the size of generations and fertility rates. The population of retirees globally is expected to grow from 1.5 billion to 2.1 billion between 2017-2050, while the number of workers for each retiree is expected to halve from eight to four over the same timeframe.

    The WEF has made clear that the situation is not trivial, likening the scenario to “financial climate change”:

    The anticipated increase in longevity and resulting ageing populations is the financial equivalent of climate change

    -Michael Drexler, Head of Financial and Infrastructure Systems, WEF

    Like climate change, some of the early signs of this retirement savings gap can be “sandbagged” for the time being – but if not handled properly in the medium and long term, the adverse effects could be overwhelming.

    FUTURE PROOFING

    While implementing various system reforms like raising the retirement age will help, ultimately the money in the system has to come from somewhere. Social security programs will need to cut benefits, increase taxes, or borrow from somewhere else in the government’s budget to make up for the coming shortfalls.

    In the United States specifically, it is expected that the Social Security trust fund will run out by 2034. At that point, there will only be enough revenue coming in to pay out approximately 77% of benefits.

  • Germany's Largest Public TV News Broadcaster: Syria Chemical Attack "Most Likely Staged"

    A senior correspondent for German state media broadcast ZDF heute stunned his European audience during a report from on the ground in Syria when he gave a straightforward and honest account of his findings while investigating what happened in Douma. The veteran reporter, Uli Gack, interviewed multiple eyewitnesses of the April 7 alleged chemical attack and concluded of the testimonials, “the Douma chemical attack is most likely staged, a great many people here seem very convinced.”

    It appears that all local Syrians encountered by the German public broadcast reporter were immediately dismissive of the widespread allegation that the Syrian government gassed civilians, which the US, UK, France, and Israel used a pretext for launching missile strikes on Damascus.

    ZDF heute: The world continues to puzzle over whether the banned chemical weapons were used in Douma. ZDF correspondent Uli Gack is in Syria for us: “you were in a large refugee camp today and talked to a lot of people – what did you hear about the attack there?” Gack responded, “the Douma chemical attack is most likely staged, a great many people here seem very convinced.”

    The German ZDF report is consistent with veteran British journalist Robert Fisk’s investigation upon being the first Western journalist to gain access to the site in Douma. Fisk reported early this week, “There are the many people I talked to amid the ruins of the town who said they had ‘never believed in’ gas stories–which were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups.”

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

    ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) is one of Germany’s largest and oldest state-owned channels, which is funded in part through citizens paying a household licensing fee, and Heute is perhaps the most visible public news program in all of Germany.

    According to the live report, some witnesses told ZDF that Islamist rebels killed victims with chlorine, filmed the scenes, then claimed an ‘Assad chemical attack’. Though interviewing “a great many people [who] seem convinced” that a chemical attack did not actually happen, the reporter did not attempt to censor what he consistently heard from locals who were said to be in the area when the events occurred.

    Increasingly, it appears that mainstream media gate-keepers are losing it over the fact that so many highly visible and respected reporters and broadcasters have featured reports this week which publicly question the Syrian chemical attack narrative and US coalition missile strikes that followed.

    One writer for the Guardian and Daily Beast who is a well-known pro regime-change advocate, for example, laments that “disinformation has taken hold” on Syria. In a series of tweets following Robert Fisk’s bombshell report for the Independent, Emma Beals, who often simply parrots whatever her ‘rebel’ sources tell her reacted to the recent profusion of high profile pundits questioning the established narrative on major British platforms. 

    Beals wrote:

    My educated and informed friends are emailing me en masse asking me about what’s going on in Syria because “it’s so hard to work out the truth.” Having spent years busting a gut to dig it out, it’s heartbreaking to see the extent to which disinformation has taken hold.

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    Beals advocates what we recently described as the highly simplistic “Disney version” of events in Syria:

    Syrian War for Dummies: Disney Version–

    Once upon a time, a country called Syria was ruled by a ruthless dictator named Bashar Al-Assad. He was a cruel man who gassed his own people. His actions caused a civil war in Syria. America and Europe tried their best to stop the devastating civil war, and even generously accepted many Syrian refugees. Eventually America went to Syria, defeated ISIS, and is now trying to restore stability.

    This above version is quite popular among many Americans and Europeans and the Western mainstream media.

    Meanwhile, almost simultaneous to German TV’s ZDF heute report from Syria, lawyers of the Bundestag (German federal parliament) issued a legal brief on the US-led strike on Syria. The government lawyers’ report was requested by the left-wing party Die Linke in response to the US coalition missile strikes which primarily targeted facilities in and around Damascus.

    “The deployment of military force against a state to punish it for breaking an international convention is a violation of the international law prohibiting violence,” reads the report, as cited by the German Press agency DPA and translated by Sputnik.

    The legal report further concluded that the US-led attack on Syria – which skirted the UN – but which was supported by the German government (though without German military participation) was based in chemical attack claims that the legal team deemed “not convincing”. 

  • Useful Idiots? New Yorker Magazine Fails Litmus Test For Media Impartiality On Syrian War

    Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    When America’s top thinking-man’s journal fails to consider at least one possible alternative as to who may have been responsible for the latest alleged chemical attack in Syria, aside from the ‘Assad regime,’ then we may conclude that the entire mainstream media complex is receiving its marching orders from above.

    In an April 14 article in the erstwhile prestigious New Yorker magazine (“Russia’s ‘Madman’ Routine in Syria May Have Averted Direct Confrontation with the U.S., For Now”), author Joshua Yaffa singlehandedly proves there is absolutely no straying from the government-approved narrative that Syrian President Bashar Assad is guilty of carrying out an alleged chemical attack in Douma on April 7. He also manages to pull Russia into the elaborate conspiracy theory, which is now accepted as bona-fide truth in the Western world.

    “Moscow welcomes Assad’s defeat of the rebels, and has little concern for how he achieves it, but the use of chemical weapons is an embarrassment and source of unwelcome consequences for the Kremlin,” Yaffa writes with breathtaking arrogance, refusing to entertain the much more likely scenario that the rebel terrorists were responsible for the purported attack. 

    “One unresolved question is whether Russia … got assurances from Syria that it would refrain from using chemical weapons in the future.”

    For any person with even a limited amount of critical thinking skills, this cannot be considered objective and impartial journalism in any sense of the word. Yet it is a prime example of what Western readers are being force-fed on a daily basis: Assad is guilty of carrying out a chemical attack on innocent civilians, nothing else to look at here, please move along [Thus far, there has been one notable exception to this rule, which has not been picked up by the US media, and never will be. Robert Fisk, a veteran British reporter of the Middle East, traveled to Douma for a first-hand account of the alleged attack for The Independent. After a lengthy fact-finding trip, which included interviews with numerous witnesses and medical staff, Fisk revealed what so many people had suspected: there was no chemical attack. The event was entirely staged by the notorious White Helmets ‘rescue group’].

    Consider the way UK broadcaster Sky News cut short Major-General Jonathan Shaw, a formerly high-ranking British Army officer, as he attempted to question what motive Bashar Assad would have had in carrying out a gas attack at this crucial juncture.

    “The debate that seems to be missing from this is… What possible motive could have triggered Syria to launch this chemical attack at this time in this place?” Shaw ventured to ask.

    “The Syrians are winning, don’t take my word for it, take the American military’s word for it.”

    At that point, the interview was quickly terminated for a commercial break. Needless to say, Sky News and other Western media won’t be inviting Shaw back for his expert analysis anytime in the near future.

    As if this even needs to be said, the function of the media is not to parrot the government line, but to challenge it every step of the way – and even more so when the consequences of failing to do so could result in the outbreak of a major conflict, possibly even World War III. Apparently that is a risk the useful idiots of the Western mainstream media are willing to take.

    In reality, to call these journalists ‘useful’ would be an exaggeration, because they are actually not being very useful at all. By dutifully refusing to consider, even in passing, other alternatives in Syria they have betrayed their allegiances, which is obviously not to the pursuit of truth. To assume your audience is so blissfully ignorant that they cannot imagine other scenarios regarding the chemical attack in Syria for themselves only serves to further alienate the mainstream media monsters from their subscribers. Thus, Western journalists are not ‘useful idiots’ per se; they are simply being idiots.

    Incidentally, this explains in a nutshell why the masters of the mainstream media universe are so terribly anxious to silence alternative media voices from the Internet. The existence of dissenting, unscripted voices throws into stark contrast just how biased, prejudiced and undemocratic the Western press has become. Better to manipulate the Internet algorithms than to risk Western audiences hearing voices that challenge the official narrative.

    Once again, the ridiculously obvious question needs to be asked since the Western mainstream media refuses to:

    Why would Assad, who was defeating the rebels on every military front with modern military technologies, resort to the most primitive and egregious form of military methods imaginable, that of chemical weapons?

    Why would he commit the one act that would undoubtedly bring NATO members into the fray, thereby destroying the results of an 8-year struggle?

    The short answer is he would not.

    Not in a million years. However, even if the Western media stubbornly refuses to consider that line of reasoning, it fails to explain why they were unanimously blaming Assad for the attack when experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had not yet arrived in Douma to conduct their forensics work. Instead, they cast aside their journalistic duties in favor of serving as mindless cheerleaders for war.

    Yaffa took the hysteria a notch higher, however, when he suggested that it was Russia that was behaving like a “madman” in Syria by warning it would

    “Whether thanks to their successful “madman” routine, or the success of arguments for restraint by U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, Putin and his generals must be pleased,” Yaffa wrote, apparently disheartened that something worked to put the brakes on full-blown military action in Syria.

    “The Russian effort to preemptively terrify the West into limiting its military operations in Syria began last month, when Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s top military officer, warned that Moscow would shoot down missiles fired at Syrian territory—and, what’s more, if Russian forces came under threat, would strike back by targeting launch facilities and platforms,” Yaffa wrote.

    Strange that even the prospect of Russia actually proclaiming it would defend itself from an outright attack is deemed the delusional ranting of a “madman.” Such is the position of the Western media as it continues to perpetuate the myth of a Russian bogeyman as it works to undermine peace in favor of yet another regime change operation.

    Clearly, alternative voices in the deeply compromised mainstream media jungle are needed now more than ever.

  • 1 In 4 Millennials Rely On Their Parents To Pay Some Bills – Even While Working Full Time

    Time and time again, we’ve discussed how America’s millennial generation is burdened by debt, effectively precluded from home ownership and increasingly disgruntled and pessimistic about their future prospects for wealth and happiness.

    Debt

    In its latest Global Wealth Report, Credit Suisse said the millennial generation has faced “a run of bad luck”, much of which was centered around the financial crisis.

    “The “Millennials” – people who came of age after the turn of the century – have had a run of bad luck, most clearly in developed markets. Capital losses in the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 and high subsequent unemployment have dealt serious blows to young workers and savers. Add rising student debt in several developed countries, tighter mortgage rules after 2008, higher house prices, increased income inequality, less access to pensions and lower income mobility and you have a “perfect storm” holding back wealth accumulation by the Millennials in many countries.”

    And maybe as a consequence of this “bad luck” (or perhaps because of their sense of entitlement and their unwillingness to seek challenging careers in the sciences or engineering fields), millennials also outrank previous generations in another area: The unprecedented number of people in their mid-to-late 20s (and some even later) who are still living with their parents, or relying on some form of financial help from their parents. Even some who have full time jobs.

    Millennials

    To that end, CNBC recently pointed out a study showing that nearly a quarter of millennials who are fully employed report receiving help from their parents.

    The survey, conducted by Instamonitor, involved 800 millennials, defined as those between the ages of 18 and 34.

    Two

    The most common bills paid for by parents were cell phones – 54% – and car insurance – 31%.

    “For some millennials, especially those just transitioning into adulthood, it can take some time to get to the point where they don’t need their parents’ help,” said certified financial planner Marguerita Cheng, CEO of Blue Ocean Global Wealth in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

    “I’d never tell a parent not to help their kids, but they do need to set parameters,” Cheng said.

    The more than 75.4 million millennials generally face financial challenges that their parents did not, CNBC concludes. And it’s not just that they’re carrying $1.4 trillion in student loan debt – their wages are lower than their parents’ wages were when they were in their 20s (when adjusted for inflation, of course).

    A 2017 study of Federal Reserve data by advocacy group Young Invincibles showed that millennials earned an average of $40,581 in 2013. That’s 20 percent less than the inflation-adjusted $50,910 earned baby boomers in 1989.

    Three

    As one might expect, a separate study conducted by CreditCards.com last year found that parents report higher rates of helping out their adult children – with as many as 74% of parents saying they provided some form of financial support.

    Of course, as CNBC points out, for many millennials, accepting support from their parents comes with some uncomfortable strings, like allowing parents to monitor your spending to a certain degree.

    Which is why it recommends that all adult children should have “an exit strategy” by having a pre-set date in mind for when they will take over paying whatever bill their parents hep them with.

    But since many of the jobs being created by the US’s allegedly “tight” labor market are part-time gigs (and what’s worse, wage growth across industries has been stagnant) – and pretty much all high-paying career-track jobs requiring advanced degrees or some specialized skill like software programming – we wonder whether a growing number of millennials are coming to terms with the idea that they might need to rely on their parents forever.

  • Citi: "2018 Is Not Going To Plan"

    Discussing recent trends in the bond market, Citi’s credit strategists point out that there have been a lot of surprised traders this year, because i) the first half was supposed to be fine “like last year”, and ii) IG was supposed to keep outperforming HY.

    And yet, contrary to expectations, both investment grade and junk bond spreads blew out in the past few months, catalyzed by the spike in real yields, the February VIX/vol ETN fiasco, the surge in $ Libor and the recent escalation in the US Chinese trade war…

    … which in turn has sent the HY/IG ratio tumbling, as junk has sharply outperformed IG.

    This led Citi’s Hans Lorenzen to conclude the “2018 is not going to plan“, prompting him to ask what’s going on: “a succession of unhappy coincidences or something deeper?”

    This paradox is accentuated when considering that the fundamentals behind credit corporates still remain sound, including corporate deleveraging among the Top 25 largest companies, a thrifty approach to spending cash and not lavishing shareholders…

    … which also mean there has been little rating deterioration and more positive than negative reviews.

    Other favorable catalysts include contained corporate supply (as in no net issuance to buy for private investors when taking the ECB’s CSPP in consideration), a relentless bid from the ECB even as deposits have continued to accumulate across Eurozone banks, with the ECB’s negative deposit rates having little impact on savings.

    And yet, Citi notes that while fundamentals do support tight credit spreads…

    … they do not support spreads “this tight.”

    But what got us here in the first place? We will spare readers Lorenzen’s favorite chart, which shows the unprecedented increase in central bank balance sheets in the past decade…

    … or rather we won’t, because as Citi’s bank strategist writes, what got us here is “central bank distortions” which have manifested themselves in three main ways:

    1. Money crowded out of govt bond space flows into IG (and HY) credit, boosting private demand. Quantity reduces already in Jan. 2018.
    2. CSPP reduces quantity of bonds available to private investors until Sep./Dec. 2018
    3. Negative deposit rate raises opportunity cost of not taking risk boosting private demand. No change in the Eurozone until 2019, but watch Fed’s impact on $ curve

    However, as central bank purchases diminish, the equilibrium shown above will shift again, resulting in far higher spreads.

    Ok fine, but everyone knows that QE is ending: the phase out will be predictable and priced in, plus since the ECB only buys IG bonds, it’s most an IG factor. Well, maybe not: consider the following correlations showing the dramatic impact QE has had on HY spreads.

    Of course, it was all fun and games for years, when thanks to QE from either the Fed, BOJ or QE, the net supply of securities was negative, or in other words, “when there’s more money than assets, everything rises.”

    But that too is changing, and over the next few months, the net supply of securities in advanced economies is set to soar, begging the question: who will replace the ECB’s buying at these record high prices.

    Said otherwise, there is a $1 trillion increase in the private funding requirement in 2018. At what yields – or equity prices – will this happen?

    So as we trek on while central banks continue to pump less and less liquidity, the sweet spot for credit is becoming an “ever thinner wedge” as shown in the right-hand chart below prompting some potentially adverse outcomes including a restrictive central bank policy, policy efficacy in doubt, and in the context of policy mistake fears and blowing out spreads, a recession. Meanwhile, Eurozone monetary policy has rarely been looser, meaning that as the ECB tightens, the only outcome is an adverse one.

    Meanwhile, in the next unintended consequence, as economic slack diminishes, debt financing is likely to increase…. just as yields start blowing out and the biggest net buyer – the world’s biggest hedge fund, the ECB – heads for the exit.

    Which brings us back to square one: will the central bank exit be enough to catalyze the next crash? Lorenzen’s answer is that the CB exit may be too obvious a trigger to launch the next drop in risk assets, it reintroduces all those vulnerabilities that will facilitate it, and which the market largely has ignored for years.

    What happens next? The simple answer, as such a coordinated global withdrawal of liquidity has never before been attempted, is that nobody knows, but according to Citi, as the central bank backstop moves “out of the money”, volatility should increase and risk/reward finally become more asymmetric…

    … resulting in the following preferred trade strategies as we finally enter the uncharted territories of the “great unknown”, which maximize carry relative to beta (translation: have one foot out of the market).

    Lorenzen’s conclusion: the artificial central bank “sugar high” is almost over, leading to growing risk of a major market tantrum, keeping Citi as underinvested in the market as possible.

  • Trump Is Getting Angrier…

    Angrier and angrier and angrier…

    President Trump’s use of ‘anger words’ has soared this year.

    h/t @dtchimp

    Can you blame him?

    Is it working?

  • It's Do-Or-Die For Tech Stocks

    Authored by Sven Henrich via NorthmanTrader.com,

    In early March I mused about a market paradox, one where tech would make new highs on a negative divergence while the $DJIA would not make a new high. This event did indeed transpire and it still may have significant implications as it is so very reminiscent of the action we saw in the year 2000. Same time frame too. Since the correction phase commenced in February we have seen plenty of volatility and solid 2 way action as one would expect during a correction. Yet key to watch during these movements is the emergence of patterns and assess their relevance as they may be indicative of the next big move.

    Curiously, as volatile as the action has been $NDX, as an index, does not appear to show much of a correction at all in context of its longer term quarterly trend, hence I asked yesterday:

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

    If Q1 represents a larger correction then please tell me where there is evidence that the most valued and overbought sector, tech, has actually corrected.

    We haven’t even tagged the quarterly 5 EMA on $NDX and it’s up 6 quarters in a row. All we’ve had is another higher low and an intra-quarter dip. That suggests a pullback in context of an overbought spike, but no correction. A correction should leave some evidence that there actually has been one. No, from my perch this means that tech has yet to properly correct.

    Given the high on a negative divergence and $DJIA failing to make a new high can we draw any conclusions yet as to the next larger move?

    Frankly, not quite yet, but charts are suggesting that next week may be very pivotal for tech in particular. A do or die moment.

    Zooming in on the weekly chart of $NDX we can observe this pattern:

    It has a very distinct heads and shoulders pattern feel to it, but it’s an unconfirmed pattern.

    I mentioned 2000 at the beginning of this post and this is what the structure looked like back then and note the right shoulder build on April:

    Freaky no?

    ..which then was sold into May:

    So why is next week then so important? Because some of the larger tech companies have yet to report earnings. As their market caps are so tremendously impactful the reaction to their reports will likely determine whether we will see this pattern repeat or whether it will become invalidated.

    Hence a quick high level technical look at some of the key tech stocks:

    $FB: Broken trend line, below the weekly 50MA:

    Can it recover? Sure, but its PR woes are not going to disappear anytime soon. Be curious to see how how many people deleted their accounts. I finally had enough myself and deleted mine, the data mining being secondary to the fact that I just saw no real utility for my life. But my view is irrelevant. Fact is this stock has yet to enter a major correction, but we have a trend line break and it’s a warning sign.

    $MSFT: Q1 saw 2 trend lines tags and the stock is back to near all time highs. The stock has more than doubled since 2016 and I see no technical damage at this stage. It could well go on to make new highs. Its earnings report reaction will be key:

    $NFLX has reported and made a new high on a negative weekly divergence. The stock is up 75% in 2018.

    $AMZN remains above all trend lines, but like $NDX, could be setting up for an H&S pattern and right shoulder build here:

    $GOOGL also held its trend line and has bounced off of its positive divergence. It could go higher still, yet if the trend line breaks it’s lights out and we can target the lower open gap. Lower highs so far.

    $AAPL: What correction?

    So these big boys have yet to see a sizable correction of any sort as far as I’m concerned and next week may well be a do or die moment for tech.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Apr 21

Today’s News 21st April 2018

  • Russia Exposes British Lies On Skripal, But Trail Leads To US

    Authored by M.K. Bhadrakumar via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Moscow says it has proof that the agent used in the UK attack is a chemical weapon patented in the US. So was this a covert operation aimed at ratcheting up tensions between the West and Russia?

    The sensational case of the poisoning of the ex-MI6 agent and former Russian military intelligence colonel Sergei Skripal on March 4 in Salisbury, in the UK, is becoming more and more curious. Under a blinding spotlight from Moscow, the British allegation regarding a Russian hand in the poisoning of Skripal is getting exposed. An engrossing plot in big-power politics is also unfolding. There is stuff here for a Le Carre novel.

    Are we witnessing a replay of the false flag Gulf of Tonkin attack of August 1964, the imaginary “incident” concocted by the US military to provide legal and political justification for deploying American forces in South Vietnam and for commencing open warfare against North Vietnam?

    To recap, Britain alleged without any empirical evidence that a military grade nerve agent of a type known as Novichok was used in Salisbury, saying it was originally developed in the former Soviet Union, and therefore, Moscow’s hand – possibly, even President Vladimir Putin’s hand – was “highly likely”.

    Moscow has maintained, on the other hand, that it had destroyed all its chemical weapons and an Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation verified and testified to that.

    The British allegation quickly morphed into a large-scale expulsion of Russian diplomats (over 100 of them) by western capitals, under heavy pressure from Washington and London. The US alone expelled 60 Russian diplomats, while Britain expelled 23.

    Egg on May’s face

    Britain is studiously ignoring the Russian requests for samples of the chemical agent used in the Salisbury attack and for consular access to be granted to the former spy’s daughter Yulia. Meanwhile, Britain instead approached the OPCW to investigate.

    The OPCW has now responded that it cannot identify the country of origin of the chemical agent used in the Salisbury attack.

    There is egg on PM Theresa May’s face.

    However, Russians managed to get their hands on the report prepared for the OPCW by its reputed laboratory in Spiez, the Swiss Center for Radiology and Bacteriological Analysis. According to the Swiss lab’s report, the chemical formula used in the Salisbury attack has been in service in the US, the UK and other NATO countries. Furthermore, neither the Soviet Union nor Russia “ever developed or stockpiled similar chemical weapons.”

    That’s more egg on May’s face.

    Now comes the bombshell. On April 18, Moscow disclosed that it has formally handed over to the OPCW proof to the effect that the Novichok agent purportedly used in the Salisbury attack actually happens to be patented as a chemical weapon in 2015 in the US and produced in that country. (By the way, unlike Russia, the US is yet to destroy its chemical weapon stockpiles, as required under the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997.)

    Now, not only the British government but Washington too has some explaining to do.

    Was Skripal attack a covert op by the West?

    Simply put, the Salisbury attack might even have been an Anglo-American joint covert operation undertaken with the ulterior motive to ratchet up tensions between the West and Russia. (The Washington Post reported on Monday that the former National Security Advisor HR McMaster might have hoodwinked President Donald Trump into approving the expulsion under the wrong notion that similar numbers of expulsions by European allies was in the pipeline. In the event though, the Europeans made only token expulsions.)

    Britain is steadily edging away from the Skripal case, hoping, perhaps, that the matter will die down. But will Moscow let Britain off the hook?

    On their part, the Russians seem to be holding back on some explosive information pointing toward the US’s direct complicity in this affair.

    Indeed, if this was McMaster’s swan song, the indefatigable Russophobe probably hoped to kill two birds with one shot – push Russia’s relations with the West to a crisis point and second, scotch the prospects of an early US-Russia presidential summit (which Trump wanted.)

    McMaster reportedly tried to stop Trump from congratulating Putin on his big victory in the Russian election on March 18 in a phone conversation where they discussed a possible summit meeting in a near future.

    How far all this is linked to Trump’s decision on March 22, finally, to sack McMaster as his National Security Advisor is yet another template. By the standards of military people, McMaster probably has the reputation of being an “intellectual” but the man proved to be an unvarnished Cold Warrior fit for a museum.

    From all accounts, Trump never trusted McMaster and the two had an acrimonious relationship. The one-star general who was overlooked for promotion by the Pentagon was Trump’s default choice following the abrupt departure of Michael Flynn.

    Michael Wolff narrates a hilarious episode in his book ‘Fire and Fury’ that during the job interview for the NSA post, McMaster tried to impress Trump when he showed up in military uniform with his silver star and launched into a wide-ranging lecture on global strategy. After, Trump reportedly remarked, “That guy bores the shit out of me.”

  • Harvard Teens Raise $1M For Crypto Fund Despite "Not Knowing A Lot"

    Teens are now setting up crypto hedge funds despite not having much of a clue as to what they’re doing. And they don’t seem to have trouble finding capital, either.

    If you are in the process of trying to gauge whether or not the world of crypto is achieving new highs in bubble status, then look no further than today’s perfunctory Bloomberg article on the crypto world.

    Our daily dose of crypto “must have” news comes in the form of an article, published Friday, that details several Harvard undergrad students who woke up one morning and decided they wanted to start a crypto hedge fund. Bloomberg reported,

    Bushra Hamid, the 19-year-old daughter of Syrian immigrants, has teamed up with three schoolmates to form Plympton Capital, a hedge fund for investing in digital currencies. Hamid says they aim to launch in six to eight weeks, starting with $1 million. Plympton, named for a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has already raised $700,000 from friends and family.

    And to give you some indication as to exactly how ready people are to throw money at crypto right now, the article states that they were able to raise $700,000 million from family and friends despite the fact that they may have no clue as to what they are doing:

    “We don’t necessarily know a lot, but they have full trust in us,” Hamid said.

    Friends – rather, investors – in the fund seem to be a little light on the “due diligence” angle, investing because founder Hamid had one run of success with cryptos:

    The quartet began meeting to discuss cryptocurrencies last year, when they each invested in coins independently. Hamid said that last fall she started the Harvard Undergraduate Blockchain Group, in which more than 300 students have shown an interest. Hamid won’t say how much she made on crypto, but a friend was impressed enough with the returns to spur her to action.

    “He was instantly, instantly intrigued,” she said. “He said, ‘Start something and I’ll invest.’

    The article continues:

    While many tech-savvy individual investors have long dabbled in cryptocurrencies, funds became interested in the last few years. About 226 have opened so far, most of them within the last year, managing as much as $5 billion in capital, according to Autonomous Research LLP.

    Bitcoin, the bellwether for the entire market, has retreated from last year’s heights, sending the crypto fund returns down 48 percent in the first quarter, according to the Eurekahedge Crypto-Currency Hedge Fund Index.

    The article states that they are banking on people their age – and as well as strategies like “technical analysis” to find the right investments:

    The Plympton group is banking on the youth movement. A recent online survey of about 2,000 adults conducted by Harris Poll for Blockchain Capital showed that 4 percent of millennials — people 18 to 34 years old — have owned Bitcoin, twice the rate of the general population. And 16 percent of millennials said they plan to buy Bitcoin in the next five years.

    “Some people might see our age, and see this is a new growing space that’s largely driven by the millennials,” Junaid Zubair, another Plympton founder, said. “That allows for a high sense of liability but also passion and interest. There we might have an advantage.”

    Plympton’s plan is to deploy technical analysis, arbitrage opportunities, portfolio optimization, and machine learning to find the right investments, Zubair said. He declined to provide more specifics.

    Good luck with that. The formation of this fund comes at the height of the crypto adoption boom and at a time where countries are the furthest along with they’ve ever been in trying to regulate cryptos and initial coin offerings.

    These teenagers have anointed themselves as experts due to one of them simply buying and holding cryptos in ostensibly benefiting from one ride up. However, now that crypto adoption has reached what seems like someone of a slow down, it’s going to take more than just being lucky or buying and holding to make consistent returns in the crypto space.

    We wrote yesterday about the only types of funds making money in crypto right now: market makers, volatility experts and those with net neutral exposure. Bloomberg reported on Thursday:

    Funds specializing in virtual currency market making and arbitrage strategies delivered first-quarter gains even as their mostly bullish peers lost 40 percent on average. That’s a big reversal from last year, when digital assets soared and market-making funds lagged far behind their long-biased counterparts.

    Pivot Digital Trading-2, managed by Hong Kong-based Amber AI Group, generated some of the biggest gains among cryptocurrency funds that avoid directional bets. It rose 4.3 percent in March to bring its first-quarter return to 30 percent, according to the firm. Market Neutral Liquidity SP-Institutional, domiciled in the Cayman Islands, earned 5.6 percent in the first quarter, said Cedric Jeanson of BitSpread Group, investment adviser to the portfolio.

    The man behind the curtain continues to get his take. The increased volume that comes with crypto’s plunge may not be great for traditional “buy-and-hold“ crypto funds or retail investors who only have the means to hold long, but that did not stop market makers, net neutral funds and volatility bettors from cashing in. The article continued: 

    The results suggest some managers are finding ways to profit from wild swings in cryptocurrencies without having to predict whether they will rise or fall. Such tactics may appeal to investors who want exposure to cryptocurrencies without their extreme volatility.

    Here’s a full list of funds that weathered the storm and the methods they used, courtesy of Bloomberg:

    We’re not sure how fund managers who don’t necessarily “know a lot” will be able to engage in these types of strategies, especially if their experience is likely just buying and holding in a Coinbase account. 

    Whether or not these Harvard students understand that the only people making money in cryptos right now are those with net neutral exposure where those making a market remains to be seen. But, the fact that there are four partners here, combined with the timing with which they decided to start this fund, has us believing this might be not only the first, but also the last time, we hear about them. 

  • Crimes Of A Monster: Your Tax Dollars At Work

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    Let us not mince words.

    We are living in an age of war profiteers.

    We are living in an age of scoundrels, liars, brutes and thugs. Many of them work for the U.S. government.

    We are living in an age of monsters.

    Ask Donald Trump. He knows all about monsters. 

    Any government that leaves “mothers and fathers, infants and children, thrashing in pain and gasping for air” is evil and despicable, said President Trump, justifying his blatantly unconstitutional decision(in the absence of congressional approval or a declaration of war) to launch airstrikes against Syria based on dubious allegationsthat it had carried out chemical weapons attacks on its own people. “They are crimes of a monster.”

    If the Syrian government is a monster for killing innocent civilians, including women and children, the U.S. government must be a monster, too.

    In Afghanistan, ten civilians were killed—including three children, one an infant in his mother’s arms—when U.S. warplanes targeted a truck in broad daylight on an open road with women and children riding in the exposed truck bed.

    In Syria, at least 80 civilians, including 30 children, were killed when U.S.-led air strikes bombed a school and a packed marketplace.

    Then there was a Doctors without Borders hospital in Kunduz that had 12 of its medical staff and 10 of its patients, including three children, killed when a U.S. AC-130 gunship fired on it repeatedly. Some of the patients were burned alivein their hospital beds.

    Yes, on this point, President Trump is exactly right: these are, indeed, the crimes of a monster.

    Unfortunately, this monster—this hundred-headed gorgon that is the U.S. government and its long line of political puppets (Donald Trump and before him Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.), who dance to the tune of the military industrial complex—is being funded by you and me.

    It is our tax dollars at work here, after all.

    Unfortunately, we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used.

    We have no real say, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow, for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

    Consider: we get taxed on how much we earn, taxed on what we eat, taxed on what we buy, taxed on where we go, taxed on what we drive, and taxed on how much is left of our assets when we die. 

    Indeed, if there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off. 

    This is true whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponrythat will be used against us, endless warsthat do little for our safety or our freedoms, or bloated government agencies such as the National Security Agencywith its secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities. Rubbing salt in the wound, even monetary awards in lawsuits against government officials who are found guilty of wrongdoing are paid by the taxpayer.

    Not only are American taxpayers forced to “spend more on state, municipal, and federal taxes than the annual financial burdens of food, clothing, and housing combined,” but we’re also being played as easy marks by hustlers bearing the imprimatur of the government. 

    With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more. 

    Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we’re getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

    Yet as Ron Paul observed, “The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens would pay nearly half of everything they earn to the government.”

    We are now ruled by a government consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process. 

    If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

    You’re not free if the government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. 

    You’re not free if government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. 

    And you’re certainly not free if the IRS gets the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say. 

    Somewhere over the course of the past 240-plus years, democracy has given way to kleptocracy  (a government ruled by thieves), and representative government has been rejected in favor of a kakistocracy  (a government run by the most unprincipled citizens that panders to the worst vices in our nature: greed, violence, hatred, prejudice and war) ruled by career politicians, corporations and thieves—individuals and entities with little regard for the rights of American citizens.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the American kleptocracy continues to suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

    But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money? 

    What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent? 

    What if, instead of quietly sending in our checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?

    If we don’t have the right to decide what happens to our hard-earned cash, then we don’t have very many rights at all. 

    If the government can just take from you what they want, when they want, and then use it however they want, you can’t claim to be anything more than a serf in a land they think of as theirs. 

  • Visualizing The Multi-Billion Dollar Industry That Makes Its Living From Your Data

    In the ocean ecosystem, plankton is the raw material that fuels an entire food chain. These tiny organisms on their own aren’t that remarkable, but en masse, they have a huge impact on the world.

    Here on dry land, Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley notes that the massive volume of content and meta data we produce fuels a marketing research industry that is worth nearly $50 billion.

    Every instant message, page click, and step you take now produces a data point that can be used to build a detailed profile of who you are.

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

    EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE, EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE

    The coarse-grained demographics and contact information of yesteryear seems quaint compared to today’s sophisticated data collection battleground. In the past, marketers would make judgement calls on your likely income and family structure based on where you lived, and you’d receive “targeted” mail and calls from telemarketers. Loyalty programs and the emergence of web analytics pushed things a little further.

    Today, the steady march of technological advancement has created a vast data collection empire that measures every aspect of your digital life and, increasingly, your offline life as well. Facebook alone uses nearly one hundred data points to target ads to you – everything from your marital status to whether you’ve been on vacation lately or not. Telecoms have access to extremely detailed information on your location. Apple has biometric data.

    Also watching your every move are web trackers. “Cookie-syncing” is one of the sneaky ways advertisers can follow you around the internet. Basically, cookie-syncing allows third parties to share browsing information at such a large scale that even the NSA “piggybacks” off them for surveillance purposes.

    The recent sales growth of smart speakers will only increase the breadth of data companies collect and analyze. Amazon and Google have both filed patents for technology that would essentially allow them to mine audio recordings for keywords. Advertisers could potentially target you with diapers before your family and friends even know you’re expecting a baby.

    FOLLOWING THE ONES AND ZEROS

    While web trackers and companies like Apple and Google are collecting a lot of personal and behavioral data, it’s the whales of the data ecosystem – data brokers – who are creating increasingly detailed profiles on almost everyone.

    Data brokers trade on the privacy of consumers and operate in the shadows.

    – Senator Al Franken (D-Minn)

    The goal of data brokers, such as Experian or Acxiom, is to siphon up as much personal data as possible and apply it to profiles. This data comes from a wide variety of sources. Your purchases, financial history, internet activity, and even psychographic attributes are mixed with information from public records to create a robust dossier. Digital profiles are then sorted into one of thousands of categories to help optimize advertising efforts.

    FEAR THE SHADOW PROFILE?

    According to Pew Research, 91% of Americans “agree” or “strongly agree” that people have lost control over how personal information is collected and used.

    Though optimizing clickthroughs is a big business, companies are increasingly moving beyond advertising to extract value from their growing data pipeline. Amalgamated data is increasingly being viewed as a clever way to assess risk in the decision-making process (e.g. hiring, insurance, loan or housing applications), and the stakes for consumers are going up in the process.

    For example, a man may feel comfortable sharing their HIV status on Grindr (for practical reasons), but may not want that information going to a third party. (Unfortunately, that really happened.)

    In 2015, Facebook filed a patent for a service that would help insurance companies vet people based on the credit ratings of their social network.

    THE MORE YOU KNOW

    Below the surface of our screens, our digital profiles continue to take shape.

    Measures like adjusting website privacy controls and clearing cookies are a good start, but that’s only a fraction of the data companies are collecting. Not only do data brokers make it hard to officially opt out, their partnerships with corporations and advanced data collection methods cast such a wide net, that it’s almost impossible to exclude individual people.

    Data brokers have operated with very little scrutiny or oversight, but that may be changing. Under intense public and governmental pressure, Facebook recently cut ties with data brokers. For a company that has bullishly pursued monetization of user data at every turn, the move is a sign that the public sentiment is changing.

  • The Road To 2025 (Part 3) – USD-Dominated Financial System Will Fall Apart

    Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

    It’s our currency, but it’s your problem.

    – U.S. Treasury Secretary John Connelly to European Finance Ministers, 1971

    Today’s post will cover a topic that consumed my thoughts for many years, but one I haven’t discussed much lately. Namely, the terminal nature of a global financial system being propped up artificially by central bank shenanigans.

    First, it’s crucial to understand that at the very core of our global economy is a financial system dominated by the U.S. dollar. The USD is a fiat currency directly backed by nothing, the supply of which can be arbitrarily altered and manipulated by a group of unelected bureaucrats in charge of the Federal Reserve. This money system represents the most powerful tool of centralized power on planet earth.

    The USD is unique in that it grants the U.S. the “exorbitant privilege”of having a national currency which at the same time serves as the global reserve currency. This was solidified toward the end of World War 2 with the Bretton Woods agreement, and was accepted because the U.S. agreed to offer sovereign nations holding dollars a right to exchange these dollars for gold at a fixed price. This fell apart in 1971, but was shortly replaced with an unofficial “petrodollar” system, which allowed the USD to remain the world reserve currency despite no longer being redeemable in gold.

    Before moving on, I want to share a few excerpts from an article I read yesterday titled, The De-Dollarization in China:

    Petrodollars emerged when Henry Kissinger dealt with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, after “Black September” in Jordan.

    The agreement was simple. Saudi Arabia had to accept only dollars as payments for the oil it sold, but was forced to invest that huge amount of US currency only in the US financial channels while, in return, the United States placed Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC neighbouring countries under its own military protection.

    Hence the turning of the dollar into a world currency, considering the importance and extent of the oil market. Not to mention that this large amount of dollars circulating in the world definitely marginalized gold and later convinced the FED that the demand for dollars in the world washuge and unstoppable.

    An unlimited amount of liquidity that kept various US industrial sectors alive but, above all, guaranteed huge financial markets such as the derivatives – markets based on the structural surplus of US liquidity.

    Pricing key commodities such as oil, which everyone in the world needs, in USD creates a massive structural support for the dollar versus other government fiat currencies. If other nations constantly have to convert to USD before purchasing commodities, there’s a constant underlying global demand to buy USD on a daily basis. No other country has this sort of structural support for its currency, and it allows the U.S. to be far more fiscally irresponsible than other countries without suffering devastating currency devaluations on the global market.

    Despite the tremendous advantage such a system offers the U.S. on the world stage, there haven’t been any rival countries that could realistically challenge it given American economic dominance. This is no longer the case.

    As also noted in the article highlighted earlier:

    Still today, the US GDP accounts for 22% of world’s GDP, while 80% of international payments are made in dollars.

    Hence the United States receives goods from abroad always at comparatively very low prices, while the massive demand for dollars from the rest of the world allows to refinance the US public debt at very low costs.

    This is the economic and political core of the issue…

    Therefore the United States is about to be ousted as world’s currency due to its continuous series of wars and military failures (former President Cossiga always told me: “The United States is always on the warpath and up in arms, but then it is not able to get out of it”) and, like everyone else, it shall pay for its public debt, which is huge and will be ever more its problem, not ours.

    This is absolutely key.

    There’s now a huge mismatch between the use of USD in the global financial system and the U.S. share of the world economy. China and Russia are acutely aware of this and have been taking major steps to transition to a more multi-polar currency world. There can be no multi-polar geopolitical world without a multi-polar currency world, which is why they’re working toward dethroning the USD. I believe they will succeed.

    Specifically, I think by 2025 the world will have a completely different global financial system from the one chaotically birthed in the 1970s. The USD will lose its total dominance on the world stage, resulting in major implications geopolitically as well as at home. Though plenty of people see this coming, everybody has their own opinion on what comes next. While it can be fun to engage in speculation, nobody really knows what the world financial system will look like in ten or twenty years. Plenty of bureaucrats have their well-oiled plans, and plenty of bloggers are convinced they know, but I promise you, nobody really knows.

    Cryptocurrencies have expanded the possibilities greatly. Thanks to Bitcoin, we now have a decentralized, voluntary, open source, free-market global currency. This is one of the most extraordinary creations in human history, and opens up possibilities for our species that never existed before. Sure, nation-states won’t just roll over and give up their money creation addiction any time soon, but the point is we finally have other options and can choose to opt out while still conducting global transactions. In summary, the next few years will be characterized by currency wars, not just between rival nation-states, but also between paranoid and authoritarian nation-states and new free market currencies.

    Readers know what I want to see. I will never get excited about transitioning away from the USD just to be under the thumb of another oppressive nation-state currency from Russia or China.

    If we want to evolve, explore the limits of human potential and usher in a world of monetary freedom, it’s important to support the key principles represented by Bitcoin. Don’t say “I like the idea, but it’ll be shut-down.” That’s giving up the battle without a fight. I genuinely think we can create a new paradigm for humankind. We have the tools, we just need the will.

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    Part 1: The Road to 2025 – Prepare for a Multi-Polar World

    Part 2: The Road to 2025 (Part 2) – Russia and China Have Had Enough

    *  *  *

    If you liked this article and enjoy my work, consider becoming a monthly Patron, or visit our Support Page to show your appreciation for independent content creators.

  • Turkey Will Repatriate All Gold From The US In Attempt To Ditch The Dollar

    After Venezuela, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands prudently repatriated a substantial portion (if not all) of their physical gold held at the NY Fed or other western central banks in recent years, this morning Turkey also announced that it has decided to repatriate all its gold stored in the US Federal Reserve and deliver it to the Istanbul Stock Exchange, according to reports in Turkey’s Yeni Safak. It won’t be the first time Turkey has asked the NY Fed to ship the country’s gold back: in recent years, Turkey repatriated 220 tons of gold from abroad, of which 28.7 tons was brought back from the US last year.

    According to the latest IMF data, Turkey’s gold reserves are estimated at 591 tons, worth just over $23 billion. This makes Ankara the 11th largest gold holder, behind the Netherlands and ahead of India.

    Turkey’s gold repatriation come at a sensitive time for Turkey’s currency, the lira, which has been pounded, and plunged to all time lows against both the dollar and the euro despite runaway, double-digit inflation in Turkey, as the central bank is seemingly afraid of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and refuses to raise rates.

    Meanwhile, Erdogan has taken a tough stance against the US currency, criticized dollar loans and saying that international loans should be given in gold instead.

    “Why do we make all loans in dollars? Let’s use another currency. I suggest that the loans should be made based on gold,” Erdoğan said during a speech at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Istanbul on April 16, according to Hurriyet.

    In what some saw an appeal for a gold standard by the Turkish president, Erdogan added that “with the dollar the world is always under exchange rate pressure. We should save states and nations from this exchange rate pressure. Gold has never been a tool of oppression throughout history.”

    Well, now that Turkey will soon have all of its gold on the ground, Erdogan will be able to launch a gold-backed currency if he so desires. Unfortunately, all signs point to the gold being repatriated only so it can be raided, pillaged and promptly deposited in offshore vaults by members of the ruling oligarchy.

    As noted above, Turkey has been one of several countries which have moved their gold from the world’s biggest, and most secure gold vault, that located 95 feet below sea level at 33 Liberty Street in Manhattan, also known as the New York Fed.

    The repatriation wave began in 2012, when Venezuela announced it was withdrawing all of its 160 tons of gold at the NY Fed, valued at around $9 billion. Germany’s Bundesbank then demanded 300 tons be returned, with the Fed saying it would take seven years to do so; a scrambling Germany was able to complete the process 3 years ahead of schedule. The Netherlands has also repatriated 122.5 tons of gold.

    As a result, according to the latest Fed data, the amount of physical gold stored at the NY Fed has dropped to the lowest on record, or 7.819 thousand tons, following a withdrawal scramble that started in 2014 and continued until the end of 2016. After a 15 month hiatus, withdrawals resumed in 2018, with 15.5 tons of gold repatriated in January and February.

    “The central banks started the repatriation already a few years ago, meaning before we had Brexit, Catalonia, Trump, AFD or the rising tensions between the Politburo in Brussels and the nations of Eastern Europe,” said Claudio Grass of Precious Metal Advisory in Switzerland.

    According to him, the world is becoming less centralized. “If we follow this trend, it should be obvious that the next step should be an even bigger break up into smaller units than the nation state. With such geopolitical fragmentation comes also the decentralization of power.”

  • US Sorghum "Armada" Turns Away From China After Tariffs

    China’s nearly 200% tariff on imports of US sorghum is already having a profound impact on the global grain trade. And in the latest evidence of how quickly the tariffs have been felt by US producers, Reuters is reporting that an “armada” of cargo ships carrying $216 million of sorghum from the US to China has changed course since Beijing imposed the tariff last week, as grain exporters are suddenly worried about taking a sizable loss on the loads. 

    Since the tariff was imposed, the five shipments, which were all destined for China when they were loaded at Texas Gulf Coast export terminals owned by grain merchants Cargill Inc and Archer Daniels Midland Co, are now liable for a hefty deposit to be paid based on the value of the goods. The payment would likely make the shipments unprofitable, according to Reuters.

    Sorghum

    Beijing announced on Tuesday that it would impose the 178.6% tariff following a brief investigation. That followed the imposition of tariffs as high as 25% on range of products produced in America. In the world of US agricultural products, China has also imposed sanctions on US soybeans – a decision that is expected to create major disruptions for US farmers.

    Cargill declined to tell Reuters where the ships that it loaded are heading now that they’ve been redirected away from China.

    The Panamanian-flagged ship called the N Bonanza, was churning its way northeast across the Indian Ocean earlier this week, carrying more than 67,000 tonnes of sorghum from ADM’s elevator in Corpus Christi, Texas, according to Reuters shipping data.

    Eleven hours after the anti-dumping deposits were announced, the ship stopped and then slowly tracked northwest.

    The RB Eden, a vessel carrying 70,223 tonnes of sorghum loaded at the same ADM terminal, was headed east-northeast through the Indian Ocean off the coast of South Africa. It turned around.

    Hours later, the Stamford Eagle – hauling sorghum from Cargill’s elevator in Houston – turned around off the western coast of Mexico.

    At least two other vessels have also suddenly changed course: the Ocean Belt and Xing Xi Hai, both loaded at Cargill’s terminal.

    It is unclear where the vessels are now heading.

    But US exporters aren’t the only ones feeling the pain from the tariffs: Suppliers of sorghum on the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans are all hurting

    Sorghum is a niche animal feed and a tiny slice of the billions of dollars in exports at stake in the trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies, which threatens to disrupt the flow of everything from steel to electronics.

    As of now, the tariffs won’t have a significant impact on Archer Daniels or Cargill – two of the world’s largest grain merchants. But it is a warning that China won’t hesitate to effectiv

    “For their overall trade businesses, this is not that substantial. But it’s a warning. If China really does start slapping tariffs on everything, like soybeans and corn, things could get really ugly, really fast,” said Bill Densmore, senior director of corporate ratings at Fitch Ratings.

    But shipping companies may be forced to discount their cargoes to sell them.

    “They’re not in a strong bargaining position considering they’ve got shipments from across the ocean that they have to sell and get the boats cleared out,” said economist Daniel O’Brien of Kansas State University in the top U.S. sorghum-producing state.

    And falling sorghum prices in Texas have already rattled farmers.

    “This tit for tat has to stop, and talks to find reasonable and lasting solutions must begin, for the good of U.S. agriculture and the customers we have spent decades working to win as loyal buyers,” said Tom Sleight, president and CEO of the US Grains Council.

    But the real reason US producers should worry about an escalating trade war can be found in the backlash to the US’s decision to ban sales of semiconductors to China’s ZTE, a Chinese smartphone manufacturer.

    Across China, citizens rallied in support of ZTE – and condemned the US measures as an attack on China. Restaurants offered ZTE employees free meals. They even “thanked” the US for helping force China to become more self-reliant.

    Meanwhile in the US, Trump’s aggressive rhetoric has been met with unease and criticism from the business community.

    Given that, it’s not difficult to imagine which side will be able to hold out longer while striking back with increasingly dramatic penalties.

  • Hayward Bay Fault Line More Dangerous Than San Andreas: It's A "Ticking Time Bomb"

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    Scientists are now saying that the “Big One” in California may not be caused by the San Andreas fault line, but by the Hayward Bay fault line. It is now thought to be the “ticking time bomb” fault line and more dangerous than the San Andreas.

    The scariest scenario for the next major earthquake may not be from the San Andreas Fault (though that one still threatens), but from the Hayward Fault that runs along the east side of the San Francisco Bay. In fact, many say that the next earthquake on the Hayward Bay fault line would be “disastrous.” According to KTUV, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake along the Hayward Fault could kill as many as 800 people and injure 18,000, according to results of a new research released Wednesday.

    The U.S. Geological Survey, citing findings from a simulated tremor with an epicenter in Oakland, said the disaster would cause 400 fires that could destroy 50,000 homes. Nearly half a million people would be displaced, authorities said.

    The simulated quake in the video above, known as the “HayWired scenario,” was modeled to occur at 4:18 p.m. on April 18 (yesterday). It replicates a rupture along the fault’s entire 52-mile length, from San Pablo Bay in the north to just east of San Jose in the south. According to this model, the violent shaking from the earthquake could cause the two sides of the fault to split six feet apart in some places. Some of the aftershocks would continue for several months as well. Cities in the East Bay would be hit hard, including Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, and Hayward.

    If a 7.0 magnitude quake occurred like the one simulated, researchers say that the East Bay residents could be without water from anywhere between six weeks to six months. Electricity could be out for up to four weeks in some locations.

    According to Business Insider, the statistical chances of this type of an earthquake occurring are not very comforting either. There’s about a 76% chance that the San Francisco Bay Area could experience a 7.2 magnitude earthquake within the next 30 years, according to some recent reports.

    The San Andreas Fault under San Francisco rumbled apart about 112 years ago, causing the devastating 1906 earthquake that swallowed city blocks, broke water mains, and triggered massive fires that burned for days.  However, the threat of another major quake for the Bay Area is “real and could happen at any time,” according to researchers for the US Geological Survey.

    The Hayward Fault is a “tectonic time bomb, due any time for another magnitude 6.8 to 7.0 earthquake,” according to a 2008 USGS report. Since then, research has indicated that the likelihood of a Hayward quake is greater and more threatening to the 7 million Bay Area residents than a San Andreas quake would be.

    “It’s just waiting to go off,” USGS earthquake geologist emeritus David Schwartz warned when speaking to the Los Angeles Times.

  • Trump To "Counter" DNC Lawsuit; Seeks Servers, Clinton Emails And "Pakistani Mystery Man"

    President Trump is eager to go head-to-head with the DNC which filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit on Friday against several parties, including the Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization – alleging a “far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump.” 

    Hours after the Washington Post broke the news of the lawsuit, Trump tweeted “Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats. This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC server that they refused to give to the FBI,” referring to the DNC email breach. Trump also mentioned “the Debbie Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails.”

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    The “Pakistani mystery man” is a clear reference to former DNC CHair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s longtime IT employee and personal friend, Imran Awan – whose father, claims a Daily Caller source, transferred a USB drive to the former head of a Pakistani intelligence agency – Rehman Malik. Malik denies the charge. 

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    Of note, the DNC would not allow the FBI to inspect their servers which were supposedly hacked by the Russians – instead relying on private security firm Crowdstrike. 

    Meanwhile, the “Wasserman Schultz Servers” Trump mentions is likely in reference to the stolen House Democratic Caucus server – which Imran Awan had been funneling information onto when it disappeared shortly after the House Inspector General concluded that the server may have been “used for nefarious purposes.” 

    The server may have been “used for nefarious purposes and elevated the risk that individuals could be reading and/or removing information,” an IG presentation said. The Awans logged into it 27 times a day, far more than any other computer they administered.

    Imran’s most forceful advocate and longtime employer is Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who led the DNC until she resigned following a hack that exposed committee emails. Wikileaks published those emails, and they show that DNC staff summoned Imran when they needed her password. –DCNF

    Imran Awan, his wife Hina Alvi and several other associates ran IT operations for at least 60 Congressional Democrats over the past decade, along with the House Democratic Caucus – giving them access to emails and computer data from around 800 lawmakers and staffers – including the highly classified materials reviewed by the House Intelligence Committee. 

    Napolitano: He was arrested for some financial crime – that’s the tip of the iceberg. The real allegation against him is that he had access to the emails of every member of congress and he sold what he found in there. What did he sell, and to whom did he sell it? That’s what the FBI wants to know. This may be a very, very serious national security situation.

    Last July, Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer claimed to Laura Ingraham that the Awan IT staffers were sending sensitive information with the Muslim Brotherhood. 

    The Awans notably worked for rep Andre Carson (D-IN) – the first Muslim on the House Intel Committee, who has several ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. 

    Among those with whom Rep. Carson has been involved as a guest speaker, panelist, fundraiser, recipient of funds, etc., are: the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and a number of its chapters across the country; the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA); the Muslim American Society (MAS); and the Brotherhood’s new proto-political party, the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO). –Center for Security Policy

    The DNC lawsuit, filed on Friday, asserts that the Russian hacking campaign – combined with Trump associates’ contacts with Russia and the campaign’s public cheerleading of the hacks – amounted to an illegal conspiracy to interfere in the election that caused serious damage to the Democratic Party.

    DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement…

    “During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,”

    “This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency,”

    Unfortunately for the DNC, which has now exposed itself to an aggressive discovery phase, their case holds no water according to Law And Crime;

    Here’s the problem:  several pages of quotes and factual allegations in the beginning of the document are wholly uncited, at least in that section of the document.

    Another section of the document, “general allegations,” does cite information through footnotes — some 107 of them. However, the records cited are almost exclusively news reports from sources such as the New Republic, the New York Times, ABC, CNN, Politico, the Washington Post, Fox News, Business Insider, Slate, and other media outlets. Ferretting out exactly what was reported by those outlets is not difficult.

    The DNC’s lawsuit shoves what ultimately is fourth-hand information to a federal judge to be taken as fact in support of this conclusion:

    Through these communications, the Trump Campaign, Trump’s closest advisors, and Russian agents formed an agreement to promote Donald Trump’s candidacy through illegal means.

     Has the DNC just created all the rope it needs to hang itself?

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Apr 20

Today’s News 20th April 2018

  • These Are The Men & Women Most-Admired By Brits In 2018

    In 2002, David Attenborough was named among the 100 Greatest Britons by a BBC poll.

    And as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, the veteran broadcaster and naturalist is still the most admired man in the UK, according to a new YouGov survey. Widely considered a national treasure in Britain, Attenborough had an admiration score of 16.6 percent, ahead of Barack Obama’s 12.3 percent.

    Infographic: The men and women most admired by the UK in 2018 | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Queen Elizabeth II is the most admired woman in the UK with an admiration score of 19.6 percent. Michelle Obama came second with 10.3 percent while Judi Dench came third with 10.3 percent.

  • How The Guardian Fulfills George Orwell's Prediction Of 'Newspeak'

    Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    On Sunday April 15th, Britain’s Guardian bannered “OPCW inspectors set to investigate site of Douma chemical attack” and pretended that there was no question that a chemical attack in Douma Syria on April 7th had actually occurred, and the article then went further along that same propaganda-line, to accuse Syria’s Government of having perpetrated it. This ‘news’ story opened [and clarificatory comments from me will added in brackets]:

    UN chemical weapons investigators were set on Sunday to begin examining the scene of a chemical attack in the Syrian city of Douma, which had prompted the joint US, French and British strikes against military installations and chemical weapons facilities near the capital, Damascus.

    The arrival of the delegation from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) came as the Syrian military announced that it had “purified” [no source provided, but this — from 7 March 2018 — is the only source that existed prior to the April 14th missiles-invasion of Syria, and its meaning is very different: the region of eastern Ghouta, of which Douma is a part, after a two-month campaign that killed nearly 2,000 civilians [no source provided as regards either the number, or that all of them were ‘civilians’ and that none of them were jihadists or “terrorists”], following years of siege.

    The propaganda-article continued directly: 

    “Units of our brave armed forces, and auxiliary and allied forces, completed the purification of eastern Ghouta, including all its towns and villages, of armed terrorist organisations,” the general command statement said.

    No source was provided for that, but this sentence is a sly mind-manipulation, because here is what the Syrian Government’s General Command had actually said: “Statement of the Army General Command declaring Eastern Ghouta clear of terrorism” as headlined by the Syrian Government itself.

    In other words: the Guardian’s ‘journalist’ had substituted the word “clear” by the word “purify” and did this after having already asserted but not documented, that the Government had just completed “a two-month campaign that killed nearly 2,000 civilians.”

    When the Syrian Government announces that an area has been “cleared of terrorists (or of terrorism),” the US-allied propagandist uses the word “purify,” such as “purified the region of eastern Ghouta” or “the purification of eastern Ghouta, including all its towns and villages, of armed terrorist organisations.”

    But by the time that the reader gets there to “purification … of armed terrorist organisations,” the reader has already been indoctrinated to believe that Syria’s Government is trying to “purify” land, or perpetrate some type of ethnic-cleansing. 

    Later, the article asserts that,

    “The OPCW mission will arrive in Douma eight days after the chemical attack, and days after the area fell to the control of Russian military and Syrian government forces. That delay, along with the possibility of the tampering of evidence by the forces accused of perpetrating the attack, raises doubts about what the OPCW’s inspectors might be able to discover.”

    However, a fierce debate is being waged over whether this was not any real “chemical attack” but instead a staged event by the jihadists in order to draw Trump back into invading Syria. In other words: any journalistic reference yet, at this time, to the event as “the chemical attack” instead of as “the alleged chemical attack” is garbage, just as, prior to the guilty-verdict in a murder trial, no journalistic reference may legitimately be made to the defendant as “the murderer,” instead of as “the defendant.” That is lynch-mob ‘journalism’, which Joseph Goebbels championed.

    The Joseph-Goebbels-following ‘journalist’ has thus opened by implying that the Russia-allied Syrian Government is trying to crush a democratic revolution, instead of the truth, that the US-allied Governments are trying to overthrow and replace the Russia-allied Syrian Government.

    It’s a big difference, between the lie, and the truth.

    Another story in the April 15th Guardian was “Pressure grows on Russia to stop protecting Assad as US, UK and France press for inquiry into chemical weapons stockpiles” and this one pretended that the issue is for “Russia to stop protecting Assad,” who is the democratically elected and popular President of Syria, and not to stop the invasion of Syria since 2011 by US and Saudi backed foreign jihadists to overthrow him.

    Furthermore, as regards “press for inquiry into chemical weapons stockpiles,” the real and urgent issue right now is to allow the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) into Douma to hold an independent and authoritative investigation into the evidence there. Russia pressed for it at the U.N. Security Council and the US and its allies blocked it there. But the OPCW went anyway — even after the US-allied invasion on April 14th — and this courageous resistance by them against the US dictatorship can only be considered heroic.

    That type of ‘news’-reporting is virtually universal in The West, among the US and its allied governments, which refer to themselves as ‘democracies’ and refer to any Government that they wish to overthrow and replace by their own selected dictator, as ‘dictatorships’, such as these regimes had referred to Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria forever, and Ukraine in 2014.

  • Over 95% Of World's Population Breathes Dangerously-Polluted Air, New Report

    Most of the world’s population resides in regions where air quality contains life-threatening pollutants. An estimated 95 percent of people are breathing unhealthy air where ambient (outdoor) fine particulate matter concentrations (soot particles) surpass the World Health Organization’s Air Quality Guideline of 10 µg/m3, a new report has discovered.

    Almost 60 percent of the world’s population breathe unsafe air in areas where fine particulate matter exceeds a dangerous level of 35 µg/m3.

    The comprehensive study noticed most of the world’s hazardous air and the heaviest societal burdens are hitting impoverished communities the hardest.

    An Indian girls holds a banner during a protest against air pollution in New Delhi, India, Sunday, Nov. 6, 2016.  (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

    According to the State of Global Air project, a joint venture between the Health Effects Institute, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), and the University of British Columbia, fine particle air pollution is the most significant enviormental hazard worldwide. It is “responsible for a substantially larger number of attributable deaths than other more well-known behavioral risk factors such as alcohol use, physical inactivity, or high sodium intake,” said the report. Medium to long-term exposure to fine particle air pollution — contributed to an estimated 6.1 million deaths worldwide in 2016.

    The report says air pollution can significantly affect people’s health, including “making it difficult to breathe for those with asthma or other respiratory diseases, sending the young and old to hospital or causing them to miss school or work, and contributing to early death from heart and lung disease.”

    In the chart below, the report specifies that air pollution is the fourth-highest leading cause of death on a global scale, right after high blood pressure, smoking, obesity, and diet.

    Figure 1. Global ranking of risk factors by total number of deaths from all causes for all ages and both sexes in 2016.

    The report specifies 95 percent of the world’s population lives in regions exceeding WHO Air Quality Guidelines. Base on the data below, the highest concentrations of air pollution are in regions of Africa, Middle East, India, and much of Asia.

    “The highest concentrations of population-weighted annual average PM2.5 (see “Defining Ambient Air Pollution” textbox) in 2016 were in countries in North Africa (e.g., Niger at 204 µg/m3 and Egypt at 126 µg/m3 ), West Africa (e.g., Cameroon at 140 µg/m3 and Nigeria at 122 µg/m3 ), and in the Middle East (e.g., Saudi Arabia at 188 µg/ m3 and Qatar at 148 µg/m3 ). The high outdoor concentrations in these regions were due mainly to windblown mineral dust. However, in some of these countries (Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon), high proportions of the population burn solid fuels in the home and may also engage in open burning of agricultural lands or forests, both of which can also contribute substantially to outdoor air pollution.

    The next-highest concentrations appeared in South Asia, where combustion emissions from multiple sources, including household solid fuel use, coal-fired power plants, agricultural and other open burning, and industrial and transportation-related sources, are the main contributors. The population-weighted annual average PM2.5 concentrations were 101 µg/m3 in Bangladesh, 78 µg/m3 in Nepal, and 76 µg/m3 in both India and Pakistan. The population-weighted annual average concentration in China was 56 µg/m3 . Estimates for population-weighted annual average PM2.5 concentrations were lowest (≤ 8 µg/m3 ) in Australia, Brunei, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, and several Pacific island nations.”

    Figure 2. Comparison of 2016 annual average PM2.5 concentrations to the WHO Air Quality Guideline.

    Figure 3. Trends in population-weighted annual average PM2.5 concentrations in the 10 most populous countries plus the European Union, 2010–2016

    “Air pollution takes a huge personal toll worldwide, making it difficult to breathe for those with respiratory disease, sending the young and old to hospital, missing school and work, and contributing to early death,” Bob O’Keefe, vice president of HEI, said in a statement.

    “The trends we report show real progress in some parts of the world — but serious challenges remain to eliminate this avoidable affliction,” he added.

    According to the report, China and India were both responsible for more than 50 percent of global deaths linked to air pollution.

    It also found that China’s air pollution has stabilized; meanwhile, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India have experienced dramatic increases in air pollution since 2010.

    The report then dives into household air pollution from burning “solid fuels for cooking and heating is the 8th leading global risk factor contributing to disease burden.” Over 2.45 billion people — one in three global citizens — were exposed to harmful indoor air pollution from burning solid fuels in 2016. Shockingly, it contributed to one in four pollution deaths in India and one in five in China.

    ” People living in homes using solid fuels can face PM2.5 levels 6 times higher than even the leaststringent WHO Interim Air Quality Target for PM2.5 and as much as 20 times higher than the full WHO Air Quality Guideline of 10 µg/m3 .”

    Figure 5. Proportion of population exposed to household air pollution from burning of solid fuels in 2016.

    Figure 6. Number of people and percentage of population exposed to household air pollution from solid fuel burning in countries with populations over 50 million and at least 10% solid fuel use in 2016.

    Figure 7. Trends in proportion of population exposed to household air pollution from burning of solid fuels for selected regions of the world.

    “The gap between the most polluted air on the planet and the least polluted was striking. While developed countries have made moves to clean up, many developing countries have fallen further behind while seeking economic growth,” O’Keefe said.

    But he added: “There are reasons for optimism, though there is a long way to go. China seems to be now moving pretty aggressively, for instance in cutting coal and on stronger controls. India has really begun to step up on indoor air pollution, for instance through the provision of LPG [liquefied petroleum gas] as a cooking fuel, and through electrification.”

    The report then glances over the burden of disease attributed to air population and found a wide range of health effects, including asthma, increased hospitalizations, illness, and reduced life expectancy from heart and lung disease. Some of those diseases include:

    • ischemic heart disease,

    • cerebrovascular disease (ischemic stroke and hemorrhagic stroke),

    • lung cancer,

    •  chronic-obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and

    • lower-respiratory infections (LRIs).

    Figure 9. Numbers of deaths attributable to ambient PM2.5 in 2016.

    Figure 10. Percentage of global deaths by cause attributable to ambient particulate matter and to household air pollution

    Figure 11. Numbers of deaths attributable to household burning of solid fuels in 2016.

    “The combined burden from both ambient and household air pollution falls most heavily on low and middle-income countries where exposures to both are high. These countries face a double burden,” stated the report.

    Figure 13. Comparison of the percentages of deaths attributable to PM2.5, household, and total air pollution by sociodemographic (SDI) index.

    Figure 14. Comparison of the global patterns of age-standardized death rates for both sexes attributable to total air pollution.

    The State of Global Air report, points out the ugly side of globalization, as many U.S. corporations offshored their supply chains and the pollution that goes along with manufacturing to the Eastern Hemisphere. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the United States has been spared in terms of air pollution, but that might not last for long, because President Trump wants to rebuild overseas supply chains back into America’s heartland. Will the opportunity cost of restoring America’s greatness be at the health expense of America’s middle-class? It certainly will…

  • The Road To 2025 (Part 2) – Russia And China Have Had Enough

    Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

    Part 1 of this series focused on how the U.S. empire no longer provides any real benefit to the average American citizen. Rather, the spoils of overseas wars, the domestic surveillance state and an overall corrupt economy are being systematically funneled to a smaller and smaller group of generally unsavory characters. The public’s starting to recognize this reality, which is why we saw major populist movements emerge on both the traditional right and left of the political spectrum in 2016.

    As millions of Americans emerge from their long slumber, much of the world’s been aware of this reality for a long time. They don’t see the U.S. as a magnanimous humanitarian empire, that’s a fairytale more suited for children’s books and the mass media. In fact, it seems clear that the billions of humans who live in various sovereign nations around the world would certainly prefer to be in control of their own destinies as opposed to mere vassal states of the U.S., they simply haven’t possessed the military or economic power to stand up and chart their own course. But things are changing.

    The most significant geopolitical change of the 21st century is the emergence of China, and the reemergence of Russia, as globally significant military powers. This is the core driver behind the establishment’s panic about Russia. It has nothing to do with Putin’s authoritarianism or human rights abuses, that’s just marketing directed at a heretofore extremely gullible public.

    In reality, those determined to perpetuate a unipolar world run by the U.S. are appalled and concerned about the fact Russia was able to become involved in Syria and prevent another regime change operation. Russia very publicly, and very successfully, stood up and said “no” to U.S. imperial ambitions in Syria. This isn’t just historically significant, it’s seen as blasphemous and recalcitrant by the U.S. status quo.

    With that out of the way, let’s revisit a few things I wrote over the weekend in my first thoughts on the latest Syria strike:

    Russian leadership are not a bunch of fools, nor will they back down. After last night, they know for certain the U.S. empire is determined to castrate them globally at all costs in order to impede an inevitable emergence of a multi-polar world.

    I don’t think Russia or Iran will respond with a shock and awe attack any time soon, nor will this likely spiral out of control in the near-term. It’s more likely we’ll see this all play out over the course of the next 5 years or so.

    I also don’t expect this to go nuclear, but I think the chances the U.S. experiences an imperial collapse similar to that of the USSR (or like any historically unmanageable and corrupt empire) has become increasingly likely. My view at this point is the U.S. and its global power position will be so dramatically altered in the years ahead, it’ll be almost unrecognizable by 2025, as a result of both economic decline and major geopolitical mistakes. This will cause the public to justifiably lose faith in all leadership and institutions.

    The more I reflect on what’s going on, the more I’m convinced the U.S. is trying to goad Russia into a response with these provocations. I think the Russians know this, which is precisely why they’re responding with cool heads to a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional strike likely based on a fake narrative. In fact, we still don’t have any reliable or rock solid evidence of what happened. Naturally, this didn’t stop Donald Trump from bombing without consulting Congress, nor did it stop Theresa May from doing the same without consulting Parliament. Please tell me again about our illustrious Western democracies. I suppose that’s just another fairytale for public consumption.

    Moreover, Russia’s lack of a military response shouldn’t be seen as a sign of weakness, but as an intentional and well thought out strategy. The Russians seem to think the U.S. (and UK) are acting like desperate feral lunatics and the best thing they can do is sit back, play defense, and let the short-sighted fools running the American empire ruin themselves. The erratic and demonstrably thuggish and shady manner in which the U.S., UK and France behaved in this latest criminal act has not been lost upon the populations of the world, including considerable portions of the American and British populace who are disgusted at what these governments are doing in our names. Russia’s strategy is to look reasonable on the global stage compared to a U.S. which seems increasingly crazy and unhinged. It seems to be working.

    That being said, Russia by itself isn’t capable of successfully standing up to the U.S. empire in the long-run. This is where China comes into play. Chinese leadership have also had enough but are, like the Russians, holding back and acting like the reasonable adults in the room. We saw this most recently with the Chinese cooling down the trade wars. U.S. pundits cheered this as a sign of weakness, but I think the opposite. China’s playing the same game as Russia. Allow U.S. leadership to continue to look like insufferable bullies on the world stage until everyone gets completely sick of U.S. dominance.

    A reader who lives in Europe wrote the following comment on my last post, which seems like a fair representation of global public opinion at this point:

    The Soviet empire fell because the cost of the arms race depleted the rest of the society to such a degree that a collapse was inevitable. I believe the US are in a similar state now. The current wars are carried out by technology at distance, or by proxy warriors, and not by actual americans on ground. How long can the citizens carry that burden? At the same time the US is losing the moral support within the public among their allies, as I know first hand, by being from a european allied country. Although our domestic politic leadership and mainstream press are supporting the US, especially when they launch some rockets, opposition and disbelief is large and growing among normal people. The US has lost its posiotion as our leading star, not just among the leftist, but all over the spectrum. The insanity and lies are becoming so evident that it is impossible to deny it.

    The U.S. is rapidly losing support and confidence at the grassroots level, both at home and abroad. We see the lies and we see the disregard for the Constitution. The U.S. and its pet allies like the UK and France will all be increasingly seen as rogue states by much of the world if they keep this up.

    Finally, for those of you who doubt which side China is on in this global drama, let me point out the following excerpts from a recent editorial published in the state-sponsored Global Times earlier this week:

    The facts cannot be distorted. This military strike was not authorized by the UN, and the strikes targeted a legal government of a UN member state. The US and its European allies launched strikes to punish President Bashar al-Assad for a suspected chemical attack in Duma last weekend. However, it has not been confirmed if the chemical weapons attack happened or if it did, whether government forces or opposition forces launched it. International organizations have not carried out any authoritative investigation.

    The Syrian government has repeatedly stressed that there is no need for it to use chemical weapons to capture the opposition-controlled Duma city and the use of chemical weapons has provided an excuse for Western intervention. The Syrian government’s argument or Trump’s accusations against the “evil” Assad regime, which one is in line with basic logic? The answer is quite obvious.

    The US has a record of launching wars on deceptive grounds. The Bush government asserted the Saddam regime held chemical weapons before the US-British coalition troops invaded Iraq in 2003. However, the coalition forces didn’t find what they called weapons of mass destruction after overthrowing the Saddam regime. Both Washington and London admitted later that their intelligence was false.

    Washington’s attack on Syria where Russian troops are stationed constitute serious contempt for Russia’s military capabilities and political dignity. Trump, like scolding a pupil, called on Moscow, one of the world’s leading nuclear powers, to abandon its “dark path.” Disturbingly, Washington seems to have become addicted to mocking Russia in this way. Russia is capable of launching a destructive retaliatory attack on the West. Russia’s weak economy is plagued by Western sanctions and squeezing of its strategic space. That the West provokes Russia in such a manner is irresponsible for world peace.

    The situation is still fomenting. The Trump administration said it will sustain the strikes. But how long will the military action continue and whether Russia will fight back as it claimed previously remain uncertain. Western countries continue bullying Russia but are seemingly not afraid of its possible counterattack. Their arrogance breeds risk and danger.

    China and Russia will work together, often behind the scenes, to convince the rest of the world that the U.S. has become a rogue state, and will use this argument to build international support for a multi-polar world. The only thing that could slow this process down is if the U.S. stops acting like a rogue state, something that appears increasingly unlikely with Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State and John Bolton as National Security Advisor.

    Part 3 will focus on the weak link in U.S. imperial dominance, the USD.

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  • Russia And Iran Complete First Oil-For-Goods Transfer, Extend Agreement For A Year

    Nearly four years after Iran and Russia first agreed to an oil-for-goods swap agreement worth billions of dollars, RT is reporting that the first delivery of Iranian crude oil to Russia under the program has been completed, and the two sides are angling to extend the deal, possible for another five years.

    “The agreement is effective; it has been extended for the year, but in general, we think it should be extended for five years,” said Russian Energy Ministry Aleksandr Novak.

    As we reported more than three years ago, the $20 billion agreement was initially signed in April 2014 when Iran was facing Western sanctions over its nuclear program (they have since been lifted thanks to the Iran deal, but will likely soon be reimposed).

    Russia

    When the sanctions against Tehran were lifted in 2016, Novak said the deal was no longer necessary. However, Novak said in March 2017 that the plan was back on the table with Russia buying 100,000 barrels per day from Iran and selling the country $45 billion worth of goods. Another agreement was later signed in late May.

    Current Iranian oil supplies under the program amount to five million tons per year. The first delivery was made in November 2017 and totaled one million tons.

    Russia and Iran have also discussed cooperation in energy, electricity, nuclear energy, gas and oil, as well as cooperation in the field of railways, industry, and agriculture. Novak said in February that Russia’s state trading enterprise Promsirieimport has been authorized by the government to carry out the purchase of Iran’s oil through the oil-for-goods program under study by both countries

    The oil-for-goods swaps are expected to boost trade between the two countries (while conveniently circumventing the petrodollar system). The nations have also signed six provisional agreements to collaborate on “strategic” energy deals worth up to $30 billion.

    Presidential aide Yuri Ushakov said earlier this month that Russian investment in Iranian oil and gas fields could total more than $50 billion.

    And in a sign of closer cooperation to come, Ushakov said Iran is weighing whether to enter the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union – a move that could come within months. A free-trade zone deal would be expected to “trigger further development of our bilateral trade and expansion of investment cooperation.”

  • "A Calamitous Collapse": Former Podesta Group Employees Reveal Truth Behind Firm's Downfall

    Former Podesta Group employees have spilled the beans about their former boss, Tony Podesta – in a scathing Wall Street Journal article which details the firm’s collapse. As part of the report, The Journal got its hands on “internal Podesta Group accounting,” as well as “financial documents, calendars and communications.”

    The D.C. lobbying firm founded in 1993 by John and Tony Podesta folded shop following Hillary Clinton’s monumental loss in the 2016 US election, when a flood of clients ran for the door virtually overnight, realizing the Podesta Group’s influence ended with the Clinton campaign. 

    The Journal describes Tony Podesta’s fall as a “calamitous collapse” following the 2016 US election:

    Then he fell, a calamitous collapse propelled by unexpected blows, delivered by fate and made worse by hubris. Financial problems, legal threats and the election of President Donald Trump took it all away—the clients, the firm and, finally, Mr. Podesta’s position as one of Washington’s most influential players.

    Here are some cliff notes from the report:

    • The Podesta Group ended 2015 as Washington D.C.’s third largest Lobbying firm, with nearly $30 million in revenue from over 100 clients – who promptly bailed after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election. That didn’t seem to bother Tony.  

    The string of embarrassing news accounts disturbed many of the Podesta Group’s corporate clients, companies that preferred to stay clear of such publicity. Mr. Podesta operated as if the whole mess would soon blow over. –WSJ

    • The Podesta Group got in trouble for the IRS for improperly reporting a $300,000 shipping expense for Tony Podesta’s art, after which he began billing his firm $360,000 a year to rent pieces displayed at the office. 

    Employees of the Podesta Group set up a system to prevent Mr. Podesta from being reimbursed by the company for personal expenditures. A 36-page instruction manual for Mr. Podesta’s executive assistants included this directive: “It is up to you and your best judgment as to what gets reimbursed.”

    • Podesta told his employees that he would entertain letting them buy equity in the firm – then worth an estimated $50 million, then stiffed them when they showed up to discuss. 

    Firm employees approached Mr. Podesta in early 2014 about selling them a share of the business. The Podesta Group was worth at least $50 million at the time, former employees estimated. Over dinner, Mr. Podesta told them he was open to the idea and suggested they meet with lawyers.

    On the day of the meeting, employees gathered in the firm’s conference room. Mr. Podesta didn’t show.

    • Tony Podesta worked for clients without his firm’s knowledge – such as Italian tire maker Pirelli, which paid $113,500 a year to Podesta while the Podesta Group was concurrently representing French tire manufacturer Michelin.  

    Neither Michelin nor its Podesta Group lobbyists knew about Mr. Podesta’s side deal, according to the people involved.

    • SunTrust bank severed ties with the Podesta Group when they discovered that they were doing work for a U.S. subsidiary of a sanctioned Russian bank – presumably Russia’s Kremlin-owned Sberbank, which paid the Podesta group $170,000 over a 6 month period through September 2016 to lobby against 2014 economic sanctions by the Obama administration.

    SunTrust Banks Inc. sought to sever ties with the firm over the sanctioned Russian bank. The Podesta Group’s chief executive sent an exasperated email to a colleague. “Tony thinks these types of clients have no repercussions on the firm,” she said, but “this should really provide evidence that we have to take the clients we bring on seriously.”

    Following Mrs. Clinton’s defeat that November, the Podesta Group cut bonuses and commissions.

    • One day after US prosecutors announced the indictments of Manafort and Gates, “an official with the firm’s new bank, Chain Bridge Bank, demanded $655,000 in cash or collateral within 24 hours – or it would cut the firm’s credit line.“

    Mr. Trump, who occasionally pointed an unwelcome spotlight on the firm, tweeted that day: “The biggest story yesterday, the one that has the Dems in a dither, is Podesta running from his firm.” –WSJ

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    • Podesta’s purchases of artwork behind his wife’s back reportedly caused Heather Podesta to file for divorce. Tony kept most of his art collection, while Heather received nearly $5 million in retirement savings, homes in Washington and Manhattan, and $4 million paid quarterly over five years. 

    • The day after Tony’s Podesta’s expensive divorce was finalized, he told employees the firm could make more money by abandoning their liberal ethos and representing big tobacco and the NRA – leading to one lobbyist quitting, costing the firm over $2 million in annual revenue. 
    • Clients were spooked as Special Counsel Robert Mueller began closing in on associate Paul Manafort. Recall the Podesta Group decided (coincidentally) to retroactively file as a foreign agent for their work with the Manafort’s Pro-Russia Centre for a Modern Ukraine campaign – tied to former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, shortly before Manafort’s indictment. The Podesta Group made $1.2 million as part of that effort. 

    Before dawn on Monday Oct. 23, 2017, NBC News reported that Mr. Mueller was preparing to indict Mr. Manafort and implicate Mr. Podesta regarding the Ukraine work. The phones started ringing: Clients wanted to know what was going on. The firm’s bank wanted to discuss its account.

    The following night, Mr. Podesta threw himself a birthday party, serving hundreds of guests pizza from a brick-oven stove in his backyard in Kalorama. –WSJ

    • The unraveling was swift. As clients such as Wells Fargo, Wal Mart and Oracle Corp. bailed on the Podesta Group, they death-spiraled into default – as Tony refused to pledge his giant art collection against firm obligations. 

    With clients leaving, the Podesta Group had no money. Rent was due the next day. One idea was to use Mr. Podesta’s art collection as collateral for a loan, but he refused.

    “At that time, it was inadvisable to provide additional guarantees as an individual for the obligations of the corporation,” the Podesta Group’s spokeswoman said.

    …

    The Podesta Group’s chief financial officer sent Mr. Podesta a 7:23 p.m. email: “If we don’t have collateral pledged prior to 5pm tomorrow, we will be in default.” If the firm went into default, the CFO wrote, “we will not be able to meet our rent, your art payments, ad campaigns, and most importantly payroll.”

    Mr. Podesta responded: “need list of next 5 layoffs,” among other questions. The next day, he left for an art show in Turin, Italy. The bank’s deadline passed.

    …

    On Friday, the firm’s CFO quit. That night, a senior manager sent an email to Mr. Podesta, still in Italy, saying the bank had frozen the firm’s funds.

    “This means that we have no way to pay employees,” the email said. “If we do not alert employees immediately that we have no way to pay them for their work, the firm is committing fraud.” –WSJ

    Meanwhile, in October 2017 a “long time” former Podesta Group executive with “direct personal knowledge” detailed several other aspects of life inside Tony Podesta’s lobbying machine to Tucker Carlson. Some bombshell claims and quotes from the former employee:

    • In 2013, John Podesta allegedly recommended that Tony hire David Adams, Hillary Clinton’s chief adviser at the State Department, giving them a “direct liaison” between the group’s Russian clients and Hillary Clinton’s State Department
    • In late 2013 or early 2014, Tony Podesta and a representative for the Clinton Foundation reportedly met to discuss how to help Uranium One – the Russian owned company that controls 20 percent of American Uranium Production – and whose board members gave over $100 million to the Clinton Foundation.
    • “Tony Podesta was basically part of the Clinton Foundation.”
    • Believing she would win the 2016 election, Russia considered the Podesta Group’s connection to Hillary highly valuable.

    Separately, White House visitor logs revealed that Tony Podesta visited the White House at least 114 times during the Obama administration, and was said to have had “special access” to the administration through his brother, John Podesta, while lobbying for various pro-Kremlin interests.

    • Podesta Group was a nebulous organization with no board oversight and all financial decisions made by Tony Podesta. Carlson’s source said payments and kickbacks could be hard for investigators to trace, describing it as a “highly secret treasure trove.” One employee’s only official job was to manage Tony Podesta’s art collection, which could be used to conceal financial transactions.

    The Podesta group also earned $180,000 lobbying for Russian-owned mining company Uranium One during the same period that the Clinton Foundation was receiving millions from individuals connected to the U1 transaction.

    The WSJ must have inadvertently left out another factor which may have contributed to Podesta Group clients heading for the hills; a spotlight on Tony Podesta’s strange artwork which began swirling around the internet during the emergence of the discredited “pizzagate” theory.

    Internet sleuths pointed to a June, 2015 issue of “Washington Life” magazine featuring some of Tony Podesta’s artwork, along with a 2004 Washington Post article entitled Married, With Art – describing how shocked Podesta guests stumbled across pictures of naked teenagers during a house tour. 

    “At political events, there’s an inevitable awkwardness,” former Clinton administration official Sally Katzen

    Folks attending a house tour in the Lake Barcroft neighborhood in Falls Church earlier this year got an eyeful when they walked into a bedroom at the Podesta residence hung with multiple color pictures by Katy Grannan, a photographer known for documentary-style pictures of naked teenagers in their parents’ suburban homes. “They were horrified,” Heather recalls, a grin spreading across her face. –WaPo

    One piece of art which sparked curiosity is an illustration of a girl against a green background:

    Photo: Joseph Allen, Washington Life Magazine

    As well as more pictures of children laying around:

    …from an artist who creates pictures of children in grotesque circumstances:

    Then there’s artist Louise Bourgeois’ “Arch of Hysteria” in Podesta’s Falls Church home – a headless body contorted into a “tetanus arch” – which also happens to be a pose Jeffrey Dahmer posed at least one victim. Comet Ping Pong pizza shop owner James Alefantis – another figure in the unproven “pizzagate” controversy, thought it was pretty cool while he was hanging out at Podesta’s place.

    Here’s one of Podesta’s many other staircases in 2014:

    Tony also loaned out a wax statue entitled “Dismembered” to the DC College of Arts and Sciences in 2011, which appears to depict a vivisected child:

    At the end of the day, disturbing art or not – Hillary Clinton’s loss meant that Tony Podesta’s ability to provide clients access to the White House had disappeared for at least four more years. Indeed, the Podesta Group lost its most valuable commodity on the night of November 8, 2016 – and the rest is history.

  • The Dollar's 70-Year Dominance Slowly Coming To An End

    Authored by Alex Deluce via GoldTelegraph.com,

    The US dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since 1971, but that might change soon.

    Republican Congressman Alex Mooney is proposing that the US once again place value on the dollar by backing it with physical gold. The problem is, the Federal Reserve has been printing money with the abandon of a drunken copy machine, and the 147.3 million ounces of gold being held in Ft. Knox may not be enough to cover the out-of-control fiat currency currently in circulation.

    According to Alex Mooney’s bill, the dollar has decreased 30 percent in purchasing power since 2000. It has lost 96 percent of its value since 1913. On an average, the US is devalued by 50 percent every generation.

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    If the gold standard were to be reinstated, control of the dollar would revert to free market forces instead of the whim of the Federal Reserve. It would mean that each dollar would have its equivalent in gold, as it did prior to 1913. At that time, the US economy grew at a robust annual rate of 4 percent compared to an average annual growth of 2 percent since 2000.

    Officially, the US has 8,133.5 tons of gold in reserves, although the government won’t confirm that number. No one is permitted inside the various vaults to verify. Even the purity of the available gold bars is in question, as many may not conform to industry standards. As other countries contemplate the return to the gold standard, unless the US catches up, the dollar will lose its dominance as the world reserve currency.

    China launched its oil futures-backed Petro-Yuan in March.

    The oil industry has revolved around the petrodollar since the 1970s. It is expected that the Petro-Yuan will take up to $800 billion worth of trade from the petrodollar. Currently, the petrodollar secures global demand for the dollar. For the US, the petrodollar translates into tremendous purchasing power. China’s Petro-Yuan may change all that.

    China is the largest crude oil importer in the world, and that may give it enough leverage to unseat the US dollar when it begins to pay Saudi Arabia for its crude in Petro-Yuan. This provides an opportunity for oil exporters to bypass the current powerful petrodollar arrangement. If this happens, it could mean serious trouble for the US dollar. The value of the dollar is heavily dependent upon US oil imports. If oil exporters become dependent on the Petro-Yuan instead of the petrodollar, it could be the death blow for the dollar. In addition to the Petro-Yuan, China has been quietly building up its gold reserves for years and may have plans to ultimately back the yuan with gold.

    President Trump has been discussing tariffs on Chinese imports while attempting to persuade Beijing not to use its crude oil contracts as a means of trade. China is unlikely to agree to this, thus opening the possibility of a nasty trade war between the two countries.

    China has much to lose in a trade war. Its economy is overly dependent on exports to the US. Also, the Petro-Yuan is, as yet, an unknown quantity, while the petrodollar has been securely established for decades. In addition, the US is less dependent on oil than China, as it is able to produce more oil for its own needs. While China’s oil futures are a wakeup call to the US, they are still a dice toss.

    Additionally, Germany is another country that is rediscovering the value of gold. The Deutsche Bundesbank has recently recalled $28 billion worth of gold previously stored in New York and Paris back to Frankfurt.

    The National Bank of Hungary has called back 100,000 ounces of gold back to its Budapest reserves in an effort to strengthen its own market. Other central banks have followed suit. There is a global interest in keeping gold reserves close to home in the event of upheaval in the geopolitical situation.

    At this point, it is unknown whether Congressman Mooney’s bill to reinstate the gold standard will pass. What is certain is that the global interest in gold continues to take off. In bettor’s terms, gold is the last ace in the hole for global currency stability.

  • Police Foil Murder-For-Hire Plot After Woman Paid $10K In Bitcoin Over The Dark Web

    And just like that, yet another murder-for-hire plot involving bitcoin has been foiled.

    A Chicago TV  station is reporting that a nurse from the city’s northwest suburbs named Tina Jones has been charged with solicitation of murder-for-hire after trying to use the dark web to hire a company to murder the wife of a man she had an affair with.

    Jones appeared in bond court Wednesday morning where a judge set her bond at $250,000. On April 12, Woodridge, Ill. police received a tip that a woman was the subject of a murder-for-hire plot. Police said that in January 2018, Jones paid the dark web company $10,000 via bitcoin to have a woman murdered.

    Jones

    Jones turned herself in after a warrant was issued.

    Jones is scheduled to appear in court on May 15. If convicted, she faces a minimum sentence of 20 years in prison.

    Prosecutors said Jones gave very specific orders.

    “This woman not only paid over $10,000, but she left specific instructions on the website as to when the woman’s husband would be at work, so they would know when this woman would be alone,” Berlin said. “She left instructions not to hurt the husband and also to make it look like it was an accident.”

    Of course, longtime followers of the pioneering cryptocurrency will remember that the founder of the Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht received his life without parole sentence largely because he “hired” what turned out to be an undercover federal agent to carry out a hit on an associate Ulbricht had suspected of turning on him.

  • The World's First Trillionaire Will Be A Space Miner

    Authored by Michael Kern via SafeHaven.com,

    Famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and Goldman Sachs share a common belief: The next trillion-dollar industry will be in the mining sector – in outer space.  

    As Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it:

    “The first trillionaire there will ever be is the person who exploits the natural resources on asteroids. There’s this vast universe of limitless energy and limitless resources. I look at wars fought over access to resources. That could be a thing of the past, once space becomes our backyard.”

    While the renowned astrophysicist sees the potential for peace, Goldman Sachs sees the radical arrival of a trillion-dollar mining industry in the 21st Century.

    It may sound like a long-term gamble, but Goldman has been eyeing improvements in technology and the trends toward lowers costs for manufacturing spacecraft.

    A year ago, Goldman noted in a 98-page report:

    “While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower. Prospecting probes can likely be built for tens of millions of dollars each and Caltech has suggested an asteroid-grabbing spacecraft could cost $2.6bn.”

    So, science fiction is becoming the narrative of reality, and radical opinions are starting to seem rather sober.

    All the more because the whole idea is being given a major boost in Luxembourg of all places.

    Asteroid mining is being led by private sector interests that are dead set on making money in outer space.

    Two of the leading companies formed with this in mind are California-based Deep Space Industries and Washington-based Planetary Resources. Both have been operating for several years, and both plan on profiting from asteroid mining.

    But the tiny European country of Luxembourg is hoping to become the hub of cosmic mining—a tax haven banking center-turned-asteroid-exploiter. So it’s no mystery why Deep Space Industries, for instance, has offices both in Luxembourg as well and a partnership with the government of Luxembourg.

    Luxembourg is home to a few communication satellite companies and has a similar asteroid mining law to the U.S. law, which makes the small nation an attractive alternative to the U.S. market. This European country sees massive opportunity and plans to be way ahead of the game.

    “Our goal is to put into place an overall framework for the exploration and commercial use of resources from ‘celestial bodies’ such as asteroids, or from the moon,” said Etienne Schneider, Luxembourg’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Economy.

    Once a famous steel producer, an experienced commercial satellite hub, and now famed for private banking and low-tax base, Luxembourg’s mining and financial backgrounds make it a prime candidate for the race to cosmic natural resources.

    The first European private satellite operator, Société Européenne des Satellites, was launched in 1985 and today it’s the second-biggest commercial satellite operator in the world.

    Luxembourg started working on an asteroid mining bill since 2016 that came into force last year, giving companies ownership over whatever, they extract from celestial bodies. This law is very similar to Obama’s law signed in 2015, which also gives mining companies the right to keep their cosmic loot.

    Both laws also take advantage of a loophole in the United Nation’s Outer Space Treaty, which states that nations can’t claim and occupy the moon and other celestial bodies—but it doesn’t say anything about what’s extracted from them.  

    There won’t be any ownership of asteroids, either.

    The only difference between these laws is that in the case of Luxembourg, companies don’t have to be based in the country in order to enjoy protection. An office will suffice.

    Luxembourg established the Space Resources initiative in 2016 and earmarked $223 million of its national space budget to provide early-stage funding and grants to companies working toward space mining.

    Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources are already working closely with Luxembourg’s government, which contributed an undisclosed amount of R&D funding to Deep Space Industries and struck a deal with Planetary Resources in 2016 for a $28 million investment in exchange for undisclosed equity in the company.

    While there may be limitless natural resources from asteroid mining, as deGrasse Tyson notes, the first commercial commodity is likely to be precious water.

    It may be decades before anyone actually starts ‘fracking’ an asteroid and delivering new natural resources, but when it happens, Luxembourg will have secured its place on the space map as a definitive hub.

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Apr 19

Today’s News 19th April 2018

  • The Global Smartphone Boom Has Peaked, IMF Warns

    As it turns out, Apple executives aren’t the only ones who should be worried about slowing smartphone sales: The trend has the potential to hammer global economic growth – especially in Asia, where the rise of mobile technology has created increasingly complex supply chains.

    The IMF highlights this dangerous trend in its latest World Economic Outlook (albeit buried on page 34 of the report’s first chapter). In it, researchers lead with a stunning statistic. In 2017, global smartphone sales reached 1.5 billion units – that’s one smartphone for every fifth person on the planet.

    IMF

    Taken together, smartphone production and sales contributed $3.6 trillion (4.5%) to the global economy in 2017. Across Asia, sales of smartphones and smartphone components are accounting for an increasing share of total exports. Furthermore, they account for one-sixth of the growth in global trade.

    In 2017, China exported $128 billion worth of smartphones to the rest of the world, equivalent to 5.7 percent of its total exports. In Korea (the main supplier of smartphone components) semiconductor exports alone accounted for 17.1 percent of total exports. Similarly, components for smartphone production at the peak (October 2017) accounted for more than one-third of exports from Taiwan Province of China, 17.4 percent from Malaysia, and 15.9 percent from Singapore

    However, these data mask a troubling trend: Smartphones’ rising contribution to global GDP was last year largely driven by higher prices per unit. Looking past this, the number of units sold actually shrunk for the first time ever.

    This growth was driven mainly by an increase in value added per unit, rather than units sold, which declined for the first time on record. As a result, the average sale price of an iPhone increased from $618 in 2016 to $798 in 2017, according to Apple Inc. quarterly financial statements. In the five main Asian economies involved in the tech cycle (China, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan Province of China), total exports grew by 6.7 percent in 2017. Even though tech exports accounted for less than 10 percent of total exports in the region, smartphone-related exports contributed about one-third the growth rate of total exports.

    That’s because, as the IMF explains, demand for smartphones is highly cyclical and dependent on release dates of new phones. This new cycle differs from tech growth cycles of years’ past, which were mostly driven by personal computers.

    Two

    This new cycle unfurls in two phases, and is heavily dependent on the release of new models of the Apple iPhone:

    Apple Inc.’s iPhone releases are the key determinant of the new tech cycle. Reflecting booming global demand, iPhone sales surged from 35.1 million units in the first quarter of 2012 to 78.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2016 (Figure 1.1.2). While a clear quarterly pattern is emerging—in which second- and third-quarter sales are usually weaker, reflecting the expectations of another release in the fourth quarter— the amplitude of this quarterly pattern has only really been established since the release of the iPhone 6/6 Plus in September 2014. Moreover, there are clear spillovers from the fourth quarter of the previous year onto the first quarter of the following year, ahead of the Lunar New Year in China.

    The new tech cycle can be subdivided into two components. The first is the prerelease cycle, which comprises the export of all components from several Asian countries to China—the final producer of most smartphones. The second is the postrelease cycle, with shipments of smartphones from China to the rest of the world. Both pre- and postrelease cycles have a strong impact on growth and trade patterns in Asia and beyond.

    Looking more closely, the IMF says that global sales of smartphones might actually have plateaued in late 2015, and the market is showing warning signs of becoming over saturated.

    Global sales of smartphones may have plateaued in late 2015. By decomposing the cycle from trend for Chinese exports of smartphones, regression results show that the trend is nonlinear and may have reached its peak in September 2015, suggesting that future global demand for smartphones may grow more slowly (driven more by replacement demand than new acquisitions). This is confirmed by updated regression results on Chinese export data up to December 2017 (see Figure 1.1.3). In fact, global shipments of smartphones declined in 2017 for the first time on record (IDC 2018).

    Fortunately for the Asian economies where a slowdown in smartphone sales might have the biggest impact, wearable devices, smart appliances and car computers are all seeing gains accelerate – meaning any slowdown in smartphone sales might be offset by increases in other tech products.

    Three

    In any event, the tech sector’s importance to Asia’s economy remains paramount – which is perhaps one reason why the Trump administration backed out of adding a plethora of consumer tech products to a list of Chinese goods that have been threatened with tariffs.

  • Will Armenia Be The Next Victim Of Western-Backed Regime Change?

    Authored by Frank Sellers via TheDuran.com,

    Well-meaning Armenians have no idea that their grievances are being played upon by international interests like a pawn on a global chess board…

    Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in all major cities across Armenia as the outgoing president, Serzh Sargsyan, is elected Prime Minister by the Parliament.

    The move is largely perceived as a power grab, as Sargsyan will largely retain the same powers that he held during his two terms in the Presidential capacity.

    This move takes place just after Armenia’s April 9th transition from a presidential system to that of a prime ministerial one.

    Western backed Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been heavily involved in post Soviet Armenia’s education system, community and charity works. These NGOs have been selling the public on the perception that Armenia’s economic woes are directly the result of their corrupt, Russia friendly government, as well as Russia itself.

    Hence, the concept that Sargsyan’s government has only made matters for the population worse is the grievance upon which much of the unrest hinges. With Sargsyan seen as being in bed with the Russians, and his further development of Armenia’s ties with Russia, these protests therefore possess a potentially disastrous outcome, both domestically, for the Armenians, and also geopolitically, as it threatens Russia’s position in the region.

    However, Armenia has been playing both sides of the fence in recent years, as it has additionally been moving closer to the European Union, signing itself to a Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement with the European bloc, attempting to deepen diplomacy and economic ties with the West, while simultaneously making commitments to Russia’s economic initiatives in the region. Russia gets a villainous wrap over the fact that Russia is playing both sides of the Nagorno Karabakh-Azerb conflict, as Russia is the benefactor of both players, the common perception, derived from the propaganda of these NGOs, is that Russia benefits by stoking the conflict.

    The situation, in effect, represents a powder keg scenario, with all the elements in place to provoke the necessary popular discontent that would play into an attempt at regime change.

    And, indeed, this situation has all the markings of a color revolution, as the ring leader for this movement, Nikol Pashinyan, is already calling it a “velvet revolution”, an allusion to the regime change that took place in Czechoslovakia in 1989.

    Pashinyan has called upon protesters to obstruct roadways and prevent the opening of governmental offices, and has been so bold as to declare that the Armenian government “no longer holds legitimacy”, and that all government agencies and police personnel should only be obedient to “committees” appointed by his revolution.

    Keep in mind, however, that Sargsyan hasn’t, thus far, broken any law, nor violated the Armenian constitution, so, Pashinyan’s claim against Sargsyan’s legitimacy can only be viewed as a baseless instigation for further violence and an obstinate unwillingness to look for a middle ground scenario, or peaceful resolution to the situation at hand. An unwillingness to compromise satisfies one of the key factors that is commonly seen in many color revolutions.

    The typical manner in which Western backed color revolutions unfold is when a peaceful protest about legitimate grievances are hijacked to become the catalyst for a violent revolution. If we consider the EuroMaidan revolution that took place in 2014, a peaceful protest turned violent after the slaughter of the “heavenly hundred” by mystery snipers, killing police and protesters both, in order to help the conflict along to a point of no return to peace.

    To date, the situation on the streets of Yerevan seems to be going in a similar direction, as the protests have already turned semi violent, with police officers sustaining knife wounds. Note that this sort of behaviour is foreign to the Armenian psyche. Western provocateurs are often present to stir up mayhem when these tragedies occur. Pictured here are some of the assailants, observe also that the fellow on the left is not an Armenian.

    In January 2015, Sargsyan made Armenia a signatory to the Partnership for peace, linking military cooperation with both Russian forces within Armenia and NATO, and joined the Russian led Eurasian Economic Union.

    Within six months of these agreements involving Russia, the Armenian government faced popular riots aimed at regime change, with the uprising being dubbed “Electric Yerevan”, and the grievance being used to provoke the civil unrest being that of the proposed increase in electricity prices. Nikol Pashinyan, enjoyed the position of prominence in this movement, as well as in the one that is currently ongoing in Yerevan, and across Armenia today.

    Approximately one year later, riots again broke out about the arrest of an opposition leader, with the protest quickly turning violent, leading to a hostage situation and the shooting of two on duty police officers, which saw the Western media and the US Embassy in Armenia taking sides with the hostage takers. In the following video, produced by German media, we can see that some of these factors appear to fit the recipe for a Western backed color revolution, and the geopolitical factors involved.

    Many Armenians are of the persuasion that by changing their government and rejecting Russia as Armenia’s strategic partner, in favour of hopeful Western integration, Armenia will realize greater economic opportunity, and a vastly improved standard of living for the average Armenian.

    However, what does history show us about just what Western-backed regime changes bring to their victim nation? Let’s observe the economic situation in the Ukraine before and after the coup d’é-tat, as reported by Vesti:

    If we evaluate the results of the new government, they’re simply disastrous for the country. In the year before the coup, the GDP was estimated at $180 billion, in 2017 it’s expected to be half as much, $90 billion.

    The average salary in the country was more than halved, from $408 per month to $196 last year. The exchange rate of the hryvna fell three and a half times, from 8 to 27 per dollar. As the main high-tech enterprises are destroyed, the economy acquired a colonial structure.

    More and more raw materials are exported, being nearly 80% of exports. Half of this is agrarian. Total export volume fell by 57%. Foreign direct investment fell by at least four times, from 6 billion a year to one and a half. That’s practically nothing. And out of this nothing, however, most of the investment still comes from Russia.

    The national debt has been increasing all the time and has now become difficult to be paid back. It was 64 billion dollars which then became 80 billion. Many millions of its citizens have left the country in search of a better life. Some of them went to the West, some to Russia. The health system and the education system have deteriorated.

    The system of legal proceedings as well. Corporate raiding became the norm. Corruption increased. The country broke into pieces.

    Poroshenko and his team deceived everyone: the West, and Russia, and their people in terms of the country’s prospects, the practices of the new government, and the Minsk Agreements.

    An about-face with regards to Russia, and an adherence to the West, however, not only fails to present the economic outcome that many Armenians might hope for, but it presents a very real danger in the form of a greater escalation of conflict with its neighbor Azerbaijan, with regards to Nagorno Karabakh, the last such major conflict costed the lives of some 6,000 Armenians, and approximately 30,000 Azeris.

    Additionally, if these protests continue to move in a violent direction, and categorically seek regime change, if the government does not step down in favor of the opposition, but instead opts to call in the military to defend itself, then the situation could lead to a destabilization of the country. During such a period of chaos, it is not unthinkable that the Azerbs could seize the opportunity to launch a fresh campaign to take Nagorno Karabakh while Armenia’s government and forces are concerned with preserving order elsewhere.

    Such a renewed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan produces results that are simply unpredictable, concerning the geopolitical implications regarding the involvement of Russia and NATO, seeing as Armenia hosts Russian military bases, while Azerbaijan is host to a NATO base, but if the Armenians have broken off its relations with the Russians in the favor of the West, Russian involvement is left in a state of bewilderment, while the conflict devastates Russia’s economic and military perspective in the region. This, therefore, holds the possibility of being the next proxy war between Russia and the West.

    Therefore, these protests are exceedingly dangerous, not just for the region, but also relevant to the geopolitical balance of power between the east and west, due to the possibilities that could be unleashed if these protests escalate out of control. While protests against Sargsyan’s government isn’t anything new, considering the protests of recent years, the protests taking place at the present time differ from its predecessors in the sense that previous riots were confined only to Yerevan, whereas the current uprising is national in its scale, and therefore presents a much greater concern.

    Meanwhile, the well meaning populace of Armenia has no idea that their grievances are being played upon by international interests like a pawn on a global chess board.

  • Largest Chinese Naval Drill "In 600 Years" Begins: Live-Fire Exercise In Taiwan Strait

    Last week, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) assembled all of its most advanced warships, aircraft, and nuclear submarines for a massive show of force in the South China Sea. We explained, how the 3-day war drill from April 10 through 13 would be held in the waters south of China’s Hainan Island.

    Asia Times estimates some 10,000 People’s Liberation Army airmen, marines and sailors boarded 48 naval warships and 76 aircraft to show their loyalty and devotion to President Xi Jinping, who was greeted on a destroyer “by a resounding chorus of platitudes from soldiers.”

    Exclusive: Xi Jinping reviews PLAN Drill in the South China Sea

    State-run Chinese papers said the number of warships assembled “the largest of its kind in 600 years.” This is following the 14th-century fleet admiral Zheng He, whose large expeditions in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Western Asia, and East Africa — helped establish China’s power through expansion of the Maritime Silk Road during the Ming dynasty era.

    Which by the way, looks similar to President Xi Jinping 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road.

    Just a few days after Beijing’s historic show of force in the South China Sea. President Xi Jinping sent Taipei a clear message with warnings of ‘last-minute’ live-fire drills in the Taiwan Strait, said the South China Morning Post.

    “Beijing’s first live-fire exercise in the Taiwan Strait in three years, which is expected to include the first drill appearance in the area by aircraft carrier the Liaoning, appears to be a last-minute countermove to Washington’s attempt to play the Taiwan card.”

    The one-day naval drill will be conducted on Wednesday, which marks the first time the PLAN has held live-fire exercises in the strait since September 2015; also coincides with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen four-day trip to Swaziland.

    Song Zhongping, a military expert and TV commentator, told the South China Morning Post that Liaoning’s presence at the upcoming war drill in the Strait would send a forceful message to Taipei.

    “It’s likely the Liaoning carrier strike group will take part in the Taiwan Strait drill, presenting a direct and powerful deterrence to Tsai’s administration and the island’s independence-leaning forces,” he added.

    A source close to the PLAN told the South China Morning Post that the major objective of the Taiwan Strait exercise is to show Beijing’s support for Russia, which is facing a very high possibility of direct military confrontation with the United States in Syria.

    “[US President] Donald Trump’s warning of military attacks on Syria forces was a bit of a surprise for Beijing and Moscow,” the person said.

    “As Russia’s strategic partner, Beijing is trying to cause some well-timed and controlled trouble for the US, a drill in the Taiwan Strait being the most plausible option that will benefit both Xi and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.”

    Macau-based military analyst Antony Wong Dong, agreed with the South China Morning Post’s source, by saying: “Beijing is trying to give some relief to Russia from the unfolding disputes with the US over the Syria crisis.”

    However, both military analysts, proficient in Sino-US relations, maintained that the military drill was aimed directly at Taipei ahead of a visit by US national security adviser John Bolton to the American Institute in Taiwan.

    Earlier this month, the Trump administration cleared various American manufacturers for business to sell submarine technology to Taiwan, which deeply angered Beijing.

    “The live-fire drills would almost certainly be intended to be seen as a response to the Trump administration’s new initiatives over Taiwan,” Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, said.

    “It is probably intended more for Taipei than Washington as the military exercise cannot intimidate the US but can get Taipei to think of the security dilemma, which is that the more Taipei seeks to secure US support, the more Beijing will do to make Taipei feel less secure.”

    Ni Feng, director of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the parallel events of the Syrian crisis and the Taiwan Strait war drill is coincidental.

    “Beijing needs to send its warning to Taipei on time if Bolton wants to visit Taipei, which will obviously be a breakthrough [in the US-Taiwan relationship],” he said.

    Yun Sun, director of the China programme at the Stimson Centre in Washington, agreed with the other military analyst, stating the Trump administration is playing a dangerous game “using Taiwan as a potential bargaining chip with China.”

    “With Trump’s love for transactions and linking issues together, it is conceivable that he is using Taiwan as a potential bargaining chip with China,” she said.

    That move increases “the possibility of an armed conflict between the US and [mainland] China out of miscalculation; and it creates an illusion that Taiwan is up for negotiation”.

    “For many policy experts, US support for Taiwan is warranted, and should be independent from political or economic deals [between Washington and Beijing].”

    The threat of World War III has never been greater…

  • The Road To 2025 (Part 1) – Prepare For A Multi-Polar World

    Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

    If pressed to describe what I think the next several years will look like as concisely as possible, I’d simply provide the following quote, often misattributed to Lenin:

    “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

    There will be many such weeks from now until 2025, with the end result an emergence of a multi-polar world that will permanently unseat the unipolar U.S. imperial paradigm.

    Since World War 2, the U.S. has successfully sustained a position of global dominance unlike anything the world’s ever seen. Virtually each and every corner of the planet has been subject to inescapable and overwhelming American influence, both culturally and economically. This root of this power didn’t just emerge from GDP strength and the USD, but from Hollywood, popular music and tv shows. The impact of the U.S. empire on the planet over the past 70 years has been extraordinary but, like all things, it too shall pass. I believe this end will be realized by around 2025.

    When I say this sort of stuff people think I’m calling for the end of the world. I suppose that’s what it may feel like to many, because a paradigm change of this magnitude will indeed have monumental global implications.

    Yet the world will go on, it’ll just be very different place. That said, Americans should not see this as an apocalyptic thing. It’s not healthy or sustainable for one nation to dominate the planet in such a manner. Many of us like to think that a benevolent global empire led by philosopher kings is just fine, but the problem is this is utter fantasy. What happens in real life, to quote Lord Acton, is  that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

    This is precisely what’s happened in the U.S.

    The country’s been looted and pillaged with rapacious fervor in recent decades while a unaccountable class of people I refer to as top-tier predators operate at will with total impunity. The man on the street’s thrown in jail for the smallest offense, while financiers who destroyed the global economy with fraud retire comfortably to their mansions. The U.S. empire no longer benefits the average American, but instead systematically funnels all the spoils to a smaller and smaller segment of the population. Most of the world already sees it, and the average U.S. citizen is starting to see it as well. This is not good for the establishment.

    This is also why the U.S. status quo constantly lies to the public with its nonsense narrative that U.S. military action overseas is based on humanitarian concerns and a desire to spread democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, all significant U.S. military action overseas is driven by money and power. Humanitarian concerns play zero role. Not even a small role, zero.

    Caitlin Johnstone recently summarized what’s going with geopolitics perfectly with the following paragraph:

    The mass media narrative factory tries to make it about chemical weapons, about election meddling, about poisoned ex-spies, about humanitarian issues, but it has only ever been about expanding the power and influence of the oligarchs and allied intelligence/defense agencies which run the western empire. All the hostilities that we are seeing are nothing other than an extremely powerful conglomeration of forces poking and prodding noncompliant governments to coerce them into compliance before global power restructures itself into a multipolar world.

    The biggest problem for the U.S. establishment right now is people are no longer buying the narrative. They certainly aren’t buying it overseas, and even here in America, U.S. citizens are finally starting to see the “humanitarian bombings” for the shams they are. It’d be one thing if your average American was benefiting from U.S. empire, but they aren’t. Rather, the spoils are all going to a small handful of people from the top tier predator class, while life for tens of millions is characterized by dilapidated infrastructure, a completely broken healthcare system, continued unaccountable Wall Street looting, a decimation of of civil liberties, and an overall precarious economic existence that seems modeled off of the Hunger Games.

    The only people who don’t see how dysfunctional the U.S. empire is are the people running it. The U.S. establishment, which consists of a diverse assortment of elites from Wall Street, American intelligence agencies, mass media, Congress, the Federal Reserve, the military-industrial complex, etc., disagree on many things, but one thing they agree on completely is the U.S. empire — that it should not only be preserved, but expanded. The major problem for them is this isn’t 1995 anymore, they just haven’t got the memo yet.

    The U.S. establishment is either too busy making boatloads of money or playing keyboard warrior with other people’s lives to acknowledge what’s happening both here and abroad. A disconnected, greedy and unaccountable elite class filled with hubris and an insatiable hunger for power is a core ingredient in any imperial collapse, and this exists in America in droves at the moment. A reckoning is coming.

    Today’s piece focused on how the U.S. empire is no longer working for the average American citizen. Part 2 will focus on why it’s not working for the rest of the world either. 

    *  *  *

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  • Hong Kong Dollar Spikes Most In 3 Months As HKMA Chief Jawbones

    Having blown through almost US$7 billion in the last few days to rescue the Hong Kong Dollar from breaking the weaker-end of its peg-band, the HKD is jumping (most in 3 months) following comments that HKMA doesn’t see “large-scale shorting” but more arbitrage activities.

    In a press briefing, Hong Kong Monetary Authority Deputy Chief Executive Howard Lee said FX transactions are in line with expectations and sees no unusual HKD shorting activity. As Bloomberg notes, Lee said:

    • A lot of outflows are arbitrage activities, but probably of asset transfers.

    • HKD purchases operation is smooth and sound.

    • HKMA will carefully handle if unusual activity is seen.

    • HKD interbank rates are slowly increasing and HKMA expects this to continue.

    • Market confidence is strong on linked exchange system and the HKMA.

    • Exchange fund bills will be available for bank funding when needed.

    And the local currency jumped most since Jan 17th…

    As a reminder, Lee is the same gentlemen that warned Hong Kong citizens to “stay calm” as ATMs ran dry and the currency devalued.

    While this 0.07% spike is cause for some celebration at the HKMA, we note that – just as we have seen in the last few days – the strength is being sold into already…

     

    As while the LIBOR-HIBOR arb has improved (with cost of funds surging in Hong Kong), the spread of over 100bps remains a considerable draw for carry-traders…

    As a reminder, this story is not over yet, as this is an arbitrage, where traders take advantage of differences in prices, selling a low-yielding product (the Hong Kong dollar) to buy a high-yielding product (the US dollar). In this case, the price difference is between the local borrowing cost known as the Hong Kong interbank offered rate (Hibor) and the US borrowing cost known as the Libor.

    Simply put, traders are borrowing against the low Hibor, selling the Hong Kong dollar to buy the US currency for investments in high-yielding US assets. The difference between the two is widest since 2008.

    As more traders pile on to the carry, more pressure is placed on the Hong Kong dollar, causing it to weaken further against the US currency… and The Fed’s plan to hike rates (as many as four times – which just hit a cycle high) will do nothing to help ease the situation – meaning any dollars sold in defense of the weaker HKD will be battling global carry trade flows driven by The Fed’s tightening.

  • The Syrian Conflict Is A Distraction From A Secret War

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

    Back in March 2010 I published an article titled ‘Will Globalists Trigger Yet Another World War?’under the pen name Giordano Bruno describing what I felt would be the most effective triggers for a new global conflict. In that article I pointed to Syria as the primary powder keg, followed in close second by Iran and Yemen. This was written well before the Syrian civil war was engineered by establishment interests. I focused on potential false flags that could be used as a rationale by the U.S. or Israel to invade the region, thereby giving Russia and China reason to retaliate, for the most part economically. Ultimately, this scenario would play out perfectly as a cover for the deliberate collapse of the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency.

    In August 2012 I reiterated my concerns in an article titled Syria And Iran Dominoes Lead To World War, right after the Syrian civil war began to gain momentum.

    Needless to say, I have not changed my general thesis since those days; however, I would like to touch upon certain factors now that the dangers I examined in those articles are mostly coming to pass in 2018.

    First, no hard evidence has been produced by western intelligence agencies to support the claim that Bashar Al Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. None. Therefore, there is no basis for the latest missile attacks on the regime. This same exact false flag tactic was attempted under the Obama administration to draw the U.S. people into open war in Syria, and it failed. Now the chemical weapon card is being played again, this time with a “conservative” president. The establishment must be hoping that Republicans will find excitement in becoming the war party so long after the Bush years.

    As I queried the last time a chemical false flag was attempted, what exactly does Assad have to gain by initiating a chemical attack against innocent civilians when he has the tactical momentum and upper hand in the civil war?  The answer is nothing.  The only people that have anything to gain by asserting such an attack, either real or fabricated, are people seeking to create chaos for their own benefit.

    The insinuation of neocon warmonger John Bolton into the Trump cabinet suggests that the neocons are very much back in charge and that ongoing war is guaranteed. At this late stage in the game, it is unlikely that our government or any other government involved in the Syrian theater even cares to explain its actions. When establishment criminals no longer care if their criminality is transparent to the public, THEN it is time for a large scale societal collapse.

    Second, each successive Trump involved theater, from the trade tariffs to international war tensions, has become progressively more dramatic, and I believe this is meant to hide the effects of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet cuts and interest rate hikes. The real and secret war being waged is not against Syria or Syria’s allies, but against the American people and our economic stability.

    In January of this year, I warned that central banks were preparing to enter into an accelerating process to deflate the massive market bubbles they created to prop up our fiscal system over the past several years. That process is indeed continuing, and each successive rate hike and balance sheet cut will act in a cumulative fashion. Meaning, central bankers are treating the global economy like an oversized Jenga tower, pulling blocks here and there until the system topples completely from lack of stability.

    This latest event in Syria is yet another grand gesture of illusion, designed to provide cover for the banking cabal as they pull the plug on financial life support. It also is timed rather conveniently for the Fed’s next policy meeting on May 1-2. The meeting is likely to include yet another interest rate hike as well as a large reduction in the balance sheet, resulting in another sizable plunge in stocks. All negative moves in our manipulated markets will now be blamed on Trump administration activities as well as blamed on trade retaliations by eastern nations. The mainstream media will no longer discuss the reality that central banks are the true cause behind a systemic breakdown.

    Third, the current pattern of events suggest there will be a joint economic retaliation by Russia and China. China has publicly admonished the U.S. government for its strike in Syria, and this is merely added to the increasing tensions over trade tariffs by Trump. Again, this is a perfect opportunity to undermine the U.S. economy, primarily through China and Russia initiating a dump of the dollar as the world reserve currency.

    The dump of the dollar has already begun in a semi-covert fashion. China’s currency has been inducted into the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights basket system, and China has also launched the first international oil exchange that does not use the dollar as the petro-currency. What many people are ignoring is the fact that the shift away from the dollar is being championed and helped along by the globalists at the IMF itself.

    An impending change in the global monetary framework is often referred to as the great “global economic reset” by IMF members like Christine Lagarde. This change will be facilitated by central banks as they sabotage their respective national economies through the creation and destruction of market bubbles. Ultimately, it will not be the Chinese Yuan that replaces the dollar as world reserve currency, but the SDR basket system, controlled by the IMF.

    The question of how this can be done by the globalists without an unprecedented liquidity crisis often comes up. I’m not so sure they care if there is a liquidity crisis, at least for a short time. Yes, the U.S. dollar has some of the most liquid markets in the world, but it is wrong to assume the globalists will not sacrifice those markets in order to force the public into accepting one world centralization of monetary administration (the biggest and most important step in establishing global government).

    People who argue that the dollar will never be demolished by the globalists cling to the false notion that there is no liquidity replacement for the dollar. In reality, there is a replacement — cyrptocurrencies and blockchain technology.

    The IMF has recently applauded blockchain systems and crypto as a potential rejuvenating force in international money transactions. Far from being opposed to cryptocurrencies, global elitists have been piling into them with praise and with investment dollars.

    The global economic reset is not about East versus West. It is not about trade wars and nationalism. No, the global reset is about banker centralization of assets and consolidation of power. Beyond that, it is about the public ACCEPTING the reset as necessary and “good” for society. Globalists want us to beg for their rule. When one understands this simple truth, all the current events and disasters of our era begin to make sense. Crisis is the quickest path to complacency and tyranny.

    The Syrian quagmire is a path to engineered and guided calamity.  Its effects will continue to leach into the economic world as an international excuse for a trade war tit-for-tat.  Syria is a smoke and mirrors game.

    The true war, a secret war, is being fought between liberty champions and lying globalists. For now it remains a cold war, a battle of principles and facts versus disinformation and fear. One day this war will become a hot one. Until that time, distractions will assail the public like a hailstorm. My hope is that we can educate enough people to see through the fog of this hidden war; enough people to come out the other side and change things for the better.

    *  *  *

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  • Warsh, Druckenmiller Buy "Basis" – The Central-Bank-Inspired "Stable" Cryptocurrency

    Three Princeton grads just raised $133 million from some of Wall Street and Silicon Valley’s biggest investors for a cryptocurrency that is ‘boring by design’…

    On Wednesday, the New Jersey-based cryptocurrency startup ‘Basis’ announced it had raised $133 million in a round backed by venture capital firms including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Bain Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sky Capital.

    Stanley Druckenmiller, the billionaire hedge fund manager, and Kevin Warsh, the former governor of the U.S. Federal Reserve, also bought in.

    Basis co-founder and CEO Nader Al-Naji writes:

    “…we are building a cryptocurrency with an algorithmic central bank that we believe will make cryptocurrency stable and usable around the world.

    we believe the price volatility of cryptocurrencies is one of their biggest barriers to widespread adoption. Unlike the currencies we use today, most cryptocurrencies do not have a mechanism to keep purchasing power stable. This means that sporadic swings in demand can cause huge changes in price.

    This is bad. Imagine you’re paid a salary of 1 Bitcoin per month. If the price of Bitcoin drops, you might not be able to make rent. If it rises, your employer won’t be able to afford your salary. It’s simply not a reliable means of payment.

    A currency needs to be stable in order for people to use it. Central banks apply monetary policy to mitigate currency volatility. Until now, there’s been no way to create a cryptocurrency with comparable benefits. And no way for cryptocurrencies to become true currencies.”

    And so that is the approach that ‘Basis’ takes, attempting to keep prices stable by algorithmically adjusting supply… “like a central bank.” (White Paper here)

    “When demand is rising, the blockchain will create more Basis. The expanded supply is designed to bring the Basis price back down.

    When demand is falling, the blockchain will buy back Basis. The contracted supply is designed to restore Basis price.

    The Basis protocol is designed to expand and contract supply similarly to the way central banks buy and sell fiscal debt to stabilize purchasing power. For this reason, we refer to Basis as having an algorithmic central bank.”

    Basis isn’t the only cryptocurrency startup that’s hoping to create a stable token that can be used to buy things – As BI reports, the controversial Tether, for example, bases its value on the US dollar, intended to keep the price steady. However, Basis believes that its focus on the developing world will help make it a key part of the financial system.

    But, as Bloomberg reports, Basis’s approach has drawn skepticism.

    Preston Byrne, a blockchain consultant, described the project, formerly known as Basecoin, as “the worst idea in cryptocurrency.”

    He argues that the startup over-promises on the potential and its implementation has little in common with a central bank.

    Of course, all these ‘elite’ investors in ‘Basis’ are hoping to make a quick (stable) buck just like all the unlucky punters in the latest Crypto startup – SaveDroid – whose investors are wondering whether the founder ran off with their money, the site has been hacked, or if it’s all part of an elaborate joke.

    As Bloomberg reports, a South Park meme with big, block letters saying “And It’s Gone,” was the only thing on the company’s website on Wednesday.

     

    While some investors held out hope that this was an elaborate (unfunny) joke… or that the website had been hacked, the founder, Yassin Hankir, tweeted a photo of himself at an airport, and then holding a beer on the beach, saying “Thanks guys! Over and Out…”

  • Social Media Now Being Used By Police And Intelligence Agencies To Collect Biometrics

    Authored by Nicholas West via ActivistPost.com,

    Amid the ongoing Facebook/Cambridge Analytica debacle over their general surveillance and misuse of users’ private data, there is an emerging trend that is infinitely more disturbing.

    The first story popped up in the UK yesterday where police admitted to using a photo sent through WhatsApp to cull fingerprints for evidence that successfully led to the conviction of 11 individuals for drug crimes.

    The story further revealed that this was not just a special-use case; apparently it is a technique that has been developed specifically to use the vast amount of public photos available to extract evidence from images that have been posted or transmitted online.

    As reported by Dawn Luger for The Daily Sheeple, this new technique is being rolled out and law enforcement is calling it “groundbreaking,” as it can pull information from even partial photos:

    It all started with a drug bust. The bust resulted in the police getting hold of a phone that had a WhatsApp message and image of ecstasy pills in a person’s palm. The message read: “For sale – Skype and Ikea-branded ecstasy pills…are you interested?”

    The phone was sent to South Wales Police where the photo showing the middle and bottom portion of a pinky was enhanced.

    […]

    “Despite being provided with only a very small section of the fingerprint which was visible in the photograph, the team were able to successfully identify the individual,” said Dave Thomas, forensic operations manager at the Scientific Support Unit.

    No specifics were actually given by the police department about this “pioneering fingerprint technique,” but it is quite clear that this is a tool they are ready and willing to use.

    Meanwhile, intrusions from Facebook are compounding in the wake of a massive lawsuit sparked by revelations that Facebook appears to be using facial recognition information for much more than just tagging people in your private social circle. The multi-billion dollar lawsuit was just given the go-ahead by an Illinois judge and illustrates the scope of what Facebook retains about people, how they are willing to distribute it, and the lack of safeguards against outside violations:

    The class of users approved by Donato dates back to June 2011, when Facebook had an Illinois user base of more than 6 million people, according to lawyers for the plaintiffs. “Although many individuals may not have had enough tagged photos to generate a face template in Facebook’s database, in January 2011 (i.e., before Facebook implemented tag suggestions for all users) the average user was tagged in 53 photos, far more than the 10 needed to generate a face template,” according to a December court filing.

    Privacy advocates have said the billions of images Facebook is thought to be collecting could be even more valuable to identity thieves than the names, addresses, and credit card numbers now targeted by hackers. While those types of information are mutable — even Social Security numbers can be changed — biometric data for retinas, fingerprints, hands, face geometry and blood samples are unique identifiers.

    (Source)

    And yet, it’s not only hackers and social media companies that have found this data to be irresistible. According to a new report in Forbes, former military intelligence operatives are also creating their own databases from publicly available biometric information.

    Forbes identified an Israeli company named Verint that is comprised of ex-spies who have created a service called Face-Int based off of harvested online biometrics. Moreover, their data collection system is one that almost assuredly will spread (if it hasn’t already) as they “have long been vendors for the U.S. government, providing bleeding-edge spy tech to the NSA, the U.S. Navy and countless other intelligence and security agencies.”

    Of course, the stated focus of the company’s activities are to pursue terrorists – the catch-all justification to introduce new surveillance technologies that just so happen to inevitably trickle down to mundane law enforcement sooner rather than later, as the UK case above clearly illustrates. Credit should be given to Forbes for acknowledging the reality behind this propaganda, as their article states (emphasis added):

    Though Terrogence (now Verint – Ed.) is primarily focused on helping intelligence agencies and law enforcement fight terrorism online, LinkedIn profiles of current and former employees indicate it’s also involved in other, more political endeavours. 

    One ex-staffer, in describing her role as a Terrogence analyst, said she’d “conducted public perception management operations on behalf of foreign and domestic governmental clients,” and used “open source intelligence practices and social media engineering methods to investigate political and social groups.” She was not reachable at the time of publication.

    Naturally, since none of the issues surrounding the use of our private online data for law enforcement applications was ever fully disclosed prior to rollout, we are now saddled with a pervasive real-time surveillance apparatus that harvests our information without consent. Moreover, this public-private info-grid is rapidly evolving as courts scramble to define exactly what the violations are and if the individual retains any right to privacy and constitutional protections in the Digital Age.  We are clearly picking up steam down the slippery slope as we are being converted from human beings into digital algorithms where our entire existence is just one click away.

  • Iran To Unveil New Missile Next Week

    As President Donald Trump decides whether to reauthorize the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which according to Israel’s Channel 10, Trump could very well abandon the agreement on May 12, Iranian authorities are taking no chances as the invitation to war increases with the West.

    Authorities in the country have just announced their latest round of new deterrence systems of advanced ballistic missiles and helicopter gunships, expected to debut in an upcoming military parade later this week.

    Iranian Army Airborne Commander General Yousef Qorbani revealed on Monday that the Islamic Republic is planning to showcase a new short-range missile named ‘Shafaq, during the country’s military parades on April 18, which he added the missile is a complete upgrade of an earlier version — with much longer range.

    “The range of the missile has doubled to fly 8 to 12km farther compared with the previous version and given the regional threats that we are facing, they can be highly effective in combats in short-range combat zones,” General Qorbani said on Fars News Agency.

    The unveiling of these new deterrence systems could greatly complicate continuing “efforts by the Trump administration and European allies to solidify a range of fixes to the landmark Iran nuclear deal that would crack down on Iran’s ongoing ballistic missile program and research into nuclear arms,” said The Washington Free Beacon.

    General Qorbani added that the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran are planning to unveil an “aerial parade of the Airborne units’ helicopters,” which are specifically equipped with a variety of armament subsystems, including rockets and machine guns for the use of combat in proxy and guerilla warfares. The General also said the country’s helicopters had been outfitted with night vision-systems for night operations.

    “Our dear experts in the air industry have had a highly successful performance and have equipped our helicopters with night-vision systems,” General Qorbani said.

    “We have also become fully indigenized in the field of long-range missile systems. Turning ground-based missiles to air-based missiles and enjoying the best fire-and-forget missiles are among other achievements of the Army Airborne Unit,” he added.

    General Qorbani further said Iran is one of the most advanced states in the region in developing “helicopters with the capability of fighting electronic warfare, targeting guided missiles, interception of targets from a distance and using cruise missiles,” as quoted by Fars News Agency.

    As the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran are in the process of modernizing their military with new deterrence systems ahead of the Trump administration’s decision whether or not to abandon the nuclear agreement; we ask a straightforward question: Is ending the Iran deal an open invitation to war?

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Apr 18

Today’s News 18th April 2018

  • Tech Firms Promise To Fight Back Against Government Spying

    In an announcement ostensibly meant to put Russian and Chinese hackers on notice – but we imagine is truly intended to reassure wary foreign customers that American cloud computing firms wont’ turn their data over to the NSA – 31 tech titans from around the world (but mostly the US) have signed on to a set of principles stipulating that they will not help any government – including the US deep state – mount cyberattacks or cyberespionage against “innocent civilians and enterprises from anywhere,” the New York Times reported.

    The publication of these principles follows a first-of-its-kind joint condemnation on Monday from American and British officials that placed the blame for nefarious cyberactivity squarely on Russia’s shoulders.

    Here’s Reuters:

    The Cybersecurity Tech Accord, which vows to protect all customers from attacks regardless of geopolitical or criminal motive, follows a year that witnessed an unprecedented level of destructive cyber attacks, including the global WannaCry worm and the devastating NotPetya attack.

    The principles are intended to be the cornerstone of an eventual “Geneva Convention for the Internet” that would strictly limit how governments can conduct cyberespionage and cyberwarfare.

    On Monday, American and British officials issued a first-of-its-kind joint warning about years of cyberattacks emanating from Russia, aimed not only at businesses and utilities but, in some cases, individuals and small enterprises. The warning was only the latest in a series about Russian threats to elections and electoral systems.

    But thanks to some of the documents stolen by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the public understands that the US is extremely guilty of browbeating tech firms into cooperating with its intelligence agencies, according to the New York Times.

    Perhaps as important, none of the signers come from the countries viewed as most responsible for what Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, called in an interview “the devastating attacks of the past year.” Those came chiefly from Russia, North Korea, Iran and, to a lesser degree, China.

    ….

    The impetus for the effort came largely from Mr. Smith, who has been arguing for several years that the world needs a “digital Geneva Convention” that sets norms of behavior for cyberspace just as the Geneva Conventions set rules for the conduct of war in the physical world. Although there was some progress in setting basic norms of behavior in cyberspace through a United Nations-organized group of experts several years ago, the movement has since faltered.

    Mr. Smith said over the weekend that the first move needed to come from the American companies that often find themselves acting as the “first responders” when cyberattacks hit their customers. “This has become a much bigger problem, and I think what we have learned in the past few years is that we need to work together in much bigger ways,” Mr. Smith said in an interview. “We need to approach this in a principled way, and if we expect to get governments to do that, we have to start with some principles ourselves.”

    Microsoft played a central role in trying to extinguish the WannaCry attack last year that struck the British health care system and companies around the world. The Trump administration, along with several other Western governments, later blamed that attack on North Korea. Last summer the NotPetya attack struck Ukraine, crippling systems throughout the country. Iran is suspected in a recent attack on a Saudi petrochemical plant.

    Yet not all governments are likely to embrace the “Cybersecurity Tech Accord” in part because the principles it espouses can run headlong into their own, usually secret efforts to develop cyberweapons.

    According to Microsoft President Brad Smith, who led efforts to organize the alliance, several high-profile cyberattacks from 2017 demonstrated the need for the technology sector to “take a principled path toward more effective steps to work together and defend customers around the world,” per Reuters. Microsoft and – how’s this for irony? – Facebook are leading the project.

    While the accord promised to establish new formal and informal partnerships within the industry and with security researchers to share threats and coordinate vulnerability disclosures, several major US tech companies including Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Twitter didn’t sign on. And for those that did, Reuters notes that “it was not clear whether any companies would change their existing policies as a result of joining the accord.”

    With this in mind, will the CTA ensure that US tech firms will do everything in their power to rebuff not only hackers but intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA?

    Or is this essentially a marketing ploy for the US cloud-computing industry?

  • The Neocons' Real Plan For Syria Emerges From The Lack Of Rubble

    Authored by Tom Luongo,

    I told you over the weekend that Trump’s presidency was over.  As a practical matter it is.  His yielding to his ‘advisors’ on every foreign policy issue makes it clear that he can’t or won’t stand up to the relentless pressure to do what his instincts tell him.

    This morning’s article at the Deep State Washington Post paints a very clear picture of what the situation is.  The advisors whose loyalties are dubious run the show.  Their thinking has not evolved one whit from previous administrations.

    Remember what Russian President Vladimir Putin always says, “Presidents change. Policies do not.”

    Case in point they manipulated Trump into over-reacting to the Skripal poisoning by ousting 60 Russian diplomats, even though Trump clearly wanted to match Germany and France.

    The United States, they explained, would be ousting roughly the same number of Russians as its European allies — part of a coordinated move to punish Moscow for the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil.

    “We’ll match their numbers,” Trump instructed, according to a senior administration official. “We’re not taking the lead. We’re matching.”

    The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian officials — far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on.

    You can almost see the evil glee on the part of the WaPo writer and Trump’s staffers who misled him into signing an order they knew he disagreed with.

    And this is why Trump is not president currently.  This is not the first time he’s been backed into a bad decision by the nest of vipers in his administration.

    And he won’t be until he removes the worst people from his cabinet.  Unfortunately, the trend on that front is definitely not our friend.

    Tillerson out. Pompeo promoted.  McMaster out (who was awful), John Bolton in (who is worse).

    So, now that the WaPo is writing victory lap articles for the the Deep State in neutering Trump, let’s talk about where this is headed in regards to this weekend’s attack on Syria.

    Target: Iran

    I’ll get right to the point.  This attack was all about the long-game of taking down Iran.

    Israel is desperate to prevent Iran from remaining in Syria after the war is over. And with good reason.  That’s the prime motivation for their actions.  But, on top of that is the need or the desire to always go farther, to take more than they should and use U.S. assets to achieve those goals which are in no one’s best interests, including Israel’s.

    Because despite the rhetoric spewing forth from Lil’ Miss AIPAC, Nikki Haley, a failed state in Syria is not good for Israel.  A beaten and cowed Russia is not good for the world.  And yet, that is exactly the policy that wing of the Trump administration is pushing him to pursue.

    Now, if they can’t get that because Gen. James Mattis isn’t a moron, then the next best thing is to prolong the war in Syria for as long as possible.  Why?

    To bleed Iran white.  To fight a war it can’t afford and keep its best military units and commanders bound down in Syria and not have them return home to help maintain order.

    Events in April are happening quickly.  First, Iran bans the use of dollars internally.  And, predictably, the Iranian Riyal blows up versus the dollar.  Second, the U.S. pushes for much stricter sanctions on both Russia and Iran.

    Iranians can’t get dollars and are, again, being cut off from international trade as sanctions create even more uncertainty on the ground there.

    At the same time, President Rouhani’s economic reforms are, at best, slow to improve things.  This was the source of the protests that rocked the nation in December, which U.S. and Saudi NGOs tried to fan into a revolution.  Russia is finding it harder to move money around internationally and the U.S. is putting massive pressure on Europe not to do business with Iran.

    However, the Italians blocked even stricter sanctions on Iran, so the revolt in Europe is gaining strength.  And that’s going to become a bigger part of this narrative as 2018 barrels ahead.

    The goal, of course, is to foment an overthrow of the current Iranian government through external pressure.  And Iran’s support of Syria is a pressure point in that campaign now.

    The Empire Strikes Back

    The U.S. claims this strike was to end Assad’s future use of chemical weapons, which the Russians say they have irrefutable proof didn’t even occur this time.

    That’s the story being sold to what’s left of Trump’s base, the MAGA-drones who can’t accept that he’s not actually running the country despite his public persona to the contrary.

    By prolonging the war you bleed out an already bleeding Iranian economy and treasury.  This is why, I think, the U.S. is hell-bent on staying in Syria even though Assad has, for all intents and purposes, won.

    The strikes from this weekend were intended to do much more damage than they did.  The U.S. Military’s presser on Friday after the attack was purposeful disinformation.  They only admitted to attacking three sites, all of which were empty and obliterated.

    But what about the airstrikes on no less than four Syrian airfields, including Al-Shairat (again)?

    No mention of those.

    Because they didn’t succeed.

    Now, certainly salt this report to taste but there is a major kernel of truth uncovered by it.  The U.S. intended to knock out a major portion of the Syrian Air Force with this strike and failed spectacularly.

    Assad’s air force has been one of the most effective parts of the war against the insurgents in Syria.  They are doing what the U.S. leadership says is their goal in Syria, to end the threat of ISIS.

    So, it makes less than zero sense for them to then attack Syrian air fields to show Assad it will not accept his using chemical weapons in doing so.

    Something doesn’t add up.  And, of course, we’ve known this from the beginning, but now the Russians and Syrians are providing proof of these inconsistencies if only the American people will engage with them.

    If the U.S. didn’t do this to just knock out Syria’s CW capability then it must have had a much, much larger goal.

    And that goal is Iran.

    War Without End

    The hope is that Syria will go on long enough and cost the Iranians enough that it will destabilize the country and force an overthrow of the Mullahs. 

    There comes a point where guns meet butter.

    This strategy is consistent with the thinking of the Neocon/Deep State trolls in charge at the White House.  It makes sense strategically to a guy like Mattis who knows Syria cannot become a truly failed state lest the entire region go off the rails, but at the same time wants a much different Iran.

    Putin and Xi will not play along with this and will move to strengthen Iran’s money situation through increased oil revenue.  The Saudis’ pushing this escalation behind the scenes will put them in a bind when China finally says, “Nope. Not paying for your oil with dollars anymore. In fact, we’re not buying oil from you period.”

    At that point the real chaos is unleashed.  Never forget that the Russians can withstand lower oil prices better than any producer.  China is the marginal buyer of Saudi oil and the Saudis are becoming less important to them by the day.

    Trump was forced to voice in his speech on Friday an overt plea to Putin to give up his alliance with China and Iran, abandon Syria and some of his transgressions will be forgiven.

    Trump didn’t believe those words anymore than I did, but watching him confirmed for me that he knows there will not be peace any time soon.  That he’s not up to the task of resisting the pressure.

    Just as I said this weekend to the dismay of many, including myself.  What it revealed was that no matter who wins, the world loses.

    *  *  *

    To Support work like this and to see its continued presence in debunking the War of the Narratives, please pledge at my Patreon page and get access to both my Private Blog as well as the Gold Goats ‘n Guns Investment Newsletter.

  • Chinese Stocks Slump To 2018 Lows As LatAm Markets Soar

    Authored by Steven Vannelli via Knowledge Leaders Capital blog,

    Last night the China Shanghai CSI 300 index fell a bit more than 1.6%, taking out February lows and setting a new YTD low for the index. This is important since the global equity markets have a very high correlation to Chinese stocks. In the chart below, I compare our KLSU Americas Index (top 85% of developed market cap, USD) to the China CSI 300 Index (in USD). With a correlation in excess of 80%, this suggests that Chinese stocks explain a little more than two-thirds of the movement in developed Americas stocks.

    The stats are similar if we compare Chinese stocks to developed Europe and Asia. Developed Asia is already at YTD lows, so this move in Chinese stocks may confirm a downside breakout.

    Turning to the emerging markets, there are a couple interesting divergences. In the chart below, I show our KLSU EM EMEA Index (top 85% of market cap, in USD) compared to Chinese stocks. While the correlation is bit lower, the trend seems to be the same, with stocks breaking down.

    Emerging Asia has by far the highest correlation to Chinese stocks, suggesting the moves in EM Asia are overwhelmingly dominated by the performance of Chinese stocks.

    Emerging Latin America is the real outlier here. Not only is the correlation the lowest among all DM/EM regions, our KLSU EM Americas Index is up over 7% YTD (in USD), making it the best performing region in the world equity markets.

    Perhaps the performance of Chinese and EM Americas stocks can be explained by the rise in oil prices. In the charts below, I show a few of the JP Morgan Government Bond Indexes of various Latin American countries (in USD). Performance is highly positively correlated to oil prices in Chile, Colombia and Brazil.

    All of this adds up to a growing preference for EM Americas stocks and bonds as oil prices march upward. For those that may not be able to access Latin American bonds directly, the Van Eck JP Morgan EM Local Currency Bond ETF (EMLC) could make sense.

    Today EMLC may make more sense than the iShares Bloomberg Barclays EM Local Bond ETF (EBND) because it has a much higher weighting to Latin American countries.

    The EBND also has a much higher weighting to Asian bonds, which brings us back to the observation that Asian stocks are making new lows while Latin American stocks and bonds are making new highs.

  • "Once Upon A Time; Long, Long Ago, Truth Was Important…"

    Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

    I wonder how many people, not just Americans but those in other countries, have come to the conclusion that the United States today is a less free and less aware society than the societies in the dystopian novels of the 20th century or in movies such as The Matrix and V for Vendetta.

    Just as people in the dystopian novels had no idea of their real situation, few Americans do either.

    What are we to make of the extraordinary war crimes committed by the United States in the 21st century that have destroyed in whole or part seven countries, resulting in millions of dead, maimed, orphaned, and displaced peoples? Consider, for example, the latest Washington war crime, the illegal attack on Syria. Instead of protesting this illegality, the American media egged it on, cheering impending death and destruction.

    During the entirety of the 21st century, Israel, Washington’s only ally—as contrasted with the European, Canadian, Australian, and Japanese vassal states of Washington’s empire—has continued with Washington’s support, protection, and encouragement the genocide of the Palestinian people. Essentially, all that is left of Palestine is a ghetto concentration camp known as Gaza which is routinely bombed by Israel using weapons and money supplied by Washington. When a bombing of Gaza is announced, God’s Chosen People take their lawn chairs and picnics up on a hill overlooking Gaza and applaud as the Israeli military murders women and children. This is America’s only ally.

    The crimes committed by the US and Israel are horrific, but meet with little opposition. In contrast, an alleged attack in which 70 Syrians are alleged to have died sets in motion the wheels of war. It makes no sense whatsoever. Israel routinely bombs Syrian targets, killing Syrians, and the US arms and supports the “rebels” that the Obama regime sent to overthrow Assad, resulting in large numbers of dead Syrians. Why all of a sudden do 70 Syrians matter to Washington?

    According to the Washington authorities, or to the presstitutes’ reports of their statements, two or three alleged Syrian chemical weapons facilities were destroyed by Washington’s missile attack.

    Before…

    After…

    Think about this for a minute. If Washington bombed or sent missiles into chemical weapons facilities, a vast cloud of lethal gas would have been released. The civilian casualties would be many times higher than the claimed 70 victims of Assad’s alleged and unsubstantiated chemical attack used as the pretext for the Trump regime’s war crime against Syria. There is no evidence whatsoever of these casualties.

    Had there been casualties, Washington’s attack would obviously be a far greater crime than the chemical attack that Washington used as cover for its own crime. Yet the American presstitutes are crowing over the lesson that America has taught Syria and Russia. Apparently, the American media consists of such immoral or moronic hirelings that the presstitutes are unable to comprehend that an attack by Washington on Syrian chemical weapons plants, if such actually existed, is the equivalent of an attack on Syria with chemical weapons.

    As I wrote yesterday, when I was a Wall Street Journal editor, if Washington had just announced that it had bombed the chemical weapons facilities of another country in punishment for that country’s alleged use of a chemical weapon, the Journal’s reporters were sufficiently intelligent to ask where are the victims of Washington’s chemical attack on that country?

    Are there thousands of dead people from the chemical gas released by Washington’s attack? Are the hospitals of the country over-filed with the injured and dying?

    If a reporter had brought to us a story that was nothing but a Washington press release claiming obviously impossible happenings, we would have told him to go look again and ask the obvious questions. Today the NY Times and Washington Post put the unsubstantiated report on the front page.

    Today reporters no longer have to check sources, because there is no longer journalism in America. When the Clinton regime in compliance with the Deep State that made the Clintons super-rich permitted 90% of the independent and diverse US media to be concentrated in the hands of six political companies, that was the end of journalism in America. All we have now is a propaganda ministry that lies for a living. Anyone in American journalism who tells the truth is either immediately fired or in the case of Tucker Carlson at Fox News is set upon by outside presstitutes in an effort to force Fox to replace him. I wonder how long before some woman pops up and claims Tucker Carlson sexually harassed her.

    As far as I can tell, the United States is now a police state in which all information is controlled and the population is trained to believe the propaganda or be accused of lack of patriotism and consorting with terrorists and Russians.

  • And America's Richest Zip Code Is…

    The most exclusive zip code in America isn’t where you’d think it is.

    It’s not in Connecticut’s Fairfield County – famous for being a haven for old-money WASPs and, increasingly, America’ nouveau riche. It’s not Berkeley or Palo Alto or some other piece of the Bay Area, where economic inequality is among the worst in the country.

    Instead, it’s in South Florida, not far from Miami. The place is called Fisher Island, and with an average income of $2.5 million – beating the second-richest zip code by $1 million – it’s the wealthiest zip code in the country, according to recently released IRS data that was reviewed and analyzed by Bloomberg. The study included more than 22,000 eligible zip codes.

    The average income in Fisher Island, zip code 33109, was $2.5 million in 2015, according to a Bloomberg analysis of 2015 Internal Revenue Service data. That’s $1 million more than the second-place spot, held by zip code 94027 in Silicon Valley, also known as the City of Atherton on the San Francisco Peninsula. The area’s neighbors include Stanford University and Menlo Park, home to Facebook and various tech companies. While the IRS data only provide the averages of tax returns, which can be skewed by outliers, Fisher Island is the only zip code in the Bloomberg analysis where more than half of all tax returns showed an income of over $200,000.

    Fisher Island stands out for several reasons. For example, not only is it the highest earning zip code in the US, but it’s also an outlier in Bloomberg’s list because nearly all the other top spots are occupied by zip codes in the Greater New York metro area or the Bay Area. It’s also notable for its thematic consistency.

    Fisher

    Typically high cost of living makes wealthy zip codes inaccessible to poorer individuals and families. But not only is this true of the zip code’s property values, it’s also true for another reason: Fisher Island is surrounded by water and it’s extremely difficult for outsiders to travel there.

    Chart

    Palm Beach (home of  President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club) and Naples were the only other two Florida zip codes that made the top 20. Meanwhile, certain suburbs of Seattle, Philadelphia, Chicago and Boston also ranked high on the list.

    Many of the taxpayers living on Fisher Island were able to carve out more in itemized deductions from their tax bill than most Americans can affthan Taxpayers on Fisher Island also managed to carve out an average of $448,100 in itemized deductions last spring when they were settling up with Uncle Sam.

    Still, Fisher Island’s deductions were smaller than the average deduction for high net worth individuals across the US – though BBG attributed this to the fact that Florida doesn’t have an income tax, so Fisher Island residents have less to deduct.

    The zip code that took the most advantage of tax deductions in 2015 was 94301 in Palo Alto, California, where the average deduction was $491,600. Fisher Island had smaller average deductions relative to its income size than other zip codes and that’s likely because Florida has no income tax, so its residents can’t take deductions from that category. On the other hand, California has a top marginal income tax rate of 13.3 percent, the highest in the country.

    But deductions for the very wealthy could look a lot different this year because of the new tax cut legislation, according to Falanga.

    Deductions for state and local income tax have been curtailed to a maximum of $10,000. Before the new legislation, these deductions were unlimited. Limits on charitable contribution deductions have increased to 60 percent of gross income from 50 percent. That is just for cash contributions and does not include foundations, stocks, or artwork, which have different hurdles, said Falanga.

    Of course, residents of wealthy zip codes across the US are about to take a financial hit from President Trump’s tax overhaul plan because many of these areas are situated in blue states with high local taxes. The Trump tax plan dramatically curtailed deductions for state and local taxes, imposing a cap of $10,000 when previously these deductions had been unlimited.

    But here’s another advantage for Fisher Island is it’s in reliably low-tax Florida.

    “I haven’t seen them change, but they have been curious about what’s going on,” Falanga said. “And to a certain extent, some of them will be paying more.”

    But one thing is for certain: Whatever the impact is, it will be much less impactful than it will be for residents of other tony enclaves like – for example – Greenwich, Conn., where the tax law and shifting tastes are creating some of the most adverse market conditions since the financial crisis.

    With that in mind, we wouldn’t be surprised to see an exodus of HNW snowbirds making the journey as a move to sunny Florida looks increasingly appealing by the day.

  • Employee Of Bombed Syrian Research Site Says No Chemicals Released Is Proof None Existed

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    An employee of the chemical research center which was bombed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France says that no chemicals were released during the strike that leveled the building. 

    That’s incredibly important proof that no chemical weapons were actually there, he said.

    Said Said, an engineer at the Scientific Research Center facility, told RT Arabic that the very fact that no chemicals were released during the strike should serve as evidence that no chemical weapons program was run at the site.

     “You can see for yourself that nothing has happened. I’ve been here since 5:00 a.m. No signs of weapons-grade chemicals,“ he said.

    The researcher said he had worked at the facility for decades, and it used to develop medicine and household chemicals.

    Before…

    After…

    The West is alleging Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s leader used chemical weapons on civilians to justify military attacks on Damascus and Homs.  But interestingly enough, those strikes occurred the day before international investigators were scheduled to arrive to conduct a thorough inspection of the site. 

    The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had visited the site several times and never found any traces of banned chemicals. Since Syria joined the Chemical Weapons Convention under a deal brokered by Russia and the US in 2013, the UN chemical watchdog repeatedly confirmed its full compliance with its obligations to dismantle and remove its chemical stockpiles. In June 2014, the OPCW declared Syria free of chemical weapons.

    On April 12, even US Secretary of Defense James Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee that the US government does not have any evidence that sarin or chlorine was used, that he was still looking for evidence. Yet the bombing happened anyway.

    “We even provided them [OPCW] with a special place where they could collect and pack test samples taken during the inspection,” Said told RT. The inspectors would stay in the rooms on the upper floor and use the laboratory equipment, and the staff was “cooperating with them completely.”

    Being a civilian research center, the staff did not believe it would be identified as the primary target for an attack. “As we work in civilian pharmaceutical and chemical research, we did not expect that we would be hit,“ Said told AFP. The allegations that that Barzeh was an integral part of Syria’s chemical program were “totally incorrect,” he stressed, speaking to CBS News.

    Reports by the UN’s chemical watchdog, the latest of which was filed just a month ago, suggest Said is correct, and there are no chemical weapons at the facility.  The report on the first inspection that was conducted between February 26  and March 5, 2017, says that “the inspection team did not observe any activities inconsistent with obligations under the Convention,“ noting that Damascus had provided unimpeded access to the inspectors “to all selected areas.”

    The follow-up inspection, carried out in November, did not find any incriminating evidence either. The March 2018 report reiterates: “As stated in previous reports, all of the chemicals declared by the Syrian Arab Republic that were removed from its territory in 2014 have now been destroyed.”

  • The Death Of Retail Real Estate Continues: 77MM Sq.Ft Of Shopping Space Closed In 2018 Already

    Retail real estate carnage is going to continue this year with no signs of slowing up, as Bloomberg reported this morning that over 77 million square feet of retail real estate has closed this year and that 2018 will easily pass 2017’s record of 105 million square feet closed. The latest example was the fall of the once massive Toys ‘R’ Us name:

    The fall of the Toys “R” Us chain, with more than 700 U.S. stores, shows how much retail real estate has changed in just the last decade. When KKR & Co., Bain Capital, and Vornado Realty Trust took over the company in 2005, the buyers justified the $7.5 billion price, in part, because of the supposedly valuable properties that came with the deal.

    If there was ever to be any silver lining to the complete carnage in the retail real estate space, it was the argument that has been perpetuated over the last decade or so: despite retail stores closing, the real estate would eventually be worth something.

    This argument was made by real estate investment trusts as well as activist investors and analysts who tried to put a positive spin on the death of brick and mortar retail. Now, with more space freeing up, the bid under former retail property is at ask of falling off as supply is starting to get far ahead of demand:

    Real estate can put a floor under the value of a retailer and make it easier for the company to borrow. Maybe a particular store concept doesn’t work out as consumers’ tastes change, but in that case, investors can always sell the land and buildings to someone with a better plan. Long-term leases can be similarly valuable. But what if the problem isn’t that a particular store is out of fashion, but that consumers are just shopping less at brick-and-mortar retailers in general? As more storefronts empty, the valuation floor will look wobblier.

    This pace of closings puts 2018 on pace to pass 2017’s record of 105 million square feet of retail space closed:

    At last count, U.S. store closures announced this year reached a staggering 77 million square feet, according to data on national and regional chains compiled by CoStar Group Inc. That means retailers are well on their way to surpassing the record 105 million square feet announced for closure in all of 2017.

    It doesn’t look like the pace of these closings is going to slow anytime soon, either:

    And with shifts to internet shopping and retailer debt woes continuing, there’s no indication the shakeout will end anytime soon. “A huge amount of retail real estate in the U.S. is going to meet its demise,” says James Corl, managing director and head of real estate at private equity firm Siguler Guff & Co. Property owners will “try to re-let it as a gun range or a church—or it’s going to go back to being a cornfield.”

    So goes one set of stores, as go others. Despite the fact that the U.S. still has some of the most square footage of shopping space per person, there isn’t enough being spent at these locations to make them worth it:

    Even though retailers have been retreating for years, the country still has about 24 square feet of shopping space per person, many times more than any other developed nation, according to research firm Green Street Advisors. Consumers aren’t spending enough offline to support such a generous amount. Vacancies are headaches for landlords, of course, but they also have a mushrooming effect. People may steer clear of a mall that has lost an anchor tenant or has an abundance of “for lease” signs in smaller spaces. Deserted big-box stores, their facades naked and parking lots barren, can spread a sense of blight for blocks around. Who wants to open a business next to a place that’s gone out of business?


    The article finishes by pointing out that companies like Amazon and Whole Foods have still seen success using a brick-and-mortar retail concept. It’s possible that the space is simply just downsizing and becoming more efficient instead of disappearing entirely. Regardless, there seems to be a long runway to go in terms of retail real estate freeing up over the next couple of years. The trend of internet versus department stores also remains anything but encouraging. 

    And the outlook, with overlevered companies and lack of a serious bid under property prices, continues to look grim. Retailers are not going to be able to refi or recapitalize in ways necessary to try and grab onto lifelines. As the sector continues to collapse it’s going to be harder and harder to try and engineer turnarounds – this could lead to a self fulfilling prophecy of accelerating turmoil and collapse for the industry:

    But not every deserted retail property can be turned into a gym, theater, or boutique outlet of a tech company. That reality will weigh on any investor thinking about scooping up a struggling chain with real estate assets today—especially buyers in private equity, who borrow heavily to finance their deals. “Retailers cannot support large debt loads,” says Perry Mandarino, head of restructuring at B. Riley FBR, an investment bank that’s worked on retail liquidations. “Add to that the possibility of a decrease in the value of other collateral, such as real estate, and the successful execution of a retail-leveraged buyout may be almost impossible.”

    Almost a year ago to the day, we reported on retail closing setting up to hit a scorching pace in 2017. The narrative for 2018 stays the same, only worse. In early 2017 we pointed out the astonishing fact that “Barely a quarter into 2017, year-to-date retail store closings had already surpassed those of 2008.” 

    We asked in early 2017 if Amazon was assured of becoming the world’s first trillion-dollar stock, perhaps hitting the milestone even before Apple? Here is how the two names have fared since then:

    The race is on.

    Others have given up waiting for a recovery that seems always out of reach and are settling into what appears to be the new normal – but regardless, 2018 is setting up to, one again, break new ground in misery for retail real estate. 

  • 5 Fast Facts About The Federal Judge In Michael Cohen's Case (And Why Trump Should Be Worried)

    Submitted by Ann of The Political Insider

    Federal Judge Kimba Wood will be overseeing the court case against President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Here are five facts about Judge Wood – and why Trump should be very worried.

    1. She was President Bill Clinton’s pick for Attorney General in 1993

    President Bill Clinton nominated Wood to become the first female Attorney General. In fact, Wood was hand-picked by Hillary Clinton, who had been asked to submit a list of possible nominees for her husband’s consideration. However, Wood withdrew from the nomination after the White House learned about her brief time as a Playboy Bunny – and that she employed an illegal alien as a nanny. Further, Wood actually helped the nanny to illegally remain in the country by paying taxes for her.

    2. She trained as a Playboy Bunny

    The daughter of a U.S. Army career officer and speechwriter, Wood spent much of her childhood and young adulthood in Europe. While studying at the London School of Economics in the 1960s, she trained for a few days as a croupier at a Playboy Bunny casino, but quit because “she thought the gig was silly.” Nevertheless, the job would haunt her in her later career and played a role in costing her the position of Attorney General.

    3. She had an extramarital affair that earned her the nickname the “Love Judge”

    Wood might be a judge, but her personal past indicates that her moral scruples are lacking. In 1995 at the age of 51, Wood began an affair with married multimillionaire Wall Street financier Frank Richardson. The affair was uncovered by Richardson’s wife when she found passionate passages written about Wood in Richardson’s diary. The tryst earned Wood the nickname the “Love Judge” during Richardson’s divorce trial. Wood married Richardson in 1999.

    4. She officiated George Soros’s wedding

    Wood officiated the 2013 wedding of notorious liberal billionaire George Soros. At the time, Soros was 83 and his bride, Tamiko Bolton, was 42. Numerous prominent liberals attended the wedding, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and then-California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsome. In lieu of wedding gifts, the couple asked that donations be made to several organizations including Planned Parenthood and Global Witness, an environmental activist group.

    5. She doesn’t believe in attorney-client privilege

    During Cohen’s hearing on Monday, Wood forced Cohen to expose the identity of a previously unnamed client. That client turned out to be none other than Fox News host Sean Hannity, who maintains that he only asked Cohen for legal advice as a friend and never retained or paid him for any legal services.

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    As many people have pointed out, you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.

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    Has the deep state ever been more obvious than it is now?

  • Mattis Wanted Congressional Approval Before Syria Strike, Was Overruled By Trump

    Confirming our report from Friday, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis favored a more cautious approach to the Syria situation but was overruled by President Trump as well as other notable neocons interested in an immediate strike – including brand new National Security Advisor John Bolton, administration officials told the New York Times.

    Mr. Mattis pushed to get congressional authorization, according to people with knowledge of the internal debate. In several White House meetings last week, he underscored the importance of linking military operations to public support — a view Mr. Mattis has long held.

    …

    Mr. Trump, the officials said, wanted to be seen as backing up a series of bellicose tweets with action, but was warned that an overly aggressive response risked sparking a wider war with Russia.

    Friday night’s limited strikes on three targets, which lasted under two minutes, were the compromise. –NYT

    Bolton and Mattis were said to be duking it out over the Syria strikes on Friday – with Mattis and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dunford reportedly “concerned with managing escalation and preventing blowback on US troops,” while John Bolton is known for getting very excited at the prospect of a good ole’ fashioned regime change

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    In the end, Mattis prevailed in limiting the Friday night strikes to three targets which would avoid hitting Russian troops stationed at various military facilities throughout Syria. Democratically elected Syrian President Bashar al Assad moved fighter jets to said installations before the US-led strike, which also included the participation of the United Kingdom and France to give it an air of legitimacy.

    Administration officials say that Trump wanted to hit Syria hard enough to appear aggressive, but not so hard that it would prompt Russia to engage in combat.

    “The combined American, British and French response to these atrocities will integrate all instruments of our national power — military, economic and diplomatic,” said Trump in a national address while the strikes were underway. “We are prepared to sustain this response until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents.”

    That said, the Pentagon said no more strikes are in the works. “This is a one-time shot,” Mattis said on Friday after the attack was launched, suggesting that the airstrikes were “a very strong message to dissuade” President Bashar al-Assad of Syria from using chemical weapons against his own people.

    “He just wants the big show,” said Obama Admin assistant Secretary of Defense, Derek Chollet. “So Mattis was probably pushing on an open door.” More from the NYT:

    Mr. Mattis is particularly concerned about overextending the American military in Syria. He does not want the United States to veer from its stated policy of focusing only on the fight in Syria against the Islamic State — and avoid delving into the country’s seven-year civil war.

    Russian forces and Iranian militias have helped Mr. Assad remain in power against Syrian opposition fighters who accuse him of a brutal siege against the country.

    “The strike was really just enough to cover the president politically, but not enough to spark a war with the Russians,” said two-tour Iraq war veteran Jon Soltz, chairman of liberal veterans group VoteVets. “It was clear the military had tight constraints on the operation, and that everybody in the military seemed to know that except the president.”

    As the New York Times points out, Mattis is down one major ally in the West Wing with the departure of former NatSec Advisor H.R. McMaster, who would routinely defer to the Defense Secretary – a retired four-star Marine general. Enter John Bolton – a war hawk and notorious neoconservative who never saw a middle eastern nation he didn’t want to bomb – for the most part. Mattis greeted Bolton for the first time by asking him if he was in fact the “devil incarnate.”

    Mr. Mattis is widely viewed by global leaders as the strongest and perhaps most credible voice on foreign policy in an administration that has been rocked by firings and resignations among senior presidential advisers. The recent exits of both General McMaster and Rex W. Tillerson as secretary of state has focused more attention on Mr. Mattis’s role in the cabinet. –NYT

    On Tuesday, Mattis publicly disputed claims that last weekend’s limited strikes amounted to little more than a fireworks show.

    “The French, the United Kingdom, the United States, allies, all NATO allies, we worked together to maintain the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons,” Mr. Mattis said at the Pentagon. “We did what we believe was right under international law, under our nation’s laws.”

    “And I hope that this time, the Assad regime got the message,” said Mattis.

    Based on images of Syrians dancing in the street after the weaker than expected airstrikes… 

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    … and protesting the US-led strikes in Damascus right now, and the fact that the cleanup crew at the destroyed Barzah chemical weapons Research facility didn’t need protective clothing to sift through the rubble, the message is loud and clear; the West needs to get it’s act together before bombing a sovereign nation based on crappy – or even worse, fabricated intel.

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Apr 17

Today’s News 17th April 2018

  • Stoltenberg Brushes Off Greece-Turkey Tensions: "Not An Issue For NATO"

    In the last two months, tensions between two NATO member states have escalated dramatically – Turkey has threatened to invade Greek islands, Greece has responded, and Greeks now see Turkey as the greatest threat to their existence.

    But, the rapidly souring tensions between Greece and Turkey are “not an issue for NATO,” the General Secretary of the North Atlantic Alliance, Jens Stoltenberg in an interview with Turkish news agency Anadolu.

    As Keep Talking Greece reports, saying that both countries are “two highly valued NATO allies” Stoltenberg hailed the telephone conversation between Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Turkish counterpart, Binali Yildirim, after the Mirage 2000 crashed and the pilot was killed on Thursday when returning form a mission to intercept Turkish F-16s violating Greek airspace.

    ‘Tension in Aegean should be resolved between Turkey, Greece’

    Q: The tension between Turkey and Greece over the Aegean Sea continues to rise. There are reports that Greece has officially asked NATO to take a more active role in this context. What is NATO’s position on the rising tension between the two NATO allies?

    Stoltenberg: Greece and Turkey are two highly valued NATO allies, they have been allies since 1952.

    Both contribute to our collective defense. I expect that the differences we see on some issues are solved between Turkey and Greece in the spirit of good relations. In this context, I welcome that the PMs of both countries have recently held a phone conversation and that they have agreed to resolve these differences through dialogue. 

    Q: So, NATO does not foresee involvement?

    Stoltenberg: No, it’s not an issue for NATO, this is something that has to be addressed between Turkey and Greece. 

    Commenting on a wide range of issues including the agenda of his visit, the Turkish-led Operation Olive Branch, the fight against terrorism, and Syria, Stoltenberg emphasized the importance of Turkey as a valuable strategic ally.

    The interview was given ahead of Stoltenberg’s visit to Turkey on May 16th.

    No surprise here. No comment. Members need only to contribute to the NATO, while the Alliance sits back and makes plans for the safety of the whole planet…

  • The Grand Troika: A Chance For A World New Order

    Authored by Matthew Jamison via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Back in the late summer of 2017 I wrote an analysis of the state of world affairs and international relations after two seismic geopolitical world events occurred almost simultaneously in 2016 – the UK Referendum result to Leave the European Union and the defeat of Democrat Hillary Clinton by Republican Donald Trump for the White House in the US 2016 Presidential Election. Those twin political events were like major earth shaking bombs going off creating all kinds of disturbances and tremors, aftershocks and creating the greatest of shock and bewilderment within the international political order that had held sway since the defeat of Nazism in 1945. 

    It had become clear to me by the summer of 2017, as I had thought for some time, that politics in Britain – and global geostrategic politics within the broader historical framework of civilizational and human development – had changed profoundly and significantly from were we had been during the 1990s-2012 period, perhaps even from where I started off life in the most intense but ending days of the Cold War in the mid 1980s.

    The UK EU Referendum result and the election of Donald Trump and rejection of Hillary Clinton have simply brought into focus that the world has indeed entered what many international relations experts have been discussing for sometime, the era of extreme global tension, so intense and great that it could trigger World War III. The state of international affairs and the tension within the international system along with the upheavals in the post-WWII 1945 international geopolitical, economic and security architecture have created the environment where misunderstandings and differences can now lead to profound policy implications for foreign affairs, international peace and stability and the course of human history.

    The world has now become what Europe was like on the eve of the outbreak of the World War I.

    A new Cold War has begun, as I wrote back in the summer of 2012, it started some time ago. I placed the point at around 2012. For the great historian Michael Burleigh in his excellent work “The Best of Times. The Worst of Times,” a review of the current now in world affairs, it is around 2011-2013. For Burleigh it is not so much a Cold War more a transition phase of historical proportions on a civilizational scale. The most disturbing matter of all is that this new Cold War could be more deadly than the last. Yet it does not need to be like this and a Cold War mentality must be rejected of seeing Power Politics as the ultimate beneficiary of a State on State zero-sum game based on rampant mass national psychological manipulation and control. The International Community can yet avoid slipping back into a Cold War mentality even if it has now slipped into a new era of international relations, a 2012 New World Order.

    This 2012 New World Order signifies the ending of the period of sole American superpower unipolarity after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The American unipolar moment has come definitely to an end in terms of its sheer unilateral ability to carry out enterprises such as the 2003 Iraq invasion or the preceding invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 combined with the damage wrought by the Wall St Global Financial Crisis of 2008. There has been a tremendous power shift to the East, most notably in economic and financial power, and of all the emerging economies and new mini-regional powers in the area, the most important of these and the most salient to the changes under way in this Great Global Transition, is one of the greatest countries and civilisation in human history, China.

    The fundamental transformation in communications and information which the internet and social media has introduced into the public realm has completely upended the traditional process for Governmental policy making, diplomacy and political campaigning as well as the media and business and leadership in general.

    Technology is creating a virtual reality cyberspace world of enhanced globalisation but greater atomised individualism while inequality in the West is rampant as is social decay and breakdown alongside a serious problem in the Western Anglo-American democratic electoral model which seemed to prevail in 1989 and in general a deeper moral malaise of existential nihilism.

    A global struggle for power is occurring on many levels. This is due to the breakdown of the global balance of power that has held sway since the end of World War II and the brief interlude of the 1990s. In my article in August 2017 I discussed the remoulding of President Trump around the traditional military-industrial complex with his penchant for military Generals. I also stated that the more liberal “West Wing” Democrats seemed to be in the ascent with the removal of Mr. Steve Bannon. The National Security Council seemed to be in better hands under HR McMaster while Rex Tillerson was showing some promise at the State Department but had already started to exhibit worrying trends.

    That is the inclination in some parts of the American foreign and defence policy National Security Establishment to view this new era of international relations, this 2012 New World Order, as a period of Superpower Rivalry and Great Power competition. Nothing could be more destabilising and dangerous for the future peaceful and prosperous development of the planet through this Great Transition than following such a policy course and setting the United States on such a global posture. There is nothing preordained that the United States cannot remain the number one economy on the planet during President Trump’s tenure and beyond for quite some time.

    And even if China were to start to economically advance well above the United States in the decades ahead, America would still be pretty much number one in terms of overall assets. Besides that is a long way off and the planet is big enough for two powerhouse economies on planetary super scales. While China has transformed itself the likes of which has not been seen in human history and is on course to once again play a unique, special and critical role in world affairs as a Superpower, which it has been many times before throughout history, it is still a developing nation with all the challenges that a country of 1.3 billion people possess. It has no great wish to usurp the United States as the global policeman and Leader of the International Order. There is great potential for a deep and creative comprehensive and truly lasting partnership based on mutual admiration, mutual respect and mutual collaboration and trust between Washington DC and Beijing which together could be of enormous benefit for the development of humanity in peace and harmony. The work on North Korea which China has undertaken is a fine case in point of Chinese diplomacy contributing to the greater global good.

    Over the course of the last few months President Trump has remade his administration again and with a new National Security Advisor John Bolton. It was very wise to get rid of Secretary Tillerson and also to reign in the Obama/Clinton pro-German wing of the State Department and US National Security community by replacing McMaster. However Bolton is an extreme American nationalist hawk and allied with the neoconservative movement which portends for some significant and serious ramifications for the making and influencing of American foreign policy going forward.

    The changes in the domestic personnel have also seen a shift which is worrying with the more moderate Goldman Sachs type of Gary Cohn who was the President’s Director of the White House National Economic Council is gone. Instead the administration seems to be flirting with the Office of the Trade Representative Peter Navarro’s ludicrous ideas for a Trade War with China which would be totally counter-productive and extremely damaging to the international order at this fragile and extremely vulnerable time, not to mention hurt America a great deal and the Republican Party in the midterm Congressional elections. There is no need for this and a return o protectionism such as that of the 1920s and 1930s could lead to the rise of a new form of extreme totalitarianism in power. Hopefully calm will prevail on this issue of major global significance. President Trump’s new pick for Director of the CIA, the first woman to serve in the role, Gina Haspel looks also a very astute and good pick. 

    In this post-2012 New World Order the Asia-Pacific is a crucial theatre of strategic significance. As is Eurasia comprising the European Union, the UK and the Russian Federation. The Atlantic arena containing the United States and Canada is heavily integrated and connected through the Western Atlantic NATO Alliance with Europe and also the European Union. It had been my great hope, one of the highest of the incoming Trump administration, to see a successful, truly successful and enduring reset in relations between the United States of America and Russia in a final positive dynamic post-1991 based on mutual admiration, mutual trust and mutual cooperation in vital global national security interests such as combating the danger posed by the spread of violent and ideological jihadist Islamic fundamentalism and nuclear security. With Europe remaking itself due to the crisis over Britain’s departure from the EU it seemed to be a propitious time to be imaginative. However nothing involving America, Europe and Russia is ever going to be suitable in terms of time. 

    It is pointless for two big and great strong countries like America and Russia not to have a positive and constructive dialogue and even partnership for the benefit of common interests. President Obama wanted to reset relations and have a good dynamic with Moscow as did President George W. Bush and President Clinton. It never really worked out and now the hopes of the Trump Presidency have nearly evaporated. US-Russian diplomatic relations and the bilateral US-Russia relationship are at their lowest and worst stage since the darkest days of the Cold War. I am shocked and mortified at the speed and deep deterioration in relations between Washington DC and Moscow since I wrote the last article on this subject back in August.

    I am greatly disturbed at the speed and strength which the relationship seems to have nearly collapsed and the negative turn it has taken. I am very surprised at this turn of events as I had hoped the one bright spot of the Trump administration might be President Trump getting along better with President Vladimir Putin and utilising that relationship to get a better American-Russian and hence Global strategic accommodation for the Great Transition going forward in world affairs. Russia is a great country and deserves a new relationship with the West, especially a new and more vibrant respectful and harmonious relationship with America. A warm relationship.

    The Russian people and Russia itself deserves a great deal more respect than how it has been treated and spoken of late. So the actions of the British Government of Theresa May regarding the stage managed and appallingly planned spiteful anti-Russian bigoted so-called Skripal poisoning affair in Salisbury, England has been a deeply shameful and irresponsible act of madness on the part of an increasingly irrelevant, trivial and useless Prime Minister badly damaged and leading a country in the midst of a collective Brexit nervous breakdown in no way fit for the duties of a serious responsible national actor on the global stage.

    In this new era of international relations in the post-2012 New World Order, a more respectful and constructive understanding and approach is required to take account of Russia and Russian interests, legitimate security and defence political interests which were trampled on at the end of the previous Cold War. Russia is and will be a key power in the 2012 New World Order and together the Leaders of America, China and Russia can form a special strategic troika of global leadership to enhance global security, understanding, stability and development. Thus it would be in the best interest of the United States and the world for the Trump administration not to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war or if it really must keep it as limited and surgical as possible. The chemical weapons attacks over the last seven years have and are barbaric and beyond the conscience of humanity and civilised values but this war has been raging for seven years now and it will not be brought to an end with a belated American military intervention.

    Furthermore, the British Government has known for some time that chemical weapons attacks were ongoing in Syria despite the 2013 autumn diplomatic breakthrough for their disposal. Why now is this such an urgent matter to be resolved when the British Government has known about it for over three and a half years? Such a time may have existed early in 2011 but President Obama chose not to intervene overtly militarily thus allowing a vacuum which Islamic State filled. Russia in many respects had no choice but to side with its only remaining Middle Eastern ally and listening post. Furthermore, after the disastrous US-UK interventions in the region in Iraq and then Libya not to mention the still continuing catastrophic war in Afghanistan the growth of al Qaeda/ISIS posed a clear and growing threat to Moscow and the region and world as a whole. The chemical weapons attacks are truly nightmarish but there should be no rush to judgement in a war just as the situation was measured in the autumn of 2013 before a intervention was proposed. The best course would be to let the Russians continue to exercise their influence over Assad and allow for a end to the conflict with a peace process instigated. Both Russia and Israel should team up to manage and contain the situation in Syria while the United States would be best advised not get itself dragged into and bogged down in another war in a Middle Eastern Arab Muslim country.

    Yet the stakes are even higher than that. It would not just be a conflict fought against the Assad regime. The truly appalling nature of this crisis is that it could potentially lead to all-out war between America and Russia which would in all likelihood lead to a Third World War. That situation is inconceivable and it is deeply distressing that we have even arrived at that point in 2018 after only 27 years of the USSR officially having been dissolved. If a war breaks out between America and Russia there will not be much of the planet left for anyone to enjoy in the years to come.

    That is what is most alarming about the growth of the anti-Russian xenophobia and hysteria in the UK fuelled by the right wing Tory Government of Theresa May and the near total collapse in US-Russian relations.

    How could we have arrived at this situation in the international community and global system in 2018 where after the End of History there is a serious and distinct geopolitical possibility of a real hot war between America and Russia over a proxy battle in Syria.?

    How has the international political system become so tense and volatile that such a scenario after all the events of 1945-89 has emerged again and this time perhaps in an even more deadly form?

    Russia is not the source of all evil on the Earth and to believe so is not only deeply offensive but completely mad.

    As President Trump said when asked regarding President Putin: ‘We have a lot of killers. What you think our country is so innocent?’ Greater dialogue and understanding is needed to bring Washington DC and Moscow back together and ensure between President Xi, President Putin and President Trump a Troika of Statesman Leadership that can steer the world through its current choppy waters. A role of constructive partnership can be found for Russia with America and China. A solid, suitable and worthy role befitting of a great nation like Russia. There are so many opportunities and challenges to face as a world this century and together the capitals of Washington DC, Beijing and Moscow can be a Grand Alliance for good on the planet in the early 21st century.

  • "They Know What's Going To Happen" – Governments, Big Banks Are Stockpiling Gold

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    The writing is on the wall and major financial institutions across the world are warning about the economic disaster to come. Unabated money printing, tariff trade wars, rising interest rates and retail slowdowns point to one result, and it’s going to be brutal.

    Big banks and governments know what’s coming and they are preparing for this eventuality by stockpiling huge amounts of “real money” ahead of the crisis.

    According to Keith Neumeyer, the CEO of the world’s top primary silver producer First Majestic Silver and chairman of First Mining Gold, the cartels he’s previously reported to the CFTC have continued to manipulate the prices of precious metals while loading up their own vaults with gold and silver. The answer to why they’re doing it is simple, as Neumeyer highlights in a recent interview with SGT Report:

    The verdict is still out on whether we’re going into a dis-inflationary or inflationary environment… gold can do well in both environments… the fact of the matter is governments are printing extraordinary amounts of fiat currencies and that is not going to change…

    The stage is set for higher gold prices due to the amount of money being printed… I am of the belief a major reset is coming where the governments of the world will need to get rid of their debt by fixing everything to the price of gold… and that’s why governments like China and Russia and other governments around the world are accumulating gold… it’s because they know what’s going to happen over the next several years…

    (Watch at Youtube)

    If it is true [that JP Morgan has acquired the largest position of physical silver in the world] then it’s pretty amazing… Any bank wanting a long position like that is doing it for a reason… 

    Banks like JP Morgan… they haven’t had a losing trade in multiple years… if they’re long something that’s probably what you want to be buying.

    Neumeyer explains that not only are there monetary factors at play, but also supply issues, as production, especially in silver, has dropped markedly over the last several years.

    All of this bodes well for rising precious metals prices going forward, with reasonable estimates for future growth far exceeding the all-time highs we saw in recent years:

    Metals are in an extremely tight trading range… This base the metals are building right now is three years in the making… and when the metals finally take off this year it’s going to be astounding to watch.

    … We lived through it in 2010 and 2011… a good mining stock will far exceed the movement of the metal itself… a stock like First Mining would absolutely explode in an environment like that… it’s hard to predict the exact prices that stocks would do but it would be quite different than it is today…

     I think $2000 or $3000 gold… these are reasonable numbers that we will experience in the not too distant future. 

    Financial analysts and large institutions have generally avoided gold and silver for nearly a decade. But the tide appears to be changing.

    As prices remain suppressed, government are acquiring, big banks are acquiring and even Morgan Stanley recently noted that gold can be used as a “very good proxy of the true value of a dollar over long periods of time.”

    We know economic collapse on a massive scale is approaching.

    To get an idea of where one should be diversifying their assets in the event this worst-case scenario plays out, one need only ask the following question: What is money when the system collapses?

    5,000 years of history for the single most reliable monetary asset class of last resort has already given us the answer. 

    Prepare accordingly.

  • "I Want To Set The Record Straight": Hannity Expains His Relationship With Michael Cohen

    With most of the media in a feeding frenzy after judge Kimba Wood – the same judge who 5 years ago married the 83-year-old George Soros to 42-year-old Tamiko Bolton…

    Georges Soros married Tamiko Bolton; Judge Kimba Wood officiated the non-denominational ceremony

    … unveiled that Michael Cohen’s “third client” is Sean Hannity, questions swirled over potential conflicts of interest, and whether Hannity had an obligation to disclose his relationship to Cohen, whom he defended on his show on more than one occasion.

    As we observed earlier, Hannity justified his silence on the matter claiming Cohen never represented him “in any matter involving a third party”, had never “retained  [Cohen’s] services” and had occasionally “asked Mr Cohen questions concerning the law that Mr Cohen indicated would be privileged.”  This however prompted more questions, the top two being i) whether asking your lawyer “some legal questions” and saying “attorney/client privilege” makes you their client and, ii) why was Cohen’s team so reluctant to reveal Hannity’s name in the hearing, and why the secrecy?

    Earlier on Monday, even attorney and frequent Fox News guest Alan Dershowitz Sean Hannity criticized host Sean Hannity for not disclosing his relationship with Cohen during his frequent discussions about Cohen in recent weeks.
    Dershowitz, a defender of Trump amid his legal woes, was brought on to discuss former FBI Director James Comey’s Sunday night interview on ABC News, but first addressed the Monday revelation that Hannity is the previously unnamed client of Cohen. “I really think you should have disclosed your relationship with Cohen,” Dershowitz said, calling it a “complicated situation.”

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    So to answer all of this, in his show on Monday night Hannity addressed the Cohen situation for the second time as follows.

    “Michael Cohen never represented me in any legal manner. I never retained his services, I never received an invoice. I never paid Michael Cohen for legal fees. I did have occasional brief conversations with Michael Cohen, he’s a great attorney, about legal questions I had or I was looking for input or perspective.

    “My discussions with Michael Cohen never rose to any level that I needed to tell anyone that I was asking him questions. And to be absolutely clear: they never involved any matter, any – sorry to disappoint so many – matter between me, a third party, a third group, at all. My questions focused almost exclusively on real estate. I said many times on my radio show ‘I hate the stock market, I prefer real estate.’ Michael knows real estate.

    “So in response to all the wild speculation, I want to set the record straight here tonight. I never asked Michael Cohen to bring this proceeding on my behalf. I have no personal interest in this legal matter. That’s all there is, nothing more.”

    To be sure, if Hannity is lying – and with both the FBI and NSA now in possession of all Cohen docs – we will know momentarily, or as soon as the leak to the NYT/WaPo hits, at which point Hannity’s future at Fox News will be no more. On the other, if indeed as Hannity claims “there is no there, there”, maybe Trump will be right, and “attorney-client” privilege is indeed dead, in which case perhaps judge Wood who officiated the wedding of the the lovely couple in the photo above, in which the bride is exactly half the age of the groom, can disclose just what the nature of their relationship is.

    PS. the following brief blurb on Judge Kimba Wood is certainly interesting:

    In 1993 President Bill Clinton nominated her to become the first female Attorney General. But she withdrew from the nomination after the White House learned she had hired an undocumented immigrant as a baby-sitter.

    Wood, who was Clinton’s second choice for AG post, didn’t break the law employing the nanny and in fact paid the woman’s taxes. But the White House asked her to withdraw because her situation was similar to Clinton’s first AG nomination, Zoe Baird.

    Baird bowed out of consideration for the job after she drew criticism for employing two undocumented immigrants as housekeepers.

     

     

  • Only 0.04% Of Taxpayers Are Reporting Any Bitcoin Gains To The IRS

    With the US tax deadline just one day away, crypto investors who traded actively during the market’s run-up and inevitable meltdown should have a lot of activity to report to the IRS.

    But according to a survey conducted by Credit Karma, only a handful of people who have filed their taxes using Credit Karma’s tools have reported bitcoin holdings or holdings of some other cryptocurrency – fewer than 100 out of a total of 250,000 filers, or a whopping 0.04% in total.

    Bitcoin

    In all likelihood, this means that (tens of) thousands of bitcoin traders are refusing to pay the IRS, either betting on the anonymity of the blockchain to conceal their identities, or perhaps in some cases they simply don’t have the money to pay, having lost most of their profits during the market’s spectacular meltdown, as was the case for one anonymous trader who complained on Reddit that he owed the IRS $50,000 that he didn’t have, according to CNBC.

    “If I had to guess, there’s probably a lot of underreporting,” said Elizabeth Crouse, a Seattle-based partner at law firm K&L Gates. “Most of the people in the cryptocurrency world tend to have a pretty high risk tolerance.”

    Bitcoin had its best week in four months last week as selling pressure that appeared to coincide with the US tax season appeared to dissipate.

    Meanwhile, Fundstrat’s Tom Lee and other analysts have predicted that “a massive outflow” of cryptocurrency to fiat ahead of tax day in the US had created a massive overhang, and that the bitcoin price could shoot higher after tax day.

    In a report last week, Lee noted that, since US households owe an estimated $25 bln in capital gains taxes due to their crypto holdings, and crypto exchanges also will owe income taxes, both households and exchanges will be selling their crypto to pay the US government:

    “We believe there is selling pressure by crypto exchanges who are subject to income tax in U.S. jurisdictions. Many exchanges have net income in 2017 [of more than] $1 bln and keep working capital in [Bitcoin]/[Ethereum], not USD — hence, to meet these tax liabilities, are selling BTC/ETH.”

    While it’s possible that crypto traders just aren’t using Credit Karma for whatever reason, the data should be a concerning sign for Lee and other crypto bulls. It means that the forced selling might not be over – and in fact could be just getting started – as nonreporters are hunted down by the IRS.

    In the past, crypto traders have mostly ignored warnings and guidance about reporting crypto-related gains. Of course, traders who ignore the IRS do so at their own peril. They could be subject to fines or other penalties once the federal government learns their identities. But as one might suspect given their high risk tolerance, like Crouse mentioned above, some crypto traders might be crazy enough to mix it.

  • China Macro Data Disappoints As MOFCOM Threatens Retaliation For ZTE Ban

    With the yuan at its strongest since devaluing in 2015…

    and lunar new year distortions starting to wash out of the macro-surprise data… (Monthly data for January and February are often plagued by shifts in the lunar new year holidays in China. For today’s March numbers, we should really be past that — although last week’s trade numbers still had a surprise impact.)

    Tonight’s smorgasbord of Chinese economic data is the first glimpse of the state of the economy as the credit impulse slipped negative and the crackdown on shadow banking (and implicitly leverage) began.

     

    Commodities are leading the China bubble for now, with bonds and stocks having been bubbled-through…

    And China stocks (red) are notably underperforming their Asia-Pac peers (green)…

     

    So, the markets need some hope to cling to and so we strongly doubt GDP will be allowed to miss. Bloomberg notes that the backdrop to today’s data is that China is broadly expected to slow somewhat this year, after last year it saw the first acceleration in growth since 2010, when China — and the rest of the world — was bouncing back from the global recession.

    • China Q1 GDP YoY MEET at 6.8%, versus +6.8% exp. and +6.8% prior.

    • China Retail Sales YoY BEAT at 10.1%, versus +9.7% exp. and +9.4% prior.

    • China Industrial Production YoY MISS at 6.0%, versus +6.3% exp. and +6.2% prior.

    • China Fixed Asset Investment YoY MISS at 7.5%, versus +7.7% exp. and +7.9% prior.

    Notably, China Q1 GDP QoQ disappointed however, rising only 1.4% QoQ (versus expectations of a 1.5% QoQ jump…

    So the initial sign is some softening in the industrial part of the economy, and strong growth in the consumer side.

    This one will disappoint President Trump: Steel production still growing…

    • First Quarter Crude Steel Output Rises 5.4% to 212.15M Tons

    • March Crude Steel Output Rises 4.5% Y/Y to 73.98M Mt

    • March Steel Product Output Rises 4.2% to 89.77M Tons

    Bloomberg’s Chris Anstey notes that on the softening in industrial-output growth, Goldman Sachs economists had warned that weather conditions in March weren’t favorable for reducing pollution — so authorities probably put more restrictions on production, construction, and transportation.

    Additionally, a new indicator – the monthly survey-based urban unemployment rate will be introduced today, providing a reading on China’s labor market.

    The NBS may start publishing China’s monthly surveyed unemployment rate (SUR) very soon. The government has long been in a dilemma: cares much about employment but lacked an effective gauge. SUR, we believe, is necessary for guiding the economic transition toward high-quality growth. Compiled according to international standards, the SUR defines the unemployed (the numerator) as people of working age (above 16) who are out of work, want a job, have actively sought work in the previous three months and are available to start work within the next two weeks.

    Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Dollar remains glued to its peg band’s lower limit with HKMA intervention not helping for now…

    The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has bought a total of HK$19.02b ($2.4b) worth of Hong Kong dollars since the currency fell to the weak end of its trading band last week, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. This includes HK$9.36b of purchases in the past 24 hours. No need to proactively adjust the local dollar’s interest rates, as that would easily lead to doubts over the city’s determination in defending the linked exchange rate, HKMA says in an emailed statement.

    But, despite this statement (raising rates would counter the USD Libor carry trade flows), when  former Hong Kong Monetary Authority Chief Executive Joseph Yam said there IS room for Hong Kong to adjust interest rates and additional exchange fund bill sales can be an option, the dollar strengthened…

     

    Finally, it appears the trade wars are anything but fading as China’s Ministry of Commerce said in a statement on its website that China has noticed U.S. Commerce Department’s export restriction on ZTE, and will take necessary measures to protect Chinese companies’ interests.

    Trading of ZTE shares in Hong Kong suspended from 9am pending release of inside information announcement on the activation of denial order by U.S., it says in filing to Hong Kong stock exchange.

    The statement went on to note that ZTE has cooperated with hundreds of U.S. companies and has contributed tens of thousands of jobs in the U.S.; and China hopes U.S. to fairly deal with the matter based on rules and regulations, and ensure fair, stable environment for company.

  • Mapping Where The 13 Million Displaced Syrians Are

    While the stock market seems to believe the worst is over, one-and-done-and-everyone-crawls-back-in-their-hole, we suspect the ordeal that the Syrian people are dealing with is far from over and could lead to an even greater spike in the number of displaced Syrians, 13 million of whom are now scattered all over the world.

    That’s according to a Pew Research Center analysis published in January. Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that Pew’s analysis found that over 6 million Syrians are displaced within their own country and they account for 49 percent of all Syrians displaced worldwide.

    Infographic: Nearly 13 Million Syrians Are Displaced | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Turkey has the second highest population with 3.4 million displaced people currently living there.

    Another million of them have made the long and dangerous journey to Europe. Germany hosts most of them with 530,000, followed by Sweden with 110,000. Another 54,000 Syrians live in Canada while 33,000 are in the United States.

  • What Hyperinflation In Venezuela Really Looks Like

    Authored by J.G.Martinez D. via Daisy Luther’s Organic Prepper blog,

    The intention of this article will be to describe how the prices went wild, and what you could expect in a hyperinflation scenario. Perhaps softer, or perhaps worse, that is not possible to know for an amateur like me, not being an economist. But something similar to this is what could be expected in the real world, not in some hypothetical scenario of the theoretical economy..

    For some reason that I will try to elucidate afterward, the salaries stopped being useful for buying anything other than food. The prices I will publish in our national currency, the Bolivar already were rounded by taking 3 zeroes by Uncle Hugo´s command. A few days ago, this was done…again, now by command of the bus driver, in an attempt to make the hyperinflation look less threatening. Go figure.

    One Bolivar is worth 0.000020 USD. The minimum wage is $5.21 or 1.800.000 Bs for a month. Now, how could we expect someone to live under these conditions? It is entirely unexplainable to me that this has not generated massive riots…yet.

    Here are the hyperinflation costs of basic items in Venezuela

    Remember, many people are paid only 1.800.000 Bs for a month:

    • Vegetable oil 900ml. Bottle: 748.367 Bs
    • Cereal mixture for milkshakes: 900Grs can: 1.057.057 Bs
    • Wheat flour, 1 kg: 398.750 Bs
    • Cheese, 1 kg:  2.160.950 Bs (yes, TWO MILLION)
    • Chicken and Bacon: 2.299.500 Bs
    • 395Grs Condensed milk w/sugar: 566.144 Bs
    • Oatmeal 400 Grs:  550.000 Bs
    • 1 kg. Margarine: 747.000 Bs
    • 1Kg Chocolate mixture for milkshakes: 2.060.000 Bs
    • Cheese (melted-for spreading) 300 Grs: 1.097.230 Bs
    • Black Olives 235Grs: 1.677.120 Bs
    • Ladies deodorant: 890.000 Bs
    • Insecticide 1 can: 900.000 Bs
    • Mayonnaise 910 Grs.: 955.000 Bs
    • 2 toilet paper rolls: 399.974 Bs
    • 1 Kg. avocados: 500.000 Bs
    • 30 Eggs: 650.000 Bs.
    • Dog food, dry, bulk 20Kg: 6.060.000 Bs
    • Dishwashing soap, cream 500 Grs: 440.000 Bs
    • 2 door fridge: 627.900.000 Bs (yes, six hundred MILLION)
    • 400ML. Shampoo:  2.052.050 Bs (2 million)
    • 4 small ice cream cups: 2.072.691 Bs
    • Rice 500 Grs: 115.277 Bs
    • TV 65 inches: 329.999.990 Bs
    • 2Lt soda: 298.000 Bs
    • Lemon Juice, 500ml bottle: 731.881 Bs
    • Light bulb, power saving: 935.000 Bs
    • Shoes: 5.986.825 Bs
    • Catfish: 465.300 Bs
    • Sweet corn 400Grs: 466.480 Bs
    • Ground meat: 1.150.000 Bs.
    • Steak: 1.300.000 Bs (depending on the region, usually cheaper in cattle-producing states)
    • Pork chops: over 1.000.000 Bs
    • Corn flour, 1 kg: 265.000 Bs.
    • Dollar price: 350.000 Bs / 1 USD

    How people are reacting

    One of the most amazing things I have seen is that people are in total denial, and they refuse to accept that the money is not worth even the paper it is printed on. They won’t innovate changing to cryptos easily, nor will they accept silver coins, much less other precious metals. They won’t barter, they won’t trade their labor time (I mean major cities, in my small town things are a little different). We had a good supply of silver coins in the 60s, but that changed.

    They talk and talk, complaining about the government, but they just don’t do anything. I have seen some small plots in our subdivision with tomatoes plants and other vegetables, but that is just a salad for one lunch. And the people passing by will take whatever is within their hand’s reach.

    The electronic money has been devaluated much more than cash. Something with a price in cash, if you try to pay with debit card or money transfer via internet the price will be 2 or 3 times the cash price. Illegal? Yes, it is. But there is no way to control it.

    The main problem arises because it is the military taking over the supply chain. They have an agreement with the gangs, and they deviate the production of the plants that are under military control, to the street sales. The gangs are armed, and they protect the retail sellers from thieves and turmoil. This is in the most populated cities, where the money is, and therefore the products don’t make it so often up to the smaller towns.

    The black market offers of tires, food, car spares, engine oil, and all kind of medicines and goods are rampant, and the social networks are full of resellers. You may expect a morality crisis, in parallel with this economical crisis. I asked a granny how much was charging for some hand towels she had for sale, and I did not have enough money in my pocket to buy even one towel…I apologized but saw she was upset. It was a sad, awkward moment indeed.

    Senior citizens are taking a beating. Their pension is not enough for one week worth of food. Jeez, maybe once this is published it will be not enough even for a couple of days…the clowns that tried to sell the “petro” just realized that this snake oil did not work.  The calculated inflation is 13.000%. Without money from the IMF, having paid the debt, and kicked them out of the country…the disaster arrived anyway. The government just does not want to do what they have to do. There are too many military personnel involved in the black market and an uprising is more than possible that will launch the gangs in power off to the ground if some of them are disturbed.

    How people survive

    To find a medium of exchange, and at the same time capable of holding its value until you actually need to exchange it is not easy. Cigarettes, chocolates, all kind of commodities have been used, and there is a small but growing trade with this stuff. Not at the dimensions one would imagine, but generally speaking, the financial culture in our society is almost unknown. There is no such thing as a stock exchange (but there was one, in the past), and whatever other things that smell like the free market, the gov carefully removed. People clamor for “price control” without even realizing that it is not the price but the lack of production what is starving them.

    I have known some people that even received satoshis as a medium of payment for food or car parts. However, as the BTC has been going down these last weeks and the amount of satoshis to receive is calculated based on the USD price, this trading has been slowing down.

    As I have mentioned, the country is already collapsed. Those self-employed that could adjust their fees for their service from one day to another, and that could receive, say, a bag of sugar for their valuable services are those who are not overly stressed to leave the country. This is one of the most important lessons, I think. Someone with manual, valuable skills, that could provide basic goods or services, will be able to survive. They will just adjust their prices…and if the customer can´t pay, then most likely they will trade in their service for something to barter. People with low maintenance trucks,  that have received meat as payment in a farm for transporting a load of hay (many farmers have to buy hay down here in the dry season because they don´t have the machines to compact it and there is no rain for the pastures to grow). They exchange the remaining meat for cheese, poultry, and fish. Or the electrician like my dad got paid with half a pork for one day of work at his friend´s farm rewiring an old corn mill. He took the excess as a gift to one of my cousins, and got back 6 kgs of pasta, and 2 of sugar.

    This is how we, in the small community I was born and raised and my family is lucky to live yet, are dealing with the criminals that have imposed the crisis. These are the places where people support each other because we know everyone since we were small kids. We grew up together, went to school, and celebrate birthdays, Christmas, Mardi Gras together. We cried when our elders were gone, all together. I have found people from my hometown in the opposite side of the country that I did not remember, and they had gone to basic school with me, and after a few anecdotes, we were laughing and shaking hands. This is the kind of community that will struggle but will survive.

    The other ones?. The big city dwellers?…

    The hardworking father of three, with a minimum wage, is starving, and watching their family starve too. Some of them quit their jobs and started a life of crime. Other ones leave their families behind and don’t come back. Other have been kind enough to tell their families that they will be in this or that country, and never appear again.

    Many have committed suicide.

    Elders do it because they don’t want to be a burden nor an additional weight for their family.

    Youngers because they don’t see themselves in such apocalyptical scenario. Normal stuff in other countries like buying a car, a house, having children, graduating from college, seem to be impossible tasks, no matter how hard you work for that.

    The official rate of suicides is not something that can be trusted. The gang that claims to be a government is covering up even the starvation deaths of the children in the hospitals, in an attempt to avoid further international sanctioning.

    They are forcing doctors to fake the cause of the deaths in the reports.

    And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what hyperinflation and a collapsed country looks like.

    May God bless us and protects us all.

    Note: Thanks for your generosity, to those who have contributed to get my family out, and those who will assist us in the future.

  • Russia Reveals Who "Staged" Syria Gas Attack, As US Claims Moscow "May Have Tampered" With Site

    The Russian envoy to the chemical weapons watchdog group, OPCW, said that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) funded by the UK and US carried out the April 7 chemical attack in the Damascus, Syria suburb of Douma.

    Russia’s permanent representative to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Alexander Shulgin, said Russia has irrefutable evidence that there was no chemical weapons incident in Douma.

    “Therefore, we have not just a “high degree of confidence,” as our Western partners claim, but we have incontrovertible evidence that there was no incident on April 7 in Douma and that all this was a planned provocation by the British intelligence services, probably, with the participation of their senior allies from Washington with the aim of misleading the international community and justifying aggression against Syria,” he stated. –Sputnik

    Shulgin added that the US, UK and France are not interested in conducting an objective investigation of the attack site. “They put the blame on the Syrian authorities in advance, without even waiting for the OPCW mission to begin to establish the possible facts of the use of chemical weapons in Syria,” he said.

    The nine-member OPCW mission people has yet to deploy to the city of Douma according to the organization’s Chief, citing pending security issues.

    “The Team has not yet deployed to Douma. The Syrian and the Russian officials who participated in the preparatory meetings in Damascus have informed the FFM Team that there were still pending security issues to be worked out before any deployment could take place. In the meantime the Team was offered by the Syrian authorities that they could interview 22 witnesses who could be brought to Damascus,” OPCW Director-General Ahmet Uzumcu said as quoted by the organization.

    The Russian Envoy says that the controversial “White Helmets” were one of the anti-Assad “pseudo-humanitarian NGOs” which staged the event. As Disobedient Media and others have reported, the White Helmets are funded in large part by the United States.

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    “The Syrian Civil Defense Force (aka the White Helmets) is funded in part by United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Included here are two links showing contracts awarded by USAID to Chemonics International Inc. (DBA Chemonics). The first award was in the sum of $111.2 million and has a Period of Performance (POP) from January 2013 to June 2017. It states that the purpose of the award will be to use the funds for managing a “quick-response mechanism supporting activities that pursue a peaceful transition to a democratic and stable Syria.” The second was in the sum of $57.4 million and has a POP from August 2015 to August 2020. This award was designated to be used in the “Syria Regional Program II” which is a part of the Support Which Implements Fast Transitions IV (SWIFT IV) program.” Via Disobedient Media

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    Moscow says they have confirmed that “these structures [NGOs] on a fee-based basis cooperate with the governments of the United States, the UK and some other countries.”

    Russian experts who conducted the verification of reports on the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian city of the Douma, found participants of video filming, presented as evidence of the supposedly occurring chemotherapy, according to the Russian Envoy to OPCW. –Sputnik

    “Everything has been developing according to the script that was prepared in Washington. There is no doubt that Americans are playing the ‘first violin’ in all of this. The United States, the United Kingdom, France and some other countries after the “fake” addition from the White Helmets and their ilk in Douma, immediately pounced upon the Syrian authorities with accusations,” Shulgin said.

    Meanwhile, the U.S. has alerted the OPCW that Russia “may have tampered” with the chemical attack site in Douma…

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    “It is our understanding the Russians may have visited the attack site,” U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Ward said at a meeting of the OPCW in The Hague on Monday.

    “It is our concern that they may have tampered with it with the intent of thwarting the efforts of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission to conduct an effective investigation,” he said. His comments at the closed-door meeting were obtained by Reuters.

    Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov shot back in a BBC interview, saying “I can guarantee that Russia has not tampered with the site.”

    Earlier, Britain’s delegation to the OPCW accused Russia and the Syrian government of preventing the international watchdog’s inspectors from reaching Douma.

    The inspectors aim to collect samples, interview witnesses and document evidence to determine whether banned toxic munitions were used, although they are not permitted to assign blame for the attack. –Reuters

    “Unfettered access is essential,” the British delegation said in a statement. “Russia and Syria must cooperate.”

    Moscow says the OPCW delay is due to the Western air strikes. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the British accusation that Russia was to blame for holding up the inspections was “groundless”.

    “We called for an objective investigation. This was at the very beginning after this information [of the attack] appeared. Therefore allegations of this towards Russia are groundless,” Peskov said.

    ***

    On Friday we reported that Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow has “irrefutable evidence” that the attack – which allegedly killed over 40 people, was staged with the help of a foreign secret service.

    “We have irrefutable evidence that this was another staged event, and that the secret services of a certain state that is now at the forefront of a Russophobic campaign was involved in this staged event,” he said during a press conference according to AFP.

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    According to defense ministry spokesman, Major General Igor Konashenkov, the Kremlin has evidence that Britain was behind the attack.

    Quoted by Reuters, he said: “We have… evidence that proves Britain was directly involved in organising this provocation.”

    As RT further adds, the Russian Defense Ministry presented what it says is “proof that the reported chemical weapons attack in Syria was staged.” It also accused the British government of pressuring the perpetrators to speed up the “provocation.” During a briefing on Friday, the ministry showed interviews with two people, who, it said, are medical professionals working in the only hospital operating in Douma, a town near the Syrian capital, Damascus.

    During a briefing on Friday, the ministry showed interviews with two people, who, it said, are medical professionals working in the only hospital operating in Douma, a town near the Syrian capital, Damascus.

    During a briefing on Friday, the ministry showed interviews with two people, who, it said, are medical professionals working in the only hospital operating in Douma, a town near the Syrian capital, Damascus.

    In the interviews released to the media, the two men reported how footage was shot of people dousing each other with water and treating children, which was claimed to show the aftermath of the April 7 chemical weapons attack. The patients shown in the video suffered from smoke poisoning and the water was poured on them by their relatives after a false claim that chemical weapons were used, the ministry said.

    “Please, notice. These people do not hide their names. These are not some faceless claims on the social media by anonymous activists. They took part in taking that footage,” said Konashenkov.

    “The Russian Defense Ministry also has evidence that Britain had a direct involvement in arranging this provocation in Eastern Ghouta,” the general added, referring to the neighborhood of which Douma is part. “We know for certain that between April 3 and April 6 the so-called White Helmets were seriously pressured from London to speed up the provocation that they were preparing.”

    According to Konashenkov, the group, which was a primary source of photos and footage of the purported chemical attack, was informed of a large-scale artillery attack on Damascus planned by the Islamist group Army of Islam, which controlled Douma at the time. The White Helmets were ordered to arrange the provocation after retaliatory strikes by the Syrian government forces, which the shelling was certain to lead to, he said.

    The UK rejected the accusations, with British UN Ambassador Karen Pierce calling them “grotesque,” “a blatant lie” and “the worst piece of fake news we’ve yet seen from the Russian propaganda machine.”

    So when will Moscow release their evidence for the whole world to see? Or is it maybe waiting for the US to first release its own proof that Assad launched the attack?

    If so, we’ll be waiting for a long time.

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